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“This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we'd have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks
of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.
Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way
with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea.”
― John Glenday
________
on the first night the wind breaks and curls around their west virginia home in long tendrils that make her smell smoke, and they are the only people on earth.
they are still, movement attracts predators, and she is so, so tired of running. they are lying statuesque on a bare mattress, their sheets unopened in a box on the floor. they’d argued about them for fifteen minutes in the store before deciding on something both of them hated just out of mutual spite. they’d held hands on the way out though, and she’d kissed him when they walked in the door because this was their home, and they lived here and she could, she could, she could and so she did.
but now, frozen in place, she has never felt less like porcelain, never felt more bruised, rough-edged and unfinished. he smooths his hands over her ribs and molds her into something more human. they are still until they can't be and even then they are silent. even when he kisses her, and she closes her eyes and the world becomes a heady twist of reds and blues behind her lids. even when it is perihelion, when she is the closest she will ever be to the sun without burning, they are quiet, quiet, quiet.
"scully," he says and she opens her eyes to watch the way their shadows dance on their bedroom walls.
"shh," she tells him, thinks: you're not supposed to speak in graveyards or in sacred places.
she dies a hundred times before she leaves him.
in the middle of the night, in the late, lazy heat of the mid-afternoon, on cool grey mornings. a bullet through the shoulder, poison in her brain, dripping onto her bottom lip and staining the sheets. the tattered pieces of her pajama top cover a hole big enough to put his hand through like singed curtains. she tells him not to worry. it's alright, it's alright, she says. blood soaks through her shirt, covers his hands.
mulder, she says, wake up.
"hi."
it's her cool fingers butterflying against his cheek, his forehead, his wrist. she is everywhere and he feels blurry and out of focus.
"you died."
"i know. it's okay." she is rearranging the blankets around them, running her hand down his arm.
"no, scully, you don't know." he's breathing in shallow, rushed gasps. he's reaching for her and it feels too cliché, too much like drowning.
"it's alright," she murmurs and with practiced ease she pulls him against her shoulder. he thinks of a forest in florida, has the overwhelming urge to ask her to sing. she tightens her arms around him like she can hold out the world around them.
"you die all the time, mulder," she tells him. he kisses her wrist, the dip of her breast bone. then, quietly, like a secret or a prayer (or a lie): "i think we're going to be okay.”
she’s always needed proof, his scully, and they haven’t been participants in this experiment for quite long enough to draw a conclusion. he wonders what her hypothesis was. did she plug them into an if-then formula? if i love him, then we will be happy. if i try hard enough, then we will be okay. she’s a good scientist; she had to know there were too many variables.
“sleep, please,” she says, runs her fingers over his cheek again. he closes his eyes tightly, and it is like a perilous, high-stakes version of hide and seek: if i can't see them, they can't see me.
for years they live like that, eyes twisted shut, fingers tangled together, hushing, hushing each other. they are waiting to be found.
here is how the world ends: it doesn’t.
it stutters, it slows, it stumbles in its endless revolutions, but it does not stop. at the stroke of midnight on december 22nd he does not kiss her, but they do sit curled together on their couch with the curtains flung wide open, staring at an impossibly black sky.
“the world didn’t end,” he says, later, his voice cracking around some kind of smile, tasting some sick cosmic joke. he had not kissed her at midnight but after, when he finally does, it is desperate and terrified and like they are dying and not like they have just been granted yet another chance to live. she tastes his guilt in the back of her throat like hard liquor, like cigarettes.
“no,” she agrees. “it didn’t.”
oh, she wishes it had.
on the radio, they joke about mayan calendars and the end of the world.
on the radio, they play christmas music and mulder wraps her in a sweater and then his arms. she closes her eyes, starts to play an old game. she’s been memorizing him in increments, so sure that they were coming up on The End (capital letters, this would be final). she opens her eyes. the calendar on the wall says december 23rd, 2012. it’s been a long time since he held her and she felt it in the present rather than saving it for the future.
the radio says next year, all our troubles will be miles away. next year. she almost laughs but doesn't.
they sway barefoot in the kitchen and the tile is cold under her feet.
an acosmist, he'd once told her, is a person who believes that nothing exists.
