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somekindofseizure · 7 years

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When the Ink Dries III

Rated: Explicit with a warning for self harm references.

Notes: If you haven’t read the previous chapters, go here. Also on Ao3. This is (apparently) a novel length fic so you might want to set aside a minute. Thank you @icedteainthebag for making me earn this one, @holdthiscat for speedy and insightful feedback and @gazeatscully for your endless encouragement and eagle’s eye proofreading.

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Chapter 7

Stella Gibson didn’t make a habit of watching people sleep. The last time she’d done it was years ago, a prolonged jag that resulted in the purchase of three new sets of bed sheets, a zealous effort to fight memory with thread count. She’d traded one vice for another, would spend the rest of her life quietly indulging a weakness for pima cotton and crisp corners, a penchant for Italian linen and French embroidery. But it would be a long time before she settled in beside someone to wait for their eyes to open, the sleep-boiled scent of peaceful slumber coming off their hair, the fragile spot on their neck pulsing with life. There were some luxuries she simply couldn’t afford.

It still brought Stella a twinge of private embarrassment to recall it so well. Bridget sleeping on her stomach, dark hair always parted around her pear-shaped ears, clinging to the mattress like a frog in a rainstorm with her lean swimmer’s leg zig-zagged across the mattress. Stella would stay in bed tiptoeing her fingers up the crease of a quadricep, stroking an ear to its sylphan point. And long after the woman was gone, the lightning bolt imprint of a leg split the bed down the center, the new sheets continued to bunch in an invisible hand – fleeting images mistakenly committed to permanence by an overly ambitious pair of eyes. It was a nuisance but not a surprise. The only other bedroom vigil she’d ever kept had left an even more indelible impression – a child standing graveside, puffy lavender rings sprouted like violets around her eyes, watching her father be put in the ground.

So by the time Stella woke up next to Dana Scully for the second time in her life, she was so practiced in her abstinence that it took hardly any discipline at all to direct the day’s first glance upward, aim her plans at the ceiling. Shower alone. Allow guest to wake and begin gathering own conclusions. Emerge dressed, provide tea and friendly conversation, make end as forgettable as beginning was not.

She licked her lips before turning over, sealing her resolve like an envelope.

But hours passed; the shower stall remained desert dry and Stella a captive audience to Agent Scully’s feature-length performance of unconsciousness. Spotlight-white skin behind a thick opera-house curtain of hair, eyelids fluttering like fringed balconies, bottom lip folding down like a red velvet seat on the exhales. Stella leaned in to whisper Scully’s forbidden first name into her ear and felt something like suspense. Maybe she didn’t know how this would end after all. Scully stirred, her fist rippling, her nose turning, and Stella felt something in the center seat of her chest shift in discomfort. She could easily go broke here.

“Have you been up long?” Scully asked innocently, less a question than a corrupted yawn. She twisted at the neck, angling to read the alarm clock, a wooden box with grooves on the top that apparently made it impossible even for professional cleaners to dust properly. She covered her face with her hands in horror. “Oh my God, it’s so late.”

Stella lifted the little gold cross that had snuggled up into the pillow overnight. She dragged it across the neat hem of Scully’s collarbone and dropped it in the pocket of her clavicle, wondering how long it would take for her to get tired of playing with it. Whatever the answer, most likely, she wouldn’t be around for it.

“You won’t go to hell for it,” she said. “But I am starving. I’m going to call down. What’ll you have?”

Scully chuckled.

“I don’t think they have room service at this hotel.”

“They do. I checked.”

Stella had known a lot of these women, the ones who were more likely to eat a granola bar in traffic than breakfast in bed. She enjoyed converting them almost as much as she enjoyed fucking them.

“I don’t know…” Scully mused, eyes drifting up like she was trying to remember what breakfast tasted like. Stella didn’t wait. She propped herself up on an elbow and reached over Scully’s head for the phone. Pancakes for two. With berries. Ice water and juice.

“I’ve had time enough to decide for both of us,” she said as she placed the phone back in its receiver, dawdled over Scully’s face on the way back to her side of the bed.

Stella had only grabbed a few basics to bring to Philadelphia, and her favorite robe hadn’t made the cut. But she had found a (presumably) clean white one hanging in the closet here, the hotel’s humble insignia stitched upon its chest pocket. There was something sad and sweet about it, imagining the proprietor who assumed this touch would elevate his institution to great heights. The bleach-ragged arm, too long for Stella, now draped Scully’s bare shoulder.

“Could’ve woken me sooner if you were hungry. So polite.”

“I’m a nice English girl.”

“Mm.” Scully pawed at Stella’s waist as she gathered her energy. “I don’t know about nice.”

Stella traced Scully’s lips with a knuckle. This was something else she didn’t do in bed anymore. Her cheeks burned with the obscenity of the affection, her palms grew sweaty when their feet wiggled together in the same warm spot on the mattress. But Scully seemed undaunted. She pushed Stella onto her back and lifted the barricade of sheets between them so that she could roll naked on top of her. Heat melted their bodies together through Stella’s fluffy white robe until they were one rare indulgence, a layered confection of fresh-whipped terry cloth and skin.

Scully moved her hand down Stella’s chest, smoothing the cotton loops down like stalks of wheat in the wind, then ruffling them when her thumb moved in circles against the grain. Stella felt her body come up off the mattress like a bridge and Scully smiled at the first real sign of Stella’s interest. Morning-after sex was not far behind watching people sleep on her list of things not to do. She tried to focus on something less charming, less sexy, less red-headed than the person making figure eights between her breasts.

