It gets a little laugh out of her, the easy, silly kind no one else ever seems to elicit. Maybe she'll get him a lava lamp instead. Maybe they're due for some silliness. The giddy stuff they never had time for when they were younger.
He doesn't say any of that, but she hears it anyway. Perhaps it's superstitious, not wanting to be too explicit about where they stand. She's never been good at being open. (It means a lot, though, that he understands that about her.)
With an arched eyebrow, she smiles a little wider.
Equally superstitious: She laughed again. She'll stay. They've each got their own form of magical thinking, when it comes to this...this everything, all of it. Their lives, in this house and outside it, and the ways they're twining back together.
Under the table, he nudges her shin with his. "Finish your cake. You said we have to eat the whole piece. Then you can have everything else."
Her other foot slides over his. Two can play at this game. That old desire to be tucked up close, all the time, is back in full force. It's easier than holding hands, when they're occupied with forks.
"Maybe we should have taken smaller slices," she muses, not really complaining. If her killer-robot-service-worker-induced stay has proven anything, they'll find ways to burn off the energy of all this excess sugar if they can't sleep.
She's intrigued enough to make short work of it, watching him expectantly the whole time.
Mulder gets through two layers of cake - the ones on the bottom - then realizes there's still a full third left, and this one's drenched in frosting. He glances at it, and then up at Scully, and shrugs. "Think I can take a rain check on the rest of this? I'm thinking cake for breakfast."
Now that he's promised more, after all, he wants to get to the next parts, too. Sex is inevitable, and it's eventual, but there's an in-between. It might be a small kind of in-between, more comparable to a commemorative keychain than a pair of pearl earrings Mrs. Scully couldn't hear about, but it's there and waiting.
"Lightweight," she teases. Doesn't bother pointing out that there's still more cake, too, so they'll have to do cake for breakfast if they don't want to waste food.
"But this was a valiant effort. I think we can make an exception to the clean plate rule."
"Thanks, Mom," he says sarcastically, then immediately regrets - then, nearly as immediately, decides he shouldn't have to regret it. It'd be Leave It to Beaver absurdity even if William were right there with them, and Scully knows it. "Do you want the rest of yours?"
Or should he swoop it up along with his and the rest of the cake? He has the vague idea of sneaking into an office someplace in town, or maybe the teachers' lounge of an elementary school, and leaving it as an offering. Or putting slices wrapped in wax paper in the mailboxes of all their neighbors. There's no way in hell they can actually finish it.
"It's your birthday," he says, as though he'd had any intention of hosing down dishes right this moment. When he's coming back over to get the cake, he leans down to kiss the side of her head. "I'll get all this. Meet you on the porch."
Around the corner of the wrap-around porch, where the swing's been swept of any possible snow and there's a pair of boxes, one small and one larger. They're wrapped identically, with the kind of half-hearted effort of someone who knows making presents look nice isn't his strong suit, but who's trying anyway. Sure, it's kind of cold out, but they can probably make themselves cozy.
If it wasn't her birthday she'd offer to deal with the dishes, or at least to help. She's got a secret soft spot for that sense of shared domesticity, and it just seems fair when someone else handles the cooking. For now, though, she's not going to argue. When she stands she leans to plant a light kiss on his temple.
Before slipping outside she grabs a couple of layers- including an oversized sweater that's nominally his, though she suspects he hasn't worn it since their first winter here when she made a habit of stealing it. Grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch, she heads out, sitting with a smile when she finds his gifts. It almost doesn't matter what's in them; the care he's put into all this is enough to keep her warm.
Just as she'd suggested, he dumps everything in the sink - save the cast-iron pan, which stays on the stove, to be babied later - and goes hunting for a coat. When he gets out there, he decides it was the right choice to insist on the porch. It's not as cold as he might have expected, though he's still glad he's got a jacket on.
"Room for one more?" He's already sitting down next to her, wrapping an arm around her beneath the blanket. "I thought you'd already have these torn open."
As he sits, she tucks herself up against him; not because she's freezing but because there is nothing so delicious as the contrast; the cold accentuating the pleasure of his bodily warmth, the way hunger elevates a common meal. Her condo is always comfortable-- neither too warm nor too cool-- thanks to the smart thermostat. In retrospect, what a terrible, terrible idea. You can never really appreciate being comfortable without a bit of discomfort.
