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She finds him, Mulder, loading someone else’s suits into the back of a truck that someone else’s money paid for, and she has to remind herself, Mulder, that’s Mulder. When he asks what she’s doing here, an old pain flickers in the space between her eyes: That’s Mulder, and he thought he’d never see me again.
She tilts her chin up at him, at the usual angle, and finds that the geometry between them is the same.
“I need to talk to you,” she says. “Something’s happened.”
Behind him, his not-wife drags a recliner over the threshold in reverse, yelling at the houses that all look like hers.
“I have to talk to you alone.”
She says “alone” like she always says it and wonders if she meant to do that. There are days when she’s sure she could leave him in the dirt and still wind up in a room with him at the end of the world. As they slip behind the truck, she's gripped by the idea that to Joanne Fletcher, she is the woman Mulder shouldn’t be with.
He almost touches her arm; he doesn’t. She almost speaks. They hover together in the glint of the sun on the asphalt and it’s almost something, but then again they always are. Is this technically Mulder as a father? Neighborhoods and cities and towns where people are raising families—she should have been more specific. Her thumb runs over her ring finger.
“Scully?”
Mulder.
“There’s a gas station a couple miles out on Route 375,” she starts, looking him in the eye again. “I passed it two nights ago. It was burned to the ground.”
He nods. “I was there when it happened. The attendant—it was like he was trapped in the floor. They killed him, Scully.”
“That’s just it—they didn’t. I passed the station again this morning; it’s completely untouched. The attendant greeted me like nothing happened.”
“I saw him,” Mulder protests.
“I believe you, Mulder,” she says, and her ribcage expands at the muscle memory of his name. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it looks like the warp is doubling back. We have to get back to the highway, exactly where we were when the anomaly occurred.”
“Scully.”
Nine days ago he tapped her hip and told her that he loved her in a hospital bed. She gives him an I love you in a course of action.
“We have to hurry.”
As they pull out of the driveway in the escort of the men in black, she catches the U-Haul in her rearview mirror, realizes he had no idea where he was going, and thinks, That’s Mulder.
****
The really blinding thing is not the UFO but the way her whole forearm fits inside his hand.
“Mulder?” She looks so young looking up at him.
“It’s me, Scully.” He slides his hand down to her fingers and gives himself a once-over. “I’m not going home with a pet rock, am I?”
She lets out her breath and just for a second goes loose at the edges, then orders herself again. “What did you give me after my abduction?”
If their roles were reversed, he thinks, he’d interrogate her just to see her raise her eyebrow like this. That’s how he’d know.
“Your cross necklace.”
“And?”
She’s bringing out the baby pictures. He smiles a tight line into his flushed face, pleased in spite of himself that she’ll never let him live this down. “Superstars of the Super Bowls.”
Now Scully does go soft, and as she bites her lip and glances at the ground he sees her in flannel, lit by the glow of a lone swinging bulb. When she lifts her face to him, it’s like the last frontier. He squeezes her hand.
Fletcher is already straightening his tie.
“Whatever happened to time snapping back?” he squawks.
Mulder checks his watch. “It did.”
“Then what am I doing listening to you two lovebirds? Very cute, by the way. Do you just get laid at Dana’s place? Is that it?”
“Watch it, baby.” Scully’s blocking his path and showing off her holster before Mulder can react. Fletcher holds up his hands in mock surrender and risks a whistle.
“I misread you, Fox.”
It’s his favorite thing—one of his favorite things—about Scully: the way she’s never the same natural phenomenon twice. She’s a thunderstorm in Oregon, a blizzard in Alaska. Here she’s a dust devil, whip quick, a whirl of smart red hair spinning over her right shoulder to face him, and he recalls that in the Navajo tradition, the dust devils that spin clockwise are thought to bring good luck.
“We’re getting out of here,” she says, so low he barely hears it. And he follows.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on?” Fletcher calls. When he tries again, there’s something like humanity in his voice.
“I just want to know if my wife is still speaking to me.”
Mulder unlocks the car. “Well, you might want to buy her some milk tonight.”
His whirlwind slips into the seat beside him and slams the door, and the air goes still. He hasn’t heard silence in days. Scully has a way of speaking without breaking it.
“What is going on, Mulder?”
He gives his best guess as he fumbles for his keys, which is that their proximity to the original anomalous event must have canceled out any effect on their memories. He doesn’t give her his second-best guess, which is a still-solidifying theory about balance, lost time, and nine missing minutes.
If it’s going to repay him like this, the universe can keep the change.
****
“Bee pollen,” she says, before she talks herself out of saying it.