But Scully had not doled out the cash for those overwrought sheet sets, had learned no lessons about dangerous extravagances. So now she nudged her face along the vertical hem of the robe, spreading and dotting her confidence down Stella’s body like icing. And when Scully finally reached her first slice of thigh, Stella forgot about her plans, her pancakes, forgot everything but the tip of Scully’s nose.

“How long do I have?” Scully asked as she carefully folded the robe up to kiss Stella’s leg. Stella bent her knee up, letting the pleat fall open in encouragement. She liked clothes and she liked watching people try to get underneath them.

“As long as you like. If the food comes, I’ll tell him to leave it out there.”

She rolled out her fingertips across the back of Scully’s head like a welcome mat and Scully licked her way from pussy to belly button with a lascivious, lazy bottom lip. And there was the feeling worth a thousand bikini waxes, that first moment of tongue-on-skin contact like the first prickly suck of a freshly unpackaged creamsicle. A drop of Scully’s saliva traveled from her clitoris down her center and up the crack of her ass.

The way Scully fucked was earnest and eager, level-headed as a judge as she balanced wet with dry, hard with soft. Someday, Stella might have told her this, but too soon would seem simpering, and any later – well, she wasn’t going to be there any later. So instead she said nothing and sighed through clenched jaws, tongue forming the silent shape of curses at the back of her teeth. The food was going to be there any minute; a certain kind of woman would have felt it was too much pressure, let Scully off the hook. Stella was not that woman.

“Touch yourself,” she demanded.

She looked down over her breast as Scully reached her left hand between her legs. Her right hand, the good hand, worked Stella like a sewing wheel, nimble enough to earn promises of firstborn children and spin biology into gold. Stella’s teeth began to chatter, hips and legs bucking against the confines of Scully’s straddled legs, toes grasping for bedding, and the fabric of Stella’s breath caught and dragged, then at Scully’s behest finally came loose, an exhale splitting down a newly-made seam and leaving Stella in frayed pieces.

Scully dropped her forehead against Stella’s thigh, her arms spread to the side like wings.

“I’m getting better at it, aren’t I?”

“It’s not an Olympic sport.”

Stella’s leg reached around Scully’s body and nuzzled her with the arch of a foot, pulling her closer. This was contentment – sexual satisfaction, food she didn’t have to cook coming, a woman with a tongue as sharp as her mind proudly hugging her hip.

But then Scully gulped against her leg. The cold, curt feeling of a doctor’s thumb replacing a lover’s, tracing a straight line across Stella’s inner thigh, opening new wounds even as it sewed up the old. Stella knew the little line well, could find it blind and spinning in the dark.

The finger found another line.

And then another.

Stella breathed evenly, determined not to flinch as Scully passed over each white raised rail of skin, knowing if she did so, a conversation would be more likely to follow. She felt a strong, hot surge of anger as she pictured the near future – Scully with her brow knit and cheekbones shadowy with worry, lecturing and shaming her.

Finally, Scully relaxed her hand and, seeming to have made a decision, came to lie directly beside Stella. Stella’s heart skidded as Scully looked her in the eye. She had been forced to tell these stories to therapists, emergency room nurses before, but she had never had to do it looking into a pair of eyes as blue as Billie Holiday.

There was a knock at the door.

“Leave it there please,” Stella called out, her voice loud but level, a trigger inside her trembling while she waited for Scully to draw. Scully searched Stella’s face like she’d just found her outlaw, her eyes pacing the length of Stella’s nose like she owned it.

“Finish me,” Scully said.

Stella undid the belt of her robe without looking and shook it off, left her panic in a pool of terry cloth as she pressed her body against Scully’s, one thigh between Scully’s legs, her old scars covered in Scully’s fresh skin.

They ate at the room’s tiny table, the cumbersome silver warming hats stacked on the nearby heating vent. Stella had always felt a sense of connection to other people when she sat at a hotel room table. Here was their shared site of awkward morning-afters, lonely resting wallets and illegally doled out wads of cash.

Scully was wrapped in a sheet and squinting aggressively. Stella reached behind her to pull the gauzy inside drape shut.

“Thank you.”

Stella swallowed a bite of lukewarm pancake and tried to figure out how to begin to say goodbye to someone who looked like that, who hummed as she ate, scooped shrinking ice cubes from the water glass and dropped them into her juice before she sipped. Stella thought of the scars on the soles of her feet. Scully hadn’t found them yet, but she would if this continued any longer. Now that she’d gotten a taste of Stella’s secrets, she’d be bloodthirsty for more, always looking. She would ask questions – didn’t they bleed when you walked on them? How did they ever heal?

She surprised herself as much as she did Scully when the words left her mouth.

“I made them.”

It was a simple thing to give a person – an answer, the truth. But Scully received it like someone who rarely got it. She put her fork down like it was an infant, as if any noise she made might make Stella change her mind and clam up.

“I would cut myself. In my teens, my twenties. Once about five years ago, but that was aberrant.”

“Why?”

Stella shrugged.

“Just an urge I got some bad night.”

“No. I meant why in general.”

Stella forced herself to scrape a piece of pancake onto a raspberry, dip it in the congealing powdered sugar. Both the plate and her stomach had grown inhospitable to food, but her hand happily suffered the journey just to have something to focus on other than Scully’s growing disappointment.

“I was lonely, angry. The physical pain seemed soothing by comparison.”

Usually, Stella thought of it distantly, if she thought of it at all. But as she described it for Scully, it came alive for her again, made sense again all of a sudden. She caught the glint of the butter knife under her hand and thought of her friend Mike, a former smoker. Most of the time, Mike told her, when he walked by smokers on the street, he felt smugly superior for having quit already. But every so often, the thing was fresh lit, orange-tipped and reeking of nicotine and as he walked through the cloud of smoke, he’d think of every bus stop, every bedroom he’d ever been in with one.

