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Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.
- Mary Oliver, A Settlement
There is really very little blood. After it’s over. There is nothing to wash off. She doesn’t have to throw away this blouse because it’s stained red or brown or some deep bruised purple in between. Modell bleeds, but she doesn’t look at him. She looks at Mulder, and Mulder doesn’t bleed at all.
The sprinklers come on after an extended delay, like the pause and heartbeat count between thunder and lightning. They rain down hard over the sound of the alarm. Nothing is burning.
Someone says, “They should get that fixed.”
Her hair curls as she steps backward out of the room to avoid the localized storm. The gun in her hand is heavier than she’s used to and smells like hot metal. A revolver. A thief or a warrior’s weapon. She avoids the impulse to curl her finger around the trigger because she has always liked to walk a half-step behind Mulder, feel what he felt after he’s shrugged off the feeling. He’d put this in her hands like a ransom. To be exchanged for life, love, loyalty. It was the second gun he’d given her today.
She steps backward out of the room until her spine hits the hallway’s opposite wall. The alarm seems to have triggered the sprinkler system only in every other room and the 8th-floor hallways. They really should get that fixed.
Mulder stays in the rain.
--
“And he fired the weapon?”
“The chamber wasn’t loaded.”
“We’ve got that here, Agent Scully. I just want to clarify the chronology.” Agent Riley looks about fifteen. His last name sounds like it could be a first. That used to bother her.
He scratches under his glasses with a pen. “Anyways, you said he fired the weapon at Mr. Modell, and then at himself?”
She presses her hands together and makes her whole body tense and ready like a bow or something prepared to be fired from one. “Yes. Have you ever seen The Deer Hunter, Agent?”
There is no reason for her to want to give him this visual. The image of a gun against someone else’s temple, held firmly there by their own hand. There is no reason, except that when Mulder had pulled the trigger on himself the click had left her with something less like relief and more like triumph. I could have told you, she wanted to say to Modell. I could have told you he was too much for it to end like this.
Agent First-Name blinks. “No, I haven’t, Agent Scully.”
She’s not surprised. “Doesn’t matter.”
He asks ten more questions. None of them include: And did you think he would kill you, Agent Scully? Or: What would you have done if you’d been wrong?
What would you have done if the chamber had been loaded when he put it against his head? If you’d had to throw this blouse away because it was red?
--
She does not believe in immortality, but she does believe in the unprecedented and uninterrupted existence of Mulder. She knows she’d have asked to do his autopsy if she’d ever really believed he could die.
--
A hospital, a different one, cleaner, with sprinklers that probably work and Modell strapped stupidly down to a small white bed. She’d touched Mulder’s hand just long enough to make sure a gun wasn’t the most recent thing that he’d held.
Mulder corners her in an empty room that smells like formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol with the sharp undercurrent of someone’s Nicotine and mint gum. Her eyes water. Pressed against the wall in a maybe lab, maybe storage room, maybe autopsy bay, he holds her tight enough to bruise. Her nails scrape down his dress shirt, under his suit jacket. She feels a thread pull loose and trail after her. He presses his face against her neck and does not speak.
She can see this going one of three ways. They’re overdressed for at least one of the possible occasions. But she says, “It’s alright, Mulder. Okay?” and it goes no way at all.
He lets her go with a suddenness that feels violent. She gasps but it only feels like breathing.
He says, simply, “No.”
When she was in med school, she’d treated a girl for the flu who couldn’t stop crying. When she’d asked what was so sad, her mother had explained that earlier her daughter had tried to hold her mouse for comfort and had accidentally suffocated it in her hands. I loved it too hard, the girl had said.
The door snicks shut behind him. Her ribs ache like she’s been screaming or laughing hard. her eyes prick from the nicotine smell and the burning under her jaw where his cheek had felt rough and hot. She wraps her arms around herself in a room that smells like someone else’s addiction.
--
Sometimes she thinks Mulder has been trying to leave her since Bellefleur. Like you might leave a child at the gas station or the laundromat. He could pretend it was accidental. She could watch his headlights drone into the horizon.
Mostly she knows this is not true. Or if it is, he’d never follow through. If it is, he’d swing a U-turn three miles down the road and find her drinking Coke on the curb, ready to kick himself back into her good graces.
Still, she mutters, “Goddamn it, Mulder,” as she watches him peel out of the hospital parking lot. She’d wandered the hall aimlessly for long minutes after he’d left her in the Nicotine room. Tried to convince herself she was waiting for him, but mostly avoiding Virginia’s pre-dark sunset, which she’d caught streaking across the sky as she passed a window. It would paint everything in gold and red, turn her white blouse pink.
