The Way That Light Attaches To A Girl
SUMMARY: Maybe she’s not so bad, this gingery little doctor.
RATING: PG (language)
SPOILERS: S1
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from 1013 to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thank you to maybe_amanda and the kindness of strangers in general.
Mulder reads Cicero and finds the method of loci tool useful in honing an eidetic memory.
***
It's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
- Counting Crows
***
It’s gritty outside, gritty and gray with a rime of salt on everything. There are pockets of rotten snow for him to kick, slushy and satisfying against his heavy shoes. He pulls his coat tighter, feeling like a hard-boiled detective in a pulp paperback, thinking this would be a good time for a cigarette if he still smoked.
His divorce papers were filed this time last year, just like his parents’ had been a couple decades back. The ink had scarcely been dry on the marriage certificate when they realized they didn’t know each other and changed their minds. It was the same time Diana left him and his - their - files for whatever the fuck had summoned her across the sea. Paperwork, as ever in his life, was all that remained of these experiences.
If this were really a detective story, he thinks, stepping over a soggy Washington Post, a tall cool blonde would have walked in through the frozen mist and into his arms. Someone lithe, with red lipstick and half-lidded violet eyes. She would look like Veronica Lake and speak in a low, compelling voice, urging him to do brave and outlandish things to thwart the Nazis. He’d wear a fedora, buy a mink stole for the blonde. They’d drink martinis and make love in dark hotels smelling of leather and intrigue.
But he’s not living in a dime-store novel, he’s living in Alexandria on Christmas Eve 1992 (“The Year of Space,” claimed the United Nations, somewhat cryptically) and is eager to turn the last page in his calendar. Mulder knows it’s symbolic only, that his Eurocentrism is showing, but he still watches the ball drop on TV. Last year he’d kissed a woman in a bar and gone home with her too, but doesn’t think he’d remember her face if he saw it. He hasn’t got the energy to entice a stranger this year, and Scully’s hardly his type.
He shouldn’t be sleeping with coworkers anyway, it’s never worth the trouble and the FBI is full of people who are paid to do nothing but sniff out secrets. Besides, he is now 31 years old which is really about time to start getting your shit together even if your baby sister was abducted by aliens at Thanksgiving.
Mulder generally holds the holidays in low regard.
He pauses to watch a small flock of cats at an upended trash can, feasting upon pungent things like battlefield ravens. One of the cats glances at him sidelong, narrowing round yellow eyes as though Mulder has designs on the gray thing it’s gnawing at. He holds his hands up to show the cats he wishes them no harm, keeps walking.
Scully had offered to drive him home but he thanked her and caught the blue line, the clank and rattle of the train making him feel like some variety of normal businessman. Maybe people thought he was a banker or a Congressional staffer, going home to a twinkling Douglas fir and a mantle hung with stockings.
Nine months and a broken condom can, in many circumstances, result in a whole new person. But it’s been nine months with Scully and she’s still her own woman, though Christ knows Mulder’s tried to remake her in his own image. She’s trudged alongside him through graveyards, military bases, bad diners, and one memorable night in Pennsylvania where she had captured a frantic bat in the hotel lobby. (“Do you want to wait for it to take human form before I release it?” she’d asked drily.) Through all of it she remained disbelieving and supercilious, leaving him vexed.
She’d chirped “Merry Christmas, Mulder” at him, assuming that he celebrated Christmas and was capable of merriment. He was afraid Scully’d bring in a little Charlie Brown tree for the office, ornaments smooth and shining as her earnest face. She is skeptical in all the wrong ways and probably has the Michael Bolton Christmas album on her stereo at this very moment. She probably has eggnog in the fridge and will drink it without rum. She probably likes fruitcake and ham with pineapple rings on it.
Mulder, going home to the shadows of his apartment where he might listen to Pink Floyd and nurse his resentment with three fingers of whiskey, feels justified in his scorn.
A couple loaded with gifts pushes past him and he nearly loses his balance on a patch of black ice, clutches at a lamp post. He gazes up at the endless sky as snow begins to fall again. (Scully’s probably delighted by the prospect of a white Christmas, probably whistling a few bars of the song as she puts on a green sweater.)
But he’s being unfair, isn’t he? For all her tattling back to the higher ups, she’s never tried to present herself as an angel. Her primary fault is in not being Diana, not being a tall dark moon goddess. Being pretty rather than beautiful, being frank rather than alluring. He’s seen her smoking a couple of times, discovered that she says “Jesus!” a lot so that she doesn’t say “fuck” or “shit.” This amuses him; he thought the blasphemy would be worse. He knows Scully watches what she eats but turns to carbohydrates and wine in times of stress. He found out she was sleeping with that asshole Jack Willis, which really threw him for a loop because Scully has a schoolteacherish quality that led him to presume premarital abstinence.