What then? she had asked.

I walk faster.

“But it didn’t replace the other pain. It just distracted me. A far less magical feat.”

“So you stopped, then.”

“Of course,” she said, more pridefully than was necessary. “There are much less dangerous and damaging things with which to distract oneself.”

Stella was still expecting some sort of outburst, a selfish display of hindsight’s concern, a nodding speech about her braveness, a wobbling exclamation of horror that masked secret mouth-watering for the sensational. But Scully looked up and leaned forward, silent and sturdy as a stable. She bridled Stella’s face with iron cold hands and made a horseshoe of kisses there. Stella wanted to accept her kindness, but the touch was so light that her skin bristled and then ached. She bucked back into the chair and gripped Scully’s wrists, the sound of reigns still snapping in her ears as she finally turned on the shower.

Stella held the phone between her ear and chin as she ironed her sweater. The steam came up smelling like yesterday – red wine and river embraces, sex on a hotel room floor – the residue of which Stella intended to leave here on the floral-covered board.

Scully came out of the bathroom in Stella’s clothes and Stella realized she’d never brought her things in from the car, she’d been so distracted with Mulder’s adventures and Stella’s mixed messages. She fixed herself in the full-length mirror, glancing over at Stella under a thin veil of nonchalance.

“Aisle seat is good, yes. Thank you… no that’s all.”

When she hung up, Scully marked time, trying to get a crisp M shape out of a silk collar as she waited for Stella to explain.

“What was that about?” she finally asked.

“I’m going home sooner than expected.”

“How soon?”

“First thing tomorrow morning.”

Scully nodded, mouth pursed as she looked down, eyebrows making a single hop as she tried to hide her disappointment. It was almost enough to make Stella pick the phone back up.

“Oh.”

“We’ve had a nice time,” Stella said with the sigh of an inconvenienced shopper. Scully’s reflection disappeared and when Stella turned, slipping her warm sweater over her head, Scully was posed at table, one hand on her hip, the other gripping the back of the chair she’d eaten breakfast in so joyfully not an hour ago. Stella pretended to concentrate on the button of her pants, chewed the inner tag of her cheek with her pointiest tooth, and then looked up, finally prepared to be the person who chased that other Scully from the room.

“We were never going to see each other again anyway. It’s better this way.”

Scully kept looking at the floor, spoke like she was talking to herself.

“This morning you weren’t acting like someone I was never going to see again.”

“And how do they act? Besides trying to kill you.”

Stella regretted it the moment it left her mouth, but she held steady, chin lifted. Scully looked up with hard, hot eyes, ferocious and justice-seeking, ready to storm the castle with her simple kindness and decency, no matter how Stella treated her.

“What were you expecting?” Stella continued.

“I was expecting you to stay until Saturday because you said your flight was on Saturday,” Scully said evenly. “Maybe Sunday or Monday if we were having a good time.”

“It’s one day’s difference.”

“It’s not the amount of time, it’s the fact that you’re doing it.”

“Did you think we were going to have some kind of relationship?”

Scully pressed her weight off the back of the chair and began to gather her things. Stella picked up the tiny travel bottle of perfume she’d brought with her and then put it back down, the smell suddenly turning her stomach.

“No,” Scully said. “I don’t think you could have a relationship with anybody.”

Stella blinked, choking a bit on her own speechlessness as Scully grabbed her coat, whirled it around her shoulders, sending the industrious scent of the dry cleaners wafting around the room.

“You’re acting like this because you scared yourself. And you’re not even brave enough to admit it.”

“Maybe we’ll stay in touch,” Stella said. She wasn’t one to offer friendship as a breakup concession. But Scully’s bleeding pride and fussy hair-tossing was too much, a sort of glamorous temper tantrum, a beloved old movie star having a meltdown. She ignored the offer and reached for the hotel door handle without even a glance back over her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” Stella asked, hoping to get a look at her face one more time. It would do her better to remember it this way – reeling in hatred – than, for example, in profile over a glass of wine, or tipped back asking for Jesus Christ. Scully did not grant her the favor.

“Home. Alone,” she muttered and then stepped into the hall, door swinging open and lifting the back of her coat up.

“Shall I go back with Agent Mulder?”

“Do whatever you want, Stella.”

Stella folded her arms across her chest as the door slammed shut with one last petite gust. Fine. Doing whatever she wanted was Stella’s specialty. She intended to do exactly fucking that.

Stella sat up suddenly, not yet feeling like herself, but unable to face the faded glory of the popcorn ceiling another moment. The place had seemed kind of romantic last night, an appropriately vintage backdrop to Scully’s late autumn complexion, her hourglass figure, her cedary voice. Now Stella saw only decay. She’d been lying on the bed for an hour in her clothes, proclaiming her faith in her own performance. But just a few inches away, just a few hours ago, Scully had melted beneath her in a self-sacrifice to Stella’s pride, offered her body when she saw that Stella had shed blood. She needed to get the fuck out of there. She needed the cold pagan temple of her room in DC.

Agent Mulder was the only person left in Philadelphia she knew, and he happened to have a car.

She pulled herself together, gave her sleeve a brisk tug as she knocked on his hotel room door.

His tie was askew, shirt untucked, when he answered. He reeked of something halfway between mouthwash and aftershave and his neck was dotted with bloody bits of toilet paper like a kid who’d just learned to shave.

“I’ll be right behind you guys,” he said.

