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just after season 1, summer -
In May, it’s an early heat. A sort of somnambulant swamp fever that creeps across the Potomac and settles in deep. The museum, by comparison, is so cold he can smell it. He opens his mouth in the entryway like all of it, the cranked up air conditioning, the faint touch of cosmoline and formaldehyde, the long, long dead things pressed right up close with the only just alive ones, or the other way around, could crawl in and shut him the fuck up for good.
But he’s here for the next best thing. Here because somewhere, comfortably stolen away between the dead and living, carefully taking notes on the art of preservation, is Scully.
The humidity has curled her hair, and he finds her right away. Head tilted, glasses on, as she twists her hair back into a ponytail in front of the elephant’s right knee and a cluster of first graders. She’s never been hard to spot but now, somehow, he sees her everywhere. She is getting harder and harder to ignore.
He was the one who’d called this meeting. On NPR earlier this morning there had been some offhand remark about a fourteen year old boy’s inexplicable disappearance in North Carolina and even less explicable reappearance in Kentucky, sipping cherry coke at an Exxon with one hell of a fucking sunburn. All signs point to him being a Rockwellian runaway. But Mulder had left a bag of sunflower seeds on Scully’s desk earlier regardless, feeling a little dizzy from the heat and from something else entirely.
So he was the one who’d called the meeting. But looking at her now, twisting her wrist with mindless intention to adjust her hair tie, he knows he won’t call one again.
He glances for too long at a stuffed mouse, on careful level with a five year old’s curious gaze, frozen in perfect imitation at the elephant’s foot near the base of the diorama. It is small enough to be slipped into a pocket, if you were so inclined. He isn’t.
When he looks up, she’s gone. Her space by the elephant’s shin occupied by an older, light haired man. There is a split second of unwarranted panic, where the first word that comes to mind is taken. He finds a column to lean against, thinking of the easy, self-assured way Scully had twisted back her hair while looking carefully at an elephant’s taxidermied knee. She’s too firmly there, too familiar with both sides of the mortal chasm, to ever be removed against her will.
Still.
From somewhere on the other side of the display, a young child shrieks and laughs, pointing at the mouse’s pinched little face and then bursts into unexpected tears. Mulder ducks out along the tall columns in search of his own memento mori.
—
Some summers, right after Samantha, his parents used to send him into the buzzy heat of upstate New York. He’d made his first best friend there. Martha’s Vineyard was cloistered, small. It was hard not to be the Mulder with a missing limb, suddenly walking around straightened up in the absence of Samantha’s little kid clinging, her silhouette on his back as he piggy backed her up to the old baseball diamond giving him extra appendages.
But upstate, there was just Jacob and horseflies. The sticky sting and iron-mouth moment of a pubescent blood pact. Jacob’s red hand against his in firey, fidgety camp cabin light. They spent most of their thirteenth summer wading through tall grass and shallow ponds, seeking out a sort of Stephen King moment. A horror so visceral and tangible it would bind them for life. A secret, maybe, or a body.
The Egyptians, Jacob used to say into the tin-can telephone they’d wired up between their cabins, cut the heart right out of the corpses before they mummified it.
No way.
Yes, fuckin’ way. They ate it.
No, they didn’t.
But wide-eyed on the other end of a tin-can and thirteen and smelling like campfire smoke and you’ll believe anything. He’d believe anything. You grow all the way up but somehow never really do.
They did. Jacob had nodded, he could hear the scrape against the metal. If they leave it in the body, then there’s always a chance it could come back. That it’ll go looking for anyone it lost in life. The heart is where the soul is, man, that shit doesn’t die.
Mulder had pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger. Mulder had said, I think that’s vampires.
—
He finds her among the dead.
Rounding a hard corner under a strung up banner sheet - Mummies of Egypt! - he suddenly finds himself with a chest full of Scully in front of the canopic jars. A jackal’s carved smile, out of the corner of his eye. Scully lets out a surprised laugh and it echoes.
“Well hi,” she says, still right up against him.
“Hi yourself. You disappeared on me.”
She adjusts her glasses, staying close against him to let a middle school group past them. ”We didn’t agree on an exact spot. I thought the elephant seems a little conspicuous.“
“And you wanted to look at the mummy.”
Scully grins up at him. “And I wanted to look at the mummy.”
They usually did this in profile, informer/informee like. Because looking at each other implied a conversation. Implied familiarity and firsthand knowledge. He can’t really remember the last time he’d looked right at her since late March. Her bangs are still wispy around her face, her freckles only slightly pronounced. He knows her. God. Thank God.
He hooks her wrist as the group passes and she starts to step away. “Wait a second.”
She looks back at him, eyebrows raised. “Mulder?”
Her smile is a little dizzy, bemused and twitchy. He had lived so long before meeting her.
From beyond them now, he hears the teacher at the head of the class says: “Don’t lose track of your partner, everyone.”
Mulder circles Scully’s wrist between his pointer and thumb, nods back at the chain of eighth-grade pairs, arms hooked through each other’s in an illusive tangle of skinned elbows and sweaty fingers. “Buddy system, Scully. I’m not losing you again.”
She smiles, slipping her wrist from his hand to squeeze it. "What was the first time?“
—
Late last night, there had been snaps of silent lightning outside his drawn shades. It’s a heat thing, an illuminating crackle like you’d find in summer sheets. D.C.’s very own imitation swamp gas, buoyed up. There is always an absence of rain, a gap where there should be even distant thunder.