He thinks of her in that first motel room, her smooth back beneath his hands, her panic turning on some masculine caveman switch. It’s been a long year, perhaps she could be his type after all despite her sensible underwear. She’s attractive enough if you like that sort of Hibernian look. He can tell she’s a bit awed by him and he could manipulate that to his advantage. Mulder walks the last slushy block thinking impious thoughts about Catholic school uniforms and playing doctor.
The honeycomb tile of his building is muddied, layered with fragments of leaves and footprints. A radio blares something about George Bush pardoning six of the Iran-Contra guys, including Caspar Weinberger. Mulder shakes his head; it’s pretty much the same bullshit theater that surrounded the pardoning of a Thanksgiving turkey last month.
“Merry Christmas Agent Mulder,” says Leo, the maintenance guy. Leo’s got some kind of intellectual disability that Mulder hasn’t bothered to diagnose, but he’s always quick to replace a kicked-in lock or a shot-out window, and Mulder therefore regards him as a master craftsman. He gives Leo money every year at Christmas. At present he’s attacking the hallway sludge with an ancient mop.
“Merry Christmas, Leo.” He gets his mail, sorting through it as he ambles to the elevator. Bill; bill; Playboy; Christmas cards from his doctor, dentist, and insurance agent; coupons; a thick manila envelope from the divorce attorney. Mulder rolls it all into a bundle and shoves it under his arm.
He’s fumbling with his keys when the elevator deposits him on the fourth floor. There are wreaths on most of the doors in his building, a handful of mezuzas. Number 42, as usual, conforms to no given standard.
He stops when he sees Scully leaning against his door. “Um,” says. “Hey.”
She waves her fingertips, looking uncomfortable. She’s holding a cardboard FedEx envelope. “I forgot to give you this before you left.”
“Okay,” he says, uncertain about the idea of Scully on his turf. “Hang on a sec.” He makes sure the packet from the lawyer is hidden, though she’s probably heard the whole story. He knows what the talk is. They all act like he’s John fucking Douglas, like he can guess what number they’re thinking of based on how they part their hair. He’s a sideshow act, the guy who can think like John Roche and Monty Props. A freak.
Scully turns to slouch against the wall while he jiggles the latest lock open, wishing there were a convenient place to stash a can of WD-40. “So, uh, come on in, I guess.”
She turns, walks under his arm as he hold the door open, and stands in the entryway. The door clicks shut behind him, a final sound.
Mulder puts his mail on the kitchen counter, tossing his coat over it. “You want anything to drink?” he calls to her, unsure if he can make good on the offer. What the hell does Scully drink? Tea? Zima? He’s got a few beers in the fridge, his wife’s wine is long finished.
“No, I’m good.”
Her coat’s draped over her arm when he comes back out, and he hangs it up for her. He notices that she’s wearing jeans with a navy cable-knit sweater, no tartan in sight. Her boots are dark and practical.
Mulder shrugs off his jacket, loosens his tie out of its regulation noose. “Here, sit down. There’s, uh, the couch is right over there.” His couch is the atramentous green of algae, appearing black in the close room. “So what’s up?”
She holds out the folder to him. “I realized I had this when I got home and since it’s a three day weekend, I wanted to make sure you had it. I thought it might be important.” Scully sits down close to the edge of the couch, much of her weight on her knees. She presses her hands together between them after Mulder takes the envelope, bouncing a little bit.
He looks at the return address and groans. Arlinsky, that idiot from the Smithsonian. Mulder’s got enough credibility issues without this nutcase on his tail. He tosses the envelope on his cluttered desk for later perusal.
Scully, as the messenger, looks apologetic. “Bad news?”
He sits next to her, why not? “Nah, just…you know. The usual.”
“Ah.”
He watches her do a quick scan of his apartment. He has nothing to be ashamed of, she can look around. Mulder removes his tie completely now, untucks his shirt and leans into the corner of his couch. “So I’m surprised you’re here, Scully. I got the impression Christmas was a…thing. For your family.” He waves his hand vaguely, as though families are something he read about in a Margaret Mead article but never fully understood.
Something closes in Scully’s face, which intrigues him. Discomfort usually comes with a good story, but he’ll tease it out of her later. She scratches her elbow, stalling. “I’m going to go by my parents’ house tomorrow.”
“Not tonight? No big Scully celebration with stockings hung by the fire and cookies for Santa?” He has picked these ideas up from Oxford and Christmas music. Santa would probably prefer a cold longneck and some nachos.
“My sister’s coming in tomorrow, she’s staying with my parents so they’re getting everything ready tonight. My younger brother and his family too, they’re getting in late.” Scully looks faintly guilty for this wealth of relatives.
Which one of them are you avoiding, Dana? “Fun,” he says in a tone that he hopes is not sarcastic.
