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The phone rang. Scully kept her eyes closed through the first ring, but sleep was already far away. She opened her eyes on the second ring, reached for it on the third. “Hello,” she said, no question mark at the end of it, her voice clear, not sleepy.
A pause, before the voice came through clear— not sleepy— on the other end. “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
“I didn’t?”
The covers snuffled beside her. Then started to move. Scully lifted the edge of the bedspread and Queequeg popped his head up to look at her. He sneezed. Then stood up, turned in a circle, and flopped back down.
“You didn’t,” she said.
Another pause on the other end. And then: “…Why not?”
Scully shook her head on the pillow, at the same time smiling to herself. It came through in her voice. “What do you want, Mulder?”
She was lying on her back. She tucked the phone between the pillow and her ear, cradling it with her shoulder. Letting it go with her hand, she reached down to scratch Queequeg’s chin. Mulder’s tone had that low, hushed, late-night quality to it, nothing important or urgent.
She heard what might be a chuckle. Or what might be the creak of his couch as he shifted his weight. “I— I didn’t really expect you to answer,” he said finally. “I called your cell phone.”
She turned her head on the pillow. It was indeed her cell phone that had buzzed, that was now tucked in her shoulder. They had reached something of an agreement, that when they were not working an active case she would turn the cell phone off, the signal of do not disturb. Her home phone was there for anything urgent. She hadn’t realized which phone had rung. She rarely turned the new one off.
“I’m still not used to these things,” Mulder was saying. She heard him rattle the phone in his hand. It had been almost a year since the Bureau had issued mobile phones to their agents, and his took a regular beating. It sounded like a box of loose bolts, the connection dropping out at unpredictable intervals.
“I figured you would be the one to wholeheartedly embrace change and new technology,” she said, leaving him to wonder whether she was being sarcastic. She was. But she liked to use her normal voice when she was, keep him ever unsure.
“Oh, never let it be said, Scully,” he said. Earnest. “I am. An intrusion into every aspect of our lives. Another device, marketed for the sake of convenience, enticing us to sign away yet another of our civil liberties.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said.
“Privacy. Security. All relics of the past. Mark my words, Scully. There will come a day where we can’t turn off, disconnect, not even for a second. Always connected. Always on.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And you think there won’t be those in power who use that to their advantage? A whole population, their every move tracked, their every word recorded.”
“Not to mention,” she said, “they cause cancer in lab rats.”
He paused. “So you read it too. The new Lone Gunmen?”
Now it was definitely a chuckle, not his sofa creaking.
“Is that what you called me up on your cell phone after midnight to tell me?” she said. “How cell phones are detrimental in our lives?”
“The irony is there, I realize.”
“Because if you did, Mulder, it’s not your best work.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. The silence stretched out for a minute, comfortable between them. Queequeg circled and flopped beside her again as she waited for Mulder to go on. He didn’t. To fill the silence, finally, she asked the question she hesitated to ask, the one that could push sleep that much farther away.
“Mulder,” she said. “Was something bothering you? Was there a reason you called?”
He didn’t sigh, he didn’t admit or evade. He simply said, in his normal voice, “No.” And then: “Yes.” And then: “I don’t know.”
She waited again.
“I’m still thinking about her,” he said.
It had been a week since their return from Seattle. She said, “Lucy?”
“Yeah,” he said finally. “And Amy. But mostly Lucy. And you.”
“Me?” she said.
“How you were right, Scully.”
Queequeg shook his head, fluffing the mane that she flattened with her hand.
“I was?” she said. She thought it had been soundly proven she wasn’t. For reasons that left a field report lacking, yet seemed undeniable to her, Lucy Householder had indeed been what Mulder believed and what she had denied, a conduit to Amy Jacobs. She said, “Mulder—”
He went on. “It’s not like you were wrong. What you said. How much of what I think, and feel and do— how much of it does go back to what happened to my sister. Twenty-three years ago.”
It hung there in the air a moment. She said, “Mulder.” And then she probably surprised him, because she surprised herself. “So what?” she said. “So what if it is true? That just means you’re no different than any of us.”
Queequeg sneezed again. She reached down for him, scooped him up and onto her chest. A pink tongue swiped a black nose, eyes bright and awake now, alert. When he panted it looked he was smiling.
“Things like that shape us all, Mulder,” she went on. “Profoundly. We can no more separate ourselves from the experiences and the tragedies that occur in our lives than… than we could decide the sun shouldn’t rise in the morning. It’s just part and parcel to who we are. What we do. How we think.”
The one time he waited for her to go on without interrupting. She reached for more words. “It will be a part of you. Always. It’s a part of me.” She clarified, “What happened to… Missy.” She took a deep breath, filling her lungs. “I don’t think there’s a value judgement on that. Except what we place on that. We carry it forward. That’s not inherently bad. Nor inherently good. It just is.”
The line was silent. It didn’t crackle or pop with a bad connection.
“Are you still there?” she asked gently.
