Work Text:
The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
- Katherine Mansfield
***
Mulder looks at his suitcase, hastily crammed with polo shirts and golf shorts, deck shoes and Dockers. He feels as though he's just packed for a week at WASP camp and zips it closed in annoyance. Of all the male-female partners in the Bureau, he cannot believe that this unfortunate lot should have fallen to them. When the woman in the property department complained about their sizes, Mulder had helpfully suggested she put in a request for agents with more standard-issue builds. To his dismay, she went shopping instead.
Scully's been making noises of irritation about the whole thing, but he knows that some part of her is excited. He imagines that a childhood of bouncing around military bases before graduating to dorm rooms and one bedroom apartments will make playing Lady of the Manor more than a little appealing.
His mother, of course, would sneer at the parvenu neighborhood, at the lack of suitable facilities for obscure racquet sports. She'd sneer at Scully. Teena Mulder thinks "Catholic" is synonymous with "hired help."
Frohike has been suppurating with envy, innuendo seeping from him in a steady yellow ooze. So how far does the fiction need to extend, Mulder? You wouldn't want to take any chances and blow your cover, am I right? Be sure to tell me how it goes. Pictures if you can manage, and let me know if you want a video setup.
Mulder flops back on the bed, whose sloshing comfort he has grown to appreciate. He and Scully slept together once, in the most chaste and literal sense of the word. They were on her lumpy motel mattress, awkwardly settling in as a ton of hamburger occupied his quarters. Scully was scrunched on her side near the edge, muttering to herself over satellite images. Her satin pajamas shone dully above the cheap polyester bedspread. He'd offered again to have a cot brought in but she just told him not to be ridiculous and then she shut off the light.
The next morning he'd staggered into the cramped bathroom, which was tiled with a sickly beige and pink mosaic pattern. Scully's hand-wash items hung from the towel rack, her fussy toiletries clustered on the sink. He showered quickly, dressed, then sought out a diner to afford her some privacy.
Mulder stares up at his reflection, reminding himself for the hundredth time to have the god-awful canopy hauled off. The mirrored tiles cut him into neat chunks and the comforter makes him feel as though he is in a high-budget porno. It's a ridiculous bed for anyone, but especially for a man who has resigned himself to a couch and an X-rated multimedia library. There are women he could call, but he's decided it's a far better idea to scratch that itch alone.
He remembers Scully's stockings drying in the bathroom in Kroner, the way they'd given him a weird, lonely pang. He doesn't want to play house with Scully. He's afraid he might like it.
***
His mother's people, the Kuipers, were lapsed Jews who wandered down to Raleigh from Ohio, lured by a promised land of delectable real estate deals and temperate winters. They'd raised young Elizabeth, called Teeny, to be a Carolina debutante and sent her north to earn her fortune. She'd made good on their investment by spending two semesters at Mount Holyoke before marrying Bill Mulder, an illegitimate cousin of the Boston Lowells. His status as a bastard made his Jewish wife a distasteful aberration rather than a full-on scandal. The Kuipers embraced Bill warmly and invited him to call them Mom and Dad.
Which he did. With an enthusiasm that irked his young wife. She, in turn, fell in love with New England and was determined to ingratiate herself to the Brahmin cousins. She volunteered at any event that would have her, and pored over the tangled lineages of the prominent families.
Teeny, who decided that Teena was considerably more dignified, brought her young family to the house in Raleigh six times a year, breaking up their summers at Quonochontaug with two southbound trips. She left the children with Agnes and Clementine, a pair of Gullah housekeepers imported from Savannah, while she shopped and visited old friends with her mother. Bill preferred her family to his snide Yankee relatives and spent the days with his father in law, drinking cocktails and shooting things.
When he was eight, Fox built a haphazard treehouse in the crook of an ancient oak and retreated there from the oppressive summer heat, drinking Cokes and reading comic books. He let Samantha come up, teaching her how to turn the fragile pulp pages from the corners. They spent two whole days and a night up there once, horrified when they found their grandfather drowning one of the countless litters of barn kittens. Chagrined, Grandfather Kuiper bought them a Weimaraner puppy, which Samantha named Butterfly and pushed in her doll carriage.
Fox wouldn't touch him.
Less than three years later, Samantha disappeared into the freezing New England night and Fox went eleven days without speaking. He cut the screens from his bedroom windows and raised the sashes night after night for a week, wishing someone would either bring her back or take him too. It left the house painfully cold, but Teena put on gloves and left him to his own devices until her husband declared it "a lot of goddamned nonsense" and made Fox pay for new screens from his allowance.
Bill intensified the solace he took from both hard liquor and the barmaids who served it to him. Teena asked him for a divorce on Christmas Day. He signed everything her lawyer sent over, then burned her water skis in the yard where she could see.
Teena and Fox spent June through August of 1974 in Raleigh, seeking refuge from the absences in their lives. Fox made his peace with the dog and tried to get him to understand that Sam wasn't coming. Butterfly persisted in whining, tail drooped, until Fox chased him away, yelling and throwing clods of dirt.
Fox kissed the neighbor's daughter behind the woodshed, and she declared that this qualified as an engagement. Her bridesmaids were going to wear pale blue and she wanted a great big diamond ring like her Mama's. He told her that marriage was for assholes and he was planning to join the Army and kill communists and she was out of her fucking mind if she thought he was going to marry anyone.
She called him a faggot.
He called her a whore.