Scully shrugs, picks at the cuff of her sweater. “Yeah, it’ll be good. I’ll get to see my niece and nephew. What about you? What are you doing?”
“Oh, just…you know. Laying low.” He’s meeting up with the Gunmen for Chinese food and bootleg video games from some Japanese guy they know, but he’s not ready to tell Scully about them. In part because she might want to meet them and would end up charging Frohike with a sex crime.
“Sounds good,” she says in a non-judgmental tone. “I could use some down time myself.”
“Job wearing on you?” Going to wimp out and request a transfer?
She puffs a breath of air out, pushes the tip of her tongue to her top lip. “No. Well, I mean, it’s hard. We travel so much, I didn’t do that before and it’s taking some adjustment.”
Mulder drapes an arm over the back of the couch, wishing he could take his pants off and order a pizza. But he wants to know more about what drives her; Diana left him wary of unknown quantities, and this is his first opportunity to peer into Scully’s head. “Yeah, I guess they mostly shipped the cadavers to you before, huh? When you were doing doctor things?” He sees a slight narrowing of her eyes at this, the implication that she’s not a doctor now. The fact that she took it as an insult means it’s a vulnerability.
“Mostly.”
He decides to push it, being as he has home field advantage. “How come you decided to stop practicing medicine?”
Scully sits up straight, her palms on the tops of her thighs. “I didn’t realize I had.” Prickly.
“Oh, sorry, no offense. I just….you left your residency to join the FBI, right?” Faker, he knows her career trajectory down to the day.
“My work as a Special Agent has always revolved around my background in forensic pathology. I just felt…called to the FBI as the place to best put those skills to use.”
Called, religious imagery. Interesting. Her reply had a rehearsed sound, it’s something she’s repeated numerous times. Who gives her grief about being an FBI agent? A younger brother wouldn’t, would probably look up to that. Mom or Dad, most likely, though it could be one of the older siblings. He’d put his money on Dad or big brother based on the cold formality of her words. Both men are in the military, she’d speak to that. And big brother wasn’t mentioned as being in town, so Dad it is.
He throws her a bone for revealing so much. “I’ve heard nothing but commendations.”
“Thanks.” The appreciation seems genuine. “So what about you, Mulder? Why….this?” Scully holds her arms out like an orchestra conductor. The gesture encompasses his desk, the groaning bookshelves and fading newspaper clippings. Area 51, Reticulans, ectoplasm, and jackalopes.
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible,” he quotes.
“Feynman.” Scully knows her physicists.
“It’s the perfect con, really. I figured out a way to get the federal government to pay for my hobbies.” He hopes that will satisfy her, but knows better.
“Why is it your hobby?”
Ah, Scully. You little investigator, you. “I’m a lousy knitter.”
She smiles. “Because of your sister?”
He steeples his fingertips, taps them against his chin. It’s tempting to blow her off, but he considers the implications of her presence. There was no reason to bring that letter by; she could have called and he could have told her to round-file it. She’s trying to build something between them, she’s looking past his annoyance with her assignment and he’s not going to slap her hand away on Christmas Eve. “Hold that thought,” he says.
Mulder goes to the kitchen for the beers and the churchkey magnet stuck to the freezer. He checks for food, but a cursory examination reveals that Scully is going to have to make do with some brews.
She’s peering into the fish tank when he returns, scrutinizing the inhabitants. “I think one of your mollies is pregnant,” she says. “That spotted one.”
“Yeah, they’re prolific little cannibals. Here, Scully. Have a drink.” He holds the bottle out to her when she turns, watches her hesitate for an instant before accepting.
“Thanks,” she says. “Though I probably shouldn’t.” She pops the lid off when he’s done with the opener. Takes a long drink.
“So,” he says, returning to his seat on the couch. “Why do I spend my time looking for ET and yetis, right?”
Scully rolls the bottle between her palms. “It’s hard for me to understand why someone with your abilities chooses to use those gifts this way.”
Once she rides out this dogleg, Mulder thinks, she’ll go far in the Bureau with her careful diplomacy. “When my sister was…taken, it was the first time that none of the authority figures in my life had an answer. Not my parents, my teachers, the police…no one could tell me what had happened. Years went by and there was still no solution. People stopped thinking about it, you know? They just acted like she was gone and that’s all there was to it.”
“But not you.” Her voice is gentle.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that this was a question with an answer, even if no one wanted to delve deeper into what that answer was. I became, well, obsessed with the idea that there were all of these mysteries out there with answers that people were uncomfortable finding. So when I found the X-Files…” He glances sidelong at his partner, her nutmeg freckles and her cinnamon hair.
“Isn’t that what you were doing already, though? Solving impossible cases?”