Stella took a breath and made a concerted effort not to heave it back out. She had not accounted for the energy she’d expend trying to recount it all to Mulder.

“Agent Scully left. I was wondering if I could ride back with you.”

Mulder looked surprised. He opened the door wider and backed away.

“Come on in, I’m dressed,” he said, though that was obvious.

The air in Mulder’s room didn’t smell of half-eaten pancakes under silver covers, wasn’t haunted by the ghost of a woman swaddled naked beneath a sheet. It hadn’t ever held charm for Mulder, but instead had been rough and unfriendly from the start. Stella wondered now which way was worse.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing happened,” she said with instantly regrettable edge. She did not want the conversation to continue, much less intensify.

“She get pissed off at you?”

He sounded hopeful, amused even. Should she choose to share it, the truth would wipe that dopey half-smile right off his face.

“You could say that.”

“What’d you do?”

She said nothing.

“Fine,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “You don’t have to tell me…”

He turned around to put his shoes on, bent to tie them, and his shoulder muscles stretched the fabric across his back. Stella felt a wave of relief, a steady spot on a carsick road. She looked down at his ass – so tight that her fingers toyed involuntarily with the coin in her pocket. When he stood, her eyes slid down his back to the strong plateau where the sway of a woman’s would usually be. He’d been behind her when he fucked her and she hadn’t much taken the time to appreciate him. (Then again, Scully hadn’t found time to appreciate him in five years.) Perhaps Stella should have. Perhaps she should have been smart and put Mulder between her and Scully to begin with, protected herself.

There was Scully in her head again. How’s Mulder doing?

She stared at him hard, trying to replace the image of Scully’s top lip caught between her teeth with one of Mulder’s hands on her hips. He glanced at her nervously as he tucked his shirt into his pants, hapless and impossible to objectify. She began to wander around the room impatiently.

The pointy toe of her shoe sanded the tile of the bathroom floor. She felt some relief in the dark room as she transferred the coolness of the counter to her hands and then her neck. A hotel-sized bottle of mouthwash sat empty, reeking as if it had come from the minibar. Its cheapness was magnified by its companion – a man’s travel bag, thick, worn leather, half-zipped. She toyed with it, comforted by the weight of it, the sandalwood smell of it, and idly sifted through it – an old-fashioned razor and a box of Gillette single-blades.

“You didn’t have time to pack clothes but you stopped home for your shaving kit?”

“It was my father’s. I keep it at the office as a spare in case of last minute travel. I’m not so great with it.”

That explained the toilet paper. Stella shook a razor out of the little matchbox-type encasement, ran her thumb along the safe edge, thinking of the nimble line of Scully’s collarbone against the tip of her nose, Scully’s lips on her temple at the breakfast table, the way the sheet beneath her armpit rustled as she almost lost sight of it and dropped it. She turned the blade absentmindedly, tapping the sharp edge against the counter and then the safe one, the sharp and then the safe. Her thoughts ran amok, but the blade’s focus was narrow, unforgiving.

“Guess she’s still pissed at me too,” he said, pouting from the next room. Stella envied the routineness of it for him. Mulder knew that Scully would get over it, that their relationship would be restored to its comfortable (if deluded) state in no time. He wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t have to forget her. He didn’t have to decide if it was better to be kind or cruel.

“What are you doing?”

He appeared beside her in the mirror. She tossed the bottle of mouthwash and zipped his bag, pushed it at him.

“Nothing. Are you ready?”

“Yeah, we can go apologize together. Strength in numbers.”

“I don’t think she’s angry with us for the same reasons,” Stella said. She didn’t know why she’d done it, given it that inflection. She had to have known intuitively that he wouldn’t miss it. And of course, he didn’t. He stared at her, a dazed look in his eyes, shoulders broadening for a fight.

“Was she…”

He gulped and she sighed, emotional fatigue setting in before he even finished the question. How many people’s days could she be expected to ruin in the course of one hotel checkout?

“With you… last night?”

She slithered through the narrow passage between Mulder’s body and the doorjamb to escape and his tie caught on her coat collar. For a second, she thought he might grab her by the elbow, force her to look him in the eyes while she answered. The thought of tossing that back and swallowing it, chasing Scully’s anger with his, sent a thrill up the back of Stella’s spine, goosebumps down her arms.

But Mulder was not a grabber. He lingered at the bathroom counter, looking at his fingernails as they wiped the edge of the sink. She pitied him his imagination. Look what that had done to Ed Jerse, and to his victims. She decided at this point that an ounce of honesty at this point would be better than a lifetime of wondering.

“It didn’t mean anything, Mulder.”

He looked at her as he began to shuffle back into the room. His pupils dilated and spun, green and gold pinwheels, carnival souvenirs of betrayal and jealousy.

And something else. Love. He loved Scully so much it was almost like he could put her in the room by sheer will.

Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? This could be easy. It could feel good. It could feel like Mulder’s body beneath her as she rode him raw, his eyes fluttering shut so he could think of Scully. It could smell like Mulder sweating away the loss on Stella’s behalf, sound like him moaning the name she wouldn’t let pass her lips.

“You mean, it didn’t mean anything to you,” he said sharply and then opened the door, holding it for her with mock chivalrousness.

She paused beneath his gaze, placed a loose hand against his chest, the steadiness of his heartbeat bordering on melancholy beneath the heel of her hand. He seemed to have no trouble posing for her, bottom lip pouting inimitably, as she quickly examined the perimeter of his face, the line of his jaw and his raw-cheap-shaven neck, felt his mournful spearmint breath tickle her ear. If he wondered what the fuck she was doing or thinking, he didn’t let on, just stood there, his doe-eyes unreadable.

