Work Text:
What was it I wanted?
The captain to sail safely? To land alive
and, like survival, loved?
But colder and louder blew the wind.
— Lashed to the Helm, All Stiff and Stark
Ada Limón
_______
The bright lights of a twenty-four-seven diner never fail to make Scully feel like a child. The smell of oil and syrup, the sticky plastic tables and the harsh fluorescence follow her from state to state, city to city. With them, fractured memories of childhood, specks of light dancing on her closed eyelids, as vibrant now as they were at eight years old. Nights seemed endless then, long stretches of time-outside-of-time, uncharted waters of which she’s always known, but did not have a map for. She'd felt special, then, and wonderfully small.
"Burger?" Mulder points in her direction, already on his way to the counter, and he doesn't even really have to ask. She's half-way to a corner table herself, so she calls back, "Cheese!"
Scully settles in with both their bags at her feet, looping a leg through the straps despite the two of them being the only customers, despite the gun at her hip. There's a coke spill at least a day old right where she would like to rest her elbow, and the napkins have not been refilled. She can't gather enough will to go and ask, legs tired and concrete-heavy.
She glances over her shoulder at the back of Mulder’s head, looking up at the worn combo signs, wanting to signal to him to pick them up some napkins without yelling it out, as if she might be able to telepathically tell him what she needs. He doesn’t turn around. Nights don't seem as long as they did when she was a child, anymore. Lately, they've been slipping away, like water through her fingers when she holds on the tightest, escaping her like melting sand. Every morning seems to come sooner than the last, another case and another rental car, and whatever they're chasing never seems to be getting any closer. She's worn out so thin, so ravenous it feels like sea-sick. Behind her, Mulder makes the pretty cashier laugh. The nights she spends with him are the only ones she can still stomach.
Scully drums her nails on the blue plastic tabletop to pass the time until Mulder approaches, carefully balancing two battered looking trays stocked full of their orders and smelling delightfully deep fried.
She makes a grabby little gesture at her food, all thoughts of napkins fleeing her mind, replaced with an overwhelming urgency to sink her teeth into something. Mulder sneaks a fry off her plate before handing her the tray and she tucks in, right away, without so much as a pause to scold him and with no regard to his amusement.
“They don’t give extra pickles on the side. I asked.” He sounds remorseful while he slides into the seat opposite her, like he's really sorry, but he says it with the same childlike smile.
Around a mouthful, “Bummer.”
It isn't the best burger she's ever had. Actually, it probably lands somewhere on the lower end of the scale, but the meat is warm, the bun soft, the cheese processed beyond recognition, and the fries are salty and fatty and she savours every moment of it, feeling just short of human again. They eat in silence, and it isn’t until Scully’s half-way done with her meal that she puts it down for the first time.
“I love these sorts of places,” she says, swallows, licks her thumb of salt.
“Well, good, I keep dragging you to them.”
She shakes her head. “When I was a kid,” she pauses to wipe grease off the corner of her mouth, and Mulder reaches across the table and stops her hand. She watches him search his jacket pocket for a minute and then, perhaps having heard her telepathic plea after all, she watches him produce a paper napkin. She takes it.
“Sorry, you were saying?”
"When I was a kid my mom never took us to these places," she sets down the napkin and eyes the cheese oozing onto her plate, which wouldn't, not in a million years, earn her mother's approval, "But I'll never forget the one time she did."
Mulder pushes his tray forward, fingers lacing together in front of him. His undivided attention, her special gift on nights like these.
“My father… He was a captain, you know. Sometimes he'd come home very late and we wouldn't know he was there until morning." Ahab hated it more than anything if he caught them out of bed. They'd stay up in anticipation, then trip over one another up the stairs, racing to their rooms before their parents could find them.
"One night, my mom put Bill in charge and told us all to go to bed, because she had to pick my father up at the dock. It wasn’t usual for her to pick him up. She had a routine, always a routine, for everything, even with four kids…" Scully feels her brow furrow, trying to remember it all, suddenly afraid any piece of it will drift away from her, the shape of the moon through the car window on the way there or the smell of the living room carpet when they made it back home. "But he was injured, and my mother worried about him driving alone at night. And I… I just refused to go to bed. Even Missy had fallen asleep, and she was always wandering down corridors getting up to things.”
