Chapter Text
“In the other version of the story, love rises early to put the water on the stove. Love is a girl who slept beside me, barely touching, for two years. Love is whatever kept us fed. And this was how we knew that we belonged to it.”- Cameron Awkward-Rich, A Prude’s Manifesto
___
Scully remembered a cliffside overlooking the San Francisco Bay, covered in cypress trees and cedar.
She remembered going up there with her father when she was younger, and sneaking up there by herself when she was older. Most nights the city lights and fog would black-bleach out the stars, but sometimes on very special nights she could see them. These were the days before she even knew stars had names for her to discover, and young Scully simply allowed herself to wonder at them.
Even when they moved from one base to another Scully never forgot about the cliffside, or the beach below. In dreams, she would sometimes walk out there and look at the glow of the Golden Gate Bridge through the fog. If she closed her eyes during waking hours, she could still recall the silky cold feel of sea air on her skin, the sweet-static sound of waves and wind colliding.
At one point when she was in high school her family visited friends in San Francisco again and she made her way up to that cliffside once more. Though now, other teenagers had found it, and her once private Eden had become the local hookup spot for half of the teens in the city. She still climbed the hill to the rocky ledge, and still left smelling like sea salt and juniper, but with the added scent of pot and beer.
“Isn’t there anyone you want to take up there with you?” Melissa asked that afternoon, sipping a coke across from Dana in Dolores Park. She wiggled her eyebrows as she teased her sister.
The truth is, Dana would have liked to, but there was no one she wanted to share it with. It was ok, though, someday she would find someone she wanted to take up there and share the view with, just not right now.
*-*-*
Fox Mulder never labored under the illusion he was normal. Even when he was a child, he stood out not like a sore thumb, but an entire extra appendage, something that shouldn’t even be here.
It’s probably for this reason his best friend in high school felt comfortable coming out to him.
It was late summer on Cape Cod, and he and his friend David were walking down a long stretch of beach, occasionally seeing who could throw rocks further into the ocean. They stopped at a piece of driftwood halfway down the beach to eat the sandwiches their mothers made for them, and a tense silence fell between them.
“Fox, you’re pretty open-minded, right?”
Mulder could tell David was afraid of something, but since he was the only person Mulder knew who was brave enough to sneak into horror movies at the drive-in all summer with him, he had no idea what could possibly scare him.
“I’d like to think so, yeah.”
David took a deep breath in and looked out to the horizon. “I want to tell you something, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way, or freak out or anything.”
Mulder put away his sandwich and looked at his friend, who still couldn’t meet his gaze. “Yeah, I promise, what’s up?”
The young boy sighed, not taking his eyes off some imaginary point in the distance. “Fox, I think I might be gay.”
The admission did shock him, but only because Mulder had seen him making out with a girl at the last school dance. He took a minute to process this before speaking. “That’s ok, thanks for telling me.”
David sighed with relief and seemed to deflate a little, weight literally falling off his shoulders. “You really don’t mind?”
“No, of course not.” Mulder kicked the sand in front of him and decided that what he was saying was true, he didn’t mind at all. “Can I ask why you felt comfortable coming out to me?”
The other boy shrugged “I don’t know, you’re my best friend? Also, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought you might be gay, too.”
Mulder tilted his head at that. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I never see you looking at girls, and we never talk about crushes or anything like the rest of kids in school.” David opened up a bag of chips between them. “I don’t know, I only didn’t talk about that stuff because all the crushes I’ve had have been on other boys.”
“But, the girls you made out with?”
“That was just to save face. I didn’t want anyone catching on.” David popped a chip into his mouth. “So, how about you?”
Mulder sat back and looked at the sky, the way it perfectly blended in with the sea to become one grey, shimmering half-dome in front of them. “I’m not sure. I honestly haven’t thought about it before.” He really hadn’t. While people in his grade were busy hooking up and developing crushes and talking about girls in just the grossest way possible, Fox didn’t know what all the fuss was about. He got the sense he was supposed to feel something, but he didn’t know what that something was. “I don’t think I have a sexuality.” He said finally.