He shrugs. “They weren’t impossible. They followed a pattern if you knew what to look for. But what I do now, no one wants the answer, Scully. That’s the real challenge.”
“You caught Monty Props. Props, Jesus, that case is legendary! I want to understand, I do. I see what you’re saying about the challenge, it does make a kind of sense. But when I think about the people you stopped…” She shakes her head.
She doesn’t get it. But she’s trying instead of dismissing him. That’s something. “That’s just it. Your reaction, it’s…look. Serial killers, they’re sexy. The public loves them. Everyone wants to be Bill Patterson or, or… Jack Crawford, right? People still read about Jack the Ripper, they practically turn these psychopaths into folk heroes. There will never be a shortage of people wanting to do what I did.” Half the beer is gone in his next swallow.
Scully looks thoughtful, her thumbnail at the damp corner of the label on her bottle. “So this is like, what? Like a martyr thing? If you walk away from the limelight for this then it makes up for never knowing what happened to your sister?” She turns her head to give him a level gaze, her eyes so blue and clear they seem artificial at times.
He’s been called worse than a martyr, but somehow it stings. “Martyr? That’s condescending.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sorry. I just, I guess it’s hard for me to understand what you hope to gain. What all this means to you in the end.”
Mulder’s had enough of her analysis. “I’m not like you, I don’t crave approval.”
It’s her turn to look stung. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
He sighs. “Your questions aren’t unfair. It’s been a hard year.”
“I heard.” There’s sympathy in her tone and he tries not to resent it.
“Listen, Scully, I know you didn’t ask for this assignment and you’re doing your best with a bad hand. It’s just hard to share a career I’m passionate about with someone who pretty clearly thinks it’s a waste of time.”
Scully sets her beer on the coffee table, resting her elbows on her knees, her hands cupped around her chin. Mulder props his feet up next to her bottle, patient in the silence. There are deep shadows in the room, illuminated by the ambient streetlight through the curtains, the cool blue aquarium lamp. Puddles of light leak from the kitchen, but they barely stain the rug. Scully looks like a Hitchcock girl, white and pure, untouched by the surrounding gloom. She reminds him of Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo, her good bones and heavy-lidded eyes.
“You know,” Scully says, muffled, “Pathology’s hardly the hottest specialty in med school. It’s not really seen as a place to make a career.”
“The malpractice can’t be bad though, right?”
She rolls her eyes. “You spend years of your life learning to care for the living and use it to examine the dead. People have…opinions about that.”
This had not occurred to him, and he says as much.
Scully sits up and settles back into the couch. “And to then take that to the FBI, well…”
Full circle to the truth. “Lots of grief for that?”
She shrugs. “From some more than others. My dad, he - look, Mulder. I’m not saying we’re in the same place or have the same ideas or that we’re both noble misunderstood renegades. I am not trying to oversimplify anything. I’m just telling you that I know what it’s like to care deeply about something that other people don’t necessarily understand.” She looks defensive after this, takes a fierce swig of her beer.
Mulder eyes her up with a new appreciation. “I guess I just figured all doctors sit on pedestals.”
“If so, some of the pedestals are much higher than others. I know you don’t like me, Mulder. Or at least you don’t like our partnership. We may never be friends, I realize that. But it’s been three quarters of a year, you have to let your guard down if we’re going to work together. I want what you want, answers to these questions.”
He smiles at her. A real smile, and thinks that it’s been a long time since he’s done it. “But you still think I’m spooky.”
Scully smiles back. “Absolutely. And I still don’t believe in aliens. Or yetis. Or missing time or vampires or Nessie. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe there are answers.”
He scratches his chin, five o’clock shadow rough on his fingertips. Maybe she’s not so bad, this gingery little doctor. “I did say I wanted a challenge.”
“You did at that.” She returns her bottle to the table, then turns to face him. The aquarium provides a ghostly backlight, her hair gleaming like rubbed copper. He holds this image of Scully in his mind until it is indelible, then tucks it away to remember her by. The Rhetorica ad Herennium advises sensory encoding to aid in recall, and so he places her in the sunlit portrait gallery of his memory palace.
Scully stands, crosses the room to take her coat from the rack. “I’m sorry the letter wasn’t good news.”
Mulder gets up to join her. “It’s okay.” He squints when she opens the door, the hallway so bright it hurts his eyes. “Thanks for bringing it by.”
“Okay, well, I’ll see you on Monday, I guess.” She seems hesitant to go. She probably feels sorry for him. “Thanks for the drink. And the company.”
“Go,” he says. “You don’t want coal in your stocking for oversleeping tomorrow.”
She laughs a little, then takes his hands in her small white ones. She gives them a squeeze. “This is going to be okay, Mulder.”
He thinks she might be right, squeezes back.
She lets go of him, walks out and turns right. He locks up behind her, her perfume still lingering on his side of the door.