He drew a chalk outline in the treehouse and wished he had a horrible disfigurement so that people would admire his fortitude at merely arising in the morning. No one cuts any slack for a wound as invisible and sissified as a broken heart.
Bill's mother died from a carbon monoxide leak that awful summer. Looking sheepish, he came down to Raleigh to escape the press of relatives who had turned up to reminisce over her disgrace. Fox caught his parents in bed together the next morning, then ran outside to the treehouse. He could not be coaxed down. He hoped Samantha was happier wherever she'd gone. Maybe she'd been taken by a family who couldn't have their own little girl and, in desperation, decided to steal one. Maybe she had a roomful of toys and got to wear her best dress every day, even in the sandbox. He could stand being miserable if that were true.
His father went home that afternoon without saying goodbye. There were sunflower shells in the ashtrays.
***
Mulder turns the TV on and hears the canned laughter of a sitcom without absorbing any of what's happening. Everyone's attractive and witty and instigating improbable hijinks. It lends credence to Tolstoy's observation about happy families, but Mulder doesn't believe it to be true. Unhappy families are all alike. Resentful spouses, bitter children, awkward holidays. Decades of secrets and lies. Happy families fascinate and repel him with their ability to adapt to the exhausting variables of life. They are endlessly resourceful, stringing popcorn on their Christmas trees and turning rained-out vacations into cherished family lore.
From his pocket comes the chirp of his phone. He pulls it out, checking the caller ID. "Scully," he says.
"That's my line. Mulder, what are we supposed to do about rings? My mother offered to loan me hers, but I'd really rather -"
"They've got some," he replies. "We'll get them at the debriefing tomorrow. Liability thing if we travel with them."
"Okay, good."
Mulder hears the beep of her microwave in the background. "Whatcha cooking?"
"Huh? Oh, um, it's...'Tuscan chicken breast with linguine and tender spring peas.' Reduced sodium."
"We're not eating that crap when we're married," he informs her, idly flipping channels. "Apropos of which, I like my steaks rare and my potatoes fluffy."
She snorts into the phone. "You can tell that to the nice people at Outback."
"What? You're not going to prepare three balanced meals a day? Dammit, Laura. When a man spends all day at the office, he likes to come home to a delicious dinner."
"You work from home, Rob."
He smiles at the gloat in her voice. "Laura wouldn't care. Laura would get home from her Junior League meeting and carve little radish roses to adorn the sea bass. She'd make profiteroles."
"Laura sounds like a real piece of work. What time are you getting here tomorrow?"
"You tell me, birthday girl."
She groans. "Don't remind me."
He is surprised by this. Scully is not generally possessed of the sort of vanity that leads people to lament birthdays. "There's nothing wrong with thirty-five."
"No, there isn't." She sounds affronted that he would even imply it. "It's just not exactly the sort of thing wants to do on one's birthday. Getting...fake married to a coworker."
"A coworker?" He's actually a bit stung and masks it by pretending to be a bit stung. "You make it sound so clinical. Besides, I don't think we're fake married until the day after. Tomorrow's props and paperwork."
"Oh, well, that sounds like almost as much fun."
"Do you want me to see if Skinner will loan Kimberly out and spare you all this horror?"
She sighs. "I'm sorry. I've just never gone undercover before, and have to confess to some anxiety. I know it's absurd, given everything we've done, but I've never had to pretend to be another person. To operate under an imaginary set of guidelines and mores."
He stretches out on the couch, muting a rerun of The Simpsons. "It's not too bad. As long as they don't break your fingers or make you rob a bank."
Scully chuckles, but there's something strained in it. They've never fully discussed his time with the New Spartans. "Ill grant you that sounds much worse than being a Stepford wife."
"Marginally," he says, thinking of his mother and her friends playing canasta and smoking like chimneys. Day after day after day.
She yawns. "I'm going to finish this truly delectable meal and go to sleep. Call before you come over, because I need to swing by the dry cleaner to pick up a few things."
"Are they silken unmentionables for the honeymoon?"
She tells him good night, but he hears a smile in her voice before she hangs up
Mulder drops his phone to the floor. He drifts to sleep in a wash of flickering blue light and dreams a memory of kissing her, of her slugging him in the jaw.
Even his subconscious can't decide which aches more.
***
He lost his virginity to his fourth cousin Tassie at a birthday party held for an aunt of some extraction. He wouldn't have even attended, but his father was away and his mother, mindful of not offending rich old ladies, had urged him to go. Tassie was home from her first semester at Wellesley and he was toiling through his senior year of high school. It was an awkward, exhilarating affair in the root cellar, fueled primarily by the aunt's very good wine. Tassie made him promise to wait ten minutes before going upstairs, and he gave it eight before trotting back to the party and having two more glasses of champagne.
He wasn't particularly fond of Tassie, who had a bad case of Locust Valley Lockjaw and who introduced him around as "the bastard Jew" at her coming-out party. They avoided one another for the rest of the evening. Still, he had the general sensation of a weight being lifted from his shoulders. Fox whistled on the drive home, gave his mother a cheerful kiss on the cheek, and ignored her suspicious looks over breakfast.
"Theresa Carmichael!" she exclaimed when he got home from school, and he wasn't particularly surprised she'd ferreted it out of someone. He shrugged in response and crunched into an apple. There was no use denying it or acting affronted by her prying.
