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somekindofseizure · 5 years

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When the Ink Dries Part IX

This is not the end of the story, still working on the last few chapters but I felt these were ready to see the world and you all have been so patient. Thank you all for that and thank you @icedteainthebag for editing brilliance.

This is, as the previous 22 chapters were, adult-rated material.

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Chapter 23

The vinyl upholstery crackled as Mulder shifted his weight and looked out the diner window onto the expanse of knotted beltway. FM radio scattered particles of music around him like dust that moved with the swoosh and capture of twin glass doors. It was a busy morning in the restaurant, but for Mulder, there was only unleased space and silence, the room Scully’s voice and body would soon take up across from him, where her new reality would be borne, where time would reset itself for them as it had so many times already.

The waitress dropped menus and clicked her gum, winked as though she knew what he was about to do. New realities, a zero on the stopwatch - these were things of science fiction, sexy from afar, terrifying up close. He turned down the coffee, he was jumpy enough.

He had run his finger up and down the coiled spine of the menu for the fortieth time when she finally slid into the booth, brushed back a front-leaning strand of hair from root to end, an impractical gesture that had never really seemed to serve any purpose except to distract him. Saturday brunch sunlight pierced the window like a bullet and Scully chose her spot carefully, taking redheaded cover in a shadow. He fidgeted in parallel, wanting to be directly opposite her when he said what he had to say. She laughed, as though he was making fun of her, and reached across for a quick squeeze of his hand. He fumbled the gesture, his grip still favoring the safety of carefully-named omelets over human women. She didn’t seem to notice his worriedness. Maybe in her mind worriedness had become his natural state.

“How was London?” he asked because he didn’t want to say you look so good, I missed you, please come sit next to me, and these exclusions limited small talk. And yes, because he wondered if she would tell him what happened with Stella.

“Nice,” she evaded, scanning the menu. They both knew she would get two eggs scrambled with an avocado instead of bacon, tell them to hold the home fries but on-purpose-forget to tell them to hold the buttered toast. Looking at the menu was mere formality. “How are you, Mulder?”

And now she flicked her eyes up to note the quality and integrity of his answer, a doctor assessing a patient, if the doctor and patient had spent many years being in love. And so he could assess back, could see now as she studied him was that though she was happy to see him, there was sadness too. No doubt this sadness had something to do with Stella’s phone call from the bathroom floor. The realization was bittersweet - a poignant comfort on Stella’s behalf that the heartbreak she’d nursed was shared by the silent party, the dizzying disappointment that that other party was the person he himself was still heartbroken over.

“I’m good, Scully. You were right about the therapist.”

“Well--”

Normally, she was happy as anybody to accept an I-told-you-so, but she demurred here, waving him off. He persisted.

“I should’ve gotten help much sooner. You were right.”

“Okay. Good. You look well.”

She turned the menu over, pretended to consider a milkshake. He’d only seen her actually order one once. It was as memorable a diner moment as they came - glow-cheeked and kohl-smeared, she’d asked for it with a sigh of relief, as though the night they’d just spent together had earned her some sort of bonus. Relief.

It had been like making love to her all over again, watching her gaze into the frothy glass, the Redi-Whip level and locking like a canal as she sucked her cheeks in making pinwheels of her cheek and jaw bones. He had reached over to take it, slurp the remains from the bottom of the straw and she’d slapped his hand away. When she finally chose something, she possessed it, devoted herself to it. What happened when there were two competing items on the table?

“Any good cases lately?” she asked.

Strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, her finger physically skimming the plastic cover over these joyful words.

“No… well, some,” he said. “Hospital good?”

“They’re still a little sore over my long leave, but they’ll get over it. I’m starting to think about retirement. I think I could do more good that way, volunteering on my own terms… It’s not like I’d do nothing, but...”

Myriad were the hypothetical topics Mulder loved and Scully hated, but this was one of a few that went the other way around. She could pass hours daydreaming aloud about what she’d do with free time. It incited a sense of panic in Mulder, made some voice inside him start chanting, I will work until I die. He muffled a sigh by coughing into his elbow, trying not to sound annoyed, and waited for her to take a short pause before interrupting her.

“I actually brought you here to tell you something,” he blurted.

She looked up, eyebrows at a two percent incline that indicated she was in no way prepared for this moment. He picked up the file folder on the seat beside him, but the waitress came by with her pad. Scully made Mulder go first, buying time she didn’t need, and then ordered her usual.

“And a black and white with whipped cream,” Mulder tacked on at the end.

“No, I’m on a cleanse. London was all red meat and chocolate and alcohol.”

London, not Stella. As though she’d been in a hotel somewhere alone.

“I’ll have it, then,” he said.

