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it’s around their fifth year working together, and by now they know that they’re a duo and they’re unbreakable and that it’s us against them, when she allows herself to think back to the first time when she first entered his—their—office.
apart from the lack of his habits stuffed around the office, apart from the increase of paperwork and monsters and odes to UFOs, his—their, dammit, their—office is pretty much the same as it was when they looked younger and their eyes were brighter and she was sure that she wouldn’t spend more than a day in the basement.
five years later and there’s still a lack of a partner’s desk, there’s still a sign showing only his name, and there’s still a giant poster with his—not theirs, never theirs—motto on it. i want to believe.
not “we.”
“I,”
Meaning him.
and yet, traces of her presence are scattered all around the office, making it a very their office.
her post-its (the ones pasted on top of files, remarking really? and no and vampires are NOT real, mulder), her empty yogurts in the trash can, a lipstick tube here and there….
more and more his world becomes her world and her world becomes his.
her world used to be hospitals and studying and reading and planning for the future. now her world is guns and little green men, sunflower seeds and dirty motel rooms smelling faintly of illegal substances.
her world is being unsure of tomorrow, today, yesterday. weekdays hunting invisible monsters and weekends reading books.
and ever since melissa had died, since the cancer, since the countless hospital beds and countless tears shed, his apartment had become more of a home than her own, too.
his lack of a bedroom. his empty fridge. the bad lighting. his dirty couch. his ever-hungry fish. his open windows and rigged telephones and cheesy elvis music and UFO magazines, and...
she’d always thought she wanted the great American life—the picket fence and the nice house and the dependable husband and the perfect kids. and yet sometimes she’ll be chasing imaginary aliens, or driving endlessly in silence, watching him chew on sunflower seeds, and she’ll forget the death and the paperwork and the bickering, and she’ll think, yeah. yeah, i like this life.
and that scares her, so she represses it. because that’s his life, not hers. and thinking about what her fondness for it means is complicated, and someone as efficient as her is not supposed to be fond of complications.
but that’s the paradox, isn’t it?
she has never thought of herself as a complicated person. she’s never thought she wanted a complicated life. she's never thought she’d be drawn to a complicated job or a complicated person.
and complicated was now a synonym for her life.
because i had become we and his had become ours and somehow, impossibly, his quest had become hers.