"Well," his mother said, scrutinizing him, "if you're lucky, she'll get pregnant and you'll have to marry her. You know one of her great-grandmothers was a Cabot. Married a Pell, I think." Teena had not understood her son's amusement when he'd shown her Eliot's The Boston Evening Transcript two years prior.
"We used...protection," Fox said contemptuously. "And I don't plan to see her again. And I'm seventeen."
His mother clucked. "Typical, no one wants responsibility for anything. And I married your father when I was eighteen."
It had been a relief to go to the University of Pennsylvania that fall. Both of his parents came to install him at Gregory College House, his mother lamenting that it wasn't Harvard, his father rambling about fraternities.
"Remember, dear, you can always apply to Wharton," Teena said as she gave him a goodbye kiss. She thought psychology was trashy and impertinent.
His father gave him a friendly punch in the arm. "Don't study too hard, boy. Ha ha."
Fox watched them go from his dorm window, his breath clouding the glass. They'd left him one of the cars and were forced to drive back together. He imagined the cutting remarks they'd make on the ride home. They couldn't stand each other. His mother thought his father was an idiot who couldn't keep his dick in his pants and his father thought his mother was a judgmental bitch with a liquid nitrogen core. And yet they were bound together through him.
That's what happened when you had a family. You married a fantastic girl, settled into a gracious home, and produced a cherub-cheeked heir. And then, somewhere along the line, you realized that the love of your life was a shrew, the kid wouldn't stop needing things, the house was a pain in the ass to keep up, and you were generally fucked six ways from Sunday. He vowed to keep his dalliances impersonal and free of consequences.
He excelled in school, unencumbered by the crushing weight of his family. Philadelphia was a captivating city. The history of the place reminded him of home and he haunted the University Museum and the Van Pelt library on campus, the Franklin Institute and Independence Hall when off. He never did make it to see the Liberty Bell. He took music appreciation and Egyptology, astronomy and urban legends. He taught freshman study groups in psychology and, in a conspiratorial tone, told them that he found Freud distasteful. He joined the basketball team and wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian. He helped adorn the Benjamin Franklin statue at College Hall with a Marilyn Monroe costume.
His parents bothered him very little, and he dutifully headed home and to Raleigh on holidays and the occasional long weekend. He went to Tassie Carmichael's wedding and ended up catching the garter. He had several girlfriends, most of whom he deliberately pissed off when things began to get serious. He earned a reputation as a flirt and a womanizer, which suited him just fine.
In early November of his penultimate semester, Bill called to say that Grandmother Kuiper had uterine cancer.
"What does that...I mean, will she be okay?"
"We're going to Raleigh for Thanksgiving this year," Bill said gruffly. "To say goodbye."
"Okay."
"You, uh, you still getting good grades?"
"Yes sir, straight As."
"Good kid. I'll see you in a few weeks. Mom sends her love."
His grandmother died before they got there and they had a funeral instead of Thanksgiving dinner. His father wept openly and his mother looked disgusted. "For all the attention he pays his own relatives, I don't see why he ought to be so broken up about mine," she snapped afterwards, startling the rabbi that none of them even knew.
"Mom," Fox said, "you know what it's like for him. He feels accepted here."
"Oh, fine, take his side. If you had any idea what he's done to this family, Fox..." She pressed her lips into a thin line and shook her head. She only aired other people's dirty laundry.
He shrugged wearily and let Agnes and Clementine bustle him into the kitchen and feed him choice morsels. Butterfly, milky-eyed and arthritic, thumped his tail under the table. Fox gave him shrimp and patted his head.
He went to the treehouse that night, revisiting his boyhood wish to be tragically maimed. It had been nine years since his sister vanished like a ghost, and that was long enough for everyone to stop giving a crap about what her disappearance had done to him.
Fox curled up to make himself small in the darkness and waited for morning to come.
***
He wakes up just after seven, disoriented by the refreshed sensation that comes from a reasonable night's sleep. "Shit," he says mildly, though they don't need to be to the airport until eleven. But his dissatisfaction with the time gives him a purposeful feeling.
Mulder indulges in a leisurely shower before dressing, pleased to be wearing jeans on a Monday, wondering whether Scully will be in costume yet. She has it in her to make a formidable suburban housewife. Scully doesn't know that he knows about Daniel, that the Gunmen had dug up that fascinating tidbit back when she was but a starry-eyed young vision in plaid. He'd pondered what it was that made her run, and suspected it was rooted in the knowledge that her father would frown upon a marriage begun in adultery.
He's not glad that Scully's father is dead, but he's not sorry he doesn't have to deal with the man either. His interludes with her brother have been hideous enough, and he's given to understand that Bill's a mere shadow of Ahab. Scully's planning to work in a brief visit while in California. She went to a toy store last weekend and called to ask questions about the psychological development of infants. Mulder refrained from pointing out that any child of Bill's was unlikely to have normal psychological development anyway.
She probably would have driven them both crazy with Emily, had the girl lived and the court overlooked Scully's tendency to push the limits of the Bureau's health plan. He wonders how that new scar in her gut is doing. He wonders if Peyton Ritter fully appreciates the restraint exercised by the famously unpredictable Spooky Mulder.
Mulder brushes his teeth and fuels himself with mediocre coffee. He never splurges on the good stuff because it would make the oily brew he gets at work and on the road even more depressing. He pops two weekender tablets of fish food into the aquarium before fetching his luggage and a small parcel from the bedroom.