Diana’s not coming home. It’s time that he moved on.
***
The End
RATING: PG (language)
SPOILERS: S1
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from 1013 to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thank you to maybe_amanda and the kindness of strangers in general.
Mulder reads Cicero and finds the method of loci tool useful in honing an eidetic memory.
***
It's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
- Counting Crows
***
It’s gritty outside, gritty and gray with a rime of salt on everything. There are pockets of rotten snow for him to kick, slushy and satisfying against his heavy shoes. He pulls his coat tighter, feeling like a hard-boiled detective in a pulp paperback, thinking this would be a good time for a cigarette if he still smoked.
His divorce papers were filed this time last year, just like his parents’ had been a couple decades back. The ink had scarcely been dry on the marriage certificate when they realized they didn’t know each other and changed their minds. It was the same time Diana left him and his - their - files for whatever the fuck had summoned her across the sea. Paperwork, as ever in his life, was all that remained of these experiences.
If this were really a detective story, he thinks, stepping over a soggy Washington Post, a tall cool blonde would have walked in through the frozen mist and into his arms. Someone lithe, with red lipstick and half-lidded violet eyes. She would look like Veronica Lake and speak in a low, compelling voice, urging him to do brave and outlandish things to thwart the Nazis. He’d wear a fedora, buy a mink stole for the blonde. They’d drink martinis and make love in dark hotels smelling of leather and intrigue.
But he’s not living in a dime-store novel, he’s living in Alexandria on Christmas Eve 1992 (“The Year of Space,” claimed the United Nations, somewhat cryptically) and is eager to turn the last page in his calendar. Mulder knows it’s symbolic only, that his Eurocentrism is showing, but he still watches the ball drop on TV. Last year he’d kissed a woman in a bar and gone home with her too, but doesn’t think he’d remember her face if he saw it. He hasn’t got the energy to entice a stranger this year, and Scully’s hardly his type.
He shouldn’t be sleeping with coworkers anyway, it’s never worth the trouble and the FBI is full of people who are paid to do nothing but sniff out secrets. Besides, he is now 31 years old which is really about time to start getting your shit together even if your baby sister was abducted by aliens at Thanksgiving.
Mulder generally holds the holidays in low regard.
He pauses to watch a small flock of cats at an upended trash can, feasting upon pungent things like battlefield ravens. One of the cats glances at him sidelong, narrowing round yellow eyes as though Mulder has designs on the gray thing it’s gnawing at. He holds his hands up to show the cats he wishes them no harm, keeps walking.
Scully had offered to drive him home but he thanked her and caught the blue line, the clank and rattle of the train making him feel like some variety of normal businessman. Maybe people thought he was a banker or a Congressional staffer, going home to a twinkling Douglas fir and a mantle hung with stockings.
Nine months and a broken condom can, in many circumstances, result in a whole new person. But it’s been nine months with Scully and she’s still her own woman, though Christ knows Mulder’s tried to remake her in his own image. She’s trudged alongside him through graveyards, military bases, bad diners, and one memorable night in Pennsylvania where she had captured a frantic bat in the hotel lobby. (“Do you want to wait for it to take human form before I release it?” she’d asked drily.) Through all of it she remained disbelieving and supercilious, leaving him vexed.
She’d chirped “Merry Christmas, Mulder” at him, assuming that he celebrated Christmas and was capable of merriment. He was afraid Scully’d bring in a little Charlie Brown tree for the office, ornaments smooth and shining as her earnest face. She is skeptical in all the wrong ways and probably has the Michael Bolton Christmas album on her stereo at this very moment. She probably has eggnog in the fridge and will drink it without rum. She probably likes fruitcake and ham with pineapple rings on it.
Mulder, going home to the shadows of his apartment where he might listen to Pink Floyd and nurse his resentment with three fingers of whiskey, feels justified in his scorn.
A couple loaded with gifts pushes past him and he nearly loses his balance on a patch of black ice, clutches at a lamp post. He gazes up at the endless sky as snow begins to fall again. (Scully’s probably delighted by the prospect of a white Christmas, probably whistling a few bars of the song as she puts on a green sweater.)
But he’s being unfair, isn’t he? For all her tattling back to the higher ups, she’s never tried to present herself as an angel. Her primary fault is in not being Diana, not being a tall dark moon goddess. Being pretty rather than beautiful, being frank rather than alluring. He’s seen her smoking a couple of times, discovered that she says “Jesus!” a lot so that she doesn’t say “fuck” or “shit.” This amuses him; he thought the blasphemy would be worse. He knows Scully watches what she eats but turns to carbohydrates and wine in times of stress. He found out she was sleeping with that asshole Jack Willis, which really threw him for a loop because Scully has a schoolteacherish quality that led him to presume premarital abstinence.