A nurse had eventually caught her elbow. “Your partner,” she’d said, gesturing. For a moment, a second longer than was acceptable for a Doctor, a logical person, she’d been sure that everything until now had been a hallucination. That Mulder was dead and she’d just come out of some sick kind of shock and she bit her lip hard.
“He left already, I think. North exit,” the nurse finished.
Scully pretended not to be surprised. She’d thought: Thank God and then Motherfucker in the same half-second.
Her phone is slick in her hands as she jabs his number on speed dial.
“Stop the car.”
“What?” She can’t see him, but the car slows.
“Stop driving. Did you think I was going to call a cab? Fuck.”
It's not clear if the last word is a verb or a noun. The car stops hard and waits, crouching on the side of the road. When the light moves just right, she can see his hands on the steering wheel, white-knuckled and too hard in the sunset golden-red. His fingers twitch as she picks her way across the road to him. It is not so different from the way he’d held the gun.
--
In the car. She could start a hundred thoughts that way. In the car, in a car, in this rented red Taurus that she’d insisted was somehow both unprofessional and lewd, she watches the pulse of his jugular vein and he watches the road.
“Home or motel?” she asks, skimming her thighs with her fingers like she’s checking for unseen injuries. Virginia is the perfect transitory state – some purgatory between out-of-town and not.
He doesn’t look at her. “I think we should get something to eat.”
“Okay,” she says. “That sounds good. Yeah.”
It doesn’t sound good. She wants a shower and a bed. But she’s relieved at the ease of the request. A biological function wholly unrelated to the fact that earlier he’d pressed her up against a wall, pointed a gun at her.
The sky had knit together as the sun came down. The clouds drawn low and dark over the skyline. It is too warm for snow. The air is still with want of rain.
Mulder worries his lip between his teeth in the grey light. She considers some twilight urge that has existed in her since he’d had stumbled feverish and terrified into her apartment last year. The one that wants her to take him home, close the blinds and curl herself around him like a comma or a question mark or a parenthesis to mark the end of something.
It’s an illogical urge, an unreasonable line of thought. She knows this. Still. Sometimes she can see his fever dark eyes as she’d pressed him gently down into bed. The way he’d caught her wrist, his cheeks flushed red, and said, “Wait, wait.” And nothing after. Let it hang in the silence. She’d watched him sleep for a moment. Wanted to say something gentle or profound while she pushed hair unnecessarily away from his eyes. But he was quiet in sleep and she’d only said: I will.
--
Because they seem to either repel or resist convention, the first place they find to eat is an all-night supermarket, lit from the inside out like a second sun.
“We can just get sandwich stuff, or something.” It’s not really a question, and she’s not really hungry, but she follows him into the white light.
It’s an off-brand store, sporting off-brand frozen pizza and pancake mixes down the aisles and post-Valentine’s day sales. She hadn't even realized Valentine's day had passed. Her birthday is this week, she thinks, without fanfare. She’ll be older than her mother was when she’d had Melissa. She can’t remember when she started measuring time based only on how much she’d lost.
The freezer aisle hums with cool white electricity. She’s been dumbly following Mulder as he paces down the aisles, too quickly to even be looking for anything. She wonders if he’d wanted something to eat or if he just didn’t want to be alone in the car with her.
She stops hard in front of a wall of ice cream. She’s not just going to follow him aimlessly around the supermarket until he decides that somewhere between his guilt and annoyance, gee, he really does feel bad for almost killing her and/or himself. And not in the way that made him want to repeat an attempt of the latter.
The chocolate ice cream is, of course, on the highest shelf. She leans hard on the glass door and stretches up to reach it. The metal shelves scrape at her ribs under her coat and she cusses low under her breath. She feels Mulder behind her before he does anything. Like a change in barometric pressure or the quiet sense of suspicion they always endow girls with in horror movies. They know what’s coming and it still doesn’t save them.
“Let me get it,” he says, quiet.
Still doesn’t save them. She considers, for a moment, half-leaning back against him and letting him reach up and above her. It would make him happy, she thinks, to be able to put something as simple as ice cream in her hands. But earlier, in the hospital, he’d handed her a gun and then hung his guilt across her shoulders like a mantle. So she does not. Lean/let. She elbows him, gently, and mutters, “No, I’ve got it.”
She hears him take a breath. “Scully.”
“I said I’ve got it.” And she does got it. For a second. And then he moves away from her and her heel slips for a moment and the ice cream comes crashing down out of her fingers on the floor and only then does she notice that the freezer was just shy of cold and its melted anyway. The brown river makes a detour around their shoes.
