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"Do you think it's true?" Her soft tone broke the comfortable silence that had been sitting between them for the better part of an hour.
He peered at her over the rims of his glasses, flicking the top of his newspaper down to study her face. "Do I think what's true?"
She tilted her head back and to the side, her wavy red tendrils framing her freckled face in a way he could never resist. "What they write about love."
She had his full attention now. He folded the newspaper and leaned forward, his long legs folding beneath his elbows as he took his feet off the ottoman. There was a quirk of amusement in his gaze that quickly disappeared as something more serious took place.
"What who writes about love?"
"Anyone. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Machiavelli, Dickens, Plath, anyone."
He chuckled and eased back into his chair. A pretty smirk sat on his plush lips. "Machiavelli wrote about love?"
She shot him a bemused look. "You know what I mean."
"Well, I don't know, Scully. Are you asking if I think their words, the feelings they're endeavoring to express, are true? Because my answer would be no."
"No?" She quirked a brow.
"Love isn't any one thing. Like a fingerprint, or a genetic code, it's a variation of a pattern. So what Dickens, or Austen, or Machiavelli would've written about love would be true for their characters, or maybe even themselves, but that in itself isn't a whole truth. You'd just be examining pieces of a larger puzzle."
She leaned back into the worn leather couch that had become her second home and gazed out his front window in thought. "Hmm."
He grinned. "Not the answer you were looking for?"
She smiled softly. "Is it ever?"
"Do you want what they've written about it to be true?"
She pursed her lips.
It was his turn to be surprised. "No?"
"I'm not sure," her smile was back. "Kind of takes the fun out of it, don't you think?"
He chuckled. "If you think what Machiavelli was writing about love was fun, then you've got a streak of masochism I wasn't expecting, Agent Scully. Was it not Niccolo himself that said 'love is preserved by link of obligation'?"
"You can quote The Prince? Really Mulder?"
He held his hands up in mock surrender. "You're the one who brought our Italian friend into this, Scully."
"What if he wasn't wrong?"
He laughed, then. "If you're looking to Machiavelli, the king of altering the sense of virtue from moral worth to power, then we've got bigger problems."
"Humor me."
"You're kidding."
She quirked her brow in the way he knew that no, she wasn't kidding.
"Scully..."
"Maybe love is born of some obligation, of some desire to cling to what you know or what you owe. I mean think about it. Other than the evolutionary expectation that families stay together in packs for both protection and for genetic strength, what other purpose would there be? Mates seek mates based on genetic diversity and the evolutionary need to keep the species surviving. What if our concept of love is merely an extension of that? Something we've created to convince ourselves we aren't animals. Some misguided notion that we are beyond the reason of evolution."
Mulder fell silent, studying her with something she could almost call hurt in his eyes. "You don't believe that."
"Why not? Doesn't it make some kind of sense?"
He frowned. "I love my mother even if she does not show that she loves me. I love my father despite the abuse I've suffered at his hands. That doesn't help my evolutionary line. That is not obligation. That's my choice."
Scully looked away from him, instead studying the patterns of freckles on her knees. "You love them because they're your parents. That's the obligation."
"Am I an obligation, Scully?"
Her head snapped up as she dared to look back into his sharp green eyes. "What?"
"Am I an obligation?" His eyes didn't leave hers. As much as she wanted to look away, she couldn't.
"Of course not."
"Well by your standard, I am."
"Mulder, I--"
"It's been seven years we've been together. Seven. You've been abducted and kidnapped. Your sister, murdered. I almost shot you, point blank, right in the face, twice. You almost died from cancer. Not to mention the death of your daughter and your womb left barren. I've watched you die countless times, in visions, in false memories, in past lives. You've watched me die too. And I certainly can't continue your evolutionary line. So why stay? Why continue to put yourself through this if love is 'just an obligation'? How obligatory are you? What could you possibly owe me that makes you stay through all of that?" His voice was so quiet and demure, and so un-Mulder, that it sent chills down her spine. "So no, Dana. I don't think love is preserved through obligation."
She flinched at the use of her first name. He only used it when he was really, truly serious about something. And that something was usually her. There was an unsettling sense of disquiet in his eyes that made her feel like her heart would beat right out of her chest if he looked at her any longer. She knew she was treading a thin line, here, but she wanted to push. She wanted to hear his truth. She wanted him, maybe, to convince her that she was wrong. It wasn't something she'd ever admit, but she loved when he proved her wrong.
"Alright." She whispered.
Silence fell between them as they studied each other, each of them carefully gauging their next words like it was a chess championship and one wrong move would send the pieces flying off the board.
"On second thought, I do think it's true." He missed, deciding for the both of them that the silence was worse than anything they could say to each other.
"What?" She whispered, her eyes watering with flagrant, misguided hope. How she hated hope. How dearly she loved him for giving it to her.
He smiled softly. "What they write about love," a chuckle escaped his lips. "Not Machiavelli's version, though. That guy...woof."
She laughed through quiet tears as they traced salty patterns down her starry cheeks and shook her head. "What changed your mind?"
He leaned forward and wiped her tears away with the warm pad of his thumb. "You're here, and so am I, and we're set within and amongst the stars, treading our familiar paths."