Work Text:
Scully silenced her phone before dinner, but it must have ended up pressed against her keys in her purse, because the metallic buzzing sound is even louder than the ringer.
“Do you want to get that?”
“No, I don’t,” she says, though truth be told, the way it’s vibrating through her chair is more exciting than anything else that has happened since she sat down across from Rick, the friend-of-a-friend-of-her-friend-Ellen.
Mulder will leave a message if it’s important.
She committed herself to an X-File-free evening. Her work has a habit of spilling over into her nights and weekends, and she needs to define some boundaries around it. The man calling her after eight-thirty on a Friday about who-knows-what is a cautionary tale of what can happen if she doesn’t.
Even a boring social evening is important for her health and wellness, like exercise, or taking Vitamin D in the winter.
Despite her healthy new commitment to a work-life balance, when her date leaves the table to chase down some overdue attention from the waiter, she peeks at her phone. No message.
Good, she thinks intentionally, trying to paper over the other, more curious (and bored) voice that’s asking What is it? What??
She and Rick both saw The Shawshank Redemption and thought it was good—that’s almost a common interest, right? Enough to build on over dessert, at least.
“Maybe they’ll make a sequel,” Rick says.
Scully grits her teeth and resists the urge to call Mulder back.
Pennsylvania is always under construction.
Scully almost asks, We’ve been here before, haven’t we?, but answers her own question before it reaches her mouth. Twice in ‘95, and then again in June of ‘97—or was that a warm April?
Even if they have never been past these specific late-night highway mile markers before, the answer would still somehow be yes.
This time around, they’re here about a young woman who is either possessed or deeply unlucky, depending on who you ask.
Scully hasn’t yet—asked, that is—because they have been in the field every week for two months. She’s tired. Mulder’s so tired that she refused to let him drive and relegated him to the passenger seat, in the hopes he’ll manage to get some rest while she crawls along at thirty miles an hour.
It’s not like she needs him to be awake to have the conversation. She already knows what he will say, knows what she will say in return, and it will all be speculation anyway until they get there and can gather some real facts. Scully runs the entire debate in her head between orange traffic cones, as real as if they said it out loud. They’re as predictable as asphalt pavers on I-80 in the spring.
They should be sick of it. Sick of each other. An hour ago, arguing over rental keys in a parking lot, they definitely were. Now, as he sleeps next to her while she keeps the radio on low…
He sighs, drawing her attention. The tie he’s using to cover his eyes against the construction floodlights outside is slipping down his face. The next time the traffic brakes to a standstill, she reaches over and carefully sets it right.
She hears the spark of static as the radio in her ear shorts out.
He knows where I am, she thinks, over and over for the next four hours. She’s armed, but with her escape route cut off and no further intelligence coming from the outside, the only smart bet is for her to stay exactly where she is, as quietly and invisibly as possible.
Don’t panic, she thinks, too—not directed at herself, but at him, as if she could send the message along an invisible thread. I’m okay, because she is, and she’d much rather be in her position than his.
If she were the one pacing around a surveillance van and Mulder were the one in here, having to choose between staying still for a few hours or doing something impulsive and dangerous, they’d really be in trouble.
She makes the right choice.
“I wasn’t worried,” Mulder tells her, as if she’ll believe it.
They’re in the basement, killing time in a boring week. She’s filling out paperwork at his desk, and he’s rifling through reference books, doing research for an argument he won three days ago.
She was feeling impish at the time, so she agreed with him before he had the chance to lay out his whole case. Since then, he has been arguing both his side and hers, trying to bait her back into the ring so he can win a fair fight. She’s enjoying this change in their well-tread dynamic, seeing how easily she can rile him up by changing one of their many unspoken rules.
She looks up from the expense report. The adding machine tape is full of mistakes. Her mind isn’t on math.
She watches him for a minute, the way his lips are silently moving while he reads, and wonders…
He looks up and she jerks her gaze away as soon as he meets her eyes. Her face feels hot. She dives back into her receipts with a feigned focus she hopes will deter him from asking why she’s blushing.