"It's less fun without an audience." And really, isn't anticipation half the fun? Leaning in against him, she taps on the smaller box.
"Is there a suggested viewing order?" If not, she's going to go ahead and tear into the smaller one first.
Mulder's arm slides around her. Pulling the excess blanket around his shoulders, he taps the box with more surface area. It's obviously a Blu-Ray from its shape alone. "Big one first. Tonight's entertainment, if you want."
Specifically, it's The Shape of Water, which looks to Mulder something like the place their respective interests overlap, Venn diagram-style. It occurs to him now, and only now, that maybe she's already seen it - but if she had, she would have mentioned it, probably. The reviews had sounded good.
The other box is smaller in size and denser in weight. Inside the wrapping paper is a box, and inside the box is tissue paper, and inside the tissue paper is a pewter figurine of a dog sitting back on its haunches. Its tail curls at its back, its ears pricked up. It's no longer than Scully's thumb.
Honestly, they could just sit here, and she could be happy. Trying not to acknowledge that is becoming more and more pointless: she's happy, being here with him. It's not passing giddiness, it's not mere nostalgia. It's not the same as it was, but it's the truth: she missed him.
"You've got the whole night planned out," she marvels, skimming the back of the DVD case. It sounds good-- and all the better, if she watches it draped over him on the couch. It earns him a peck on the cheek as she tucks it between her leg and the armrest to free both hands for the other box.
The little dog is-- well, a bit puzzling. She turns it over in her hands thoughtfully before shooting him a quizzical look, waiting for the explanation.
"Well, it's the only good holiday in February. Groundhog Day only matters if you're in grade school or a Bill Murray movie, and Valentine's Day is an excuse to sell candy that tastes like chalk." Take that, Necco. "So we have to make your birthday count."
Never mind that he's only fitfully interested in holidays as a general rule. Sometimes he just wants to talk, and now is one of those times - so it's a good thing she's looking at him like she's never seen a pewter akita before.
"Have you ever heard of Hachiko?" he asks. No point in telling the story if she's already intimately familiar with it.
Fitting enough, since they've only ever had a passing interest in birthdays. Maybe holidays-- select ones-- are new ground to be explored together. Maybe they've spent too many alone already.
She shakes her head, looking up at him, idly rolling the figurine across her palm.
Scully doesn't have many dark secrets left, but here's one she won't say, though he might know anyway: even if she knew the story, she'd let him tell it. There's nothing that quite compares with the way he does, when it's something he thinks matters.
"Almost a hundred years ago now -" which is incredible to think of, the world his parents were born into being close to a century old, but that's neither here nor there - "a man in Japan gets a dog and names him Hachiko. Every day, the guy takes the train to work, and Hachiko stays home. But Hachiko's a smart dog; he learns when his master's on his way home, and he goes to the train station to wait for him.
"One day, while the guy's at work, he dies. But how do you make a dog understand that? Hachiko doesn't know that his owner isn't coming back. What he knows is when the train comes, his owner gets off, and they walk home together. So for the next nine years, Hachiko goes to meet the train every day. He sits and waits for his master, until he himself dies.
"There's a statue at the train station now," and it's obvious, all of it is so obvious, why he bought her a little figurine of a patient dog. But he couldn't resist it when he thought of it. "Hachiko is revered in Japan as a symbol of fidelity. He was loyal to the person who mattered most to him, long after that person was gone. And he's a dog," this with some humor, as though it's the true lynchpin of his reasoning, as he taps the figurine's head, "and I know you like those."
It's a beautiful story, and sad-- so sad that she wants to protest, at first. It wasn't anything like that, she wants to say-- she hadn't disappeared without warning, though of course it must have felt sudden at the time. You can't explain death to a dog, but she'd tried to explain herself to Mulder. Hadn't abandoned him, not really; had been a phone call away, not that she thought either of them would dare make that call. And it touches on the fear she'd had when she left-- the fear that had cemented her need to go-- that he'd be left stagnant and directionless, without his work and without her. That to go would be to leave him waiting, endlessly-- to be one last loss, and not to know if he could recover from it. Staring alone at crowds, never spotting the familiar face he wanted.