The waitress nodded as she jotted and Mulder wondered how many people used places to set a scene. Should he have done it in private, where she could cry or scream or do something else (he didn’t know what)? It was true, he’d been counting on the fake-leather booth and egg-pan breeze to undercut the drama, but now that he was here with her it seemed more likely to exacerbate the situation.

“Sounds like big news,” she said but lightly, a benign reduction - you, the boy who cried aliens. She folded her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Come on, you’re killing me.”

No sooner did the sarcasm settle than she spotted the mustard yellow folder under his hand and her technicolor complexion went grey. This news was not we’re going to a basketball game, I’m getting a dog, or I found your favorite sweater, here ya go. This news required a folder with a standard bureau label on it.

He placed it in front of her on the table, laid his hand flat on top of it so that she’d have to look at him before she opened it. She knew the moment their eyes met.

“How?” she demanded immediately. She regarded the folder itself like a bomb, waiting for him to tell her which wire was which. His heart raced and he tried to remember his patience, tried to quell the urge to rush her into feeling any one specific thing.

“I wasn’t sure we’d be able to find him at all. That’s not how we set it up,” he said to stall, and to explain why he hadn’t told her he was looking into it in the first place. He hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up.

“And… how?” she repeated, now sounding light headed, shallow-breathed.

“Working for the FBI for a hundred years has to come in handy at some point, right?”

“Is he…?”

He reached for her hands, bending forward like a branch, an unexpected gale of guilt curling his back. Generally file folders appeared when a body turned up. Of course he should have led with this:

“He’s fine, honey. Just fine. Sorry. I should have...”

She nodded quickly, let out a breath.

The waitress arrived with the milkshake in a deep old-fashioned glass, a spoon, two straws and the stem of a cherry sticking up out the top. For the first time, he understood Scully’s gravitas around ordering these things. There was a time and place. Celebration could turn to sorrowfulness, expectation to terror quickly. Sometimes you’d be sorry or embarrassed you had a milkshake in front of you. Neither of them touched it.

“There’s a picture,” he said. “Pictures.”

In slow motion, she registered this development, licked her lips, straightened up as gradually as a puppet, pulled her hand from under his and placed it on her stomach. Air shifted visibly within her ribcage, rippling her fingers as she tried to support her diaphragm externally. Condensation began to encircle the base of the glass.

“I know, it’s a shock. I’d half been hoping Stella told you, even though I asked her not to.”

Her face twitched in confusion.

“Stella knew?”

He shook his head quickly.

“Just for a couple days before you came back. It came up.”

Color reappeared in her cheeks and her fingers went to her temples. The kind of face she normally made when she found herself in the middle of a desert in a suit in hundred-degree heat, chasing down one of Mulder’s hunches, her how the fuck did we get here again face.

“Sorry -I -? When did it come up? How?” she stammered.

“She probably didn’t think it was her place.”

“Why do you talk to each other behind my back?”

“We weren’t talking behind your back, we were talking and it came out, Scully.”

This was a coping mechanism of hers, to bicker through a loss of control, but sometimes mechanisms malfunctioned, caused damage. He knew that ‘cause he went to therapy now. Sometime - definitely not now - he would tell her she should go too.

“I hate feeling like I’m the last one to know things,” she said.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“I hate that there’s someone who can make you come faster than I can.”

She startled, almost laughed, but couldn’t - that folder was still here, in the room, staring her down, just like the milkshake.

Her eyes moved over the edge of the piece of cardboard, as though it required planning - how does one open a file folder that contains the son you gave away? He tore it open for her, a Bandaid off a scab.

Mulder wasn’t there the first time Scully laid eyes on their son. He’d had to guess at the way she must have marvelled, the beauty, the awesomeness of it. No telling how he might have held up then, how that experience might have toughened his tolerance so that now thirteen years later he might not fall apart watching this second first-time.

His chest tightened, tears freezing somewhere between his eyebrows to avoid falling. Across from him, Scully shed them with sensible abandon, weeping as science intended, peeling the surfaces of her eyes away like dead skin, leaving behind something new and unprotected, something healthier but easier to wound.

There was a school photo of William, a close-up, and then a few surveillance photos that had been taken at a distance. Mulder had insisted they take no chances disturbing the boy, so these were a little blurry, taken at odd angles, slightly refractory images. You had to use your imagination in order to piece him together. But Scully stared, tracing a finger over his profile like he might pop up from the paper and sit with them. What would he order if he could join them, Mulder wondered?

He was tall for his age and pouty-lipped, possessed of the pronounced Mulder brow. But he had Scully’s eyes and his skin was so fair he looked like he’d get a burn just turning the lights on. And there was one odd thing -

“He’s blonde,” she said finally, mystified.

“Yeah. Tell Stella I want a paternity test.”

She smiled and laughed, held a napkin to her upper lip to blot the snot.