He said, “I’m here.”
She was sure he could hear the change in her voice, softer, subdued. She was sure he could tell the shift that had happened within her. No longer talking about his long-ago tragedy; instead talking about her most recent one. She closed her eyes, fighting it, willing herself not to think about Missy.
After a moment, he said out loud: “Scully. I’m sorry.”
She thought she knew what for. For bringing this to the surface at this time of night. For everything he was helpless to fix. She nodded her head on the pillow, as if he could see it. “I just miss her,” she said, her voice a little more wistful than filled with grief.
He let her go on.
“It doesn’t feel like she’s gone. You know? We would go months without talking sometimes. It feels like, any day, the phone will ring, or she’ll just walk through the door.” She had to ask, just to say it, even though she knew the answer, even though she did not want the answer. “Does that ever change? Does it ever feel real?”
Mulder, of all people, was the last person on earth who would patronize her. He would never offer up platitudes just to spare her the hurt. “No,” he said, softly. Honestly. “It doesn’t.”
She nodded again. She let go of the breath that she held in her lungs. Somehow, it felt good to hear it. It made her feel less alone. Queequeg’s little heart beat, pressed against hers. He laid his head down again, all four pounds of weight on her chest.
“Mulder?” she said.
“Mm?”
It was her last chance to not say it. What had been turning over and over in her mind when he called. She waited to see if she would say it. If she could talk herself out of it in one last internal debate.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, and there was her answer.
“Okay,” he said.
“I— saw my landlord today. I happened to run into him, coming out of the building.”
He waited.
“The apartment above mine is vacant come the end of the month.”
“…Okay,” he said again, and she realized he was not making the mental leap to the end of her thought.
“I’m— thinking of taking it.” Silence. “Of moving upstairs.”
“In your own building?”
She made a face, a wince. It was crazy. “Yes,” she said. And then she said, “No. I don’t know. It’s just an impulse. It doesn’t make sense.”
The silence lengthened again, until she realized he was making mental leaps around her now, connecting all the dots left unsaid. The reasons she would have for such an impulse, at least one of them exhibited now in this very phone call. It was something they never discussed, but he was aware of it. That she still had trouble sleeping. Waking up in the night thinking she heard a windowpane shatter, someone lurking outside. And that was before Melissa was…
Before Melissa.
“You know what I’m going to say,” he finally said.
She did. She had a pretty good idea. She was stacking the deck for the advice that she wanted, instead of seeking out those who would call it crazy.
“If it’s what you want,” he said. “I think you should do it.”
She realized, at that moment, how fully-formed the idea was in her mind. She had turned it over and over until it had shape, it had taken on weight. She thought, up until that moment, it was an idea that she could try on for a while and then just discard it. Until she heard herself say it out loud.
“But, Mulder,” she said, like she was arguing with him, not with herself. “Why would I do something like that? Why wouldn’t I just move across town?”
“Because you love that place.”
He said it matter-of-fact, because it was matter-of-fact. “I love this place,” she said.
“You do. And you love the neighborhood.”
“I do. I don’t want to move,” she said. “Away. I just—”
Whatever inferences he made from that were likely right too. She saw it as weakness, as defeat, to want to actually pack up and leave.
The phone crackled, then warbled. “Mulder?”
It sounded like the phone had been dropped underwater.
“Mulder?”
It crackled again, the connection clearing. Mulder’s voice came back, clear and strong.
“Do it,” he said.
Queequeg had scooted a few inches up her chest. His small tongue came out, licking the gold cross on her neck.
“What have you got to lose?” Mulder was saying. “What are the downsides?”
She thought about it. “I’m crazy?”
He chuckled, letting the obvious comeback go unsaid.
“It might still feel like home,” she said. “Just—”
“Yeah,” he said. “Which is why you should do it.”
That was the problem, though. What looked like a positive in one light turned into a negative in another. The reason it had been going around in her mind for the better part of a day. She asked him, not sure how the answer would sway her for it or against: “Is it something you would do?”
“Move upstairs in your building? Yes,” he said quickly.
“In your building.”
“Oh.” He thought about it. “Have you seen my building? Scully, it gets worse with each floor.”
She smiled down at Queequeg, sharing it with him, who tried licking her chin. She scratched his ears, laying her cheek down on the little dog’s head.
“If you don’t like it,” Mulder was saying. “Just… move back.”
“It’s not that simple.”
He ignored what she said. “Or move down two floors. Live in the basement. Or keep both apartments. Cut a hole in the ceiling. Put in a fire pole.”
The serious part of the conversation was over. She knew it as well as she’d known his mood when she answered the phone.
“Okay,” she said. “Mulder. Thank you. Goodnight.”
He laughed. “That’s it? You get what you want from me, and just hang up?”
She turned to look at the clock. “At one o’clock in the morning? Yes.”
