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Her feet throb, protesting each step across the hospital parking lot. Her head started to ache halfway through her twelve hour shift, and continues to pound just to spite the eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen she swallowed with a cup of cold coffee three hours ago.
A rumbling in her midsection reminds her that she should eat. It’s late, though, leaving her options severely limited. She can’t stomach the thought of another bowl of limp lettuce and rubbery chicken purchased at a drive-through window. She can’t summon the energy to cook anything worth the time.
Foot pressed to the accelerator, she realizes that all she really wants is a decent cup of hot coffee. Hospital cafeteria coffee is shockingly bad - bitter and thick - even more so when she’s forced to abandon it for an hour to attend to patients.
Gas station coffee can’t be a hell of a lot better, but hey, any port in a storm.
So she stops, she buys a cup of questionable but steaming hot coffee, and hears herself request a pack of cigarettes from the girl behind the counter. “What brand?” The girl wants to know. Scully pauses, thinks of Mulder and the one and only time they shared a cigarette. It was her brand - Marlboro - because it was her pack, and even then she knew he was only taking silent drags alongside her because she found comfort in the companionship. Needed not to feel judged after surviving yet another abduction.
“Camels,” she tells the girl.
Sitting in her car with her nose pressed into the steam rising from the foam cup in her hand, she absently flicks the filter of the not-her-brand cigarette out the window. She thinks of him anyway, of the coffee he used to make. It was terrible. Not quite hospital cafeteria terrible, but close. It was always either too weak (“Two heaping scoops, Mulder.”) or so strong it resembled mud (“Two heaping scoops, Mulder!”)
It’s been a year since she left him and their house, and all in all, she thinks she’s handling her life fairly well. She enjoys work, usually. She has a nice apartment with a suede couch and her laundry is done on time now, there are no week-old dishes piled in the sink, no will he come to bed tonight or not taunting her every time her head hits the pillow. She sees a therapist semi-regularly, writes her feelings in a journal when they overwhelm her. The nightmares haven’t stopped, but they come less frequently and without the bone rattling intensity they used to.
But it’s been an entire year, and sometimes all it takes is a cup of coffee and a fucking cigarette to stoke the good memories of him, of them, of the times when she wanted to stay.
Suddenly, she feels a drop of liquid pelt the back of her hand. Startled, she blinks, and this time the moisture slides hotly down her cheek. She’s crying, she realizes, silent tears that seem right at home in this dark, vacant lot. She catches a glimpse of a man with dirt caked across his face, clutching a bottle of liquor as he slides down the side of the building. She feels like she doesn’t deserve to cry. Doesn’t even want to.
She sips her coffee, which is surprisingly not bad -- a step or two up from the swill Mulder used to concoct -- and wonders what he remembers about her. The good things he remembers. The annoying things.
Does he fight back tears when he gets a haircut, remember that he used to sit between her knees on the floor so she could cut his hair just so he wouldn’t have to leave the house? “That’s awful, Scully.” He laughed every time, scrutinizing her work in a handheld mirror.
When he closes his eyes to sleep, does he sometimes forget she’s not there and instinctively reach to hold her in the dark? She hopes the answer is yes. She hopes the answer is no.
Her coffee has grown lukewarm, and she no longer cares. It doesn’t taste right. It tastes like it’s been made with precisely two heaping scoops.
She steps out of the car and discards the half-empty cup. She lifts the cigarette pack to toss those as well, but hesitates. She doesn’t want them anymore, but that’s because she got what she needed from them.
When she walks into the gas station again, the girl behind the counter lifts an eyebrow. Scully gives her a small smile when she buys a second cup of and offers no explanation.
“Here,” she says quietly to the bleary-eyed man in the ill-fitted coat with blackened hands, still gripping the fifth of vodka for dear life. She holds out the pack of Camels and the too-perfect coffee, and he stares up at her. “Take it,” she tells him. “Sometimes it helps.”
He pauses only a moment before retrieving the items from her hands. As she turns to leave, she hears his rough slur behind her. “Y’have a cup? S’only fair…” He lifts the glass bottle in offering. She shakes her head, and he continues. “Sometimes this helps too, y’know… helps ya forget.”
She shakes her head again, biting her lip.
”No,” she says softly. “No, I think I’d rather remember.”