“There’s some information, too,” he said. “It’s mostly, well, you’ll see.”

She flipped nimbly through, taking it all in like one of the old casefiles she’d had to cram before she got out of the car. As in those cases, there was little to go on. A tonsillectomy. One school change to enter a gifted children’s program, a broken arm when he was ten from falling off the edge of a staircase, climbing up the wrong side of the rail, an activity which had almost gotten him kicked out of the fancy school.

She looked up, topmost edges of the papers trembling over her knuckles. Her fingers were ripply at the knuckle, but her hands were still lovely, expensive looking - little blown-glass figurines that would outlast every piece of furniture in the house.

“He’s fine?”

“Yeah. He’s fine.”

William’s life was average in the extreme. It was regular. It was everything they could have hoped for.

She put the photos down in a neat pile, straightened her shirt, her lipstick, her hair, pushed the file folder closer to the center of the table beside a ceramic bed of sugar packets. In a moment, food would arrive and they’d have to pack everything up, put it on a seat to her left or to his right, but for now it sat evenly between them. Just as much his as it was hers.

She scratched her lips thoughtfully, tapped the other set of fingernails on the table.

“He’s fine,” she said, this time quietly, talking to herself, or to the folder, or maybe to God.

And then her gaze settled on Mulder. It lingered there as the waitress balanced their food on her shoulder, placed down little dishes of overly cold butter and plasticky jam. A few feet away, a newly minted middle-aged couple joined hands for the first time ever beside their forks. Behind Scully, an aide helped an old woman into the booth. Two college girls cooed at the counter, full up with things to tell each other. Time moving forward and backwards, borrowed and stolen and still and running in circles at every table.

“Fine,” Scully repeated and tugged the cuff of his sleeve. She mouthed the words thank you, bottom lip grazing her teeth. She did it again, this time forehead collapsing into the center of her face to make that vertical wrinkle she’d had above her nose since she was twenty seven.

He nodded, reached his foot under the table so that it rested against hers, his rubbery arch warming the sharp edge of her shoe and he pushed the milkshake across the table.

She laughed and then took a sip. Relief.

Chapter 24

As a biology major, Scully had sometimes been warned she was signing up for a life of disappointment. Satisfaction would be fleeting. Few of them, if any, would make grand discoveries in their careers. The earth was already round. The miracle of penicillin had already been witnessed, sprouted hundreds of other little miracles that bore an ever-less-impressive resemblance. A scientist, Scully was told, must learn to love the question, not live for an answer.

William had been a hypothesis for most of these past thirteen years, and though that was sometimes painful, it was familiar. It was a circumstance Scully had come to accept. She’d given him up because she’d firmly believed it was better for him. Conclusions: none. Control: none. It was how she’d assumed things would always be. But now there was an answer. William existed once again. He looked a certain way and sounded a certain way and lived a very certain life and she would always miss him. This was harder than she’d ever expected or allowed herself to imagine. The earth is round - think what that had taken for people to get used to it.

She rationalized things like the thing she was doing by going over this, comparing the unfamiliar emotions associated with her son to the familiar territory of science. But Stella was no scientist, and she was no poet like Mulder. She was an answers person. And now she was here, involved in Scully’s experiments, and was not particularly happy about it.

They were seated on a cool-slatted autumn park bench, Stella draped in cashmere and reluctance, the chilly peach East Coast air settling on her cheekbones like stains of faint embarrassment. It had been eight months since their parting ways - eight months of silence. Stella had granted Scully’s request for a visit without knowing specifically what it would entail. Now she clasped her brown butter leather gloves over a tightly crossed thigh, pulled the cuffs of her sweater down closer to the edge of her gloves to warm her wrists.

Had this once come easier? The restraint it took to refrain from touch and mentioning the effect of light on the color of her eyes? An evening they’d spent in a hotel as just-friends came to mind.

“Did you color?” Scully asks, her surgeon-steady hand poised over Stella’s, light pink bottle of Chanel nail polish in place of a scalpel.

“Color… my nails?” Stella asks and blows a stream of air across her other hand.

“No, you know, like, crayons.”

“Oh. No, not that I remember.”

Scully glances up quickly to make sure of two things – first, that Stella’s not touching her hair, her spaghetti straps, her Scotch, anything that would smudge the half-finished work, and secondly, that she hasn’t overstepped Stella’s bounds by asking questions.

Stella smiles, quick, casual, disappearing. It’s hard to tell if it ends quickly because there is no reason to force it longer or because some shadow of the past has swallowed it.

“Isn’t that the sweater you let me keep?” Scully asked, eyeing the grey marled drawstrings on the hood.

“Bought myself another one.”

“And here I thought you’d made an ultimate sacrifice.”