Now it was David’s turn to nod silently and think. “Well, if you ever end up developing one, you can always tell me.”
“Thanks.” Fox said “Now, tell me which boys in our grade you’ve had crushes on.”
*-*-*
When she got to college Scully was sexually frustrated, or at least she was frustrated at sex.
Specifically, she was mad she hadn’t had any yet, and decided it was a skill she had to learn. It made sense, really. How could instinct account for all the ways humans relate to each other sexually? Human beings are highly social animals, and that had to account for a good portion of what people were talking about, she reasoned. When girls were talking about crushes and boys were bragging about who they hooked up with, it was more than likely a front put up for social clout. Behind closed doors, everyone else was just as confused as she was, she hypothesized. But Dana Scully was smart, and if she could learn about quantum physics she could learn about sex.
She was practically sure of it.
At lunch Scully would sit with other girls in her class and listen to who and what they found attractive. This was a good starting point for her to figure out what this meant. Attractiveness as a concept is highly dependent on social norms, of course, so once Scully had a good sense of this, she found some people to be attracted to, and got started.
Her first hookups weren’t the best experiences ever, but, as she understood it, that was to be expected. No one liked sex at first. There was a brief, scary moment when she hypothesized this meant she might be gay, but after an hour of thinking it through logically, Scully put this fear aside. There was nothing morally wrong with that, she decided, and she should give the hypothesis a test, to make sure. No sense being a judgmental scientist.
There was a Gay and Lesbian Alliance club at her college, and Scully found a few women who were very excited to help her in her research. She could see the appeal, the soft skin, the body that felt and worked like her own, the companionship and understanding of womanhood a man could never provide, but the spark she kept hearing so much about wasn’t there. With a certain level of disappointment, she crossed this hypothesis off the chalkboard in her mind.
By the end of college, she was no closer to figuring out sex than she began. With a resignation that frustrated the scientist in her, Dana Scully decided it was either that the whole idea of sex was overrated, or she would have to just keep practicing until she found out where she fit into this part of the human experience.
When her teacher Jack Willis started taking an interest in her at the Academy, Scully found that pretty interesting. She found she didn’t care for intimacy, but did care for attention, and Jack was so good at paying attention to her.
“Your pussy is so tight, so fucking cute, Dana.”
“How were you still single when I found you? You’re the most beautiful woman here.”
“No one sucks dick like you, I swear, no one in the whole goddamn world.”
Were just some of the complements he paid her that made Scully feel very good indeed.
“Dana,” he said, one night, while fucking her into the mattress at his apartment in DC “I could fuck you forever.”
She took her attention off the water stain in his celling long enough to kiss him, and gave herself over to the steady rhythm of his cock ramming into her again and again. It was wonderful, really, to not have to think for once.
There was something about the heat of a romantic relationship that burned away all her doubts and questions, and for a little over a year she could pretend that the search was over, and she had figured out how to like sex.
But, after the first year, things became more difficult. Jack’s desire waned, and Dana couldn’t pick up the slack. They drifted apart, and the relationship faded, and all Dana could give as an explanation was “The spark just isn’t there anymore.” But the truth was, it never had been.
*-*-*
Mulder met the love of his life on March 6th, 1993, but he didn’t know it for a couple years.
He had sworn off dating forever after two failed relationships and a lot of anguish. The sexuality he had promised to share with David all those years ago on the beach had never materialized. Instead, what had was layers of shame.
See, at the time, Fox really, really wanted there to be at least one normal thing about him. He couldn’t have conversations like normal people, he didn’t have a normal family, normal interests, normal hobbies, or a normal job. Would it be too much to ask for any human sexuality at all?
So, he started lying. To others first, then to himself. He got good at it, so good Mulder even forgot he was lying for a few years there. The porno mags Mulder bought were mostly for show, if left around conspicuously enough he didn’t even need to be sexually active for people to think he was thinking about sex. There even was this system he decided on, somewhat randomly, that if he could have sex at least three times a year, he was normal. Dating was this horrible chore he just had to go along with, and after a few years it all became too much.
Without realizing it, Mulder had unconsciously created a series of hoops to jump through to prove that he was worthy of the love of women who he never could really love.