Her palm curled and her nails took a diver’s start, poised on their tips, ready to take him head first, drag him to a depth where neither oxygen nor forgiveness could reach them. She paused as she imagined how comfortably distant, how sure-footed her escape from Washington would feel then, with Scully safely rooted in the past. How much easier it would be to leave it all here, not have to pack it up, shove it in the overhead compartment and drag it back across the ocean. She could just fuck him. It was really that simple to be free of it.

But Mulder seemed to have no interest in freedom. He waded past her into the hallway, one hand jingling the car keys in his jacket pocket, one eye on the elevator button that would take him back to Scully.

Chapter 8

An empty soda bottle scuttled back and forth between the sedan’s center console and passenger side door the entire ride home, a constant reminder to Mulder of the frenzied state in which he had come. There were still skeletons of sunflower seeds in the cup holder, rattling over every pothole like salty little ghosts. Reminders so silly that his impulsive dash to visit a Philadelphia murderer twenty-four hours ago felt more like something dumb he’d done years ago at a high school graduation party.

The orange fuel light announced itself with a dramatic ding. On the way up, he’d been a jetliner on course, a fuel tank full of testosterone, junk food, jealousy. Now all that was gone, all of it except the jealousy, and that was losing its potency in the process of being recycled and redirected at his co-pilot. Stella leaned in a little to see the dashboard for herself and he waited for her to say something about the gas the way Scully always did, as if she’d been the only one who’d heard or seen the stupid warning. But Stella looked back down at the soda bottle.

“Agent Scully always let you keep the car a mess?” she asked.

They were coming down the exit ramp now. The din of the highway faded and the dull whooshing of speed slipped out from under them like a faulty safety net. She had only asked him one thing up until then – if he minded her turning on the heat. He’d said no only to have to slouch his coat off and cuff up his sleeves an hour later. Scully would have noted his discomfort, even without him saying anything, and turned the dial back down in empathy. She would’ve put her scarf back on rather than watch him sweat. But no, she wouldn’t have let him keep the car this messy.

“Yes,” he lied.

“What did you do to your head?”

Mulder thought of the way Scully had stood between his knees at the hospital, buttoning him up. He’d longed to put his hands into the warm space between the silky inside lining of her coat and the home base diamond of her waist, cling to her and feel safe at last.

“I didn’t even tell Scully.”

“She doesn’t make it easy to act like an idiot, does she?”

Mulder smiled, surprised to hear Stella cutting him some slack, even as she insulted him. There was rarely ever anyone to break the tie between him and Scully, and when there was, they generally didn’t take his side.

“No. She doesn’t.”

“We’re all idiots sometimes. Even Agent Scully,” she said, and then mumbled with some uncertainty, “I’m sure.”

Here was the unexpected thing about Stella: he liked her. She was sharp, honest, unexpectedly caring. She was not afraid to make an enemy, and that meant her friendship was worth something. And, like him, she was a loner. Scully wasn’t really like that – her alienation from the world was unintentional, an unwelcome side effect of her loyalty to him and their work. He kept hoping at some point, she’d figure out a balance, get back the things she’d sacrificed. If she always had to choose, eventually she might not pick him.

“You never get to say I told you so to a person like that, not even if you’re right,” Stella continued.

If she was trying to earn an answer to her question, she was doing a good job of it.

“I got in a fight.”

He glanced over as he said it and caught the precise moment her eyebrows rose and fell, a remarkably Scully-like gesture. The comparison unsettled him and he looked back at the road to shake it off.

“Not like your fight with Scully. A good old-fashioned fist fight.”

“Make a habit out of that?”

He was slightly insulted at the doubt implied. He could fight. He could fucking fight anytime he wanted to.

“I got drunk and got a tattoo from that place.”

“The one with the ergot poisoning.”

“Yeah.”

“Surely there was a better place for that kind of impulse purchase.”

“No, it’s why I got it.”

He realized she was looking at him.

“Oh,” he said. “You were kidding.”

“You were testing the poison, I gather.”

“Yeah, I wanted to see if it would have an effect on me. I wanted to know for sure whether Jerse was making it up.”

“And?”

“Instead, I saw you. Together.” She made no indication that this surprised her. “Walking.”

She breathed softly and he saw her wet her lips with her tongue. Mulder thought of that saying about your secrets keeping you sick. Maybe they both had some getting well to do.

“I was jealous,” he said, feeling some relief already. “You have some kind of personal connection with her. I’ve been working with her for years and it… it’s not the same.”

“You wouldn’t want it to be the same. A personal connection is by definition unique.”

“Yeah… well… I tried to distract myself from it by thinking about Ed Jerse. I went to the bar he took her to, started asking the bartender questions, trying to see if he remembered them.”

“A random couple on a date?”

“He said as a matter of fact, he did remember her.”

It was kind of thrilling to have her engaged like this, following the story with interest, her elbow up on the windowpane, her forehead fretting. He could tell that Stella was a woman who was not easily entertained.

“He started telling me about how drunk she got. Said he saw them having sex in the hall by the bathroom and actually, that he had a turn with her himself.”

“What?”

“And so. Yeah. A fight. For no reason.”

“He was putting you on.”

“Yes,” he said, almost sorry to end on such an anticlimactic note. “That turned out to be the case.”

The bartender hadn’t remembered Scully at all, had thought Mulder looked like a corporate asshole in his coat and tie, and felt like messing with him. City of brotherly love.

“So what was your conclusion?”

He glanced at Stella, trying to find the thread he’d dropped, lost in thoughts of his own foolishness.

“About the ergot. Did it cause you to be violent? Did you hear voices?”