He drags the suitcase with one hand, holding Scully's birthday present in the other. It's wrapped in a bag from Lucky Panda, Scully's preferred takeout joint, and the contents rattle like teeth when Mulder bumps into the doorframe. He pauses to retrieve a large bag from the freezer. Then he shuts out the lights, tugs on a thick coat against the raw February slush, and heads morosely into the hall.
***
"Oxford!" his mother had exclaimed. "In England?" Her tone implied he was one step below Benedict Arnold. A Massachusetts man schooled in Philadelphia had no business giving his grad school dollars to a monarchy.
"Congratulations, Fox, Oxford is a very prestigious institution. Your father and I are so proud," he said in a falsetto, and his mother responded by giving him the pinched look she had perfected.
"I thought we agreed that psychology wasn't going to be a career choice, Fox. And anyway, you have excellent grades from an Ivy League school. There's no reason for you to go somewhere foreign." As though he'd be studying trepanning and exorcism with witch doctors in a third world shack.
"You should come with me to England, Mom, given your frequent use of the royal we."
It was their last discussion on the matter.
He met Phoebe during his first year at University College. She sidled up to him at the Shelley Memorial and, with her tongue nearly in his ear, confided that she was sexually attracted to gothic-novel melancholy.
They got around to exchanging names only when Phoebe demanded to know what she was supposed to call out at critical junctures.
Phoebe was lithe and brilliant and told fascinating lies that she half-believed. She ran with him at the Botanical Gardens and threw dinner parties for fellow trust-fund bohemians at her flat in St. Clements. She was captivated by his fear of fire, and liked to greet him wearing nothing but a diabolical smile before leading him to a bedroom full of lit candles. She opined that marriage was for the emotionally weak and wrinkled her nose at the suggestion of motherhood. He thought she might be the sociopath of his dreams until he caught her in his bed with a bearded flautist he recognized from The Eagle and Child.
They had a shouting match while the flautist gathered his clothes and slunk out. After fifteen minutes of vitriol, she threw a snow globe at the wall behind his head, snatched up her dress, and stormed out the front door. Two days later he received a box containing the scorched remains of gifts he'd given her and clothing she'd purloined. There was no further contact.
That month he watched the video of Creighton Jones and had nightmares featuring Phoebe as a fire demon, swallowing his sister in her flaming mouth.
He drowned his sorrows in a Scottish nurse named Elspeth. After four months she invited him to Christmas dinner to meet her parents, and he stopped returning her calls.
Ninety percent because he wanted to and ten percent because he felt it would create balance in a universe where Phoebe Green was in law enforcement, he applied to the FBI Academy. He was accepted, which irritated his mother and caused his father to send him a bottle of good single malt. He finished up his degree and wandered from Greenwich to Chilmark to Raleigh before embarking on his 20 weeks of training in Quantico. He met Diana Fowley, who was a graduate student at Georgetown, and was fairly sure he was in love. Diana was Phoebe without the psychosis, himself without the self-loathing. She was the goddess of the hunt and pursued criminology with a determined ruthlessness. Things became serious, but she took an internship in Chicago and he had no interest in a long-distance relationship.
He started working in the ISU, doing anything he could to get noticed. The great Bill Patterson once remarked that he "showed a lot of promise" and he lived off that compliment for a week.
1988 was his banner year. They caught Monty Props with some monograph Mulder had nearly forgotten about writing. Patterson all but adopted him and recommended him to the Violent Crimes Section, the dream of every agent with a psych background. He and Jerry Lamana acquired Top Gun swaggers and drugged themselves with women and bravado to shut out the numbing horror of their work days.
1989 brought the Barnett debacle. His old nightmares started again, Wallenberg's face blending with Samantha's into an amalgam of all his fuckups, all the people he couldn't - he didn't - save. He doubted himself and then, after the weirdness with Modeski, he began to doubt the FBI. Dr. Werber helped him get through the worst of it that summer, but he remained shaken.
Grandfather Kuiper died and they buried him in the oak-shaded family plot. His mother sold the house to a young family from Wichita and his father was drunk for a week.
The admiration of Reggie Purdue earned him his golden ticket to the BSU, where he was rewarded with the corpses of thirteen little girls. After Roche's trial, he took a week-long vacation to Chilmark. It was Valentine's Day, and the windows were full of paper hearts.
Tassie was in town to show off her new baby and had a stunning blonde college friend named Pip Llewellyn in tow. She was an airy lemon meringue pie of a girl, the very model of pedigreed DAR perfection.
"It's Philippa, really," she said to him when he raised an eyebrow. He grew up with people called Buffy and Cookie and Mimsy, but he never quite learned to conceal his distaste for such precious appellations. He realized that was a bit rich for a person named Fox, but it wasn't as though he'd picked it and the world was teeming with Williams.
Pip taught kindergarten. She crocheted blankets for underprivileged children and spent Sunday mornings at a soup kitchen. She confided to him that she and Tassie got along famously, but that his cousin's mean streak troubled her. He thought of what it took out of him to hunt creatures such as Roche, and of what his life might be if he had a woman like Pip to help him recharge from it all.
They spent three months shuttling up and down the East Coast when they could, and she casually remarked that she could envision herself being quite happy in northern Virginia. Because he didn't know what else to do, he got down on one knee in a wood-paneled restaurant frequented by K Street lawyers and Congressmen. Pip cried and nodded, the other diners applauded, and the waitstaff brought champagne.
He was shell-shocked for two days, half-wishing he'd chosen to pine for Diana after all.