His voice was still soft around the edges from the laugh. “Go for it,” he said. “Call your landlord in the morning.” She lifted her head from the pillow, tugging it into a new shape under her head so as soon as she put the phone down she would be ready to sleep. Mulder said in her ear, “But I’m warning you, Scully, I’m not moving that clawfoot tub upstairs.”
She let her eyes drift closed, trying already to power her mind off. “There’s one just like it already up there.”
His phone crackled again. “Your bookshelves either. Partners don’t help partners move.”
“That’s in the bylaws?”
“Somewhere. I’ll find it.”
She kept her voice serious. He was so full of shit.
“Goodnight, Mulder.”
“Tell me when I owe you a housewarming gift.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Night, Scully,” he said.
There was one extra beat at the end before she heard his phone click.
Leaves crunched underfoot as Mulder took the steps in front of her building. The air was brisk, crisp like an apple, the kind of day the sun would eventually warm. He stacked the two cups he carried, small cups with lids, one on top of the other, tucking the top one beneath his chin. He dug in his pocket.
Her front door always stuck, no matter what time of year. Old world architecture from some earlier, indiscernible era. Her street was lined with a hodge-podge of buildings, facades and stonework from multiple decades, Victorian next to Classic Revival. He never could keep it straight. Renovations added to the eclectic effect, a facade here and there with a facelift tacked on. Old world updated in Art Deco, or in New French Traditional. He bet this part of Georgetown alone made the original craftsmen spin in their graves.
The first floor hallway was dim. He found her door standing open. He tapped twice, stepping in, saying “Hello?” as he dropped the key back in his pocket.
“Scully?”
He stopped in the room. Pausing, taking it in. He didn’t know what he expected, but the room was empty. Boxes scattered, here and there. A stray lamp, potted plants on the floor. Except for a small table, all the furniture gone.
It was spooky, seeing it empty. Somehow, he wasn’t prepared for it. Like it was something he’d dreaded suddenly coming to life. When she was gone— that was the word they had officially assigned to it— “gone,” not “abducted,” not “presumed dead”— he had come by a few times, using the key she had given him to let himself in. To what end, exactly? Make sure a pipe hadn’t burst. Make sure the gas wasn’t leaking.
Make sure she hadn’t come home.
To torture himself. The usual.
This was a different kind of empty. Different, how— he wasn’t sure of that either.
“Mulder?”
Scully’s voice. He realized sounds came down the hall. The relief he felt was too much relief.
“I’m back here,” she called. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
He looked down at the two cups in his hand. There were a few things still left on the kitchen counter, a coffeemaker among them. It steamed, hot. He set the two cups he brought, one with cream and no sugar, down on the table, and wandered toward her voice.
Her bedroom, empty too. Even the curtains were gone from the windows. The bookshelf still stood, though, against the front wall.
“I told you,” she told him from the next room. The clank of a drain pulled, water gushed from what sounded like the tub. “The movers got most of it.”
He nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see him, eyeing the boxes of books stacked by the bookshelf. He pulled the flap of one open, finding it full inside. With one shelf left to empty.
“So you didn’t need to come. I could have gotten the rest,” she said, from the doorway behind him.
He turned around. Scully had a sponge in hand, yellow gloves up to her elbows, a loose sweater that showed spots of water. Her hair pulled into a high ponytail, which meant it was falling down around her face and neck. She blew a puff of air upwards, swiping her bangs out of her eyes with her upper arm.
“Hi,” he said, ignoring everything she had said since he came in the door. It made her smile.
“Hi,” she said.
He looked around. “I like what you’ve done with the place. I remember it different.”
The sponge tried to drip. She caught it with her glove. She ducked past him, heading with it toward the kitchen. “You didn’t need to come,” she said one more time, this time over her shoulder.
Before he followed, he leaned into the bathroom, checking the damage. There was nothing left, not even in boxes. Every surface was bare.
“You said that already,” he said. “All week, in fact.”
She had, all week. Repeatedly, emphatically. Futilely. That was one thing he knew how to do, not take her hints.
He joined her in the kitchen. Scully stood at the sink, squeezing excess water out of the sponge, swiping that excess water with the sponge down the drain. When she turned back around, leaning into the counter, he smiled.
Behind her, the bare window by the sink let in sunlight, the glass spotless. The whole kitchen looked scrubbed within an inch of its life. He thought he had come over first thing and instead it looked like she had been up before dawn.
“What’s left to do?” he asked.
She looked past him. He looked too, now seeing the odds and ends scattered around as things to carry upstairs instead of things she was leaving behind. “There’s not much left,” she said.
She sounded quiet. Possibly a little bit wistful. It was hard to tell.
When she looked back at him, he was shoving the sleeves of his sweatshirt up over his elbows. He said, “Then I’m right on time.”
She held back a long beat, but then the smile spread over her face. There it was. It was why he had come. To make it a good day for her. That’s what he meant to do.
He picked up the box she pointed out to him. At the front door he turned back to say something else, but she had snapped the rubber glove off one hand, and stood there stretching her neck, rubbing one spot with her fingertips. He let it go.