“That would be unnecessary when I could just re-purchase it.”

“You could have just asked for it back, it was expensive,” Scully says, feeling the sting.

“And now it has dog hair on it,” Stella continued.

A stranger’s Golden Retriever had brushed up against Scully’s leg and she’d kept him there for a matter of seconds

“It’s barely noticeable. You and the dog have the same color hair,” Scully said.

“I don’t shed.”

“We all shed.”

“I don’t like dogs.”

“You just pretend not to like them.”

Perhaps this had been a terrible idea. Perhaps she should have waited for Stella to call first.

“Are you certain he’s coming today?”

“No, not certain. I haven’t really established a pattern.”

“That’s good to hear. Aren’t you freezing in that denim jacket? What have you got under it?”

“A t-shirt. I’m fine.”

“I’m not pretending, I truly dislike dogs. They’re jumpy and they stink.”

Suddenly, Scully thought of some version of her life not lived, pictured Stella in their home, going stone cold as she brought in this or that mutt home from the pound.

“You’re a cat person, is that what you’re telling me?” she asked.

“I’m not an animal person, I’m a people-person.”

Scully double licked her lips as she waited for a punchline that never came.

“What?” Stella pushed back. “I’m good with people.”

“You’re good at making people do what you want, that’s not the same thing.”

“You should know.”

Scully looked away, scanned a group of children without guardians - not the right group of children.

“I should have told you this was where we were going, but I thought you’d say no.”

Stella looked at her hard - her hardest countenances were reserved for her kindness.

“I think you know me better than that,” she chided softly.

“Did you swim?” Scully asks with eager intrigue, that new friendship glee still fresh even after a few years of knowing one another.

“No. I learned when I was older,” Stella says.

Scully nodded, dug the heels of her hands into the bench as she shuffled her feet - uncrossed and then recrossed. She tossed her hair to the other shoulder so the wind wouldn’t pin it to her lip balm. Maybe it would be better if he didn’t show up.

“How many times have you done this?” Stella asked.

“Five or six times. Seven.” Eight, nine, if she counted the times he hadn’t showed.

“Long drive coming from your place, isn’t it,” Stella murmured.

Scully said nothing. She had never even noticed how long. She had spent exactly none of those hours considering the moral quandaries involved. It was only talking to other people about it that even made her aware of them. Alone, driving here, she wondered about his favorite color, his favorite food, if he could play any instruments.

“Mulder go with you?”

“Just once.”

He’d thought it was weird, said it felt wrong. She’d pretended to agree.

“What did you do then?” Scully presses.

“Horses. Everything was my horse. Riding, being with him, sitting there staring at him leaning on a fence, anything.”

Scully laughs and mumbles something about how very English this is and still Stella’s cuticles stay clean, not a stray stripe. Steady fingers, doctor’s fingers.

“Look at that,” Stella says in a soft, appreciative voice, eyes hot and hard where their hands are occupationally joined. “Even better with your hands than I remember.”

The flirtation is a change of subject, a subtle warning, and Scully licks her lips, doubles back for a second coat of the other hand, prepared to drop the topic of the horse. But Stella keeps talking.

“My father would take me.”

The father, yes. Somehow always comes back to him, somehow always seems like the best and worst of what Stella remembers. Scully paints, carefully considering her next question. The color on Stella’s nails thickens so that it goes from a translucent skin color to a ballet pink that matches Stella’s satin slip camisole top.

Stella had turned slightly to watch a crowd of nearby teenagers approaching the skate park. She slipped off a glove to scratch her lip with her nail. This was the kind of thing Stella remembered to do that Scully wouldn’t have - all her leather gloves were marked with pink, red, mauve colored wax.

“How did you and I wind up friends?” Scully asked, eyes on her son, voice going wistful against her better judgment Sometimes she wondered why they’d had to break up (was that what it was?). Other times, she wondered how they’d started in the first place. She caught Stella’s profile for a moment at such a perfect angle that she had to look the opposite direction to catch her breath. Perhaps eight months had not been enough. “Two not-people-people from separate parts of the world sitting on a bench together.”

“We almost didn’t.”

“And?”

“And I have irrepressible impulses to fuck beautiful people I know for certain I’ll never see again,” Stella said, pronouncing the F so hard it produced pulp in the air. The playground moms turned to look.

“Blonde, you said? How’s he blonde?”

“Mulder said to ask you.”

“Idiot,” Stella murmured absently, busy separating the boy out from a crowd, putting him at the crosshairs of her attention. Scully found him at once. She knew his walk by now. His carriage. She could spot him a mile away. She didn’t worry when he didn��t come. She didn’t think about talking to him or touching him. It was just this, watching, at a distance, periodically. Still there. Still there, watching him like he was an infant sleeping in a cradle rather than an almost adult riding a skateboard.