They married at the Quonochontaug house in August, and his mother was in her glory. Pip looked like a storybook princess, and he felt like the wicked highwayman who had deceived and stolen her. He toasted his bride and called her Philippa because he thought Pip was beneath her.
It took him the better part of a year to figure out that he thought it was beneath him.
***
He unintentionally startles Scully in the hallway and she jumps, plastic-wrapped clothes slithering from her grasp, a Wal-Mart bag catching on the doorknob.
"Jesus!" she exclaims, bending to retrieve her things. Mulder notices that, while not in jeans, she is wearing a pair of corduroy slacks and a sweater under her heavy coat. Her hair remains as serious as ever.
"Happy birthday," he says, shifting his parcels around to let her drape a couple of suits over his arm. He reaches for the bag, but Scully grabs it hastily.
She opens the door. "I thought you were going to call."
Mulder follows her inside, breathing vanilla-candle air sharpened with lemon polish. "It's a surprise party. Are you surprised?" He bumps the door shut with his hip, holding her clothes out like a valet.
"Honestly, Mulder, the last thing I need in my life is more surprises." She lays her dry cleaning neatly over the couch before tucking the Wal-Mart bag into the suitcase propped against the wall. "But I always like a party," she adds, hanging up her coat. Then she walks over next to him and cranes her neck the slightest bit.
He puts the items on the table and Scully, who he knows really does like surprises, taps her fingers against the glossy wood and tries not to look curious.
"Big one first," he orders, shrugging his own coat onto a chair. "It's perishable."
Scully pulls open the crinkly plastic bag, then stares blankly at him. "Fudgie the Whale?"
"He doesn't come in white chocolate, I asked. Sorry, Starbuck. But I did get some extra crunchies." He points at a plastic cup next to the cake box. "Practically had to pull rank to appropriate those."
"This is quite an upgrade from a Hostess Snoball."
"My motives aren't entirely selfless. Are you going to get some plates or what?"
Scully grins. "Let's see what's in the second box before you start making demands." She picks up the present and shakes it, looking surprised by the noise.
"You broke it!"
"Oh, Mulder, I'm sor-"
"No, I'm kidding. It's supposed to do that."
She glares at him, then commences ripping off the paper. "Boggle!"
"We have a long flight, I thought it might be something to do. I mean, unless you'd rather read the case file the whole time..." he trails off, rocking a little on his heels.
"I haven't played Boggle in years," she murmurs, turning the box over in her hands. "I used to have a set in med school and my roommate and I played a lot, just to clear our heads. Thanks, Mulder."
He is pleased by her reaction, and wanders into the kitchen before she notices just how pleased. "Fork or spoon for the ice cream cake?" he calls. Her cabinets are lined with shelf paper and the bottom of the toaster oven is free of crumbs.
"You can't be serious about eating this thing right now. It's nine-thirty in the morning!"
"Right, because it's such a good idea to eat that crap at night. Live it up, Dana. Party like it's 1999."
Silence for a moment, and he draws a knife from the block.
"Spoon," she replies.
***.
Married less than three months and he learned his father had been involved in some deeply nefarious activities. Mulder was cold and distant when he got home. Philippa fretted and asked irritating questions. He slammed the door of their elegant house in Arlington and went to Hegal Place to smoke and brood.
He asked her for forgiveness, told her he didn't want to burden her with his problems. She poured him a glass of wine and made soothing noises while she stroked his head in her lap.
He got the shock of his life when Diana turned up in his office. She'd been accepted to Quantico after her stint in Illinois and was a newly minted Special Agent. The old feelings came roaring back, but he channeled that intensity into his work - which quickly became their work - and his solve rate was so extraordinary that Reggie Purdue greenlit all measures of insanity. He and Diana would hole up at the Hegal Place apartment, poring over X-Files and eating lousy takeout. The air between them condensed and crackled with dangerous purpose, but he was never unfaithful.
Not physically.
He put Boggs away, prompting Jerry and Diana to organize a happy hour in his honor. It was extremely well attended. Philippa showed up, and she was so charming and radiant that he beamed just to have her by his side. For the evening they both forgot he spent at least two nights a week with his former lover in an apartment he couldn't make himself give up.
They went out to dinner to celebrate a case, and Philippa shyly mentioned wanting a baby. He'd known it was coming, seen it headed his way like a boulder tumbling down a rocky slope, but the actual words still came close to knocking the wind out of him.
He asked her for a few months while he got things together at work, told her he was angling for a new division that was very "research-oriented" and he thought it would be a good idea to see how that shook out first. He opined that it would make for a more stable family life.
Philippa smiled and squeezed his hand and told him he was going to make such a wonderful, responsible father. "If it's a boy, I promise we won't name it after you," she joked.
Mulder knew then it had to be over because Jesus, what was he going to do with a baby? Philippa was meant to be a rudder, not an anchor. He took her home and made love to her like it was the beginning of something. She told him that she liked the names Alice and Frederick, and he kissed her heartbreaking face.
Six weeks later they were outside the tiny courtroom, their fledgling marriage freshly annulled. Philippa wore an angora twinset and smelled of Chanel No. 5.
He'd suggested annulment over divorce as though legally erasing it all would make things okay. She hadn't agreed with enthusiasm, but she hadn't protested either. He told the judge about Diana, about how he'd kept his apartment in Alexandria even as his wife planted tulip bulbs at the house in Arlington. Philippa had gripped her purse and looked stoic as the judge gave him a cold stare.
