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i. Preface
Think of it as hibernation, Mulder’s doctors tell him as they furrow their brows and leaf through his chart. He spent three months in a state of… hibernation. Like a bear.
He knows better. The sharp, unnatural taste in the back of his throat, that’s death. The emptiness in his mind when he tries to remember something, anything, that’s death.
A hibernating organism dials its body back to one, stays in suspended animation, and waits out the hard times. The last thing he remembers is Scully’s secret smile lighting up the room as she descended his body in the pre-dawn of spring. Times were not hard. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
For a week now she’s been at his bedside every day, and each day his eyes adjust more, see her clearer. He doesn’t have a map for this territory that is her face.
Scully sits with one hand on her growing belly and looks him square in the eye. She is beautiful. She is frightening. She feeds him vanilla pudding and he tries to make a joke about it, tries to wink and rasp to her that this flavor is his second favorite in the world, after her. She closes her eyes against her tears and tips her head up. She licks her lips and shakes her head and nods and exhales loudly. She picks up the spoon again.
Once, he tries to reach out to her. He wants to feel her new body, the new life. He sees her flinch as her eyes move over the scars on his arm. He draws his hand back.
Before she leaves, she leans over him, kisses his forehead, his eyelids, his cheek. Everywhere but his lips.
He wonders what happened. Why she’s scared. Why she’s walking away. He knows he’ll never have the guts to ask. But it’s them. It’s them. They can get through anything, the three of them, he tells himself before the sleeping pill hits.
ii. First movement
After a month in the lonely rooms and long hallways of a hospital, Mulder gets to go home.
His identity has had to be reassembled from scratch. After a series of labyrinthine interactions with insurers, the DMV, his landlord, the FBI, and with himself, Mulder is once again equipped with all the key accessories of the living: a driver’s license (though he was instructed not to drive; his eyes need more time), a key to his own place, his bank account, his name.
How does a person mourn his own death when every step he takes still finds him, solid, feet to the earth, eyes to the sky? He’s been expecting, in his half-sedated state, to lift off the ground and disappear in a wisp of smoke. But then he feels his knee creak when he gets out of bed, his teeth grind when he stands up, and, if he’s honest, his heart jump and his dick stir when he sees her, all cold weather flush and pregnancy glow, and he does suppose that he’s alive, after all.
She offers no insight into what goes on behind those wondrous, wet eyes. So he goes home. Please, come in, he tells himself, to the Fox Mulder museum and cabinet of curated curiosities. The blinds are open and the place looks mournful in the late afternoon sun. His place faces west, always looking out toward the end on the horizon.
He toasts a Pop Tart (of course they’re still good); he wanders the rooms like an animal pacing in its pen. The sheets on his bed are rumpled and he kneels down at the head of her side, grabs the pillows and buries his face in the oldest one. She’s been here, he can smell her hairspray and underneath, an unmistakeable perfume of them. He’s used this pillow, more than once, to prop her hips up to allow him better access, with hands and mouth and all the rest of him. He has made her come here, and here, and here, and over there on the dresser. Will it happen again?
He showers. He doesn’t need to look down at himself to know that it isn’t pretty. The scars pucker and the brand new tissue is sore from the washcloth and heat. The religious say that rituals make things real, and so he tries one: He gets out of the shower, spends too long moussing and blow drying his hair, jagged from nurses’ scissors where they’d inspected the scarring, and shaves carefully, working around the scabs. Exogenous personhood, he thinks as he stands at his dresser, pulling out his oldest things, those that should be most him. It’ll have to do for now, until the ice inside has thawed.
He’s had these maroon sweatpants since freshman year of college. He cut them off at the knee after an ill-advised run in the prettiest of fall weather, when his sneaker had slipped on some leaves and he’d blown out and bled all over the coarse asphalt of Potomac Yard.
He wants to find his vintage Knicks t-shirt; at one point it had been his pride and joy. In his early 20s, he’d paraded around the lush parks of Oxford wearing it. All the prim and proper girls had loved it. He remembers Scully lounging, lazy and sated, with a leg across the arm of his green leather couch, her still-aroused nipples poking enticingly through the threadbare K and S on her chest.
It’s nowhere to be found. They told him no running for another month anyway. He slumps down, bare chested despite the cold, on the foot of the bed, and wheezes for a minute.
iii. Across town
Scully invites him for dinner. The invitation, on the phone, is somewhat formal, and he wants to tease her and ask her all sorts of personal questions and ask if he can touch her and bust open the door, saunter into her bedroom and nod toward the bed. Instead he stands in the hallway, neutralizing the expression on his face.
He has a sick feeling that she’s pulled away for good; he has a sick feeling that he won’t be able to recover enough of himself to make her recognize him.
He waits.
She opens the door in stretchy lounge pants and a chunky cardigan, its grey shawl collar caressing her neck. His ancient Knicks t-shirt stretches taut across her belly.
He wills himself not to cry. “Hi,” he says, “I’ve been looking for that.” He enters her space, where both their pleasure still lingers in the floorboards, and wonders if he is a guest here, or a stranger, or family.