The road is a knife blade pitching them into darkness and she can’t stop thinking about the fact that it could have been over sooner if she’d just believed him.
Mulder squints on the driver’s side. “What?”
“My full name. My family’s names. Not knowing my badge number. And bee pollen. That’s the best you could do?”
“I don’t see you did any better,” he returns, and it sounds to both of them like an echo. “Remember Linda Bowman?”
She remembers that he saw her dead.
She’s planned for the contingency of dying in front of him. She knows that she’ll only hold one of his hands so the other will keep working when she’s gone; she knows that she won’t say “I love you” so he won’t taste her blood when he bites his tongue. She understands this as an act of control (Mulder would gather her up in his arms and would not wash his shirt after; Mulder has never known a clean declaration of anything), but he loves her for all of the lines she draws, and he will allow her this.
The priests teach resurrection as a miracle. She confesses it as a sin: expecting him to mourn her again and again, and sometimes to save her anyway. After she died in front of him and made him watch, he almost killed her, and she almost deserved it. She gave him nothing but the names of his mother and sister. Anyone could have known.
Even as she said it, she’d had a hard time believing that she couldn’t do better. She knows him, she does, but all of their questions and answers are two syllables long. Their names are complete sentences, full stop. In the ambulance, as Linda Bowman bled out, she came up with the idea to test him by asking about her abduction, just in case.
“I don’t ever have to think about proving myself to you, Scully,” Mulder says, hushed, to the road.
She understands that he’s asking for forgiveness even as he offers it.
****
In the summer of 1972, his mother drove him and Samantha down to D.C. for a long weekend, and all four of them wound up trailing through the old Arts and Industries Building, Sam clutching his hand with popsicle fingers. At 10, he was accustomed already to blue-grey Quonochontaug smoke screens, and when his father pointed out the Wright Flyer Mulder was sure that he’d meant it was a replica. Even after gruff reassurances that it was, in fact, real, he doubted his eyes.
If they’d put a road in the Smithsonian, he probably would have believed them. He sees best behind the wheel; stillness only registers when he’s in motion. It’s the peg leg theory, it’s why he runs: His conscious mind, satisfied by the knowledge that he’s going somewhere, relaxes enough to occasionally take in a useless detail or two. Scully asked if he ever wanted to stop. He does. But only when he’s going 70 miles per hour.
There are no signs of life on this highway.
“Last night," he asks, "was that it for us?”
She doesn’t look at him, but she’s listening.
“If the warp never reversed itself, would that have been the last time I saw you?”
“No, Mulder.” Scully shakes her head. “I had a meeting set with Skinner for the next morning. The Gunmen were still working on it. We would have figured something out.”
“You didn’t seem very sure of that.”
“I didn’t know what to do! I couldn’t very well drag you back to Kersh and expect him to believe that you’d been body snatched.”
“Swapped.” He corrects her before he can stop himself. “If I’d been body snatched, I’d have an alien pod person running around.”
“Mulder.”
“I really need to show you more sci-fi, Scully.”
Shut up, Mulder. He can see her shoulders tense; she said goodbye to him last night, and he’s making jokes. He doesn’t know how to do this—tell her that he can’t be without her. Tell her that he would have blamed her more for staying than leaving.
She kisses him at a gas station and reminds him with his shirt bunched in her hand that she keeps her promises.
****
When he lingers for an extra second in her doorway, she pats his chest and tells him to take it one step at a time, and go get some sleep. She smiles as she says it and hopes he can’t tell that she’s feeling her pocket for sunflower seeds. The time warp is 2,500 miles away and she’s still waiting for it to catch up, still half-sure that everything they do will be erased.
“Thanks for coming out there with me,” he says, like she didn’t leave him alone last night. His rumpled shirt is already retreating down the hall.
She would have come back for him, right?
She loves him and it’s not superficial. But when he looked like someone else, they were different.
She’s sure she would have come back for him.
When her phone rings 37 minutes later, she’s nowhere near asleep.
“Scully,” she answers.
“I have a waterbed.”
“Oh my God.”
“I have a mirror on my ceiling above my waterbed.”
“I know you do.” She traces the seams on her blanket. “I’ve seen it.”
“What?”
“I thought your apartment would go back to normal when time snapped back.”
“Were you here alone with him? Scully, did he hurt you?” Trust Mulder to stay on course.
“No, Mulder, I’m fine. He clearly wanted to try something, but I handcuffed him to the bed.” Mulder makes a strangled noise on the other end of the line, and she smiles. “I had it all under control. I knew he wasn’t you before I walked in the door.”
“My arrest gave it away.”
“That raised a red flag,” she grants, “but I wasn’t absolutely sure until he offered to cook me dinner.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
It saved you, she thinks. Everything about you saves you.