Afterwards, they shuffled papers in the hallway, avoiding one another's eyes until neither of them could deny that the clock had run down and they'd reached a parting of the ways.
"Good luck, Fox."
That was the last thing his wife ever said to him.
She turned and walked away, a bright spot in the dreary hallway. He had a wild impulse to undo the undoing, to swear to her that he'd fix everything. There would be babies and trips to the Vineyard and one of those Italian greyhounds she liked so much. He'd ditch the apartment, trade Diana in for some stodgy old relic with a passion for mail fraud, and join a fucking country club.
"Philippa, wait," he called to her receding back, even though he knew there was no way to make good on any of his intended promises. Not now that he had the X-Files to consume him.
She must have known it too. She did not turn around.
"Pip!"
She was already through the revolving door.
He looked out the window, watching as she hailed a cab. When she climbed in, it occurred to him that a good man never would have let her go.
But a better man never would have tried to keep her in the first place.
***
Just after the Boeing reaches cruising altitude, a perky stewardess named Clio informs the cabin that their luggage has accidentally been diverted to Milwaukee. Clio assures everyone that said luggage will arrive in California by nightfall and that the airline is providing each passenger with a free alcoholic beverage voucher for this gosh darned inconvenience.
Scully says shit, which delights him, and she immediately cashes in her voucher for a cup of pink wine when the little boy across the aisle begins screaming about a Godzilla toy in his misdirected suitcase.
"It's her birthday," Mulder says to Clio, earning him an elbow in the ribs from his companion. "Shouldn't she get an extra drink?"
Clio smiles toothily and says she'll see what she can do.
He requests a stack of napkins for Boggle purposes, and Scully retrieves the game and two pens from her carry-on bag. "We should probably be reviewing the case again," she remarks, but her heart's not in it. She has another sip of her wine, which is sweating condensation onto the gray plastic tray table.
Mulder takes his complimentary pretzels from the cupholder. He attempts to open them, but they've apparently used some kind of extra strength glue to seal the pouch and when he finally yanks hard enough, the bag rips apart and pretzels spray all over. The kid across the aisle stops screaming long enough to point and laugh. Mulder glares and shows the boy his badge, which shuts him up.
"That wasn't nice," Scully says, but she's smirking.
"It was my civic duty."
Scully sets the game cube on her tray, stowing the box under her seat. "English-only, or what? I usually consider Latin fair game."
"How's your Hiligaynon?"
She grins. "I'm a little rusty."
Clio returns with the napkins and two extra drink coupons, which she hands over as if they're North Korean military documents. "Happy birthday. Now, for lunch there's a choice of salmon croquettes or chicken marsala. Which would you like?"
"Whichever tastes less like the sum of its constituent parts," Mulder replies.
"Salmon it is."
Scully seconds the motion, and then flips over the little yellow hourglass to start the game. They play 25 rounds, and Mulder wins the championship with swarf.
"Victor picks a prize from Skymall," he informs her, brandishing the catalog like a triumphal banner. "I would like the detailed life sized replica of King Tut's throne, please. I think it will give our office a sense of grandeur."
"Kersh would certainly have to take you more seriously. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer the travel toothbrush sanitizer? We spend so much time on the road..."
"I like to live dangerously. You want a little something extra for your birthday? No woman can resist, uh, let's see...this framed picture of kittens surrounded by realistic light-up LED rainbows, am I right?"
Scully laughs, then squeezes his fingers.
He squeezes back. They sit like this for a moment, holding hands, pretending that there's nothing odd in it; pretending, maybe, that they're pretending already. Rob and Laura Petrie would twine their fingers like this, and perhaps that makes it okay.
Skinner's seen the two of them together, their utter lack of personal space, and has probably drawn his own quiet conclusions. So how could he know that Scully's going to be a self-conscious knot of stress when she's forced to attract attention to their physical proximity? How could he be expected to understand what it feels like to fake a thing you've given up for a kind of endless Lent?
Clio comes by with their lunches and they return to themselves, a couple of worn out FBI agents who have logged too many miles and eaten too few homemade meals. Their hands become purposeful again, clearing surfaces, opening the lids of cheap foil pans, ready to kill and to save.
***
The Arlington house was sold and he returned to Hegal Place, Diana all but living there as he devoured X-Files. They interviewed mental patients, they wrote monographs, they became so enmeshed that Mulder was viewed with open contempt for leaving his sweet Barbie doll wife and his potentially dazzling career for Special Agent Fowley and a cellar full of campfire stories.
Mulder found that he truly did not care what anyone thought, and that it was the best feeling he'd had in a very long time. He sold his wedding band on principle and bought an aquarium, feeling as though he might just as well have one ornamental living creature to neglect as another.
"This is bullshit," Lamana said to him over beers one night. "You're a goddamn savant, Mulder, and you're throwing yourself away on this oogie-boogie Ouija crap. Whatever or whoever you do in your spare time is none of my business, but it's fucking up your work."
Mulder ran a finger around the rim of the glass to make it squeak. "My work? My work's fine and dandy. Maybe you're just pissed because I'm not pulling your weight like I used to." He didn't know where that had come from, but it felt true once it was out there.
"Fuck you, Mulder. No one's gonna deny you're the better profiler, but no one's gonna deny that without someone to keep on top of you, you're as likely to write a profile on Cthulu as guys like Boggs. That's what 'partner' means, asshole. It means we're a team." Lamana threw some money on the counter and stormed out.