And the truth is, she couldn't stay, if she was only staying to avert that end.
(It's ironic, she knows; she'd worried for so long that she wouldn't be enough for him, and when she'd become everything, she couldn't do it. When they'd started their relationship she'd worried it would mean losing their work-- that he'd come to resent her for it if they did. And in the end, when they'd lost everything, they'd had each other. And it could, maybe, have been enough for him-- but it wasn't for her.)
She thinks, too, of Daniel, who had also waited for her; infinitely and indefinitely patient, unknown until a chance encounter brought her back into his life. Loyal to an idea of her and of what she could be that only vaguely resembled who she'd been the day she left him, a distorted snapshot that had seemed terribly unfamiliar, a decade or so later. For a moment, seeing him again, she'd felt the pull of old affection; she'd be lying if she said the enormity of it hadn't affected her. The fact that she had inspired such a lasting longing-- it would be impossible not to be flattered by it. But she'd changed too much to fit into the space he'd held for her, and when it came down to it, she hadn't wanted to try.
But in spite of his undeniable charm, there had been a horror to it, too. Daniel's notion that she would, in time, return to him; an inevitable parabola, a pendulum swinging back to his waiting arms. There's no doubt in her mind that this is different-- Mulder's story, their story-- it's nothing like Daniel leaving his family, following her at a distance. She hadn't wanted to return to that life she left, and she hadn't wanted to leave Mulder-- though in the end, she'd done it.
The answer is as simple as it always was-- it's different because it's Mulder, because he has always been extraordinary; because rules roll off him like water on a duck's back. It's obvious, and it's scientifically unsatisfying; Scully, who always wants to know why can't leave it at that, though she accepts the premise as a fundamental law of her universe in order to build hypotheses. She shifts and burrows closer against him as she considers, pressed to his side. Companionship, perhaps, is like the cold; a little absence makes it so much sweeter to be here, like this.
It's a beautiful, sad story, but ultimately an ill-fitting comparison. Mulder, though he's the finest of the Vineyard's sons, is not her third harpooneer beside poor Queequeg and Daggoo; his loyalty is a partner's, not a pet's. And though she doesn't doubt it was hard, he hadn't given up when she'd gone. He hadn't spent his days frozen in time, waiting for her to return; hadn't centered everything around her absence until the sorrow ate away everything left of him. He'd accepted that perhaps she'd come back, and probably she wouldn't-- but he'd kept up hope. He hadn't given up on her.
Mulder had never been one to give up on the occasional miracle, after all.
That long-dead salaryman had planned to come home that evening; but when she'd gone, Scully hadn't imagined she'd ever been able to return. Still-- neither of them had wanted to abandon a beloved companion. She can't be sure she deserves the fidelity he's shown her, or forgiveness. But she's glad for it. And ultimately, it matters that coming here, being with him, doesn't feel like returning to the past. They've both kept moving and growing. They say you can't step into the same river twice, but there's something to be said for wading back in, hand in hand, far downstream.
If he's stopped, now and again, to watch the horizon and wonder if she'd grace it-- that's not being unable to let go of a memory; it's hoping for an undreamed of future.
All these years later, looking back on what happened with Daniel, with Mulder, she's still not sure how she feels about the concept of fate. But again, looking at all the decisions that have brought her to this moment-- even the ones that set her on paths that veered far from this house, this man, these feelings-- it's impossible to doubt, on a cold night lit by stars, warmed by the heat of him, and awed, as always, by the depth of his affection, that she is still right where she ought to be.
"I like it," she says decisively, and what she means is, I love you. Her breath shudders a little-- diplomatically, you could blame the cold for it-- and she shifts again so she can look up at him, a smile curving slowly across her face.
There's nothing that scares her, in the moment, about the unknown future. That isn't strange; Mulder has always that effect on her, like his determination is contagious; he makes her feel safe in a way that nothing else ever has. What's different now is that she doesn't second-guess it.