A few minutes later, Mulder came back downstairs. He stood in the living room, looking around him again like he’d done when he first came in the door. This time, taking a mental map of it, overlaying it with the new mental map he had from above.
Scully came out of her bedroom with a box of books. It hit the floor with a thud when she bent over as far as she could, dropping it the rest of the way. A lamp rattled in the corner. She straightened up. “What’s wrong?” she said at the look on his face.
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “It’s like one of those games in Highlights,” he said, impressed. “Spot the differences.” He gestured around them. In case it wasn’t clear, he nodded at her. “I like it.”
He knew what it was to sleep for six more years in the house where Samantha disappeared. He envied the choice she had to not leave that behind, and yet move one step beyond it.
The better part of three hours. They worked, all but clearing her apartment of everything except dust. Mulder carried the books, the lamps, the small end table. Scully emptied the fridge. She filled the new one upstairs in less than three trips, feeling the fatigue setting in as she made another trip down. This time for the dust mop, to make one last sweep of the floors. She grabbed it from the corner, trying to decide where to start when a noise came from the bedroom.
She had lost track of Mulder, thinking he was upstairs. They had passed so many times going back and forth, up and down, that they had stopped acknowledging each other, unless she had instructions for where to put something or what not to do.
She found him in the bedroom. One last box by his feet, packed with books. He was leveraging the bookshelf, testing its weight.
“I think we can do it,” he announced when he saw her appear.
She looked at him, not the bookshelf. “Mulder,” she said. “It can stay.”
“What?” he said, shouldering it back in place.
“The books are enough.”
He looked confused. “You’re not taking it?”
To tell the truth, she hadn’t decided. “I don’t know if it fits,” she said. “With the other pieces.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
“And if it doesn’t? You’ll bring it back down?”
He made a face. But still he stood with his hands on his hips, sizing up the shelf, not letting it go.
“Come on.” She touched his elbow. And then turned back when he didn’t follow.
“You can just leave it?” he asked, and she sighed. A sigh that might have been more like a laugh. Everything in her partner’s apartment, everything in their basement office, should have prepared her for the fact that he could let nothing go. Not even a bookshelf that wasn’t his own. He ran one hand across it, saying it was still in good shape.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“Yeah?” Mulder said, hopeful.
“Okay. Let’s get it upstairs.”
They were twelve steps up the flight, bumping off both the walls in the narrow passage, putting dents in the molding as she steered and he hefted, when Mulder’s head popped out to the side. “Hey, Scully?”
She was about to lose her grip, trying to steady the weight as she searched for a handhold.
“Does this count as our team-building this year? Can we get extra credit?”
“Mulder. Left,” she said. Wincing as they missed the molding but hit the handrail instead. “Your left.”
“Got it,” he said, bumping them up one more step, barely grazing the wall.
Scully stretched her back out. She stood at the sink. She’d found the kettle, and set it under the tap, filling the kettle with water. The coffee from that morning was long gone, even the cups that Mulder had brought with him. He was upstairs when she found them sitting on the end table, still barely steaming. The first, black and bitter, the way Mulder liked his, and the second had no sugar but tasted mild, mixed with cream. She’d taken the one meant for her, sipping it as she worked, once they had drained the pot of coffee in quick order.
She took the kettle to the stove, the burner clicking and popping, finally firing as she put it on for tea. It made her wonder how often the previous tenant had cooked for himself. The stove felt out of use, the top of it dusty. She tried to recall meeting him, and came up with a vague face she had seen once or twice sorting mail in the hall.
Not that she was exactly the model tenant herself. Nor the model example of a good neighbor. Her stove might not collect dust, but she had found plenty of items in her refrigerator that were closer to science experiments than they were to food. Mulder had taken a shortcut through the kitchen about the time she discovered a jar that held something fuzzy and green and abnormally lumpy, and, equal parts grossed out and interested, he’d said not to throw it away, at least not without testing it for a viable lifeform.
Which might be the thing least surprising to her neighbors, she considered. She marveled a bit that her landlord had not balked when she expressed interest in this upstairs apartment. It was a risk that she took, that he might instead seize the chance to evict her from the building. But no, he seemed to like the idea, even arranging the same terms as her previous lease. He was so accommodating about it, that she wondered what conversations might have gone on a year ago, who in her building might have been offered the prime piece of real estate on the first floor. Its tenant gone— not moved out, not mortally wounded, just gone. Crime scene tape across the door.
It had been eerie, once she came home. Dust over everything. That pent-up musty smell of rooms in need of fresh air. Her answering machine full. Friends, old coworkers, a former student had called, all unaware of her disappearance. Life had gone on. That first week back, she had been expecting… something. Some sort of welcome. Questions she did not know how to answer. Instead, not one of her neighbors had stopped her in the hall, surprised to see her. Whatever had happened to her had gone mostly unnoticed, or at least forgotten once the news of it faded. She had always felt at home here, like she was building a life and putting down roots, and yet the two places where her absence was met with heartbreak was a dimly-lit office in the basement of the Bureau and her mother’s home halfway across town.