It makes her want to laugh, suddenly. Hard and loud and absurd in the middle of this stupid Virginia grocery store. She can remember being in the rain with Mulder, laughing over the silence of the dead. A smile tugs up the corner of her mouth, and she lifts her eyes to his, waits to see the familiar reflection of her own release in them.
Mulder’s eyes are closed. He runs a hand over his forehead and it’s the same face she can remember seeing on her older brother, which he’d learned from her father, when she’d done something just so disappointing. Her nails clip into her palm inside the pockets of her long jacket.
“Clean up on aisle seven,” she mutters.
Mulder sucks in a breath, opens his eyes but looks above her, just a half-inch. His voice is quiet but she feels the echo like the recoil from a gun. “Would you let me help you for one fucking second, Scully?”
She starts to shake her head, opens her mouth to speak and he catches her upper arm. Not hard, but hot and real and dangerously serious.
“This is how you’re gonna get yourself killed,” he says through his teeth.
She snorts, yanks her arm out of his hand harder than necessary for how gently he was holding it. Not because she’s afraid of him but because she needs distance if she’s going to size him up properly. Cage fighters didn’t stand arm in arm before the match. “Yes, death by ice cream attack. One of those.” Her voice is a hard, thin line. Half offer, half warning. If he laughs, they don’t have to cross it. She watches his jaw clench instead.
“You didn’t run today.”
She crosses her arms and fakes apathy in the way she knows pisses him off. “And? My job isn’t to run, Mulder. That’s not how this works.”
“So my job is to let you put yourself in danger when you could prevent it? I’m supposed to,” he runs his hand through his hair like he needs to catch the words. “Protect you,” he finishes and looks away.
What she should say is, “No, that is not your job. I do not need your care or concern.” That would be smarter, better. More professional. But she can still remember him drunk with fever and curled up like a child in her bed, so what she says is:
“You think it’s not the same for me? You put a gun to your head, Mulder. And you pulled the trigger and you think – you think I was just going to leave you.” She clenches and unclenches her fist to keep her hands from shaking, drops her voice lower. “I mean last year, when your father died –“ She’s not really sure how she’s meaning to finish this sentence. She’d wanted to keep him in her apartment for the foreseeable future? Let the trees grow into a protective aviary around her windows and be the only one to touch him until she was sure he wouldn’t bruise?
He saves her the trouble.
“When my father died? You shot me, Scully.”
Oh. Yes. Modell had said so today. She shot you, I read it in her file. Tit-for-tat and making it even. Playground games. She doesn’t have anything to say to that even though she should. It wasn’t the same. Still, it’d been only her in her own head. And she’d pulled the trigger.
“You’re right. I did.” She nods, looking a half-step away from him and down the white aisle. All the freezers to her left are broken, the light dark. Ice cream melts down the bracketed sides in white/brown rivulets. She presses her lips together, nods again.
“Scully,” he starts and she holds up a hand.
“I’ll be in the car.”
She nearly bumps into someone who works there as she clips around the corner. The man pushes up his red hat as he looks down the aisle she’s left, whistles low between his teeth.
“Jeez,” he says. “What a mess.”
--
The air is thick and too-warm for February and she lets it in through a cracked window, liking how heavy it settles in her chest. Mulder is making his way back to the car with a big red heart tucked protectively against him. It’s too on the nose to be sad, but she bites her lip just the same.
He opens the car door and then the heart in her direction. It’s Russel Stover. One of the many half-priced Valentine’s day leftovers they’d passed on their way in.
“I felt like I had to buy something,” he says. “After we, you know.” Made a scene, she thinks, but he scratches at his cheek and doesn’t finish. “Anyways, it’s not ice cream, but it’s chocolate.”
There are times she thinks that she could love him. Really, really love him. The kind of way that made her follow him around supermarkets and hold him in hospital rooms and shoot him when the situation demanded it. Whatever kind of way that was.
“Thanks,” she says.
They balance the big heart between them, and she reaches over his hand for the slip of paper that predicts their saccharine fortune. It’s hard to read in the half-light, but she squints. The inside of her wrist brushed against his as she grabbed for it, and she imagines she could feel his rabbit pulse over hers.
“You actually read that?” He’s swallowing whatever the hell he just put in his mouth, looking at her quizzically.
She lets the paper hang from her fingers. “Well, yeah. Don’t you want to know what it is you’re eating?”
He shrugs, goes for something else from the middle. Milk chocolate butter cream, she thinks, but doesn’t tell him.
“What if you get a bad one?”