"I love you," she says, softly, before she can lose her nerve. It's not as though he doesn't know-- not even that she's never said it-- but vulnerability has never come easily to her, and there's a part of her always afraid that to say it aloud makes it too real, makes it possible to lose. But it's true; and even if in the daylight tomorrow everything looks different, even if she leaves and next time she doesn't come back, right now-- right now, she needs him to hear it.
"I know." Not a Star Wars thing - he's a Trekker if he's anything - but an acknowledgment. Scully doesn't always say it, or say it first; it's always there and not always voiced. But the wind's invisible and Mulder still feels that, too. He leans in to kiss her, the night dark and cold around them. "I love you."
He can't help looking at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners, on the verge of speaking and yet not quite getting there. Time and age have pared her down to a bare minimum. She's angular, not a milimeter wasted, and when he looks and really has a moment to see, he can tell it's because there's nothing left that isn't essential. She's the Scully-est Scully that's ever been, a woman who's been refined into the purest form of herself. Who couldn't love that?
"This is it for me, Scully." Her silence was filled with the suggestion of unseen cogs turning, of wheels within wheels, and whatever thoughts lurk inside her head. She's always thinking, and it's always something fascinating. He can guess the broader picture of her thoughts most of the time, but the detail always remains hers alone.
But with an audience at hand, the only audience that really matters, Mulder can't help but externalize his own equivalent. So he lets his thoughts develop on his tongue, these things he's imagined saying ever since he opted for rush shipping on a little akita figurine. "If you wake up tomorrow and decide it's over, then it's over. But I've tried dating, and I've tried living alone, and I realized something. Not until you started coming back over, but I realized - if it's a choice between someone else and the memory of what we've had, I'll take the memory every damn day of my life."
That's it: that's what it means. If he's her little dog, patiently waiting for love or oblivion - whichever comes first - it's because he will be in the future, not because of things that happened during the Obama administration. He loved her, lost her, and has her again. And no matter what happens, from this point on until his heart stops, he's here for her for as long a time as she wants him.
There's one more reason, and it's sad and ludicrous in equal measure. Too sad and too ludicrous to say. Someday, more likely than not, he'll be dead, and she won't, because dying's too easy for Dana Scully. Mulder hates to think of her navigating eternity alone, far from the God she believes in, waiting for someone to hop off the metaphorical train and take her home. After he's gone, he wants her to think of him. He wants her to hold a piece of pewter in her fist until the metal's warm from her skin, and to remember that someone on the other side of death still loves her.
It's the right kind of moment for this. Not because it's her birthday, but because the clear winter night renders everything sharp-edged and pure; it's a night for truth. He kisses her, and the stars watch, and she feels a deep, peaceful certainty. That, she won't try to put into words; maybe she's a little superstitious. Like making a wish when you blow out the candle, some things are truest when they're unsaid.
If he'd said this years ago, maybe she'd have stayed. It wouldn't have been good for either of them; but laid out before her that way-- you, or no one-- could she really have walked away from that? And maybe she would have felt trapped, like that. She doesn't feel trapped now.
Stretching towards him, she kisses his cheek, gentle and quick. It's a mark of what she can't say; the promise she can't make, because the idea of breaking it is too awful to bear. Neither of them know the future, and on the day they left, wanted fugitives, she never could have imagined wanting to be apart from him; she can't know. But she can believe.
"I don't want it to be over," she says, sliding her hand into his. Not ever, she doesn't say, because she can't. But she hopes he hears it anyway.
Years ago, she'd have been right to feel trapped. He would have thought the same thing he thinks now, that it's just the truth, but it would have been some sad, desperate way to snag her on the detritus of his life. The only reason he's sure it isn't that still is because there's no expectation that it'll convince her to stay. If she walks away, it won't destroy him, however much it'll hurt; he'll still have a life in the white farmhouse on Wallis Road.
"Me, neither." He gives her a smile that kicks up a little higher one one side of his mouth than the other. "If you want to know the truth - and that's kind of our brand - I'd be fine with it if it never ended."
She can't come up with the right words for this; so she just beams back at him, her chin lifted and her smile wide. The warmth of this moment would be enough on its own to get her through the night. She leans her head against his shoulder, looking out into the night. Forever might be too much to promise, but she'll give it to him if she can.
Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car? She remembers asking him that, once, staring into the abyssal darkness of the desert. Even then she'd been tentatively trying to draw up a future around the idea of them, finding it at odds with her notion of a normal life-- a laughable thing, to think back on. As though normal had ever had much meaning for them.
She lets the silence linger contentedly for a while before she draws a breath, pats his leg.
"Maybe we should start by watching that movie?"
Maybe she'll even stay awake for it. But if not-- they can always try again tomorrow. As many times as it takes. That's not a promise, exactly; but it comes close.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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He doesn't say any of that, but she hears it anyway. Perhaps it's superstitious, not wanting to be too explicit about where they stand. She's never been good at being open. (It means a lot, though, that he understands that about her.)
With an arched eyebrow, she smiles a little wider.
"Oh?"
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Under the table, he nudges her shin with his. "Finish your cake. You said we have to eat the whole piece. Then you can have everything else."
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"Maybe we should have taken smaller slices," she muses, not really complaining. If her killer-robot-service-worker-induced stay has proven anything, they'll find ways to burn off the energy of all this excess sugar if they can't sleep.
She's intrigued enough to make short work of it, watching him expectantly the whole time.
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Now that he's promised more, after all, he wants to get to the next parts, too. Sex is inevitable, and it's eventual, but there's an in-between. It might be a small kind of in-between, more comparable to a commemorative keychain than a pair of pearl earrings Mrs. Scully couldn't hear about, but it's there and waiting.
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"But this was a valiant effort. I think we can make an exception to the clean plate rule."
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Or should he swoop it up along with his and the rest of the cake? He has the vague idea of sneaking into an office someplace in town, or maybe the teachers' lounge of an elementary school, and leaving it as an offering. Or putting slices wrapped in wax paper in the mailboxes of all their neighbors. There's no way in hell they can actually finish it.
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"Shove it all in the fridge, we'll deal with it in the morning." Who can resist the promise of presents? "The dishes, too."
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Around the corner of the wrap-around porch, where the swing's been swept of any possible snow and there's a pair of boxes, one small and one larger. They're wrapped identically, with the kind of half-hearted effort of someone who knows making presents look nice isn't his strong suit, but who's trying anyway. Sure, it's kind of cold out, but they can probably make themselves cozy.
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Before slipping outside she grabs a couple of layers- including an oversized sweater that's nominally his, though she suspects he hasn't worn it since their first winter here when she made a habit of stealing it. Grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch, she heads out, sitting with a smile when she finds his gifts. It almost doesn't matter what's in them; the care he's put into all this is enough to keep her warm.
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"Room for one more?" He's already sitting down next to her, wrapping an arm around her beneath the blanket. "I thought you'd already have these torn open."
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"It's less fun without an audience." And really, isn't anticipation half the fun? Leaning in against him, she taps on the smaller box.
"Is there a suggested viewing order?" If not, she's going to go ahead and tear into the smaller one first.
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Specifically, it's The Shape of Water, which looks to Mulder something like the place their respective interests overlap, Venn diagram-style. It occurs to him now, and only now, that maybe she's already seen it - but if she had, she would have mentioned it, probably. The reviews had sounded good.
The other box is smaller in size and denser in weight. Inside the wrapping paper is a box, and inside the box is tissue paper, and inside the tissue paper is a pewter figurine of a dog sitting back on its haunches. Its tail curls at its back, its ears pricked up. It's no longer than Scully's thumb.
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"You've got the whole night planned out," she marvels, skimming the back of the DVD case. It sounds good-- and all the better, if she watches it draped over him on the couch. It earns him a peck on the cheek as she tucks it between her leg and the armrest to free both hands for the other box.
The little dog is-- well, a bit puzzling. She turns it over in her hands thoughtfully before shooting him a quizzical look, waiting for the explanation.
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Never mind that he's only fitfully interested in holidays as a general rule. Sometimes he just wants to talk, and now is one of those times - so it's a good thing she's looking at him like she's never seen a pewter akita before.
"Have you ever heard of Hachiko?" he asks. No point in telling the story if she's already intimately familiar with it.
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She shakes her head, looking up at him, idly rolling the figurine across her palm.