He thinks of her in that first motel room, her smooth back beneath his hands, her panic turning on some masculine caveman switch. It’s been a long year, perhaps she could be his type after all despite her sensible underwear. She’s attractive enough if you like that sort of Hibernian look. He can tell she’s a bit awed by him and he could manipulate that to his advantage. Mulder walks the last slushy block thinking impious thoughts about Catholic school uniforms and playing doctor.
The honeycomb tile of his building is muddied, layered with fragments of leaves and footprints. A radio blares something about George Bush pardoning six of the Iran-Contra guys, including Caspar Weinberger. Mulder shakes his head; it’s pretty much the same bullshit theater that surrounded the pardoning of a Thanksgiving turkey last month.
“Merry Christmas Agent Mulder,” says Leo, the maintenance guy. Leo’s got some kind of intellectual disability that Mulder hasn’t bothered to diagnose, but he’s always quick to replace a kicked-in lock or a shot-out window, and Mulder therefore regards him as a master craftsman. He gives Leo money every year at Christmas. At present he’s attacking the hallway sludge with an ancient mop.
“Merry Christmas, Leo.” He gets his mail, sorting through it as he ambles to the elevator. Bill; bill; Playboy; Christmas cards from his doctor, dentist, and insurance agent; coupons; a thick manila envelope from the divorce attorney. Mulder rolls it all into a bundle and shoves it under his arm.
He’s fumbling with his keys when the elevator deposits him on the fourth floor. There are wreaths on most of the doors in his building, a handful of mezuzas. Number 42, as usual, conforms to no given standard.
He stops when he sees Scully leaning against his door. “Um,” says. “Hey.”
She waves her fingertips, looking uncomfortable. She’s holding a cardboard FedEx envelope. “I forgot to give you this before you left.”
“Okay,” he says, uncertain about the idea of Scully on his turf. “Hang on a sec.” He makes sure the packet from the lawyer is hidden, though she’s probably heard the whole story. He knows what the talk is. They all act like he’s John fucking Douglas, like he can guess what number they’re thinking of based on how they part their hair. He’s a sideshow act, the guy who can think like John Roche and Monty Props. A freak.
Scully turns to slouch against the wall while he jiggles the latest lock open, wishing there were a convenient place to stash a can of WD-40. “So, uh, come on in, I guess.”
She turns, walks under his arm as he hold the door open, and stands in the entryway. The door clicks shut behind him, a final sound.
Mulder puts his mail on the kitchen counter, tossing his coat over it. “You want anything to drink?” he calls to her, unsure if he can make good on the offer. What the hell does Scully drink? Tea? Zima? He’s got a few beers in the fridge, his wife’s wine is long finished.
“No, I’m good.”
Her coat’s draped over her arm when he comes back out, and he hangs it up for her. He notices that she’s wearing jeans with a navy cable-knit sweater, no tartan in sight. Her boots are dark and practical.
Mulder shrugs off his jacket, loosens his tie out of its regulation noose. “Here, sit down. There’s, uh, the couch is right over there.” His couch is the atramentous green of algae, appearing black in the close room. “So what’s up?”
She holds out the folder to him. “I realized I had this when I got home and since it’s a three day weekend, I wanted to make sure you had it. I thought it might be important.” Scully sits down close to the edge of the couch, much of her weight on her knees. She presses her hands together between them after Mulder takes the envelope, bouncing a little bit.
He looks at the return address and groans. Arlinsky, that idiot from the Smithsonian. Mulder’s got enough credibility issues without this nutcase on his tail. He tosses the envelope on his cluttered desk for later perusal.
Scully, as the messenger, looks apologetic. “Bad news?”
He sits next to her, why not? “Nah, just…you know. The usual.”
“Ah.”
He watches her do a quick scan of his apartment. He has nothing to be ashamed of, she can look around. Mulder removes his tie completely now, untucks his shirt and leans into the corner of his couch. “So I’m surprised you’re here, Scully. I got the impression Christmas was a…thing. For your family.” He waves his hand vaguely, as though families are something he read about in a Margaret Mead article but never fully understood.
Something closes in Scully’s face, which intrigues him. Discomfort usually comes with a good story, but he’ll tease it out of her later. She scratches her elbow, stalling. “I’m going to go by my parents’ house tomorrow.”
“Not tonight? No big Scully celebration with stockings hung by the fire and cookies for Santa?” He has picked these ideas up from Oxford and Christmas music. Santa would probably prefer a cold longneck and some nachos.
“My sister’s coming in tomorrow, she’s staying with my parents so they’re getting everything ready tonight. My younger brother and his family too, they’re getting in late.” Scully looks faintly guilty for this wealth of relatives.
Which one of them are you avoiding, Dana? “Fun,” he says in a tone that he hopes is not sarcastic.