“There, yes?” Stella said, a voice like a long hooked finger, the drawl so sustained the word could have reached across the Atlantic Ocean. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she hissed to herself without Scully saying anything at all.

He was wearing a hat today, a striped beanie and a pair of Ray-Bans, trying to look cool, Scully thought, but the rest of him was still sloppy and silly, lecturing at his friends about something. Like his father, she thought, and still she felt no angst, no sadness, only peace. It was like bird-watching, only it was her son out there in the wild. And this lanky creature here is known as a young human.

“Not what I expected,” Stella murmured, as though a voice any louder might make him flit away, all the way across the park. Stella said. “All you.”

“Why is that unexpected?”

“They say the first child always resembles the father, to keep him from wanting to kill it, eat it or abandon it.”

Scully looked at her knees.

“That’s not what I meant,” Stella said quickly.

“I know.”

Ten, it had been ten times.

“Were you pretty? You must have been very pretty.” Scully is flirting and she knows it but it seems harmless enough.

“I don’t know.”

Scully gives one of Stella’s fingers a little tug, bats her eyelashes to let Stella know she’s teasing, overdoing it. She doesn’t know how to pay compliments without turning them into jokes.

“Did people tell you you were pretty, fawn over your golden hair while you relentlessly questioned them?”

It’s Stella’s turn to laugh.

The kids were moving closer, William looking at his phone as he smoldered leaves underfoot, swiveling on the balls of his feet with each step to make the crunch and sizzle. Who was he texting with? His mom? Maybe a girl. Or boy. She lost herself in the last of the questions she could dredge up - imagining his turns of phrase, his favorite emoji and soon he was closer than he had ever been, just a few feet away, kicking a ball as he walked. Scully felt her breath quicken as one of the boys got William’s attention, asked him something. She had heard his voice only a couple of times, from much further away.

Stella nudged her in the side, drew her attention to the map on her phone.

“Here look,” Stella said. “Says they’ve a good Caesar salad. I’m in the mood for that.”

Scully nodded, her ankles brittle as weak stemmed flowers succumbing to first frost. Stella tugged her up from the bench. She suddenly was very cold and shivered as she wrapped her denim jacket tighter. She knew Stella’s instincts were right, that it was too strange, too risky for them to just sit there, so close to him. Don’t turn back, she told herself. And:

“Don’t turn back,” Stella echoed aloud.

Stella’s hands were in her pockets as they walked, eyes sympathetic but stern. Scully imagined it was how she looked when she brought someone in to identify a body, tell someone their sister had been strangled.

“Mulder’s right about this, you know that.”

Stella’s mention of his name, even in this context of William, or maybe because of it, angered her. Stella pulled the scarf from her neck and forced it around Scully’s neck. Loving Stella was no more or less painful than loving someone else, but it was more embarrassing, like loving a ghost or a phantom limb.

“How did you know I asked lots of questions?”

“Most children do. And you’re a detective.”

“So are you.”

“Not like you, not a born one.”

“Well you do have a second profession to fall back on.”

“A doctor?”

“A manicurist.”

Scully fake-raps Stella on the wrist and a bit of paint splatters on the crests of her knuckles.

She was grateful that she was not alone, that Stella’s footsteps were falling right beside her own, Stella’s musk-heavy floral scent bedded in the fabric beneath her own chin.

“I’m glad I got to see him this once,” Stella said. That’s it, William was in the past again, at least for today.

Would she have disliked him as she disliked other children (and dogs?) She would have been good to him, spoiled him, refused to stop cursing in front of him, probably?

“You and Mulder doing all right?”

“I don’t really want to talk about that.”

“You’ll have to get used to it again at some point.”

“So you’re not going to fight for me,” Scully said, meaning it as a joke, but her voice cracked.

“Fight for you,” Stella repeated dubiously, deciding whether to enter a game or a boxing ring.

Scully was glad they weren’t facing each other now. She had things she wanted to say. A fireplace burned somewhere in the neighborhood, the smell of a family gathering around it.

“You sent me back home because of William, didn’t you? Mulder told you. That’s why you made me leave you and now I’m home and you don’t think I should see William but you’re not going to try to get me back either. It doesn’t quite track for me.”

She stopped only because her breath ran out. Stella was silent a moment. Walk, keep walking.

“I don’t fight for people.”

If not people, then what, Scully wanted to say. But she bit her lip instead, trying to keep it from trembling as she faced the chill, keeping time as though accidentally, side by side like strangers just off the same bus.

“You can’t keep doing it. This was the last time. All right?”

Scully pursed her lips, shook her head, looked at the sky. Stella was not going to use her son to change the subject.

Or were they the same subject?

