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The way her palm fit into his hand.
He didn’t deserve it—to be so perfectly matched, to find that the shape of him was carved for the shape of her. To bring his scarred and broken skin, his dim and ever-darkening spirit into the circle of her light, and find not that she was polluted, but that he was cleansed. It was toxic cleanup; it was fresh light on old gravedirt.
She hurt; she was empty in a place where once something proud and just had stood. The solid seawall of her father wiped out, gone; the aftermath of a tsunami, all gasping gills and struggle. She hurt, and she let him touch her.
Where his fingers met her cheek, she was so soft he marveled at how she could even be in one piece, and not just ribbons of silk puddled in his hands.
She didn’t say Mulder, this is inappropriate. She didn’t even think it; he was sure he would know if she had, would have felt the poisoned dart in the space between his ribs. She met his eyes, and then let hers drag against him as they fell, her gaze cascading down him like holy water, finding impurities and sterilizing them.
It was a gift, for him—that she didn’t pull away; that she nodded. That she thanked him with a small purse of her lips, a tilt of her head. That when he told her he would see her in Raleigh, she turned halfway in his direction and said, okay, and that her voice broke on it. As if he had given her something. As if she weren’t the one who had swept in on the tide and left behind miracle after miracle as the water receded.
⧫
She came to him, instead of going to the execution. She watched the clock, and she knew the moment. They both did. The lights didn’t dim; there was no sign that anything at all had happened. Only the second hand, and when it had passed the twelve it kept moving as if the chance to have something had not just slipped from her grasp.
She didn’t react in any way, but Mulder was beginning to understand something: her face was glass-smooth and unruffled, her mouth silent and still, her hands quiet… but beneath the hush was not only sun-bright intelligence but a fervor and a feast, a cacophony of thought and feeling, justice and indignation, the intuition of a woman who had lived many lives, some of them, perhaps, with him.
She stood beside his hospital bed, and then sat beside his hip. His body reached for her, his face turned to hers, looking up at the soft settle of hair against her cheek, the stern pride of her jaw, the lush and verdant ripeness of her mouth. He lived, second after nourishing second, in and with the sight of that open face.
She wasn’t only beautiful, she was fierce. She wasn’t only driven, but lonely. She yearned for something, too, and despite all she had heard—despite all they had already seen, together—she seemed to have decided that what she sought could be found in his pockets, or his heart, or at the end of his rope. She was still here, and he didn’t know whether she realized that she brought the whole of the world to his doorstep. Whether she knew that her crisp and cutting mind gave validity not just to his work, but to his right to exist.
She looked at him like a mirror, and he saw something reflected that he couldn’t be entirely sure was himself. It was beautiful and scarred, wide as the world, beloved. Her breath eased out of her as if in rapture, and she was getting it all wrong—she was profound and holy, uncontainable and oceanic, boundless. Not him.
But maybe this was why she had become a doctor. Because when she looked at him like that, he was renewed. He felt disease flee his wretched soul and leave him quietly clean. (He could imagine her as a child, finding that strangers healed spontaneously in her passing, the lame climbed to their feet, and sick children broke their fevers under the touch of her hand.)
Her necklace hung at her throat. It caught the light; it shone. Like Scully herself, it was small, always there, quiet, enduring. She was imbued with, defined by her faith, and impossibly—perhaps without knowing it, herself—she had faith in him.
Had anyone ever, before her? Had two eyes, a small mouth, a pert little nose ever been turned toward him with some secret knowledge that he didn’t have? He was sure he’d remember if they had. Diana had been full of lust and curiosity; Phoebe had been charmed by his audacity and confidence. Neither had looked at him and seen something worth believing in—only something worth obtaining.
But Scully… Scully looked at him like he held some kind of key—like he was the key. Like there were locked doors to other worlds in an endless, stretching hallway, and not only could she not pass through without him, she somehow didn’t know she was supposed to want to.
She looked at him like he was what he knew her to be: the great secret. The only question worth asking. The only answer that mattered.
She made a confession without preamble, without marking the time since her last. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to believe. As if it were a sin—as if he had ever had the power to absolve anyone of anything.
He touched her again, and again, she let him. Fingers around her arm. She curled into it; she looked at him.
There was a pull in his loins; a tightening; a breathlessness. All she did was look, and he wanted to lick her fingers, snug his head under her hand, climb into her lap. She was so good, and he was so weak.
A moment of freefall, a wondering, a fear: he held out one arm, and his face remained unchanged but the question was there.
One second, another, but before three had passed, she nodded. He watched, transfixed, as she stood to remove her jacket. She folded it in half and laid it over the arm of the chair.
Then she climbed up next to him.
He scooted, half-turned. Her head found his shoulder like they’d been doing this for years, and he had never known—had never guessed that he would ever know—what it felt like to have all of life contained within the circle of his arms.
He wanted to pull her close. He didn’t. Instead, he held himself perfectly still, and he waited to see how long he could get away with this. How long she would stay.
One of her arms was trapped under her weight, but after a moment of buoyant hesitation, she laid her free hand on his chest.
A sigh, then. His own breath washing down his chest. She curled her hand against the warmth as if grabbing it, holding it. He let himself bring his own hand up to lay atop hers, and her fingers were so much smaller. They cupped in his palm like a plum. Hair tickled the side of his face, and he let the sensation spread through him, rich as cream. He shuddered without movement; he reveled; he basked.