Mulder had been on futile quests all his life, but only this one had been memorialized on his skin.

“Just my own.”

A moment passed and then he felt her hand on his bicep, reassuring him.

“We all do things when we’re jealous,” she said, taking her hand back, “We’ve all been guilty of letting our emotions dictate our actions.”

“You put the idea in my head,” he said at a risk of starting another argument.

“I know,” Stella said. “I shouldn’t have.”

Maybe that meant she’d never really thought it was possible that Scully had the ergot latent in her blood. Maybe it meant she had considered it and had changed her mind. In any case, the apology sounded genuine. He glanced down and saw that her fingers were fiddling very subtly with the pleat of her pants. All women were mysteries to Mulder, but this one could have had her own dedicated basement office.

“So you do too? You get jealous?”

Jealousy implied vulnerability. Even with her panties torn and her hips in his hands, Stella had seemed aloof, indifferent. Well, not indifferent, exactly, because she’d been… responsive. But whatever it was, it was not vulnerable.

“No, not really,” she admitted. “I don’t usually give anyone the chance to make me feel that way.”

Her voice trailed off, dulled by the steamed window glass as she turned her face over her shoulder. She started sounding almost sleepy, as if narrating a dream.

“Usually.”

He couldn’t tell if she was trying to convince him or herself. The fidgeting spread like a rash from her fingers to her leg. There was a sharp noise, the bottle rolling and crunching under her shoe. Mulder startled, not so much because it was loud but because it was very disconcerting to see Stella like this, fidgeting like someone who was trying not to be sick on a plane.

“Sorry,” she whispered, her voice somewhere far away.

Mulder was taking up an awkward spot in the circular driveway of Stella’s DC hotel, creating havoc among the otherwise obedient line of valeting cars. It was the second time he’d been there that day, having already dropped her off ten minutes ago, and the valet kid was staring at him. Mulder ignored him and toyed with the scarf as he tried to make up his mind about what to do with it. He wound it like boxer’s tape around his hands, fluffed it on the passenger seat like a pet cat, wrapped it around his neck and pretended to strangle himself (the valet kid rolled his eyes).

It was silky and smelled good, though the warmth from Stella’s body heat was rapidly fading. He had always been fascinated by the way women’s scarves smelled – shampoo and perfume, the sweat that contained the excitement and fear of many days put together. As a little boy, he had once asked his mother why she didn’t wash her scarf as often as her clothes and she told him never to ask a woman that again. It seemed like figures of authority had been telling him to stop asking questions ever since.

He hadn’t asked what Stella’s plans were and he didn’t have a phone number for her. It was possible she’d never see this (probably expensive) scarf again if he didn’t bring it up to her. Or it was possible she’d come to the office the next morning and he could give it to her then. Leaving it at the desk for her seemed hostile. Giving it to Scully and asking her to deliver it was… out of the question. He sighed at the indignity of mandatory valet service and handed the car over to the stink-eyed kid.

He felt like he was standing outside his body watching himself as the elevator doors opened and shut, dungeonlike. It was like the last act of a movie where the hero infuriatingly and willingly goes back into the fray for some noble cause (in this case, a scarf).

Stella opened the door barefoot and coatless, but otherwise still dressed. The room was clean, sheets pulled taut, smelled of shady-spot flowers. It was hardly a dungeon of any kind and Stella, loose-limbed and tiny without her shoes, was hardly a dragon.

“Oh. Thank you,” she said. “Do you want to come in for a drink?”

She seemed lighter somehow than she had in the car, breezier, as if she’d gotten a contact high just walking into this place. He wondered how she’d even survived the other one.

“I…”

“You’re not going in to the office, are you?”

Mulder thought of their idled case files, all the things that had been interrupted and stalled by Stella’s visit and – depressingly – suffered no consequence as a result. He was pretty sure Scully was already home drinking a glass of wine in symbolic mutiny. And it only felt early to him – for normal people, the workday was officially over. Three days of basically doing nothing had somehow inflicted more exhaustion than any multiple-victim, cross-country case he could remember.

“I guess one drink.”

She went over to the pair of stout tumblers hotels always put out, the kind Mulder usually used to rinse his toothpaste, and took both between her pointer finger and thumb. With the other hand, she reached for an already-open bottle of bourbon. He imagined Stella walking in, kicking her shoes off with a sigh, swigging right from the bottle. Whatever blows Stella had suffered during her fight with Scully had affected her more than she’d let on in the car.

Now she held the glasses out, offering him one, and caught him looking at the cracked seal on the bottle, the gulp-sized empty space.

“Luckily, company arrived to civilize me,” she said and he stepped closer to take his cup.

Scully’s beauty had the majesty of an Indian elephant. Intimidating at a distance, it softened and welcomed him as he grew nearer, put a hand on her back or whispered into her ear. But Stella’s gained strength with proximity, a white tiger coming down from its rock, pressing its nose against the protective glass. When she tipped the bourbon to pour him some, his hand shook and the lip of his glass clanged with the bottle. The tumbler cracked and a palm-sized dagger promptly fell into the center like a novelty ice cube.

“Sorry,” she said, though he knew she knew it was his fault. He put the glass down and traded it for one of the coffee mugs.

“Gently now,” she warned as she raised her glass to toast. “I hate drinking out of coffee cups.”

“To our wives and sweethearts,” he said as they clinked, a Royal Navy toast he’d picked up while at Oxford. He wondered if she’d know the reference.

“May they never meet.”

He smiled.

She swallowed and sat on the bed beside the nightstand, her back pushed up against the headboard, her elbows on her knees, drink dangling over her ankles.

“You going to sit down while you nurse that?”