Scully shook her head, clearing it of that train of thought. The kettle had grown hot to the touch. Boxes lined the counter, an overwhelming task to tackle all at once. Instead, she wandered off down the hall, toward where she had left Mulder unattended.
He wasn’t there. The bedroom was empty. The bookshelves were empty, newly installed on the wall next to the door. She stood there in the doorway, the first moment she had to herself to take it all in. Pale light fell through the windows, the room half old, half new. The chest of drawers she had bought with her mother last weekend; the desk she had had since she moved off to college. The new drapes, the new lamp, the old shelves. The old bed.
Where Mulder had slept, sick, the night his father died. She wondered if he remembered. She wondered what he remembered. Big and long-limbed, tangled up in the sheets.
Nearly delirious. Spiking a fever of 103, his clothes in a pile on the floor, streaked with blood from a crime scene. Her one duty that night should have been to make a call, report what had happened, even if she told herself it was only to clear him, but her own temple had stung with the graze from the bullet, the one meant for him, and the last thing on earth she would do is pick up the phone.
Mulder, as she tried to get his fever to break, coming back to the bed with one cool washcloth after another, would reach for her. As if for balance, grasping for her arm or her waist, sick and uninhibited. It left her in little doubt of two things: one, that he craved her touch, any way he could get it, maternal or clinical, any way at all. And two, that it took near-psychosis for him to act on it. Any circumstance less extreme than that, and she remained strictly off limits. The roles had reversed, if they had ever even been on opposite sides of the issue in the first place, and it made her wonder just when that had happened.
Their bond, undeniable, had been deep and immediate. From the start, she had been the one gently defining the boundaries of what was and wasn’t allowed, as Mulder gently pushed those same boundaries. It was since her abduction, though, since a thirty-day quarantine in Washington state, that she had started to let more of those boundaries slide. She did not enforce lines so diligently. She allowed little gaps in the fence to develop, to see which ones Mulder would find, which ones he would create himself. They had been edging closer to… something, something ill-defined and probably ill-advised, something big and new just around the corner, and she had started to turn the corner towards it when on the way there she was pulled back again. When she had gone missing, this time at the hands of Donnie Pfaster, ending up broken and shaken and sobbing in Mulder’s arms. It was as raw as she had ever allowed herself to be with him, a vulnerability beyond her control, and it was Mulder who reacted in a way she didn’t expect. For weeks after that, and then months, he treated her carefully. He went around reconstructing, reenforcing the boundaries between them, out of fear for her, out of wanting her safe from the harm he brought into her life.
It wasn’t crazy. It was wise, it made sense much more than the opposite, but it left her lonely and a little bit frustrated and not all that safe. All they needed was timing, the right kind of timing, the kind that never came, and knowing that did not make it any better when Mulder held himself in check around her, when he carefully chose words to not say the wrong thing and stood across the room when he gave her a smile.
She blinked, breaking into her thoughts. Mulder filled the doorway beside her. He came from the bathroom, drying his hands on his jeans, touching her back as he eased himself past her. Like he was at home here, going back to the boxes he had stacked one on top of the other, tugging the flaps of the top one open.
For a moment, she saw herself stepping forward. Taking the books out of his hand, taking his hands to slide them around her. Piece by piece, adding their clothes to the piles on the floor, crawling with him, disheveled and eager, down onto her bed. In the afternoon light and the dust motes floating in it and the packed-up quiet, the end of one thing between them, the start of another.
“Hey,” Mulder said. “Scully.”
He reached out, touched her elbow with the edge of the book. She jumped. Looking at him like he had materialized out of thin air, something she wasn’t expecting. He showed her the book.
“I think this one’s mine,” he said.
He hadn’t realized she had stopped paying attention. She took the book from him, opening the front cover.
“It probably is,” she said, handing it back.
He shrugged. “Not that it matters.”
“Then why did you ask?”
It took him aback. Short with him, tired all of a sudden. He frowned at her, setting the book on the shelf. “You okay, Scully?”
“Just—” She sighed. “Yeah.”
“Hungry?” he offered.
She agreed. “Yeah.”
A kettle whistled behind her from the kitchen. She turned, nothing else, and he watched her go.
A mystery to him. Mulder stood in front of the shelf, looking at the book he held for several full seconds before he actually read the cover. Joyce. It made sense to him that this book lived on Scully’s shelves, one of the hardest, most confounding, most unreadable books in the English language— and also, arguably, one of the best. He bumped his finger over the spines, looking for J, making a space for it to fit.
Scully had textbooks by the dozen. On seemingly every medical subject, thick and dogeared and marked up with highlighter, notes filling the margins. He stopped here and there to flip them open, reading what young Scully wanted to note about neurological disease, or the cardiovascular system. Her handwriting matched the kind he’d see on her reports when she stayed up too late, sloppy baselines, large, loose loops, no longer the tidy compact script she used the other hours of the day. No wonder you quit to join the FBI, he’d told her one time. Holding up a page of notes she had left on his desk, turning it for her to see. You don’t write like a doctor.