She was so light and pretty and sweet, but she was also hard and ruthless and vengeant. She hit every target she aimed at, and she cleaned her handgun every three weeks like clockwork, but she also prodded his head for swelling with gentle fingers and told little girls that they were going to be okay. He was caked in the black compost of his subterranean expedition, but she was water and sunlight.
And she was laying against his chest.
Breathe. Just breathe.
Her voice, when it came, was not startling, but soothing; it arose in the air above them. “How are you feeling? I should have asked.”
“I’m okay,” he said. What would she do if he lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles? If he placed his cheek in her palm and nuzzled? “They wanted to give me more meds, but I asked them to hold off.”
“Masochist?” There was a joke in her voice but a warm curiosity as well; the blood rushed so quickly from his head to his groin that he went immediately, blissfully dizzy. If only this could be bottled, injected: Dana Scully in his bed, her tender alto curious and teasing, asking questions he’d dreamed of answering.
“Sometimes,” he said, and it came out low and rough, raw and charged.
Her breath caught. Her fingers twitched, ever so slightly, beneath his.
“There’s no shame in medicating the pain, Mulder. You were shot.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Did she realize that her thumb had begun making small arcs against his sternum? Had she turned her face, tucked her nose into the side of his neck, on purpose? Was she aware she had inhaled deeply, or that he could feel her eyelashes fluttering against his jaw? Or was it like the way he loved her—spilling out, uncontainable, an extension of his beating heart?
Don’t question it. He let his eyes close, let himself pretend she was writing words into his chest, marking him, staking a claim.
“What is it, then?”
He forgot to answer; her voice was so quiet, and coming from somewhere around his carotid. She spoke so softly he feared, suddenly, that he had imagined it—that he was imagining all of it, that it was just another dream. The devastation of that was so wild and frenzied, so immediately convincing, that his eyes flew open.
No. He was there: a private room in Duke University Hospital. He wore a backless gown, was snug under a coarse white blanket; the room beeped and sighed around him, and Dana Scully had stowed herself against him.
“You all right?”
She had sensed his elevated heart rate.
He couldn’t laugh at himself, not out loud; she would think he was laughing at her. He swallowed it, and nodded. Used the movement to let his head tip down toward hers. “I’m perfect, Scully.” His voice a scrape; it was all there for her to hear. He abandoned the silk of her hand to capture the satin of her cheek.
A small kind of scrinching, then—a tensing; a hunkering. But she didn’t move away; she hid her embarrassment in the lines of his body; she drew herself closer. Her knee angled over his.
It was almost a shame that that gunshot wound hadn’t been fatal—that it hadn’t begun a slow countdown that would time out any minute now and bleed him to death—because there was no way that, over the course of the rest of his stupid, miserable life, he would get another moment like this one. One hand holding her fingers against his heart, the other curled around her hip. Her head against his shoulder, the tiny, cool nub of her pearl earring pressing into him, leaving a dent for itself.
“This,” she said, “is inappropriate.”
His ears strained, stretched, nosed about for some kind of regret, or resentment—some proof that she was here against her will, and he should (again, and always) let her go.
But it was only a light humor, a self-amusement, a quiet joy.
“It could be more inappropriate,” he said, and he didn’t even mean to; his hand gripped her hip more tightly; his yearning was a physical force that pulled her closer, that drew in the scent of her hair, that bloomed in his chest like helium.
He thought she would tense. He deserved for her to freeze and draw back. To give him a tight-lipped, silent smile, and extricate herself slowly, precisely, and without jostling his injury.
Instead, she drew a deep breath of her own, made the kind of sound in her throat that couldn’t have been voluntary.
Captivating, mesmerizing, magnetic: the way the line of her met the line of him. They way they both pulled in toward it as if summoned by the laws of physics.
It shuddered; it held; it released.
Then, with the hood of regret, she said, “It could be.” Wistful, on a sigh.
His leg. She was worried about hurting him. If he weren’t in danger of bleeding out…
He gave in and brought her hand to his mouth. Pressed his lips to the pad of her middle finger, then her index. Then the crease between, where they met her palm. Gathered all his courage in his mouth and dipped the tip of his tongue in the sensitive space, salt and clean skin.
She shivered. Her hips moved, nowhere to go but closer to him. She sighed. It filled his lungs.
“Rain check?” he asked, kissing her heart line, dragging his nose along the outside of her hand, his temple against her fingers.
“Rain check.” She let her hand land against his face, stroked once, slowly. Raised her head and, all honey and cold nose, kissed his cheek. Her head had returned to his shoulder before he could react. Then she was saying, “You need sleep, Mulder.”
Sleep was the last thing on his mind. Sleep was for losers. Sleep was for men who had never held the bowl of creation against their chest, who had never had Dana Scully reclined beside them in sharp-pressed navy blue trousers and a gold chain that was pillowed between her breasts.
But she was a medical doctor; she wouldn’t give him an inch of leeway. She had, undoubtedly, already gone farther than she thought was wise, simply by laying beside him.
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Good.”
He thought about asking her to tell him a story, or teach him something about forensic pathology, but her intelligent voice, full of authority on every subject it lighted on, would only have stirred him further.
It was only after she stopped shifting—only once her muscles relaxed and her breathing smoothed out—that he let himself close his eyes. As delicate and pendulous as her gold cross, a hope: that she might be there when he woke.
⧫⧫