Mulder looked around. Not a lot of seating options. There was, of course, the chair next to the bed. But that seemed even more suggestive than the bed considering the last time he’d sat in it, he was watching Stella and Scully have sex… That’s right. Stella was just a person who had sex and lost scarves and sometimes drank right from the bottle. And she didn’t want him, she wanted Scully.

Still, he kept the studious distance the length of a marble notebook between them as he sat up against the headboard.

Stella looked at him amiably, two neighbors sitting on the stoop after dinner. Evening had burned off the low-toned husk of her voice and turned it girlish and summery in time for small-talk.

“Been a long day?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer her, distracted by a raging internal debate as to which tone of voice was the affectation and which the reality. But this was of course the same mistake he’d made with Scully when she came home with her tattoo. Some people were not one thing or the other.

“Long couple of days,” he said. “Long couple of years.”

“Mm.”

“I’m looking forward to getting back to a regular workday. Whatever that is.”

She tipped her glass against the bridge of her nose, and looked deep into the bottom of it, a sip she intended to follow to the ends of the Earth.

“I didn’t mean I was looking forward to your leaving,” he said. It was a lie at first, a white one, meant to spare her feelings, until he realized he believed it himself.

She half-shrugged, a move that involved more blinking than shoulder movement, but somehow a lock of her hair traveled from her clavicle to her back anyway. Had her eyes changed color since she started drinking? Or did it just seem like that because he’d been drinking? Were they more like Scully’s now or less? Would there ever be a time when Scully was not the standard by which he measured the quality of an eye roll, the intensity of a primary color?

He realized Stella was watching him watch her and he looked down at his tie, loosening it.

“How long have you been in love with her?” she asked.

He was silent. He’d been thinking about it so often lately that the question seemed predictable, manageable, like running into someone at the store after you happened to have imagined running into them at the store. He calmly considered his options, mentally organizing the excuses and lies he’d been making to himself and others for years. He’d been running around looking for truth for so long that the prospect of one single lie now exhausted him.

“Scully,” Stella clarified. As if he even knew any other women.

“Sometimes I think it happened the moment I met her.”

Stella mm’ed quietly.

“And sometimes I think it just happened yesterday.”

“Mm,” she hummed more audibly, this time singing it like a lullaby. She looked up at the ceiling like there was an atrium above them, a cloudless sky, the tiniest hint of a romantic under all that hydrophobic fabric. He wanted to meet that version of Stella – the one who maybe liked flowers and surprises, who looked you in the eye when she shook your hand not because she was determining whether to fuck you or not, but because she was checking for mutual recognition. He shared a secret with that version of Stella and he suddenly wanted the camaraderie of it. Two schoolkids arguing about who the little redheaded girl liked better.

“How long have you been in love with her?” he asked.

But no knowing chuckle came, no coy wrestling with an admission. Stella’s face went white with shock and she turned wet-eyed and pink-nosed, the victim of sudden bad news. Her chin trembled a bit, threatening to shake tears loose from their scaffolds. Sometimes he wondered if they pulled all the women aside at the academy and taught them how to cry in mixed company – reluctantly, ladies, kicking and screaming the whole way.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wishing very hard that he could unask his question. If she kept looking so sad, he would start crying himself, and without a single kick or scream. Why did everyone make love seem comfortable and easy when really, it was this? Strangers drinking and crying in a soulless hotel bed together.

She looked into his eyes and he let her latch on there, two forgotten satellites rattling around in space together, both orbiting the same little planet, each photographing it through a different lens, each carefully measuring its own threat of collision. She placed her lips on his and then they were speeding together at seventeen thousand miles an hour as his mind struggled to catch up. He felt the pull on his upper lip as she inhaled hard, acknowledging the thing barreling toward them, the thing that would destroy them both, and maneuvering to avoid it. A little more pressure here, a little more speed there, and they might have a chance of surviving the inevitable explosion.

And maybe her plan was a good one. With each uptick of activity, his heart hurt less, his awareness dulled, his brain’s permanent backdrop of Scully at the desk pulling a pencil like a tightrope faded. So he took the glass from Stella’s right hand, placed it on the side table. She stood to take off her pants, left them on one calf as she climbed into his lap, ready to undertake the mission. When she began to unbuckle his belt, he took her wrists and held them against his chest.

“Not yet,” he said. She nodded once and wound her hands around his wrists instead, guiding them to her body, placing them at ten and two, giving him the steering wheel as she aimed the car at a cliff.

His fingers tightened and then went slack again, tingled with the heady anticipation of a steep fall. But Stella’s hips made for an unexpectedly short trip down, a softer landing than he’d expected. This was one of the places he’d traveled with Scully, one of the few trips she’d initiated, seemed wholly enthusiastic about taking. They’d been closer there, at the hairpin juncture of Stella’s hips, than they’d been at any midwestern motel, any desert crossroad.

So he held those hips a little tighter, reclining as they turned over and settled into the tracks of his body, aptly finding the right grooves, churning forward a little faster with each rotation. She had taken him to Scully once before, and maybe she could do it again.

And so he didn’t stop her when her hands went to the zipper of his pants again, but he didn’t look either. Instead he pictured the hands he watched rifle through the file cabinet each day, parting folders and picking up paper cuts as if it might finally be the day his righteous mission would make sense. Now, finally, maybe they were onto his real cause, tending to the clear chronicles of his wildest fantasies, plucking at the tiny piece of copper responsible for containing all his desires.

“It’s okay,” Stella said, peeling his fly to the edge of the bulge but not touching it. She rested her hands on his chest. “Say her name if you want to. I don’t mind.”