She had penology reviews, she had scientific journals across at least a dozen different disciplines. Virology, genetics, biochemistry, psychology— she had more APA journals than he had read the past decade. Mulder tossed one on the shelf before it caught his eye, and he reached out and pulled it back off. A thin volume, a publication on something called Fungal Cerebritis, and D. Scully was listed among the contributors, dated 1988.
There was Dickens, too. Melville and Wharton, Whitman, Poe, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley. She had a paperback of The Sea, The Sea alongside a hardback of Carrie. There were stacks of popular thrillers mixed up with the rest, shiny covers he saw in airports and waiting rooms everywhere they went. He picked up a book called The Lonely Buddha, flipping through it, finding a bookmark in the middle. He read down the page.
“Shit.” He heard the word softly. Something clattered. It came from the kitchen. “Shit.”
“Scully?” Mulder shut the book, stashing it out of place on the shelf. When he stuck his head out the door she had her back to him, running water in the sink.
“I’m okay,” she said, which brought him across the room.
The water swirling down the drain was tinged pink. She pulled her finger out from under the tap and blood immediately started to pool, dripping off her finger. She put it back under the water, spreading the cut slightly to wash it out. A clean slice, about half an inch long, on her left forefinger, between the second and third knuckle. Not quite down to the muscle.
He looked away, green.
“What happened?”
Boxes of kitchenware sat on the counter. The one closest to her held knives, graters, slicers. She sighed.
“It’s not too deep,” she said instead, inspecting the cut. With just a little too much clinical curiosity. “Barely into the dermis.”
He was already out of there, halfway across the room. “Bandages. Where?”
Mulder found them on his own. She had every box labeled, even the boxes stacked in the bathroom. It looked like she could stock a small pharmacy, possibly a small hospital. Bandages, every size, shape imaginable. Topical antibiotic. Sutures and shears, gauze, scalpel, gloves— all of which he left alone. He took what he could carry, ointments, an assortment of Band-Aids. By the time he returned, she had the wound cleaned, dried and ready to dress.
Now he could watch with a little more interest as she applied the ointment, tacking the small strips like sutures over the cut. With careful, practiced ease, she opened a bandage, wrapping it around her finger, over the Steri-Strips, to keep the skin clean. He still hovered over her when she finished, and she moved an inch sideways, putting space between them.
He tried to look disappointed. “I thought you’d need me to do stitches.”
When he checked, she was holding back a very small smile. He reached over, into her personal space, picking up her hand by the fingertips. He brought it toward him to take a closer look, like he usually did before he believed she was okay. Also to see how long she would leave her hand there before she cleared her throat and pulled it away.
Instead, Scully looked up at him. He inspected her finger. Wincing again, just on principle, even though all he saw was a tan-colored Band-Aid. She’d dressed worse wounds than that on him— a lot worse. Still holding her attention, he reached up and pulled down the neck of his sweatshirt, showing her the scar she’d left on his shoulder when she put a bullet there, because he liked reminding her of that one. Then he lifted his arm, his sleeve pushed past his elbow, showing her the healed-over cut she had stitched in Minneapolis, the one from the knife Clyde Bruckman predicted would open his throat.
“Do no harm,” he said, quoting her Hippocratic oath. He waited a beat, then shrugged with one shoulder. “Or, if you do? At least patch it up after.”
Scully had not yet taken her hand back from his. He took it as a fatal flaw in her character that she couldn’t stay mad at him. Whatever he had done— and he still had no clue— he could make her forget it. He tugged on her fingertips, reminding her of this power. Annoyance became persistence became his victory, her defeat.
Her shoulders dropped. She slumped, acknowledging it, her head dropping forward, and he tackled her shoulders with one arm, pulling her towards him.
She surprised him by leaning into him. Instead of pushing away, she let her arm go around him, let his arms go around her. She was tired, because she closed her eyes, laying her head against his shoulder.
He squeezed her tight, rubbing her back. “Headache?” he asked her, being practical. She nodded. He rested his chin on top of her head, looking out over the room. It had been a long day. And he figured as much; he had brought aspirin along with the bandages to the kitchen table.
After a moment she said something to him, muffled against him, into his sweatshirt. Mulder pulled back to hear her. She repeated herself: “You know, that’s not actually in the Hippocratic oath.”
He had to work his way back down the thread of that conversation. “What? Do no harm?”
She nodded, eyes closed against the light in the room. “It’s a common misconception. The exact phrase doesn’t appear.”
A long second passed where he didn’t answer. When she opened her eyes to look, he was smiling down at her, this partner of his who could always correct him.
“What?” Scully said. “It’s true.”
He didn’t doubt it. “Good thing it is.” He grinned. “That means you’re safe.”
Reluctantly, she gave him that one. A small smile again as he pulled her back to him, but this time she was the one to pull back, look him in the face.