Scully doesn't have many dark secrets left, but here's one she won't say, though he might know anyway: even if she knew the story, she'd let him tell it. There's nothing that quite compares with the way he does, when it's something he thinks matters.
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"One day, while the guy's at work, he dies. But how do you make a dog understand that? Hachiko doesn't know that his owner isn't coming back. What he knows is when the train comes, his owner gets off, and they walk home together. So for the next nine years, Hachiko goes to meet the train every day. He sits and waits for his master, until he himself dies.
"There's a statue at the train station now," and it's obvious, all of it is so obvious, why he bought her a little figurine of a patient dog. But he couldn't resist it when he thought of it. "Hachiko is revered in Japan as a symbol of fidelity. He was loyal to the person who mattered most to him, long after that person was gone. And he's a dog," this with some humor, as though it's the true lynchpin of his reasoning, as he taps the figurine's head, "and I know you like those."
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And the truth is, she couldn't stay, if she was only staying to avert that end.
(It's ironic, she knows; she'd worried for so long that she wouldn't be enough for him, and when she'd become everything, she couldn't do it. When they'd started their relationship she'd worried it would mean losing their work-- that he'd come to resent her for it if they did. And in the end, when they'd lost everything, they'd had each other. And it could, maybe, have been enough for him-- but it wasn't for her.)
She thinks, too, of Daniel, who had also waited for her; infinitely and indefinitely patient, unknown until a chance encounter brought her back into his life. Loyal to an idea of her and of what she could be that only vaguely resembled who she'd been the day she left him, a distorted snapshot that had seemed terribly unfamiliar, a decade or so later. For a moment, seeing him again, she'd felt the pull of old affection; she'd be lying if she said the enormity of it hadn't affected her. The fact that she had inspired such a lasting longing-- it would be impossible not to be flattered by it. But she'd changed too much to fit into the space he'd held for her, and when it came down to it, she hadn't wanted to try.
But in spite of his undeniable charm, there had been a horror to it, too. Daniel's notion that she would, in time, return to him; an inevitable parabola, a pendulum swinging back to his waiting arms. There's no doubt in her mind that this is different-- Mulder's story, their story-- it's nothing like Daniel leaving his family, following her at a distance. She hadn't wanted to return to that life she left, and she hadn't wanted to leave Mulder-- though in the end, she'd done it.
The answer is as simple as it always was-- it's different because it's Mulder, because he has always been extraordinary; because rules roll off him like water on a duck's back. It's obvious, and it's scientifically unsatisfying; Scully, who always wants to know why can't leave it at that, though she accepts the premise as a fundamental law of her universe in order to build hypotheses. She shifts and burrows closer against him as she considers, pressed to his side. Companionship, perhaps, is like the cold; a little absence makes it so much sweeter to be here, like this.
It's a beautiful, sad story, but ultimately an ill-fitting comparison. Mulder, though he's the finest of the Vineyard's sons, is not her third harpooneer beside poor Queequeg and Daggoo; his loyalty is a partner's, not a pet's. And though she doesn't doubt it was hard, he hadn't given up when she'd gone. He hadn't spent his days frozen in time, waiting for her to return; hadn't centered everything around her absence until the sorrow ate away everything left of him. He'd accepted that perhaps she'd come back, and probably she wouldn't-- but he'd kept up hope. He hadn't given up on her.
Mulder had never been one to give up on the occasional miracle, after all.
That long-dead salaryman had planned to come home that evening; but when she'd gone, Scully hadn't imagined she'd ever been able to return. Still-- neither of them had wanted to abandon a beloved companion. She can't be sure she deserves the fidelity he's shown her, or forgiveness. But she's glad for it. And ultimately, it matters that coming here, being with him, doesn't feel like returning to the past. They've both kept moving and growing. They say you can't step into the same river twice, but there's something to be said for wading back in, hand in hand, far downstream.
If he's stopped, now and again, to watch the horizon and wonder if she'd grace it-- that's not being unable to let go of a memory; it's hoping for an undreamed of future.
All these years later, looking back on what happened with Daniel, with Mulder, she's still not sure how she feels about the concept of fate. But again, looking at all the decisions that have brought her to this moment-- even the ones that set her on paths that veered far from this house, this man, these feelings-- it's impossible to doubt, on a cold night lit by stars, warmed by the heat of him, and awed, as always, by the depth of his affection, that she is still right where she ought to be.
