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At 20 weeks and six days, Scully sits in her last Bureau expense meeting feeling mildly like a deserter, Mulder doodling at her side while Doggett explains their report.
As they stand to leave, Skinner holds her back. “We’re going to miss you here, Dana,” he tells her, and she feels the weight of finality burning in her eyes.
Mulder senses it, too. He meets her in the precipice of their basement office with soft eyes and says you okay, Scully? and when she doesn’t respond quickly enough, he pulls her into the hallway and shields her face from Doggett’s view – not that he was looking and anyways, she is not going to cry.
“I’m okay,” she says, as he tucks her hair behind her ear.
They’ve discussed this. On Monday morning, he will be back in this office and she will be across the universe in a Quantico lecture hall, dependent on cell phone service that can easily be severed by elevators and rural highways.
The end is anticlimactic. As soon as the clock strikes 4:50pm, Doggett leaves politely with a one-armed hug and well wishes for the little one.
And then it’s just them. Scully and Mulder in their secretive underground den.
Scully sits at his desk and he perches in front of her.
Of all things, Mulder says: “You remember that time we got food poisoning from Wendy’s?”
God, does she ever. She complains, “Mulder, do we have to go there?”
They were barely two years in, somewhere in rural Missouri. It might have been the only time Mulder stopped driving before 7PM and to her absolute horror, the first motel he found to pull into was fumigating or doing construction or something. Whatever. They shared a bathroom for 24 hours and mutually concluded that they would never discuss it again.
“Not if I have any say in it,” Mulder says, “I haven’t been there since.”
“Seriously, Mulder," she warns with a good glare. "I'd rather hear about the praying mantis man. My gag reflex isn't what it used to be.”
“Doesn’t seem any different to me.”
“Mulder,” she scolds him around a barely contained laugh, as if the walls have ears.
Mulder dodges and shifts topics expertly. “I got you something,” he says, free hand scouring around in his pocket.
He produces a stress ball painted to look like a little baseball. “Happy anniversary, Scully.”
They have never celebrated an anniversary and even if they were to take up the practice, it would be somewhere in the crisp dew days of spring, not today.
“Our other anniversary,” Mulder explains, “I’m a little late.”
“Ah,” Scully says, taking the gift and turning it in her hand. He is several months late, actually.
Their first time was not what she expected but it was what she needed. In her more creative moments, she’d imagined that when the dam broke, he would tear buttons from her blouse and pull her panties aside, no frills maneuvering her into position. And that is Mulder, but it is not first time Mulder. First time Mulder wanted to kiss her forehead and take her in. Before, he asked, can I and after, he fell asleep grasping her thumb like a newborn.
It seems like you two have an intense relationship, Scully's therapist once told her, accurately. Leg shaking, concussed sprinting after them intense; pre-sunrise giggling on his couch intense.
“Thank you,” she tells him, slipping it into her bag on the floor.
“It’s my contribution to your labor pain management plan.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.”
“We can add it the hospital bag checklist.”
“Sure, Mulder.”
Mulder waits under the hum of the AC. “You’re welcome.”
A smoke detector is still hanging by a wire from when she took it apart to discover a bug. Sharpened yellow pencils that appeared in the ceiling – again – without explanation. The chunky patterned blanket from his couch, slouched over the back of the computer chair, brought in when she was sick and cold.
Nobody down here but the FBI’s most unwanted.
“Mulder, there have been periods where I spent more time here than at home,” she confesses.
“Me too. Probably too many times, actually.”
“I met you down here.”
“Yeah. You did.”
“And I– …we –” Her voice cracks, an all too common occurrence recently. We fell in love down here.
Or maybe not – maybe it was the rental cars or the autopsy bays – but she can’t quite remember because the where and when was never all that important. Now that she’s leaving this place behind, it feels like it happened here.
“I know.”
