Curate, connect, and discover
This is The X-Files fanfiction. Read it on AO3
A light tap on the door pulls her out of her slumber. The TV is still on and Mulder is sleeping peacefully across from her on her little striped couch. Her bare feet are juxtaposed with Mulder's head, and his sock ones are dangling over the arm of the couch near her face. A silly thought - they look way too cozy with one another as if they are spouses, siblings, anyone but merely work partners – comes and goes. It reminds her of her childhood and how she used to make a beeline in the middle of the night to her parents’ bed only to find Melissa and Charlie had already been there. There wasn’t enough room for all the Scully kids, and mornings would often find Dana with her face somewhere around her sister’s feet, with her mother’s hand in her hair. Ironically enough, Bill would never join them.
When Scully frees herself off the pile of limbs and cushions to open the door, Maggie Scully greets her with a smile so bright that Dana squints at her, like the sun is shining straight at her face.
“I brought you something,” Maggie says, letting herself in and heading to the kitchen. “We need to stock up your fridge properly. Can’t let you live on anything but nice home meals.” While you are still recovering from cancer, the end of the sentence implies, but neither of them brings that up. Dana’s remission is nothing short of a miracle - still so new and fragile, and both fear to dig too deep into it, lest any careless stir can reverse it.
She joins her mother at the counter, her eyes flicking back and forth following Maggie’s hand diving into what looks like a dimensionless shopping bag, as she pulls out one Tupperware container after another.
“That’s a lot of food, Mom. Are we throwing a party to feed an entire floor?”
“Oh, dear, wasn’t it Fox I’ve just seen dozing off in the living room?”
Maggie asks in that deep mellifluous voice Dana always finds solace in, and immediately her face goes scarlet matching her flaming hair that, if one looks any closer, is quite mussed, creating the perfect ensemble with her smudged mascara and wrinkled blouse. Scully doesn’t lift her eyes off the counter to meet her mother’s half-joking but penetrating gaze. Instead, she occupies her hands with cups and tea bags.
“Well, I can’t imagine him not hanging around here with you all weekend. He’ll help you empty the fridge.” Her mother continues nonchalantly. “You hungry?”
“Not really. Mulder ordered a pizza earlier and made sure I ate at least half of it. I thought I was going to burst. Just some tea for me.”
As they finally settle at the table, Maggie reaches out to her daughter’s hand and gives her a gentle squeeze.
“How are you, Dana?”
"As strange as it sounds, I feel alive.” With delicate fingers, she grazes the golden rim of her snow-white porcelain cup.
“I feel good, Mom. To be honest, right now I have more time than I know what to do with, but as soon as Mulder lets me come back to work, I’ll make good use of that.” To a stranger, her words may sound a bit harsh as if she’s displeased with her partner’s over-protective behavior, but her mother knows better. Behind the façade of the feigned sternness, Maggie recognizes the notes of playfulness.
She can’t seem to avert her eyes from her daughter’s elegant hands, still deadly pale, with thin bluish veins running across her soft skin. For a long time, they just sit there, across from one another, sipping their tea and soaking up the comfort they find in each other. Mulder is still sleeping peacefully just across the wall, covered up with a blanket lovingly.
“You know, Dana, I didn’t believe we’d have you back.”
“Mom…”
“No, I need to let it out. After you told me that your cancer metastasized and spread to your blood flow… I didn’t see how we could have you back.”
“Neither did I, Mom.”
“You are a scientist in our family, Dana. I could see it in your eyes – the moment you gave up. That was how I knew - there wasn’t anything left to be done for you.” Maggie draws in a breath and braces herself to continue.
“Fox wouldn’t give up, though.” Her voice is quiet, careful and measured, mindful of the aforementioned partner sleeping just a few feet away.
Subconsciously, Scully turns to the living room, the corners of her lips tug up slightly.
“He wouldn’t let you go. I believed then he was ready to follow you. It was like the first time.”
“The first time?”
“When you were abducted.”
“Mom, it’s over.”
“My faith left me, Dana.” There are tears in her mother’s eyes, and Dana reaches out to pull her in a tight hug. Her strong brave mother, who, by some absurd coincidence, is doomed to outlive her beloved husband and a few of her own children. Her beautiful mother, whose faith and courage have been tested repeatedly. There’s only so much one can take.
“I don’t know how, Dana, but somewhere along the way, I lost my faith. When you were abducted, I didn’t believe you would be returned to us. And then you had, and I didn't believe you would make it. We went as far as to turn you off the life support because that was what you had stated in your will. We stayed with you to say goodbye. Fox was there too, Missy wouldn’t let him off the hook.”
“Missy?”
Maggie smiles sadly at her daughter.
“Yes. Fox wouldn’t come to join us. He thought it was wrong, that we had to fight for you. Unlike us, he still believed you could make it. I think Missy found the right words for him because, in the end, Fox was there for you. He didn’t come to say goodbye though. He came because he still had hope. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be sitting here with you now.”