"and you think that's what i am?" she'd said, crossed her arms at him in a small diner outside tennessee.
"no, not at all."
she'd shaken her head, glanced at her plate. he'd stolen a piece of her bacon so she reached across the table and snatched part of his toast as she spoke. "is it the word of the day then, mulder? what's your point?"
"an acosmist doesn't believe in nothing, an acosmist believes nothing exists." the verbal italics hung between them as she chewed his breakfast.
"okay," she'd said. "so an acosmist believes in the existence of nothing with a capital n?"
"sure," he'd replied, signaling for the check and pushing his plate towards her. it was 1997. he carried kleenex in his jacket pocket and she had a shirley temple red upper lip and was too familiar with gas station bathrooms and types of tissues.
"and the point is?"
"there isn't one, scully."
she'd ducked under his arm as he held the door open and waited for him to press coffee-warm fingertips against the base of her spine. "then why'd you say it?"
he shrugged, looking at her over the top of their grey taurus. "it's ironic. it sounds like they don't believe anything, but they do. they believe in nothing."
she'd shaken her head as she bucked her seatbelt and he'd turned the key in the ignition.
"everyone believes in something, scully."
"even if that something is nothing?"
"nothing," he'd said, "is still something" and he'd smiled, not like he'd won an argument but like he'd won at the arcade, a game he'd played before, a game he was good at but which never ceased to thrill him. she'd smiled back.
that morning, in a taurus outside tennessee, she'd believed for the first time that she loved him.
now, she leans against the wall at the edge of their living room. she feels like she’s tiptoeing around the edges of everything these days, walking on eggshells, holding up houses of cards, balancing towers. the pastor on the tv says, "be not afraid, only believe" and she thinks: in what?
she looks at a photograph to her left, magnet bound to the refrigerator. she can’t remember what year it’s from. they’re in black like they’re mourning but the corners of her lips are turned up and she’s watching him, his eyes to the sky, with some sort of easy fascination. she thinks: in god, in him, in love, in something.
she looks at him, in the middle of the mess, looks at the torn edges of the newspaper clippings that have pushed their way out of his office, looks at the frustrated curve of his fist into his palm. she looks at him and sees their son and their sisters and the truth with so many holes poked in it that sand could filter through like water, gold flecks lost with everything else. she looks at him and sees the opposite of absolution, thinks that something can sometimes still be nothing at all.
he'd been wrong, anyway. an acosmist wasn't what he'd thought, or tried to make it out to be. acosmism denied the existence of the universe, but as far as she could tell the universe, the world, would exist as long as she did. she's been told on more than one occasion that could be a very, very long time.
the thought of living here, like this, forever, waiting for his singular myopia to blur her out of his sight entirely as the world continues to turn in accordance with the sun and stars, makes her stomach sink and her breath catch.
it is june before she leaves him.
it surprises him, but only because he wasn't listening. if he'd listened, really listened, to the way she said goodnight, to the uncertain cadence of her footfalls when she paced their floor upstairs, to the hum in her throat when she turned away from him in the mornings, he would have been hearing her goodbyes for a long, long time.
she doesn't talk to him as she packs. he flits around their bedroom like a ghost trapped haunting unfamiliar territory. he tries to touch her, tries to hold her, tries to make her just be still. she slips out from under his arm, holds his wrists by his sides and kisses him with her lips and eyes closed.
don't ask me to change my mind, she says, like they're arguing about facts and evidence.
he does not try to touch her again.