In the shivering, inconstant light his first thought had been to call her just to break the quiet. Just to say, Scully, do you see that. Just to say, Scully.
—
If I ever see one, Jacob had said, I’ll show you.
—
“That’s so absurd I’m almost offended, Mulder.” She’s looking at him head-on, has him backed up against a display on deadliest insects, standing more or less perpendicular to the museums oncoming traffic. She drums her pointer off her hip. “Almost every element of that theory is so improbable I - I don’t even know where to begin.”
“With the almosts?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Start with the elements that aren’t so improbable. You said almost every element, not every element. So some of the almosts have got to be at least a little probable.”
She shakes her head, but he sees her smirk. “It’s a little probable you’re out of your fucking mind.”
He pushes himself off the glass case and makes her catch up with him. Her heels are higher than before, impractical for fieldwork, but the sound on the hard tile is familiar. “You’d need more data to be conclusive about it, Doc. How do you know that I’m not entirely in my fucking mind, exceedingly rational, if you will, during the oh” - he glances at his watch - “roughly 167 hours in a week that I’m not in your presence.”
“God.” She’s laughing. “I’d almost forgotten how – ”
He stops up short and she has to step quickly to the side to avoid running into him. “Forgot what?”
“Oh, nothing,” she says, her voice high. She comes around his side, looking up at him with a smile so unexpected and toothy and mischievous he feels like she’s pinched him on the softest part of his inner arm, a popular little playground flirtation. “It wasn’t nice.”
“Ouch, Scully.” But he’s smiling back.
She bumps his shoulder.
“I’m kidding,” she says.
She swallows an almost.
She says, “I would never forget.”
—
On their fifteenth case together, they’d marked the anniversary occasion by making an unexpectedly clean arrest and then promptly getting sloppily drunk. He knows he was impressed how Scully could hold her own. Remembers her red cheeks and sharp eyes and her coed socks and leggings combo. She could outshoot him any day. She’d beaten him at four rounds of Go Fish! She drove him absolutely crazy, and he liked her so much.
And after she’d smacked him with a pillow for a cheap blackjack hand he’d said: This reminds me of summer camp.
I never went.
Never?
Never.
Three more rounds. She beat him squarely and was visibly pleased, utterly unstoic. I think, he said, dealing out the cards, if this were summer camp you’d be my best friend.
He’d found bodies with her. Vampires, mummies. If I ever see one, I’ll show you.
Scully had plucked the card deck out of his hand, impatient with the way he was clumsily thumbing the cards. They made a waterfall rattling sound in her hands as she let them slide between her palms. She’d said: If this were summer camp.
Yeah, he’d said. But you never went.
She beat him four more times. When she’d wandered off to bed, feet dragging on the yellow carpet and still laughing, not covering her mouth, over something stupid, he’d stretched out on the bed and imagined for a moment - just one - that he could hear her tell him tinny secrets from the other side of the wall.
—
After four and she is checking her watch, back near the mummies again, from the other side this time. The boy was a runaway, obviously, but she’d keep an eye out for deaths by sunburn in between lectures. How was his new assignment? Did he know that arsenic was one of the first ingredients used for early taxidermy? Death leveraged to preserve life in death. There were stories of taxidermists misplacing and ingesting their ingredients, maybe by accident, but she supposes you can’t get any more passionate about death than to die for it.
He follows her a little dumbly around the museum, pays three bucks for her to stand inside the butterfly enclosure because she didn’t bring cash and watches her cup her hands around a dark moth from beyond fogged glass.
“I should go,” she says. “I have to be in Adams Morgan by six. I’d like to go home first.”
And where last year he might have asked, this year, he loosens his tie and doesn’t. “We can head out whenever.”
She shakes her wrist to cover her watch, looks back up at him. “I just want to pass through here one more time.”
“Scully - you don’t keep arsenic in your apartment, do you?”
She leads him back to the body, to the main event, but he is thinking about the jars. She’d explained it earlier: Baboon for the lungs, jackal for the stomach. Viscera for the afterlife. The clean, somber cut of them. The somehow gentle thought that you could be separated from your most vital organs and still not really lose them. The jackal had a large, smiling face, and something about the whole thing calmed him.
“What about the heart?” His own voice is a surprise. The museum had cleared out quietly and steadily as it got later into the afternoon. It is just him and Scully and the mummy now. The three of them and the long shadows and the slow dark.
“Hm?”
He gestures to the display. “Lungs, intestines, stomach, liver. Where do they put the heart?”
Scully wrinkles her nose, distracted by whatever is in front of her, a collection of calcified skulls, but not disinterested. She is trailing her finger over the glass in what he pegs as childish force of habit. She wouldn’t be a pathologist if she didn’t need to open things up, to touch things after they were far beyond everyone else’s reach.
She leaves smudges behind as she walks further down the hall. Her hair is falling out of its tie, catching up against the back of her blouse. On their way out he’ll buy her a coke from one of the endless stands against Mass Ave, struck by the strange urge to offer to drive her home, even though he knows they both took the red line there, in opposite directions. But for a moment, he just watches her go.
“Oh,” she says, still walking, letting the museum’s slight reverb, hard tile echo, take it right back to him. “They leave that in the body.”