Scully shrugs, picks at the cuff of her sweater. “Yeah, it’ll be good. I’ll get to see my niece and nephew. What about you? What are you doing?”
“Oh, just…you know. Laying low.” He’s meeting up with the Gunmen for Chinese food and bootleg video games from some Japanese guy they know, but he’s not ready to tell Scully about them. In part because she might want to meet them and would end up charging Frohike with a sex crime.
“Sounds good,” she says in a non-judgmental tone. “I could use some down time myself.”
“Job wearing on you?” Going to wimp out and request a transfer?
She puffs a breath of air out, pushes the tip of her tongue to her top lip. “No. Well, I mean, it’s hard. We travel so much, I didn’t do that before and it’s taking some adjustment.”
Mulder drapes an arm over the back of the couch, wishing he could take his pants off and order a pizza. But he wants to know more about what drives her; Diana left him wary of unknown quantities, and this is his first opportunity to peer into Scully’s head. “Yeah, I guess they mostly shipped the cadavers to you before, huh? When you were doing doctor things?” He sees a slight narrowing of her eyes at this, the implication that she’s not a doctor now. The fact that she took it as an insult means it’s a vulnerability.
“Mostly.”
He decides to push it, being as he has home field advantage. “How come you decided to stop practicing medicine?”
Scully sits up straight, her palms on the tops of her thighs. “I didn’t realize I had.” Prickly.
“Oh, sorry, no offense. I just….you left your residency to join the FBI, right?” Faker, he knows her career trajectory down to the day.
“My work as a Special Agent has always revolved around my background in forensic pathology. I just felt…called to the FBI as the place to best put those skills to use.”
Called, religious imagery. Interesting. Her reply had a rehearsed sound, it’s something she’s repeated numerous times. Who gives her grief about being an FBI agent? A younger brother wouldn’t, would probably look up to that. Mom or Dad, most likely, though it could be one of the older siblings. He’d put his money on Dad or big brother based on the cold formality of her words. Both men are in the military, she’d speak to that. And big brother wasn’t mentioned as being in town, so Dad it is.
He throws her a bone for revealing so much. “I’ve heard nothing but commendations.”
“Thanks.” The appreciation seems genuine. “So what about you, Mulder? Why….this?” Scully holds her arms out like an orchestra conductor. The gesture encompasses his desk, the groaning bookshelves and fading newspaper clippings. Area 51, Reticulans, ectoplasm, and jackalopes.
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible,” he quotes.
“Feynman.” Scully knows her physicists.
“It’s the perfect con, really. I figured out a way to get the federal government to pay for my hobbies.” He hopes that will satisfy her, but knows better.
“Why is it your hobby?”
Ah, Scully. You little investigator, you. “I’m a lousy knitter.”
She smiles. “Because of your sister?”
He steeples his fingertips, taps them against his chin. It’s tempting to blow her off, but he considers the implications of her presence. There was no reason to bring that letter by; she could have called and he could have told her to round-file it. She’s trying to build something between them, she’s looking past his annoyance with her assignment and he’s not going to slap her hand away on Christmas Eve. “Hold that thought,” he says.
Mulder goes to the kitchen for the beers and the churchkey magnet stuck to the freezer. He checks for food, but a cursory examination reveals that Scully is going to have to make do with some brews.
She’s peering into the fish tank when he returns, scrutinizing the inhabitants. “I think one of your mollies is pregnant,” she says. “That spotted one.”
“Yeah, they’re prolific little cannibals. Here, Scully. Have a drink.” He holds the bottle out to her when she turns, watches her hesitate for an instant before accepting.
“Thanks,” she says. “Though I probably shouldn’t.” She pops the lid off when he’s done with the opener. Takes a long drink.
“So,” he says, returning to his seat on the couch. “Why do I spend my time looking for ET and yetis, right?”
Scully rolls the bottle between her palms. “It’s hard for me to understand why someone with your abilities chooses to use those gifts this way.”
Once she rides out this dogleg, Mulder thinks, she’ll go far in the Bureau with her careful diplomacy. “When my sister was…taken, it was the first time that none of the authority figures in my life had an answer. Not my parents, my teachers, the police…no one could tell me what had happened. Years went by and there was still no solution. People stopped thinking about it, you know? They just acted like she was gone and that’s all there was to it.”
“But not you.” Her voice is gentle.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that this was a question with an answer, even if no one wanted to delve deeper into what that answer was. I became, well, obsessed with the idea that there were all of these mysteries out there with answers that people were uncomfortable finding. So when I found the X-Files…” He glances sidelong at his partner, her nutmeg freckles and her cinnamon hair.
“Isn’t that what you were doing already, though? Solving impossible cases?”
He shrugs. “They weren’t impossible. They followed a pattern if you knew what to look for. But what I do now, no one wants the answer, Scully. That’s the real challenge.”