That’s not right, not quite. He had genuine feelings for the women he dated, but he also hoped that they would save him, absolve him from being the deviant he was. Maybe, he thought, if he could figure out how to be attracted to these women, to like sex exactly as they did, he could learn it like a dance, until one day he wouldn’t have to practice at all. It was unfair, to the women in his life and himself, the limerent, fantastic stories he would make up around women that showed an interest in him. This one was always going to be the one to save him, when what Mulder needed to do was stay far away from the whole thing.
“Fox, I feel like you don’t even want me.” Diana once said, bitterly, as their relationship was beginning to deteriorate.
“Trust me, I do.” He said back. What he should have said was “I want to want you. I want to want this so badly it hurts.” But he figured that would be more hurtful. So, he did the gentlemanly thing and broke things off with her a week later.
After that he was done. No more dating, no more trying to make something work that obviously didn’t work for him. He did keep the porno mags he bought during the time he was trying to date, though. They fascinated him, the way sports interested some people, he supposed. It was all thrilling and interesting to look at, but he didn’t really feel like joining in.
He was sure he had gotten the need for partnership out of his system until he met his actual partner.
It hit him slowly, as he realized one night on the drive home that he had memorized the sound of Scully’s footsteps in the hall, the thyme and angelica scent of her hair, and didn’t quite know what to do with himself on weekends when she was gone. It wasn’t attraction, but was it love? Mulder became an expert of putting that thought out of his mind. Love wasn’t something he got to have in this life, and he had learned to be ok with that.
The Sunday night before work, Mulder realized he was out of pretty much anything edible in his fridge. He went to the supermarket not really knowing what he was looking for, which he guessed described his life pretty well.
Under the shadowless glow of florescent lights Mulder stood in the frozen food isle, contemplating different varieties of frozen pizza.
“Alex! Cut it out!”
He looked down the aisle to see a young couple teasing each other. The man, slightly taller, had his arms wrapped around the waist of a young woman who was all smiles and laughter. They seemed to be in a world all their own, visitors from Venus sent to remind humans of their capacity for love.
What would that be like, he wondered, to simply date and go grocery shopping with someone you loved. You would go back to your home and watch Dateline, then go have vanilla sex and fall asleep next to each other. The next day, go to your stable, normal job, and never look up, never wonder, never carry the burden, the certainty, that there is more to life than this. Never even have the suspicion that something is very, very wrong with you.
He looked back at the shrink-wrapped products in front of him and frowned. It was as good a life to contemplate as a fish contemplating life as a bird.
“Forget it, Fox,” He thought to himself. “Get back to the X-Files, to the hunt, it’s where you belong.”
*-*-*
It was getting harder, pretending to be like everyone else, even to herself.
Dana Scully took her mother out to a nice restaurant in DC one night, and the whole time she wouldn’t stop questioning her about her dating life.
“I just don’t want you to be alone, Dana.”
“Mom, I’m not alone.”
She sighed “Fox Mulder isn’t the same thing as a real partner. Unless, he is?”
Scully rolled her eyes and sipped her wine.
What was she supposed to say? That he was? That her body relaxed when in close proximity to his like no one else she ever met? Or that they had practically developed an entire secret language of glances and secret smiles, and the occasional glare that was richer than any conversation she had on a normal date? Or, most confusing, that despite all this, she never found herself fantasizing about sleeping with him. Was that partnership? Was that friendship? Was that love? Or was Scully just as weird as Mulder, just better at hiding it.
“I’ll find a boyfriend someday, Mom.” She murmured, stabbing a piece of chicken with her fork.
It was easier, when she was young and her father only expected her to know the patterns of the seas, the parts of a ship. Back then the goals were straightforward, and she was always clever enough to figure them out. Scully remembered sea breezes and nights at sea, a world that once seemed big. She had learned the rules of the small world and even learned them so well she had chosen to enforce them at gunpoint, but she missed that world without rules or names when even the stars didn’t have names yet.
Maybe that was why it was getting harder and harder to be away from the X-Files and Fox Mulder.