She only ever really thinks these things in stretches of boredom, during the rare times when they have full weekends off and leave the office at five every day with the rest of the government suits. They never go to happy hour, never join the foot traffic to the local watering holes, because neither of them are made for ordinary social rituals.
She used to think she was.
She could go to the bar alone, and try not to leave that way. It would be good—healthy, even—for her to have dinner with a man now and then that didn’t turn up on an expense report, a dinner that might end with something other than a playful debate about Project Blue Book.
She tears off the adding machine tape to start her miscalculations afresh, and rolls the paper into a narrow tube between her fingers and thumb as she thinks.
What does it say about her that she’s hoping the phone will ring with a case that will eat up her weekend in a far-flung state? That, if it were a choice between him and anyone else, she’d choose to spend a Saturday morning sharing continental breakfast with a stack of police reports and a companion who slept in another room?
Across the office, Mulder opens another book. Soon, she hears a satisfied hmm! that means he found something good to weave into the next volley of his argument. She purses her lips, swallowing a smile, and waits.
Scully remembers dating—remembers it the way she remembers roller-skating or taking exams. Something she used to do, something she’d still be able to do if pressed, but it’s not part of her life anymore and she doesn’t miss it.
… not often, anyway.
When she does, she’ll start remembering what it was like to go on blind dates: getting nervous, dressing up, the minute-by-minute internal debate about whether she wants the evening to end with a kiss or if she’s going to make an early escape.
Pretty soon, she’ll also remember why she stopped. It always came back to the same thing: a man might be attractive or successful or kind, even intelligent in his own way, but none of them were that interesting to talk to.
Sometimes though, when she has been having different versions of the same argument for six hours—or six years—having nothing to talk about sounds like heaven. It has been a relentless day of travel across Southwestern state lines, between inconveniently distant crime scenes. The pavement on the two-lane highway is rough, the car air conditioner rattles more than it cools, the diner they stopped at served everything too salty, and through all of it—
“Come on, Scully, you have to admit—”
“Mulder—”
What started as a lively intellectual debate sometime in 1993 has, in the last six overheated hours, devolved into yelling straight through each other’s points of views like they’re driving over potholes.
They stop at a gas station. They’re still miles from their destination, and she decides she needs just five minutes of quiet before she gets back in the rented Ford. Five minutes, that’s all, but she’s too hot both inside and out to ask for it in any kind of polite way. With her luck, she’ll end this argument just to start up a whole new one.
She turns around and walks away instead, even while he’s talking. She high-tails it to a patch of shade and he doesn’t follow her.
Her five minutes pass. The shade and silence are refreshing enough that she starts to feel silly for getting so upset about an argument that she knows will never end. She can’t remember clearly—who can tell anymore?—but this morning, she may have been the one to start it.
She’s craving something these days, and she thought that might be close enough.
A few rolls of her shoulders, and she feels almost like herself again. Once she gets something to drink…
As soon as she turns around, planning to head into the convenience store as her last step before transforming back into a civilized adult, she almost bumps into the bottle of cold water Mulder is holding out toward her.
She takes a long, grateful swallow, and considers apologizing. She enjoys the sheepish look on his face, like he’s considering the same thing. Neither of them do, as they pass the bottle back and forth. The silent, shared thought is enough.
But when she looks at him again to ask if he’s ready to leave, she sees it on his face: that but have you considered look that means he’s going to try and squeeze in another thought that will kick the whole thing off again.
She can’t do it. She needs another five minutes without talking—or ten, or forty-five—and through some bizarre stroke of inspiration, there’s only one way she can think to get them.
She goes up on her toes and catches his mouth, half-open with words she doesn’t want him to say. If he’s as surprised by the kiss as she is, he recovers quickly, dipping his head to meet her halfway. His arm around her back is a different kind of heat.
She can feel him smiling, enough that it breaks the kiss, but neither of them pull away.
“I guess you win this round,” he says, and kisses her again.
For a while, neither of them say anything at all.