Mulder tried reading the look before she said anything. Serious, once again. A shadow back in her eyes. That small crease that ran up her forehead, the one he wanted to smooth with his thumb.
No, what he wanted to do was press his face to the soft underside of her jaw. He wanted to tip her head back, kiss his way down her neck, open his mouth on that little hollow at the base of her throat. He wanted to tug open each button down the front of her sweater, chasing that shadow out of her eyes. He held onto her gaze, reading hers back and forth. Trying to make up his mind whether she’d shoot him or drag him to bed for the thoughts in his head when her eyes moved off of his, looking past him. Across the room.
He heard it too. When she glanced back, he shook his head. It wasn’t his cell phone. He had turned it off that morning, left it behind at home. The muffled sound came from the living room, just beyond the kitchen. Scully let him go, sliding her hand down his arm as she moved off to search. She had a coat on the chair by the door. She patted it down, lifting the phone out of the pocket. She read the screen before clicking it on.
“Mom?” she said. “Hi.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, glancing back toward the kitchen, but not right at him. “Yes,” she said, and then, “Now?”
Scully came back to the kitchen. The light in it was dimmer than she was used to this time of day. She had lost the window over the sink in the move, but gained the eastern exposure in the bedroom; she considered that a fair trade she was willing to make.
Mulder had moved down the counter, discovering the fact that she had been fixing something for them to eat before the mishap with the knife. He stood in front of the spread she had left by the stove. Leftover fried chicken, cold. Sliced tomatoes. The pitcher of tea, sweating onto the countertop because she had filled it with ice.
He was sneaking a bite of chicken, pulling it off a wing, licking his fingers. He glanced up, found her there. She knew he heard the short conversation, she didn’t bother saying anything. He wiped the grease on his hands off on his jeans. Giving her a smile that had more restraint in it now than it had a moment ago.
“I didn’t realize,” he said, “it was so late. I better go.”
But she felt affection for him instead of frustration, too tired to fight it with anything else. Instead, she said, “Stay,” reaching past him to bring the plates to the table. “At least eat something before you go.”
Mulder lingered. Past the time they polished off every bite of the food, past the time he had intended to stay. Scully, in no seeming hurry to get back to her feet, neither seemed in any hurry to rush him out the door. He sat there, sipping the last of his tea, Scully across the table. Surveying what they had done. What was left to do. Framed art was still stacked along the walls; she turned down his offer to help her hang it, saying she still had to decide where it should go.
The place looked half-finished, and he liked it like that, without knowing quite why. Maybe because he fit into it, at least a little, at home in disorder, before she had the chance to arrange everything exactly where it should go. That, and the light that filtered in through the windows, more light than his apartment saw in a year.
He didn’t realize he said it out loud— that last part, about the light— until she said, “I know.” She took a long sip of tea. “It’s one reason I can’t move,” she said, like she was still making a list. “I couldn’t live someplace without all this light.”
It wasn’t a judgment against his preferred quarters, and he didn’t take it as one. Nor could he disagree with it. That was one thing that had changed for him at the age of twelve. He felt safer when he was closed in, walled off, not open to the world. Like a cave, like a bunker. A refuge. It was simple logic: no one would breach the threshold if it was a place no one wanted to go. Either that, or it was Bill Patterson’s logic, prematurely drilled into him: that to fight the darkness you had to exist in it first. Either way, he was glad it had not become the same for her.
The silence stretched out for a moment. Scully’s hair had all but fallen down. She tried tucking it back, but pieces still framed her face, tangled, and he liked her like that too. He was watching her profile, watching as she looked over the room, and she gave her head a little shake.
“Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked him again, for the second time, and most likely the last. Her voice quiet, soft. “Who does this?”
“Who—” he said, and then stopped. He had started to say, Who has the reasons you do, to move a lot farther than this. Instead he shrugged. He said, “Since when does anyone do what we do?”
She turned her glass one revolution in the puddle that formed on the table, lifting it for a sip and then setting it back down. “I don’t think that answers my question,” she said.
“I think it—” he started.
“Hello?”
A knock at the door, interrupting.
“Dana?”
The door swung inward, where they had left it ajar, moving the last boxes inside.
“Mom?” Scully got to her feet.
The little Pomeranian trotted into the room, tags jingling, nails clicking on the hardwood floor. Scully scooped him up with one arm, reaching out to hug her mother with the other.
“I wish you had told me I’d be interrupting,” Maggie said, either to Mulder or her daughter. Mulder was on his feet too. Maggie gestured him over from where he stood by the table.
“I was just leaving,” he told Scully’s mother. Bending down when Maggie reached up to embrace him. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. Maggie squeezed his neck, nothing awkward about it, like she was glad to see him. Like it did not cross her mind that the last time they were in each other’s presence, it was at the burial of her eldest daughter.
“I told Dana I’d stay for dinner,” said Maggie. “Fox, that didn’t mean running you out.”