she realizes by the door that she half expects (more than half, she is waiting for it) him to call out for her, to chase her down their walkway like it is an apartment hallway. expects him to explain it all away, to break her apart and put her back together with the seams slightly crooked but together, whole. she'd been ready to argue with him, to wipe tears and back her way into the car like a trapped animal. she’d expected him to do something.
he waves from the window. she does not cry.
it hurts more this way, somehow.
it's not that she doesn't miss him. she does, oh, she does. it's that he doesn't miss her or, more specifically, he misses scully, and she doesn't know who that is anymore.
dana does not sleep with a gun in the drawer of her night table. dana sees her mom every saturday and owns an apartment that's floor has never seen bloodstains that spread like wine. dana is quiet, but polite, well-liked by her hospital coworkers. dana goes out, occasionally, on small-talk fueled dates with fair-haired men who don't remind her of the one she left behind (except that they all do, somehow).
mulder misses scully. he calls every so often, late. she misses him too, she does.
but it's 2014 and she has been dana for a long time now.
"mulder, it's me," she says when she calls after skinner tells her the news (the word reopened had ricocheted through her veins like a firecracker) and pauses. "it's dana scully."
"i know."
she breathes in tandem with him on the other end of the line.
there had been a moment, maybe several, when she had been sure he wouldn't recognize her by her voice alone.
she's not sure when, but somehow they end up having conversations in parking lots again. it's probably around the same time that she starts wearing a suit to work and feeling the comfortable, cool weight of a gun at her hip. it feels covert and clandestine, it feels heavy with paranoia and anticipation.
it feels like before, way before, only now she sits next to him in a black car with the windows open instead of crouching by his head and they have no reason to meet like this. there is no one watching over their shoulder, there is no official fbi dictum keeping them apart.
it is just them and the old taste of blood in their mouths and the cobweb of their selfish, separate grief and the space they put between them.
they talk about a case so they don't have to talk about each other. he makes her laugh, out of nowhere, and it flies out the window and bounces across the cool concrete floors of the lot.
"really, scully? that was a b-level joke at best. your standards are dropping, g-woman," he says, smiling, cracking a sunflower seed. there he is, she thinks. twenty years and they've somehow circled back to the beginning instead of finding their way to the end.
"mulder," she says and then she can't stop saying it. it feels like there aren't enough words in the car, like the open windows are drawing out the air instead of letting it in. mulder, mulder, mulder.
i want to come home.
(she won't, not yet, but soon, she tells him, soon and he smiles crookedly and touches her like he never stopped and she feels an anchor drop in her chest, tug her closer to shore)
there is no longer a name on the door of the office. unmarked on a map, buried treasure. she opens the door and peers inside, half expects to see him hunched over his cramped desk. he would turn to her with a sardonic smile, and she would present him her hand like they were coming to accords on a business deal, like they were already partners.
wait, she wants to tell her younger self -- boxy and penciled in at the edges, not yet drawn out in ink -- when he asks you if you believe in aliens, say no. when he asks you if you think he's spooky, say no again (and keep saying it and keep telling him with words and glances that he is worth something, worth everything), but when he asks you to stay the night, that first time, say yes, say yes and yes again and don't leave. please don't leave him.
"it looks haunted in here," he says from behind her, making her jump, but he's right. the light from the skylight is grey, coming into the room in whorls of dust and reflection. it's also entirely empty, save for the plastic wrapped file cabinets in the corners that they will tear into later like christmas children.
"see any ghosts?"
"a few," she tells him. just us.
he smiles like he understands.
"you know, two desks would have fit in here."
she smirks. old wounds, scars that itched.
they are quiet for long minutes, side by side in the doorway of an empty room that used to hold them together, press them into something holy and unparalleled by sheer force of will and the defined borders of its concrete perimeter.
"are you ready?" he asks suddenly, and the burn of his fingers against the base of her spine is so familiar she forgets to breathe. they have a meeting with skinner in ten minutes and he will call them agents.
"yes," she tells him, her partner, and they match their steps until they mesh into a single sound against the echoing grey floor.