“You could do worse than Mulder,” Stella said, sharpening the edge on her voice, her weapon of choice, that vicious casualness. “You love him. He loves you. You’re best friends. He’s very well-endowed, from what I remember. He can reach things. Kill bugs. He found your son for you despite absolute impropriety and deep ethical and legal breaches.”

“Stop,” Scully said, looking away over her other shoulder just to keep from crying. A cadre of barren trees was ready to march off into winter, leave their dead, once-treasured leaves at their feet. “Please stop.”

“Fine.”

This was how Stella faced her fears, she knew. Laughed in the face of murderers, memorized her nightmares, re-read them like fairytales, salivated at the sight of blood, sneered at a plane nose-diving with a slug of Scotch.

“You aren’t supposed to tell little girls they’re pretty too often,” Stella says with slow, deliberate breaths placed mid-phrase, as though she regrets having to tell anyone this, having to spoil an innocent, unruined worldview where a compliment to a child is merely a compliment, where little girls can be pretty and not suffer for it.

“Why not?”

“Because it makes them think they’re nothing else.”

“Mm,” Scully says and caps the polish. Stella sits still as stone, hands out in front of her on the magazine, watching the polish dry with more patience than Scully has ever seen her muster.

“Sometimes you just have to let a person go,” Stella said as a boy - not her boy - on a skateboard sailed by.

“Which of you are you talking about now?”

Yes, the same subject.

Stella stopped abruptly, took Scully’s chin in one hand. Rough enough that Scully might have objected except that it was stopping the incessant spinning she’d felt since they got up from the bench.

“I can’t do what Mulder can do, Dana. And Mulder can’t do what I’m doing right now, and I don’t live here, so you need to let me say this right fucking now and tell me you hear me.”

Scully tightened her jaw stubbornly. She felt small but safe here in Stella’s one hand.

“This is the last time you see him until he’s eighteen and you can ask. Or you’ll regret it.”

Scully nodded, gulped away the tears in her throat, but they were tears of embarrassment, not sadness. Stella’s grip loosened but did not release her.

“Tell me you hear me.”

Stella finally dropped her hand and held Scully’s. The skin was bare. Where was her glove?

“I wish I could have known you then,” Scully says, replacing the fancy second square cap over the little ridged round one.

“Take this,” Stella said and handed her one glove.

“Why?”

Scully heard the footsteps before she saw him and she saw the slightly sad, slightly satisfied smile in Stella’s eyes. It could be any of them, Scully told herself, any of those kids.

“Excuse me! Lady!”

But it was him. Stella nodded for her to turn.

“This yours?” he asked.

He held the abandoned glove out at arm’s length and Scully choked the sob in her throat. Despite Stella’s impression, he looked just like Mulder the first day she met him. First day of school science lab boy, nerdy and needy, sanguine and sweet and unaware of his charms, willing to cut open anything you didn’t want to touch even if he had to hold his breath to do it himself.

“Yes, yeah that’s mine,” she forced herself to say finally, knowing that once she did it would be over. Her pause made him laugh for some reason. When she stuck her hand out to take the glove, she must have still looked dazed, lame, because he frowned at her as though she’d made a silly mistake, then stuck his tongue between his molars and held her wrist with one hand, pretending to struggle to put it on her like a toddler. She laughed, counting the seconds until she could collapse. She’d have to make it out of the park, clear the area, she knew.

“Thanks,” she said and he nodded, licked his lips, and yes that was all her, turning them chapped to the wind and jogging off to meet his friends, a thirteen year old interrupting his afternoon to return a single glove to two middle aged women he’d never seen before.

Stella immediately took her arm, keeping the pace steady but consistent. Scully kept up but would not stop looking until Stella looked back.

“What if he didn’t return it?” Scully managed to whisper.

“Why?” Stella asks.

As in why would anyone want to have known a four- and six- and eight-year-old girl like her, freckle faced and quiet eyed, brushing a horse’s back as she stands on a stool, proud and kind and a little strange, inconceivably wise beyond her years.

“Because,” Scully says and picks up Stella’s hands, squeezes her palms between thumb and middle fingers. “Then I could have told you you were everything.”

“I was willing to lose a glove today.”

Chapter 25

He realized he’d left the door unlocked by the way the early November candy corn breeze whistled through the first grade teeth of the patched screen door, winter dragging autumn out by its ankles. The kitchen was as clean as it had been when Scully lived there, back when she’d tidy it every night before bed, caring for it like she cared for her teeth or her skin.

It had taken him some time to figure out how to do this. Time plus a therapist, two bottles of pills on the bathroom counter, and experiments with various citrusy smelling liquids in spray bottles. Toxic, non-toxic, lemon-mint, gingerberry, when to hit the hard stuff - bleach, served neat. Certain things like mental health and spotless surfaces had always been Scully’s area of expertise, but in her absence, he’d learned about both.