"I like it," she says decisively, and what she means is, I love you. Her breath shudders a little-- diplomatically, you could blame the cold for it-- and she shifts again so she can look up at him, a smile curving slowly across her face.
There's nothing that scares her, in the moment, about the unknown future. That isn't strange; Mulder has always that effect on her, like his determination is contagious; he makes her feel safe in a way that nothing else ever has. What's different now is that she doesn't second-guess it.
"I love you," she says, softly, before she can lose her nerve. It's not as though he doesn't know-- not even that she's never said it-- but vulnerability has never come easily to her, and there's a part of her always afraid that to say it aloud makes it too real, makes it possible to lose. But it's true; and even if in the daylight tomorrow everything looks different, even if she leaves and next time she doesn't come back, right now-- right now, she needs him to hear it.
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He can't help looking at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners, on the verge of speaking and yet not quite getting there. Time and age have pared her down to a bare minimum. She's angular, not a milimeter wasted, and when he looks and really has a moment to see, he can tell it's because there's nothing left that isn't essential. She's the Scully-est Scully that's ever been, a woman who's been refined into the purest form of herself. Who couldn't love that?
"This is it for me, Scully." Her silence was filled with the suggestion of unseen cogs turning, of wheels within wheels, and whatever thoughts lurk inside her head. She's always thinking, and it's always something fascinating. He can guess the broader picture of her thoughts most of the time, but the detail always remains hers alone.
But with an audience at hand, the only audience that really matters, Mulder can't help but externalize his own equivalent. So he lets his thoughts develop on his tongue, these things he's imagined saying ever since he opted for rush shipping on a little akita figurine. "If you wake up tomorrow and decide it's over, then it's over. But I've tried dating, and I've tried living alone, and I realized something. Not until you started coming back over, but I realized - if it's a choice between someone else and the memory of what we've had, I'll take the memory every damn day of my life."
That's it: that's what it means. If he's her little dog, patiently waiting for love or oblivion - whichever comes first - it's because he will be in the future, not because of things that happened during the Obama administration. He loved her, lost her, and has her again. And no matter what happens, from this point on until his heart stops, he's here for her for as long a time as she wants him.
There's one more reason, and it's sad and ludicrous in equal measure. Too sad and too ludicrous to say. Someday, more likely than not, he'll be dead, and she won't, because dying's too easy for Dana Scully. Mulder hates to think of her navigating eternity alone, far from the God she believes in, waiting for someone to hop off the metaphorical train and take her home. After he's gone, he wants her to think of him. He wants her to hold a piece of pewter in her fist until the metal's warm from her skin, and to remember that someone on the other side of death still loves her.
He doesn't want her to be alone.
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If he'd said this years ago, maybe she'd have stayed. It wouldn't have been good for either of them; but laid out before her that way-- you, or no one-- could she really have walked away from that? And maybe she would have felt trapped, like that. She doesn't feel trapped now.
Stretching towards him, she kisses his cheek, gentle and quick. It's a mark of what she can't say; the promise she can't make, because the idea of breaking it is too awful to bear. Neither of them know the future, and on the day they left, wanted fugitives, she never could have imagined wanting to be apart from him; she can't know. But she can believe.
"I don't want it to be over," she says, sliding her hand into his. Not ever, she doesn't say, because she can't. But she hopes he hears it anyway.
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"Me, neither." He gives her a smile that kicks up a little higher one one side of his mouth than the other. "If you want to know the truth - and that's kind of our brand - I'd be fine with it if it never ended."
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Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car? She remembers asking him that, once, staring into the abyssal darkness of the desert. Even then she'd been tentatively trying to draw up a future around the idea of them, finding it at odds with her notion of a normal life-- a laughable thing, to think back on. As though normal had ever had much meaning for them.
She lets the silence linger contentedly for a while before she draws a breath, pats his leg.
"Maybe we should start by watching that movie?"
Maybe she'll even stay awake for it. But if not-- they can always try again tomorrow. As many times as it takes. That's not a promise, exactly; but it comes close.