Mulder could say: This place isn’t going anywhere, Scully or you can always come back to visit, but it would be a sore consolation and they both know it. This is the wheezing death rattle of Special Agents Mulder And Scully. It’s such a Mulder thought, she would never dare voice it. It wriggles into her temporal lobe anyways.
She is leaving behind the birthplace of them, the first space they ever shared. Early Them live down here, with their shoulder pads and patterns and loose-fitting suits, stealing shy glances at each other over his whirring slideshows. And Middle Them survived the fire, too; floppy haired and caught in crackling tension and sopping with grief and fear and love that they don’t yet know what to do about. Even flirty, curious Right Before them are down here, testing out new boundaries; lighter, dreamier, sweet and sticky them.
Fudge the dates a little and their baby could have been conceived down here, and in the moment, that's the story she tells herself. It's a nice one. Maybe the fetus is a little bigger than typical, or maybe she misremembered the dates of her last menstrual cycle. Maybe she’s carrying a child made from dusty file cabinets, tacked up printouts, scrawled handwriting, crumpled up sticky notes left beside the trash can filled with takeout containers, and them; all the Thems.
Scully amends her last comment. “Well, I’m not sure that it happened down here. But I realized it down here.”
Mulder takes her hand. “Tell me?”
“It’s nothing crazy.”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m good with nothing crazy these days.”
She smiles; damn, he’s got her. “Okay, well…it was a weekend. You had this dark blue jacket on. It was more casual than you’d typically wear.”
“I think I know the one. I can find it, if you ever need a reminder.”
She gives him a look and continues, unperturbed. “You were sitting here at your desk and I was over there working at the computer. You were eating Reese’s Pieces. Very loudly, I might add.”
“When are we gonna get to the flattering part?”
“Never, if you’re going to interrupt.” Scully gets her bearings again. “You were humming something, I’m not sure what but it was a short tune, over and over. And I looked over to tell you to quiet down so I could focus. You were leaning over your report – or whatever it was you were writing. You had a little cut here above your eyebrow. And I just…I just knew.”
He stares, disbelieving but still holding her hand. “That was it, Scully?” He asks. “I was being annoying and you looked over to tell me to knock it off, and that’s how you had this grand realization?”
She shrugs. “I think maybe it was the mundaneness of it.”
“You’re gonna have to elaborate on that one, Scully.”
“Well,” she tries, “how many times have we had very similar conversations? How many times have I probably been working at the computer and looked over to tell you something? Hundreds, maybe.”
“Maybe more.”
“Right. So, it was all of those…everyday things that made up our relationship, our partnership in the first place. It only makes sense that it would be one of those everyday things that...triggered something.”
Mulder takes that in.
“Huh,” he says, gently splaying out her fingers as he processes. “Did you ever tell me to knock off the noise?”
When she puts herself back in the moment, nothing breaches her memory but the all-consuming red sun dawn of the revelation that she knew she was not going to be able to ignore like she had with all the prior little stair step realizations.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think I said anything to you.”
“You might have saved us a lot of time if you had.”
“No, I don’t think so, Mulder. I don’t– maybe it’s all the hormones, but I don’t think we were ready then.”
Mulder takes a moment to digest that idea. He doesn’t necessarily agree, she can tell and it occurs to her to push it. But when he lapses into quietly dragging a fingertip across the lines in her palm, she decides against it.
A gush of self-consciousness rolls over her and she see it hit him like an aftershock. “Well,” she says, “what about you?”
He presses his thumb against one of her nails, scanning his print into the keratin of her nailbed.
“When you came to my room in Bellefleur,” he says.
“You– …the first time?”
He smiles, covering. “Yeah.”
“No,” she insists, “Mulder.”
“Yes, Scully.”
In the moment of silence, Mulder fiddles with her fingers, their heads bowed over their joined hands. Then he kisses the middle of her palm like a stigmata and releases her, gauging her mood.
When he gets a reading, he stands and offers her a hand up. “You ready to go, Agent Scully?”
She takes it, shaking hands with this little death.
“I think I am, Agent Mulder.”