Scully stood holding the dog, her fingers buried in his fur, scratching his chest. “That’s what I told him, Mom, that he could stay,” Scully said, giving Mulder a look over top of Maggie’s head that he took to be a somewhat sheepish plea: I did say those words, just not quite that intent. Back me up?
“She did,” Mulder confirmed. “And,” he said, “I told her I would, except then she’d just put me back to work.”
He hoped Maggie took that as a joke, relieved when she squeezed his elbow, the sign that she did. Realizing too late that, in this company, it was a risky joke to make. Maggie, on constant call now as the last-minute dog-sitter, was now in the position to know just how often he, in fact, kept Scully working, late nights, long weekends, trips out of town. That scale was far out of balance. But it passed unnoticed— or at least, without comment. Scully changed the subject, asking, “How did he do, Mom?” Bending to set the little dog on the floor.
“Queequeg? So much better about the barking,” said Maggie. Mulder turned with them to watch the little dog make a lap of the room, sniffing, exploring with interest.
Queequeg. In the back of his mind, Mulder had been scrambling to remember. Scully had named the dog before they’d even left Minneapolis, driving back to the hotel to pack up their things with the dog in her lap. He had expected her to be practical about Bruckman’s impromptu bequest, as practical about that as she was with everything else, realizing the only possibility was to take the dog to a shelter before they left town. Instead, they bought food and a crate and paid the one-way fee for pets below fifteen pounds, and he lost the deposit he’d put down on their rental before they reached the airport.
In truth, he kept forgetting the dog’s existence. Scully rarely mentioned it, thank God not one for stories about cute animal antics. It only came up— him saying, “Oh. Right.”— when Scully was frustrated over some trip he sprung on her unexpected, or a last-minute change in their plans. He’d start thinking this was the time, finally, when she would say no, outright read him the riot act, he’d finally pushed it too far, but then she would start figuring out the logistics, frustrated only that she had to inconvenience her mother without any notice. It was then he’d remember why he drew the line at fish, as far as living dependents. And he wondered if Scully ever noticed how often there was a new population swimming around in the tank.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “That’s what I was thinking, I want to see what you’ve done with it.”
Mulder realized the conversation had moved on without him. To the subject of furniture, some large piece Maggie had helped her daughter select. He stood awkwardly by, trying to pay attention. Caught in that limbo of taking his leave, but not yet dismissed, something he couldn’t do without interrupting.
Scully seemed to realize it at the same time. “It’s back here, Mom, I’ll show you,” she said to her mother, adding to Mulder as they headed down the hall, “Hold on, don’t leave yet. I have something for you. I’ll be right back.”
Queequeg, left behind, cocked his head at Mulder from across the room. Mulder shrugged, curious too. That was all it took. The little dog scampered over. Mulder crouched down, to see what would happen. “You like it here, huh?” he said. He stuck out his hand in front of the dog’s nose.
Queequeg regarded it stoically. Then, without so much as a sniff, opened his tiny mouth and bit down.
“Ow!” Mulder said.
“Did he bite you?”
Scully, behind him, came back into the room. She reached down, lifting the dog off the floor as Mulder got to his feet.
“I’m trying to break him of that,” she said. “He just thinks he’s playing.”
Mulder wasn’t so sure. Scully’s scolding was gentle, and the little orange fluffball, now tucked in her arms, regarded Mulder happily, panting away, not seeming displeased that this was his punishment. In that game, Mulder had lost, a fact of which both he and the dog were acutely aware.
Scully had opened a drawer. She found what she wanted, closing the drawer with her hip as she turned back to Mulder. She held something out to him over top of Queequeg.
He took it. Looking down.
A key. She had taped down a label, meticulously trimmed, that said in neat capitals: SCULLY.
Mulder reached in his pocket. His keyring jingled, and he quickly found it, the key’s identical match.
“I thought I was the one supposed to bring you a housewarming present,” he said.
Scully smiled, watching him work the old key off the ring. It was the third such key she given him, the locks changing twice, and now not just the locks but the door and the rooms behind it. He thought back to Eugene Tooms, how innocent that threat seemed now, how unnerved Scully had been over it. The next day, her landlord had hung a new door, repairing the jam where Mulder kicked through it, and she came to work that morning with a spare key. For next time? he’d asked her, taking it, and he still remembered what she said: Let’s hope not.
Now, he took that old key, or its latest incarnation, thumbing the cold metal a moment before he handed it back. He held up the keyring, showing her the new key, in its place.
Queequeg sneezed, unimpressed. Scully ruffled the dog’s fur with affection, the kind Mulder rarely saw her bestow upon other creatures. She led the way, walking Mulder to the door, a rare gesture between them. They never stood on such ceremony. They came and went from each other’s places, they hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
“See you tomorrow?” he said at the door.
“Yes,” she said. And then, “No. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Right,” he said. “Monday.”
Her hand held the door open. He paused there a moment. She didn’t push the door shut until he turned to go.