They made a sort of peace after that, the way men do when they are unkind to one another, and Lamana gave him a grudging congratulations when he got transferred to the X-Files. He and Diana were in their own world at that point and he let himself think maybe, just maybe, they could take things back to where they were in '86.
But word came from Berlin and Diana kissed him a faintly regretful goodbye. "I'm sorry," she said, and there he was again, left with the scattered pieces of a life envisioned. He resolved to salt the earth around it this time.
Seven weeks of solitary bliss before someone sent a little red-haired girl downstairs. He honestly thought it was a joke at first, that primly pressed Dana Scully was someone's idea of a clever prank. But she was bright and earnest and unlikely to rip his heart out of his chest to eat in front of him, and lately that counted for a lot.
He thought about her sensible cotton underwear more than he cared to acknowledge, even after the government sucked out other memories he'd been far more interested in retaining.
Phoebe showed up like a succubus and he was, as ever, defenseless against her mad beauty. Jerry Lamana died a traitor's death and it cut him to the core.
Scully put her hands on his neck and her gun in his face to save him.
She was eaten up by the voracious dark and he believed for a time that dying would be a blessed relief from whatever karmic hell he seemed damned to suffer though. Maybe he sensed the danger around Kristen Kilar and hoped it would unleash itself upon him.
Scully came back, Samantha came back, Samantha disappeared, his mother lied, his father lied, and Scully said she'd help him tell the truth if it killed her.
She palmed a cricket, she hollowed out an elephant.
Krycek killed his dad and Mulder cried for all the men his father had to be. He insisted to his mother that Bill be buried in Raleigh, and his mother had nodded with a sharp jerk of her head. It raised a scandal in New England. Pip, ever gracious, sent flowers to the funeral home.
The next time Scully pointed a gun at him, she pulled the trigger.
He hid among a train car full of bodies, thinking hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae, which is what happens when you work with a pathologist for too long. The fiery furnace of the desert revived him, filling his head with ghosts. He roamed the earth like a fairy-tale prince, but no one had seen his sister.
Modell made him reenact The Deer Hunter and he watched the raw horror on Scully's face. It moved him in a way that was too troubling to dwell on. Bill Patterson went down the path that some people had once predicted Spooky Mulder would. Mulder was both grieved and gratified by the miscalculation.
He spent a lot of time wondering what would have happened if he'd kept the Samantha clone. He suspected she would have wasted away, beating her wings against the glass. Mulder got suckered by Roche and after he'd blown the back off that sick fucking head, he felt like an angel with a flaming sword.
Marita Covarrubias had the most extraordinary voice he'd ever heard and he surrendered to it in her jewel box of an apartment overlooking Manhattan. The Russians, who Jameses Kirk and Bond had taught him were never up to any good, provided him with unexpected insight even as they tortured him.
Scully told Congress to kiss her ass.
She got a tattoo above it.
He thought brain cancer for anyone as brilliant as Scully was a particularly cruel torment. She was attractive, yes, but Scully defined herself by her intellect. Her body was just the thing that carried it around.
He watched her nearly kiss his doppelganger on the couch and the sight turned him on. He had a hole drilled in his head and wove a ketamine tapestry of his childhood. When his mother slapped him, the biggest shock was that she felt that much passion about anything.
Scully lived and he survived.
She grew into something strange and darkly beautiful, like a black rose. He wanted to kiss her, to strangle her, to fuck her, to ship her off to drive some other soul crazy with her endless contrarian nature. He wanted to purge himself of all the old ghosts that wouldn't let him love her.
Some twisted thing in the dark corners of his head posited that Emily was his daughter. He couldn't allow that to be true, because it made his relief at the child's death even more disturbing. He searched for Scully on a bridge full of scorched human remains and noted that scorched human remains smell a lot like any other kind of roasted meat.
He heard his finger snap, he robbed a bank, he knelt by his own grave. Tassie Carmichael got divorced and made a fortune from it. Pip had twins named Alice and Frederick.
Diana came, and there was fire.
Scully disappeared and there was ice. He stole her keys, he bought her a kaleidoscope, he and Peyton Ritter shot holes in her smooth white belly. He saw her naked in the shower and wished to God he could read her mind like Gibson Praise. He found out that his father was not dead after all.
He boarded a plane to San Diego.
***
The shower raises plumes of scented steam, and Mulder rests his head on the Plexiglas wall. He's tired after a late evening of procedural tedium, though the sandwiches they'd been served were surprisingly good. He burps, tasting roast beef and whole grain mustard. Scully had favored egg salad and a long-suffering expression as the others present engaged in sophomoric wedding night humor. To deflect this, he'd stuck a lit match into a bear claw and made everyone sing Happy Birthday.
She was nonplussed.
The hot water sluices over him, rinsing away the lather of cheap hotel shampoo and waxy soap. Mulder glances at his watch and realizes he hasn't reset it to Pacific Time. He has enough trouble sleeping without jet lag, and tomorrow demands his full attention. They've got another appointment here in San Diego tomorrow, a debriefing at the field office's crime lab. After that they settle into their new digs just outside Rancho Bernardo, and it's important to make a good first impression with these McMansion types. He's surprised that they rented a minivan for him and Scully; Rob and Laura strike him as more the Range Rover sort. But he concedes that the minivan offers an air of pathetic suburban earnestness: We want some darling little soccer players so bad we already have the car!