He’d done this often over the years, sat with William’s baby picture, forearms resting on the kitchen table, staring at it the way most people had learned during those years to stare at their tablets and phones. He only ever did it alone - waited for Scully to leave and go home, which she always did. When she lived here, he’d had to wait for her to go to sleep. He had never told her it wasn’t all research and computer screens wrestling him from their bed.

The photo paper was pliant from age and attention and it took only ten minutes or so for it to warm between his fingertips so thoroughly that he worried the colors would come off on his fingers, that baby William would disappear from prosperity into the temporariness of his skin. He used to think of old world boy-things - model rockets and baseball caps, the stuff of fifties sitcoms and Norman Rockwell. He used to think you belong here.

He used to wonder if William would look at him the same way Scully did when she was thinking aloud, the little line forming between her eyebrows, the squint, the lips tightening in distaste and restraint, or if William was more like him, a dreamer and a rambler. He knew himself. He knew Scully. That William possible, knowable. But now he was a third thing - himself.

The screen door hinge cracked and smacked behind him. He’d recently tightened the screws and she wasn’t used to its newfound snap. Stella must have gone back to London. He had not asked for dates and times - had never done that, not even when they were together. He’d always had plenty to keep himself busy while Stella was in town. He more often had trouble stopping that busyness when Stella had gone. He always made Scully re-announce her presence. “Just me, Mulder.” “I know.” I can tell by the way the gravel crunches under your tires, can tell by the tone of the wooden moan in the porch floorboards, by the way you breathe on the other side of a weight-bearing wall. You belong here. “So clean,” she marvelled quietly, as she often did when she stopped by these days to say hello or drop off some pizza or check on him, he knew that’s what it was. He wondered if someday it would sound like superiority. He wondered if he’d ever learn to take her for granted again, just a little bit, just enough to relax.

“How’s Stella?” he asked, and considered shuffling the photo out of view as he normally would, but for some reason, this time, he did not.

“She’s good, I think. You know, Stella doesn’t say much.”

She dropped William’s folder on the table. She’d had possession of it since the diner. Now she leaned on the back of the chair over him, her fingers snuggling between the wood and his back as she saw the baby picture. She petted his hair from behind, rested her chin on his head so that her voice came out funny. He wondered how long she’d been watching from the door.

“I didn’t know you still had that,” she said and her voice sounded strangled by the lump in her throat.

Someday something like that might feel like a vote of underconfidence, a dig… he wished for that someday to come.

“I don’t know what’s harder, having information about him, or when we had nothing,” she said.

“I was just thinking that.”

“Were you?”

For years, they’d resisted this. Done everything else together while they mourned the loss of their family in private. Like they’d had separate roles in that crime. Like they weren’t serving the same sentence. Just minutes ago, he’d been making plans to keep doing it forever. Why?

“I spoke to him,” she said. “Heard his voice.”

He tried not to look alarmed.

“No, not like that, not about anything. Just accidentally left something behind and he… he was… good, he’s good.”

“Of course he is, Scully. He’s yours.”

She came around the chair and leaned her behind against the edge of the table, half-smiled.

“Maybe it’ll be better if we put them away,” she said. “For us. And for him.”

Someday this might sound like she was couching her own self-correction in a criticism but tonight it sounded like thank Christ, Stella had talked sense into her.

“I think you’re right.”

“Regular people with normal jobs wouldn’t have even gotten this much.”

“No.”

“But I’m glad you did, Mulder,” she said and this would always mean what it meant tonight.

She picked up the photos - the baby one and the new ones, stared at them as she shuffled to the drawer next to the fridge and laid them in there with their love notes, blank birthday cards, Scotch tape. Sometimes junk drawers weren’t for junk, they were just for the things you didn’t know what to do with.

She hesitated, then pushed it shut, and then, leaning back against it, hands still behind her on the pull, she looked at him, really looked at him. Sweet and sexy and yes, a little sad. Her lips shined, caught the glow of the single source of light in the room over his head. He held his breath.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me,” she demanded softly. “That you were sad about it?”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

He waved her over and she came, held his hands like the holster of a carousel horse. In her eyes, shades of blue spun as she tried not to cry.

“Hard to say goodbye to him all over again.”

He nodded, swallowed, and put one arm around her hips.

“But this time I’m here.”

Her belly shook at his ear, though he heard nothing. He kissed the hem of her sweater, leaned his chin into the dip of her navel. She wiped her cheeks dry and then took his face in one wet salted palm, bent to kiss him on the mouth.

Her hands crept around his throat, thumbs at his Adam’s apple. The room stopped smelling “clean” and smelled instead like her, like the perfume she’d been wearing since the day she first walked into his office, something he had never heard the name of, never heard her mention having to replace. She was only good at keeping the silliest secrets. He put his hands around the trunk of her right thigh and tugged her towards him. More need than want is what it was up until then.