She closes her eyes to competing images of Mulder in an apron and Mulder in a wedding ring, and it hits her: He spent the last two nights in someone else’s house. On impulse she fights out of the covers and swings her legs to the side of the bed, like she’s waiting for a reflex test. Tendon to quadriceps, nerves to spinal cord, spinal cord back to quadriceps, contract, kick. The brain never gets involved. Like her with him. She has dry exam-table-paper hands.
“Mulder, where did you sleep?”
“Recliner.”
Heart rate elevated, but declining.
“So Joanne didn’t try to—”
“No. I mean yes. But I didn’t.”
“Mulder, I’m so sorry.”
Vision: blurry.
“Don’t worry about me, Scully. It was a really good recliner. You know, now that I have to throw out everything in my apartment, maybe I should get one.”
“Mulder.”
He lost someone and now he never throws anything away because it might happen again. For five minutes, the only sound on his end is the rustle of trash bags.
****
If he didn’t hate shag rugs, in general, and this shag rug, specifically, he might just stay here, face down on his floor with his nose in some other man’s disturbingly soft rug. He could turn the A.C. as cold as it goes and bury his face in white and it might feel like bringing Scully back from the end of the world.
“Mulder?”
He told her not to come and now she’s here and he’s picking up just his head to look at her, like some kind of seal.
She frowns. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he groans, flopping back down to the rug.
“Something wrong with the couch?”
"This isn’t a nap,” he says, mouth full of rug.
“I didn’t quite catch that.”
Fine. He pushes himself to his knees and pulls threads of wool from his lips. “I wasn’t napping,” he sighs.
As he shoves the rug into a roll, she positions her little pointed toes at the other end, kneels down, and waits for him to meet her.
“You need to take a break,” she says, setting her hands on his. “If you don’t want to be here right now, you can sleep at my place.”
And what if he wakes up with someone else’s life? I’m afraid, he should say, but doesn’t, that this is the dream. In his dreams, his apartment is always different: cleaner, or messier, or his fish have all died, or Scully’s not there.
“I’d rather get this done,” he says instead. She helps him move his coffee table back into position.
The bags by his door start to fill: two rugs, one bowl, five candles, two candle holders, a picture frame. Two overhead lights. Two standing lamps. Nine table lamps.
“They’re gonna have a rave at Goodwill,” he quips.
“Why do you think your apartment didn’t reset with everything else?” Scully asks.
“The time warp rejected the waterbed.”
“I’m serious, Mulder.” She settles into the couch beside him, leaning her shoulder into his.
He gives her his best guess, which is that when the anomaly reversed, it effectively erased time but not all of its footprints, and that a handful of people in its path might have found themselves last night in places they couldn’t remember going. It happens all the time, really, and is essentially the basis for déjà vu. He has already given her his second-best guess, which is that the time warp rejected the waterbed.
“Are you going to keep it?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I'm considering taking it out back and shooting it.”
She shows her gums when she laughs, and he hopes even harder that this isn’t a dream.
“Scully,” he dares, “why do you stay in your apartment? With everything that’s happened there, why don’t you move?”
He expects, I don’t want to let them win. He expects, The rent is too good. He doesn’t expect
“I’m protecting the ghosts.”
She blushes at his expression and shrugs. “Metaphorically.”
“I know it isn’t rational,” she continues, tucking her feet underneath herself, leaning more on him, "but I feel like I owe it to Melissa not to let anyone else live where she died.”
“What about all the times you’ve almost died?”
When she speaks it isn’t haunted. “I didn’t.”
No, you didn’t.
“You’re not thinking about moving, are you, Mulder?” she asks. “I love this place.”
Still? The heat works well. The neighbor just moved out, so it’s been especially quiet lately. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, kids play Little League in the park down the street; he can see the lights over the trees. He likes the way the numbers on the door sing when she knocks, and he likes that the shadows in the corners never seem hard enough to hurt them. But still, even after?
“If it’s difficult for you to be here now,” he starts. She cuts him off.
“It isn’t.”
So this will have to come down to him, then. “I don’t like the thought of him here. With you.”
He's looking directly at her, but he doesn’t see it coming: Scully, still on the couch, kneeling so they’re eye to eye. Scully taking his face in both of her hands. Scully kissing him, in no hurry.
“Do you like the thought of us here?” she asks, her nose brushing his. He nods.
“Good.”
When she leans in this time, he puts a finger on her lips and attempts a solemn face.
“Just to be clear,” he says, “I’m not ugly?”
She smiles again and grabs his shirt. “I don’t know," she tugs.
“Let me see."