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Scully sees her sister everywhere.
Two weeks ago, the way a teenager’s opalescent choker glistened under airport lights. Today, a woman across from them in the diner, auburn hair spilling over the back of her crushed velvet shirt.
She holds her breath, fixated, as if looking away would have the woman dissolve, evaporate. Tilting her head back—laughing maybe—and signing something, the bill. Pushing her chair back, turning around to find the restroom—and her face, finally. Not her face. The eyes are smaller, and deeper-set, with a gap between her teeth as she smiles. A lump rushes up to Scully’s throat, as she knew it would, as it’s been bobbing for the past three months. She’s suddenly aware of a lull, a space where she thinks she’s supposed to be talking, responding to whatever Mulder's just said. She hadn’t heard it.
“Does it get easier?” she asks, suddenly, eyes still on the metal back of the vacated chair. He leans towards her, refocusing, cellophane-tipped toothpick stilling in his jaw. Brow furrowing, a question.
She swallows. “Seeing her everywhere.”
There’s a beat as he processes the question, reaching for its meaning, and he follows her gaze to the woman, now bending over a stroller by the front door. It registers, and his whole face softens. And then his eyes falter, a bit, considering. Why the question. Why she’s asking him.
The bell chimes, and she’s gone, lost to mid-morning sunshine. Scully has to blink away the moment, the sudden smell of blood on purple velvet. She tries not to look at Mulder when she resurfaces. She fails.
“Scully,” he says, a full sentence.
She draws circles in the sweat of her water glass on the red table. “I’m sorry,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She hates that she made him give her that look , the one she’s sure she’s given him in the past, as hard as she’d always tried not to. “Never mind.”
And then he’s the one looking past her, some faraway point on the wall, long enough that she thinks maybe he’s forgotten the question. “No,” he finally says. You know, I’m still walking into that room.
She nods a little, aimlessly.
Every day of my life.
She doesn’t know how to do this, she’d realized earlier. When they’d lost Charlie, when the empty click of answering machines and chairs at holiday tables had finally made it clear that he wasn’t coming back, she’d found herself thinking: it’s like I have one brother now. That—as much as it had hurt—she could do, could know how. But she does not know how to not have a sister.
Does not want to know, as if the very thought of it is a betrayal. Could send her straight to hell. Not the Sunday school version, diligently filling in her blue workbooks for Catechism class—but the kind she awakens to, sometimes, in the middle of her bed in a dark room, feeling her toes but not being able to move them, and her lungs pumping as if they’ve just come up for air.
“Hey,” he says, bringing her back, and she wonders when his hand found its way to her wrist. Her fingers tremble in the pool of water. Will he stop looking at her.
“Not easier,” and he releases her hand to wave his own a little, like her mother might flick away cobwebs. “I guess it gets… it just, happens.”
She wants to shrink away. She wants to run. She wants to point her gun at something, anything, because this cannot be her new normal, and they cannot be having this conversation here, with the light streaming across the walls and hours to go before waitresses start offering decaf. They wouldn’t be having it at all if she had it her way, if she could turn back just an increment of time—but if they have to, certainly not here, in another nondescript diner in another nondescript town in the middle of the fucking morning.
If they have to, if they absolutely fucking have to, this conversation should be at night, with the blue buzz of a TV in the background and a lone waitress who keeps glancing over her cigarette for them to leave. They should be the only ones seated. There should not be orange juice and children crying. There should not be brunch.
She thinks she manages to nod.
“Hey,” he says again, like it’s for fucking horses. “If you ever—need someone to talk to…”
She chokes out something like a laugh, wet and utterly humorless. “I have a shrink, Mulder.” Not that she’s actually seen her very recently.
“Okay, well.” He moves back a little into the booth. “Good.”
Maybe this is it. Maybe she’s getting her wish, and this won’t really be a conversation at all, just a few unbearable minutes to endure on sunlit vinyl. But of course most of their conversations are made up of not-talking.
She takes her napkin and wipes up the water under her glass with one distinct swipe. The check will come. She will throw the money down, for once. He won’t fight her on it. They will continue to not-have this conversation in the car, in the small uncomfortable chairs at the gate. Mulder will doze, in and out, in the window seat to her right. She will catch sight of a tarot deck as the stranger to her left rifles through their carryon for a stick of gum, and her whole chest will ache. They will both continue to see their unspoken sisters. One day he might really see his. The plane will land. They will not-talk on the way to their cars. Finally the sun will set.
For now, she clenches the wet napkin in her palm and looks at Mulder long enough so she won’t hate him, for the way he looks at her and talks to her and doesn’t-talk to her when she doesn’t-ask. She looks at him so she won’t, at least for now, be able to see anything or anyone else. He gives her that dog-eared smile. He ghosts his fingers over hers and unravels the napkin from her fist, gently. His hand not-touching her still-damp palm. It feels like velvet.