“You missed him,” Mulder says. So simply he knows her. She thinks of napkins in his pocket and extra pickles in a little bowl beside her burgers, worries her lip between her thumb and index finger. Skim milk in her coffee. Water facing motel rooms.
“Yeah, I really did…”
She looks away. The window glass is cold and all fogged up, and outside it the buzzing street lights reflect on the wet blue road. Sparkling like precious stones, they break with each stray car that passes them by. A million blurry, shiny pieces, like waves hitting the shore. Like her and Mulder, in the dark, there and then gone. She traces a little spiral in the condensation with her finger.
“So she let you come with her?” Mulder nudges, ever the inquisitor.
“She let me come with her. We stopped for burgers on the way home." Another pause, equal parts for dramatic effect and to fight back the overwhelming longing flooding her chest. She tries to smile through it, tries to hold in her mind the time when nights were long. "I think that every time I step foot in one of these places I am eight years old again. Just for a moment."
Her face glows warm and pink with the admission, the adolescence of it all, and she finds her size, put against the whole of the universe, to be suddenly so embarrassingly small. Mulder grins like it hasn't crossed his mind at all.
Her dad smelled salty, she recalls, like sweat and sea. She can still feel the cool of his jacket pressed against her heated cheek, can imagine his arms around her if she concentrates. Can remember being mindful of his injured arm and how forcefully he hugged her, despite it, even now. How he didn't scold her, even though she knew he should have. She swallows thickly and wipes the shapes off the window with her flat palm, but doesn't glance through the clearness.
"I just come here for the great service," Mulder says after a beat of silence, and Scully can't help but laugh.
By the time they've finished eating the blonde at the counter has been replaced with another night dweller, and Scully, satiated and softened around the edges, can no longer ignore Mulder looking at her with a troublesome smile. She refuses to take the bait, for a while, and then, as always, she relents and bites.
"Well, what is it?"
"You've got a little—" he wiggles a finger at her, "May I?"
Without waiting for an answer, he leans forward and picks a fallen eyelash off her cheek, presents it to her like an offering. She looks between his eyes, expectant, and his fingers, outreached, and only takes a second more to consider before decisively blowing the eyelash away. When she closes her eyes, the lights of cars and street lamps dance behind them.
"Did you make a wish?" he asks, and she nods.
"What'd you wish for?"
"That's not how it works, Mulder. You of all people should know that."
Like a puzzled dog, he cocks his head to study her, and she mimics him with a squint. She must've caught him off guard; he's looking at her like she said something funny, like tonight he deserves a better answer, like if he got one, he would get up and walk right out of the door, out to the cold and get it for her.
Then, with a sly smile, "Didn't peg you for a superstitious person, Scully."
Mouth still curled with teasing, Mulder leans over the table to give her hair a playful little flick. He doesn't pull back right away, and she leans forward, too, magnetic. He isn't close enough for their noses to touch, but she looks in his eyes and it feels like he is. Her sleeve sticks to the table and she doesn't care.
"Would you tell me what you wished for? If you made one?"
And what would she do, if he stared up at her like that with a wish on his lips? His lips. He licks them, pink and pursed in question. It’d be dangerous, she concludes. Mulder eyes her, carefully, still mere inches from her face, and in that moment she decides they would be better off if he didn't tell her anything at all, because if he did, she might spend the rest of time trying to make it come true. She thinks perhaps, night after night, that she already is.
"No," he finally says.
Scully hums and smiles, only then moving back in her seat. Mulder does too.
“Thought so.”
They leave a tip without calculating, and at the door, he leans down to whisper in her ear.
“I know what you wished for,” he tells her in a conspiratory voice. Outside, the pitter-patter of rain has begun again.
“Is that so, Mulder?” She asks, ever the sceptic.
With a comical chivalry he snatches the bags from her hand and lifts them over his left shoulder. His right arm he offers to her. “You want me to drive so you can sleep on the ride home.”
Truth be told, she wouldn't dare make a wish, not even on an eyelash, too afraid it wouldn't come true. But as he held it up to her, barely visible even under the fluorescence, she thought of Missy, barefoot and racing her to bed before dad could hear them. She thought of her mother and her quiet, empty corridors. Thought of Bill and his wife and his baby, and even of Charlie, wherever he may be. And she wished them all well. Maybe, if kept secret, that's something the universe could manage.
“How did you know?”
She links her arm with his, and together, they step out to the cold, off into uncharted waters.