He shakes his head at her. “First of all, bad is not a word that is easily applied to chocolate, but I see your point. Second of all, you just, I don’t know, close your eyes and hope the next one is better.”
She smiles at him, and the tension in her cheeks leads her to believe it’s the first time she’s done so all day. Smile, Scully, he’d asked of her – on his knees – and she hadn’t. “That’s a very optimistic ideology.”
“Oh, you know me. The eternal optimist.”
Smile, Mulder, she thinks as he looks up at her. And he does, for a split second. His fingers play nervously at the end of his tie.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For earlier. In the hospital, both of them, and with the ice cream. When you shot me, it wasn’t -- ” He shakes his head. “I’m just sorry.”
She waits for him to make an excuse, to say he was scared or traumatized or grieving for a possibility that had been narrowly avoided. She would accept that, understand it. But he just brushes his fingers across her wrist, and this time she wonders if he can feel the spitfire pulse in her.
“It’s alright.” She swallows. “All of it, Mulder. Today.”
He shakes his head.
“How many times are you going to have to say that to me, Scully.” There’s no malice in it. He genuinely wants to know.
She almost smiles. “Seventy times seven.”
He almost drops the Russell Stover box, sliding off the console into his lap. “What?”
“It’s a Bible story. Jesus tells Peter that’s how many times he is to forgive someone who hurts him. From Matthew.”
He blinks and she wants to laugh at him. Wants to tell him not to worry, that she’s hasn’t been keeping track of the times she’s forgiven him but they’re nowhere near the number. That she wouldn’t stop if they were. Instead she picks another cheap chocolate from the box, and thinks about how lonely it is to eat Valentine’s day chocolate after the day has passed.
She says it aloud without meaning to.
“You’re not alone though,” he says. She studies the way a drop of moisture tracks down the windshield and catches another in its path.
“No,” she says, like an understanding. “I guess not.”
He takes another chocolate and winces.
“Strawberry crème,” she reads out from the slip in her hand. He makes a face. The Forrest Gump-humanity of the moment makes her bite her lip to press down the cliché or something beyond it. In old demon lore, esoterica picked up from Mulder and twisted Catholic School nuns, she’d learned that naming something would effectively end its power.
She doesn’t believe it. But she keeps some of the things she might say to Mulder up her sleeve and trapped down in her chest regardless. It all comes to the same. She’d hate to be the one to break the spell.
She says, “Pick me one.” Holds out an expectant palm and tries to forget the way he’d knelt in front of her, slid the cool metal of his gun into her hand.
He says, “Close your eyes.” So she does.
--
They end up in a motel just an hour past the supermarket. He invites her into one of the mirror-image rooms to watch TV only to find that there isn’t one. They watch the ceiling instead.
She lies flat on her back next to him on the queen-sized bed, because they have not gone home and when they’re not home everything she does is impermanent and without consequence. Her hands are gently warm over her stomach. Mulder’s legs hang off the motel bed, but they’re the same height at this angle.
“I’m not going to,” he says finally, to the uneven white of the ceiling.
“What?”
“Let it go. I could have, I almost -- ” He stops. Almost. That’s enough.
She fights the impulse to sit up on her elbow, to hover over him and follow the hard lines of his jaw over his lips just for the sake of making him stop talking for the rest of the night. But from this angle, flat next to him, she can pretend they are the same size, made of the same thing. That they are watching stars or clouds or other inane, childish things that track across the chemical creation of ozone and sky. That they are doing nothing outside the confines of this minute. Watching.
“Okay,” she says.
He breathes next to her. “Okay?"
She slides the back of her hand across the slick sheets, just a little, just enough. He puts his hand in hers, carefully, like she’s offering something he’s not sure he can accept.
“Today sucked,” she adds, because she’s tired and it did.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
They are quiet for long moments. She can feel the guilt in him like sky-bound tension before rain and she wants to try to tell him that they have to close their eyes, hope the next one is better.
“We’ll wait for it,” she says instead. It sounds cryptic even to her ears but she thinks he understands. She doesn’t say what they’ll wait for and he doesn’t ask, but his fingers tighten around the curve of her palm. She can hear him nod, slipping against the white of the bedspread.
They blink up together, breathe. They’re made of the same thing, from this angle. They wait for the sky to fall or God to speak or for benediction to settle heavy around them, like rain.
In the Bible and in books, forgiveness is a quantified thing. Weighty and numeric. She wonders at keeping track, at knowing when the supply had run out or the sum had become incalculable. Under the ceiling sky, she counts forgiveness for him on her fingers. Waits to run out of digits so she can start all over again.