Torpid, he drowses in the wet heat for a few moments longer until he is startled by the sound of someone entering his room. "Scully?" he calls, turning off the water. "Is that you?"
"Housekeeping! Your suitcase is here from the airport!" The door bangs shut.
Mulder wraps himself in the cotton robe from the wall hook before exiting into the relative chill of the bedroom. Scully's suitcase is propped against the bed and he knows the right thing to do is to call and alert her of the mixup.
And yet...
He hoists it onto the bed and unzips it, removing the Wal-Mart bag about which she was so protective earlier. It contains three pairs of ugly polyester pajamas. These are the garments of hair-netted lunchladies, of women who put stuffed animals on their dashboards and Cathy strips on their refrigerators.
He is baffled.
Mulder sits next to the suitcase to ponder this. Scully favors nightclothes as tailored as the rest of her wardrobe. Usually silk. And she does not ever, under any circumstances, wear small floral prints. It's not part of the Laura persona, surely, because no one is going to see her in her pajamas and, if they did, no one would think anything of a well-off professional woman wearing silk to bed.
The ugly pajamas, then, must be meant for him. Why does Scully want him to see her in ugly pajamas?
Because she looks good in the others. Because she is aware of herself looking good in them and doesn't want to be attractive during this case. Because, for some reason, she is more comfortable playing the role of Prickly Independent Woman forced to live with Boorish Leering Man.
Because those roles will keep intimacy out of their pretense of intimacy.
And this, he knows, will put her at ease. If she can focus on being irritated with him, she doesn't have to address any of the other things she might be feeling.
Or that he might be feeling.
Mulder, as an avid practitioner of emotional repression, admires her cunning.
It will be a Shakespearean play within a play, he decides. They will be Mulder and Scully playing Mulder and Scully playing Rob and Laura. He will leave the toilet seat up and crumbs on the counter. He will make inappropriate jokes and drink from the milk jug. He will scorn her beauty regimen.
Mulder returns the bag to its earlier wadded position and tugs the zipper shut. He gets up to grab his phone when there is a knock at the door. "Mulder, it's me," she says, her voice somewhat muffled. "I have your stuff."
He gets up to open it. "Sorry for the informal attire," he says as she comes in, "but I thought your underwear might be a tight squeeze. Not to brag or anything."
She rolls her eyes at this and rests his luggage against the wall. "Cute stunt with the danish, really."
"Oh, you loved it."
"It's going into my diary with purple pen and smiley face exclamation points. Anyway. Good night, Mulder." She grabs her suitcase and heads for the door.
Mulder steps forward and catches her sleeve. "I was married," he blurts, without prior intent.
She freezes, then slowly turns back. "Pardon?"
No going back now, is there? "1990. It, um. It was a disaster, actually, and my fault entirely. Turns out I find my work consuming, I bet you didn't know. Anyway, yeah, Pip - my, uh, my wife, she was...it was difficult. I was difficult. Jesus. Look, Scully, the thing is that I never meant to keep it from you, it's never come up, but just, you know, given this case..." he trails off, running his hand over his damp hair. He notices Scully watching him with a half sad, half amused expression.
"What?" he asks, feeling defensive.
"I know," she says, which is the very last thing he expected to hear.
"What?"
"Mulder, come on. I started working with you barely a few months after it all happened. You were the Golden Boy, and then suddenly you weren't. You honestly thought I wasn't going to get swamped with gossip as soon as they paired me with you? That I'd somehow go all these years without someone mentioning you used to have a wife until just before we started working together?"
It had never occurred to him, but now that she's said it, he feels like a moron. "Oh. No, I guess not."
She shrugs. "It's not a big deal, it's none of my business. We've never really discussed our personal lives and I figured if you wanted to talk about it with me, you would have."
Mulder notices that she has the grace not to mention Diana, though he supposes she has little room to take the high ground on marital fidelity. "I, well, thanks," he says lamely.
Scully nods. "But thanks for telling me." She makes no move to leave.
He studies her too-long face under that acorn cap of amber hair, her sharp nose and crooked mouth. She is startlingly lovely, even under the brash fluorescent lights. Her thirty-five years have been very good to her. He could finish what they'd teased themselves with over the summer. There is no doubt that she'd reciprocate, and he finds himself suddenly glad that the robe is loose.
But it seems like a cheap thing to do in light of the day ahead, not to mention his currently unresolved issues with Diana. He needs to close that chapter one way or another before embarking on anything else.
"Many happy returns of the day," he murmurs, standing so close that the words stir the wisps of hair falling over her forehead.
"I'll see you in the morning," Scully says, her breath warm on his chest. "And Mulder?"
"Hm?"
"I want you to know, I never believed most of the rumors I heard. Just, you know, the basics of the story."
He shouldn't ask, he shouldn't ask, he shouldn't ask.
"Which would be...?"
Scully considers this. "That she was beautiful and you were sad."
He laughs. "Never has anyone's entire life been so perfectly and succinctly summarized."
"Don't sell yourself short," she admonishes, and her eyes are solemn. She turns the knob, pulling her suitcase after her into the hall. The door clicks softly shut behind her.
Mulder leans against the wall. He doesn't believe in fate, in some orderly path laid out for him, but he does believe that a road exists for Scully and him to travel together if only they can navigate it. And he is, at last, willing to accept that it may lead him out of this dark wood and into the light.
***