“You caught Monty Props. Props, Jesus, that case is legendary! I want to understand, I do. I see what you’re saying about the challenge, it does make a kind of sense. But when I think about the people you stopped…” She shakes her head.
She doesn’t get it. But she’s trying instead of dismissing him. That’s something. “That’s just it. Your reaction, it’s…look. Serial killers, they’re sexy. The public loves them. Everyone wants to be Bill Patterson or, or… Jack Crawford, right? People still read about Jack the Ripper, they practically turn these psychopaths into folk heroes. There will never be a shortage of people wanting to do what I did.” Half the beer is gone in his next swallow.
Scully looks thoughtful, her thumbnail at the damp corner of the label on her bottle. “So this is like, what? Like a martyr thing? If you walk away from the limelight for this then it makes up for never knowing what happened to your sister?” She turns her head to give him a level gaze, her eyes so blue and clear they seem artificial at times.
He’s been called worse than a martyr, but somehow it stings. “Martyr? That’s condescending.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sorry. I just, I guess it’s hard for me to understand what you hope to gain. What all this means to you in the end.”
Mulder’s had enough of her analysis. “I’m not like you, I don’t crave approval.”
It’s her turn to look stung. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
He sighs. “Your questions aren’t unfair. It’s been a hard year.”
“I heard.” There’s sympathy in her tone and he tries not to resent it.
“Listen, Scully, I know you didn’t ask for this assignment and you’re doing your best with a bad hand. It’s just hard to share a career I’m passionate about with someone who pretty clearly thinks it’s a waste of time.”
Scully sets her beer on the coffee table, resting her elbows on her knees, her hands cupped around her chin. Mulder props his feet up next to her bottle, patient in the silence. There are deep shadows in the room, illuminated by the ambient streetlight through the curtains, the cool blue aquarium lamp. Puddles of light leak from the kitchen, but they barely stain the rug. Scully looks like a Hitchcock girl, white and pure, untouched by the surrounding gloom. She reminds him of Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo, her good bones and heavy-lidded eyes.
“You know,” Scully says, muffled, “Pathology’s hardly the hottest specialty in med school. It’s not really seen as a place to make a career.”
“The malpractice can’t be bad though, right?”
She rolls her eyes. “You spend years of your life learning to care for the living and use it to examine the dead. People have…opinions about that.”
This had not occurred to him, and he says as much.
Scully sits up and settles back into the couch. “And to then take that to the FBI, well…”
Full circle to the truth. “Lots of grief for that?”
She shrugs. “From some more than others. My dad, he - look, Mulder. I’m not saying we’re in the same place or have the same ideas or that we’re both noble misunderstood renegades. I am not trying to oversimplify anything. I’m just telling you that I know what it’s like to care deeply about something that other people don’t necessarily understand.” She looks defensive after this, takes a fierce swig of her beer.
Mulder eyes her up with a new appreciation. “I guess I just figured all doctors sit on pedestals.”
“If so, some of the pedestals are much higher than others. I know you don’t like me, Mulder. Or at least you don’t like our partnership. We may never be friends, I realize that. But it’s been three quarters of a year, you have to let your guard down if we’re going to work together. I want what you want, answers to these questions.”
He smiles at her. A real smile, and thinks that it’s been a long time since he’s done it. “But you still think I’m spooky.”
Scully smiles back. “Absolutely. And I still don’t believe in aliens. Or yetis. Or missing time or vampires or Nessie. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe there are answers.”
He scratches his chin, five o’clock shadow rough on his fingertips. Maybe she’s not so bad, this gingery little doctor. “I did say I wanted a challenge.”
“You did at that.” She returns her bottle to the table, then turns to face him. The aquarium provides a ghostly backlight, her hair gleaming like rubbed copper. He holds this image of Scully in his mind until it is indelible, then tucks it away to remember her by. The Rhetorica ad Herennium advises sensory encoding to aid in recall, and so he places her in the sunlit portrait gallery of his memory palace.
Scully stands, crosses the room to take her coat from the rack. “I’m sorry the letter wasn’t good news.”
Mulder gets up to join her. “It’s okay.” He squints when she opens the door, the hallway so bright it hurts his eyes. “Thanks for bringing it by.”
“Okay, well, I’ll see you on Monday, I guess.” She seems hesitant to go. She probably feels sorry for him. “Thanks for the drink. And the company.”
“Go,” he says. “You don’t want coal in your stocking for oversleeping tomorrow.”
She laughs a little, then takes his hands in her small white ones. She gives them a squeeze. “This is going to be okay, Mulder.”
He thinks she might be right, squeezes back.
She lets go of him, walks out and turns right. He locks up behind her, her perfume still lingering on his side of the door.
Diana’s not coming home. It’s time that he moved on.
***
The End