But now her body swayed toward him and she climbed into his lap in her sweatpants. It had been years and her lips dripped with salt. She tasted like love and sadness and the future. He was hard for her, hell, hard for all of it.

“I’m here this time,” he said, pulling his mouth just far enough from hers to speak, letting her tongue catch the chap of his lips. “I’ll always be here.”

She stopped then and something passed behind her eyes, a shift of color behind blue-tinted glass, a sheet in the wind, a wave of blonde hair, a silk shirt. Would she think of Stella whenever they kissed, when he made love to her on this table? Would he ever not wonder?

“Always is a long time,” she said without hiding the hint of mournfulness, of missing something, and he nodded.

“I didn’t say she’d be gone. I just said I’ll be here.”

She frowned, breath quickening even as her mind slowed.

“Mulder?”

“We’re too old to give up things we love,” he said and meant it. Who cared what she thought of when he kissed her?

She unzipped her sweatshirt, pushed it back off her shoulders.

He placed a kiss on her neck, stripped her naked from the waist up. She moved his lips back to her own and dropped her weight deeper into the cusp of his pelvis. With their noses pushed together and her shoulder blades clipped toward one another over the table, she breathed into his mouth.

“God, I missed you,” he said.

“Fuck me, Mulder.”

Her hair frizzed in his fist as she pulled her hamstrings tight atop his quadriceps. The grace of youth was gone but it was replaced with something better. This is what age looked like. This is what fixed mistakes looked like.

One hand on her lower back, hooked into the back of her pants, the tag silky between his thumb and her skin, he pulled her closer and tighter, sucking her into his mouth, savoring her like a sublingual pill, like he was waiting for her to melt under his tongue and be absorbed into his blood.

She arched and stretched, placing herself over him with such anatomical precision that he might as well be inside her rather than on either side of four layers of clothes. Her body was hot and impatient against his belly as his fingers slipped into her pants and under her thigh, past the cotton seam of her underwear. She hummed in his ear, fit her body more closely over his hand.

He lifted her at the waist, laid her back on the table, pulled her bottoms off in a swift but clumsy motion. He leaned over to kiss her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She bent a knee and brought the top of her foot to brush his cock through his pants, rubbed the sharp crest of her instep against him until it hurt.

“Fuck me, Mulder,” she said again, the solid edges of her voice absorbed by the wood at her back. She squeezed his arms. “Easy, baby,” he said and as he entered her, her eyes watered and a tear rolled out onto the table, crystal clear. She’d come over for dinner and television, sweatpants and chopsticks, but he had trapped her with his clean surfaces and exposed wounds. Her body shuddered, shoulders convulsing, shrugging off the past, making herself new for him. “So tight. How are you still so tight for me?”

She grinned wickedly.

“She only has so many fingers.”

And he laughed, bit her neck as he fucked her slowly.

They’d made their baby just like this, in a bed rather than on a table, but just like this, with this much love and intent. He’d known right away that it had worked, known just looking at her collapsed on his torso. “Oh my God,” she whispered as the edge of the table met the back of her knees. She pinched his t-shirt to her in both fists, then slammed one hand down hard next to her hip. He moved his hands from table to body, alternatingly bracing his weight and cupping her breasts, aligning her hips and brushing her lips, fucking her until she white knuckled the slab he used to eat his depressed dinners on.

She pulled herself up against him, gripped his neck and pushed her feet against the seat of the chair behind him for leverage. Sometimes it upset him how little he had to do to make her come. Sometimes but not now.

“Look at me like you used to,” she said and he spun around to sit on the table, let her put her knees down on either side of him. “Look at me so I can make you come.”

They did it together, like they did most things, their work and their driving and their arguing and their meals and now their goodbyes to their son. Soft staccatoed moans and her pelvic muscles squeezed and tugged him and he peeled the cheeks of her ass so that she’d take him deeper and then the rhythm of their bodies broke like a fever, madness taking over, breath tangling, toxic and medicinal at once, words all nonsense and undictionaried. If she was thinking of Stella too, that didn’t matter, that was not a bad thing, because nothing associated with this could be bad.

He held her until he went soft inside her, and she smiled - her favorite magic trick, his dick going from hard to soft and back again, biology and anatomy in motion at her whim. When they got up, she picked up her clothes, tucked them under one arm, and led him up the staircase naked, her rear silhouette incarnadine with freckles and friction. He followed her three steps behind, watching each calf raise each heel carefully on the edge of each plank, soles searching the wood grains for the stamps that showed where her footsteps belonged.

#wtid #stella and scully #the fall fic #xfiles fic #myfic

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