“Mulder is a dark wizard.”
“You didn’t see him then, Dana. It was like all of a sudden, his whole world fell apart. Then one day you turned up in a hospital and nobody knew anything, nobody was able to say what was wrong with you, and Fox just,” Maggie’s voice hitches and she takes another sip before she continues. “He just ran amok. Fox was devastated and dying along with you, but I didn’t think he’d have followed you. Not back then. He would have set on a journey to find everyone responsible for what had been done to you.”
Dana chooses not to interrupt, sensing her mother’s need to vent it all out.
“This time though, he would absolutely have. I’m terrified at the thought of having been so dangerously close to burying not just one, but the two of you. He was aching for you. He still does. Maybe you should let him in.”
Maggy departs, somehow leaving Scully both totally in disarray and maddeningly calm. She hadn’t the faintest what Mulder went through during her abduction. She could get some bits and pieces - from her family, case reports (her own file stored right there in one of the drawers), and occasional worried glances from Skinner. Allusions galore, but never anything specific.
While she tried to find a workaround for her trauma, Mulder was learning (by trial and error, no less!) to deal with his guilt complex – about being the reason for her abduction, about not getting to her on time, about failing time and again. Those were feeble attempts on both their sides and eventually, by unspoken agreement, they decided to ignore the matter entirely. As if it had never existed. It was easier that way. It was safer.
Even in his sleep, Mulder looks tired. Like he hasn’t been sleeping for days on end, that is likely to be true - he probably hasn’t been sleeping since she was diagnosed and the tumor started growing, spreading its treacherous cells and filling her mind with uneasy thoughts. She cannot bring herself to stop contemplating whether his thick brown hair turned silver on the temples because of her. She doesn’t remember him having any gray hairs before. And that signature frown line between his brows seems to have deepened and now is defined sharply. She wants to reach out and smooth that wrinkle away from his beautiful face.
Of its own volition, her hand cups his stubbly cheek, and her thumb traces the plump bottom lip. She can’t remember when they stopped being just partners and became friends. Probably somewhere around day one. She can’t remember when she stopped wanting him to be just her friend and become her lover. Probably somewhere around year one.
Lifting his head gently off the pillow, she squeezes herself in between it and the armrest, so now his upper body rests on her lap. His long legs are bent at his knees and tucked into the cushions and Scully’s bare feet are perched on the coffee table next to the empty box of pizza and she’s stroking his hair languidly. She pulls on an invisible thread and then tucks her cool hand under the neck of his t-shirt. Mulder’s skin is soft and hot under her touch, and as she caresses the expanse of his upper back, Mulder turns his head and sighs contentedly into her stomach.
“Hey,” he mumbles. His eyes are still closed and he shifts even closer and presses Scully deeper into the cushions all the while lifting her shirt with his nose and burrowing it deep in her belly button. She makes a sound, something between a moan and a chuckle.
“It tickles.”
She doesn’t attempt to stop him, though. Puffs of warm air breeze across her skin and trails of chaste, almost imponderable kisses send tingles down her spine.
Lay the blame on her being drunk with his closeness. Lay the blame on him being under the spell of sleep.
The last remnant of doubt vanishes when Mulder’s weightless dry touches turn into bold open-mouthed kisses. She wants to be closer to him. So close that she doesn’t know where she ends, and he starts. Mulder is the only man she can ever imagine herself with, and tonight he has her undivided attention.
There’s no way to resist an uncontrollable impulse to kiss her partner. They are magnetically drawn to one another. Having Mulder by her side has become second nature to her. He’s the oxygen she can’t live without. He seeps into her skin and permeates her thoughts.
She doesn't have delusions of ever having a normal family with him, where they both do their fair share of prosaic daily routines. There’s no house with a white picket fence in that equation - Mulder offers her the basement with overfilled file cabinets and dusty shelves. Over the years she has come to appreciate everything he gives her - Fox Mulder is the constant exercise to her brain, her guide and mentor, her best friend and platonic lover. He's the butterflies in her stomach and goosebumps over her skin.
Sometimes it feels like too much, and she wants to rip him off like the band-aid and expose herself to the world outside Mulder’s suffocating presence. That she did a couple of times before, only to realize that she had lost sight of herself not because of him, but without him. The air Mulder doesn’t breathe with her chokes her, and when the need to fill her lungs with Eau de Fox Mulder becomes unbearable, she calls his number. “Mulder, it’s me.”
“What are we doing, Scully.” He stops and lifts on one elbow, his face is level with her chest.
“We are… celebrating?” She asks unsure, one hand still tangled in his silky waves.
“Celebrating what?”
Everything and nothing in particular, she wants to say. Every day is a holiday now since we are alive. And so she says it.
“That I want to celebrate.” Mulder agrees.
“I think we deserve it."
Her eyes roam his handsome face, delicate fingers stroke the rough shadow of his jaw.
“I want it.”