She was like wandering into a dream, soft and warm, thoroughly convincing of her own inconsequentiality. He let his hands drift to her lower back, rest under the tail of her shirt, exploring her aimlessly as he promised himself he would wake soon. Stella made no noise at all, hiding like the morning, successfully disappearing even as she spread her thighs and pressed harder, even as she moved his hand to her breast, even as she ran a hand through his hair, scraped his scalp with her nails –

Mulder suddenly sat up, jolted awake, a sick feeling in his stomach. He placed his hands on Stella’s waist and held her still. So long as she was doing things Scully had never done, it was easy to suspend belief. Though he assumed that in the throes of ecstasy it would be different than when she was checking him for head trauma, still, Scully had run her fingers through his hair countless times.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this.”

She blinked, looked at him like, well, like someone who was currently sitting on a sizable erection.

“I know. I’m human,” he said. “But I don’t want to do it.”

His lap was empty as suddenly as it had become full. Stella calmly dismounted the bed like she’d just had a bad ride in a rainstorm. He closed his eyes tight with embarrassment, unsure whether he felt it more on her behalf or his own.

“It’s fine,” she called back, her only concern the mud on her boots. “I’m going to take a bath. Let yourself out whenever you like.”

The bathroom door remained half-open in a gesture of indifference as the water ran and guzzled. Mulder sighed. He was used to following his instincts, using his intuition. But he had made one mistake after another this past few days, done nothing but chase bad money with good, bad tattoos with… other bad tattoos. Now, against every gut feeling he had, he got up, made sure his dick was sufficiently shamed into retreat, and followed the waft of steam.

It was more of a poke than a knock. Stella’s clothes dotted the bathroom floor, a shirt and bra and panties dropped like pebbles on a wayward girl’s trip into the forest. While he doubted Stella gave much of a shit about being rejected by him, he also doubted she experienced much rejection at all, ever. Mulder knew it was not an easy feeling to get used to.

“I’m sorry,” he said, unable to think of much else. Are you all right would have sounded too patronizing. He stepped further inside, dramatically averting his eyes from Stella’s body. “I’m really sorry.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. I’m just trying not to look at you.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous. Look at me if you’re going to talk to me.”

He turned toward her, stubbornly cutting his gaze off at her neck. She sighed and the water rippled, caught on the sails of her breath.

“It’s not you, it’s not that I don’t find you attractive, I mean – obviously, I can see – but–”

“Stop talking.”

He nodded.

“It was a mistake,” she concluded with a curt shrug, water parting over her shoulder like a smooth rock in a pond. But she hadn’t asked him to leave. And he didn’t want to. He was used to making his mistakes as a team and had come to appreciate the comfort in recovering from them as a team as well.

“Can I… come in and sit with you? Not in the bath, just next to you?”

She blinked in disbelief. As if a grown man had never asked her if he could sit on the floor while she took a bath.

“You’re serious.”

“I kind of was, yeah.”

“Does it mean you’ll stop standing there looking at me like a pitiful puppy?”

“Yes,” he allowed, because sometimes it was better to admit you were pitiful than to run around getting tattoos and punching people and fucking inappropriate people. He sat down beside her, the altar of porcelain-enameled steel between them a holy reminder that some things were kept out of reach for a reason. Her arm had been resting there since he came in the door and now he reached out to place his hand around hers, but her fingers clamped down. He wondered if she was angrier than she was letting on. But when he took his hand away, he saw that there were white spots on her fingertips and knuckles, evidence of excessive pressure. She was hiding something.

“Leave it alone,” she said.

Mulder had never left anything alone in his life.

“What – what is that – ?”

Stella was wet and bound to the tub and it took little effort to peel her flexed fingers back at the knuckles. There, beneath them, was a jagged piece of glass, the one from the cup they’d broken earlier. At first, he stared at it as if it might suddenly come to life, explain its own presence and defend its usefulness, and when it didn’t, he finally looked at Stella. She kept her eyes on the bathtub faucet, sinking her chin below water level with an open mouth, letting the wet surface play with her lip in a pantomime of boredom.

“What were you going to do with this?”

“I thought you were going to leave.”

He waited for her to say more but she didn’t.

“Did you break that glass on purpose?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Then what –”

“Sometimes it feels good to hold it.”

It sounded like half an explanation – frustrating, even if it was probably the more reassuring end of one. Mulder had no way of knowing whether she was lying, no way of knowing how serious a crime she’d be willing to commit against herself. Suddenly he realized his instincts may well have led him into the bathroom, maybe even up to Stella’s hotel room. Maybe they’d been spot on after all.

His eyes wandered, numb to the false threat of her nudity now that a real one had presented itself.

The scars appeared to him like an image suddenly obvious in one of those psychedelic paintings. One minute, they’d been invisible, the next, they were impossible to ignore. He took one look at her face and he knew she’d seen him notice, maybe had even wanted him to.

“Well. We’re all detectives here, aren’t we,” she said, tossing the question mark over her shoulder with severe Englishness. But he had a feeling that first person plural included Scully and wondered if for once, they’d had exactly the same take on something. Whatever Scully had said, it couldn’t have gone that well. It was possible whatever he said would go over even worse.

So he said nothing. He thought of all sorts of things to do with the piece of glass, finally settling on the wastebasket. When it shattered at the bottom of the metal can, he noticed she did not flinch as he did. The wall behind him suddenly felt cold and sweaty and his socked feet flexed up to the ceiling. Stella’s head inched around ever so slightly toward him.

“It’s all right, Mulder,” she said in a voice as round and temporary as a bubble. “Really.”

And this time, with nothing else to hide, she turned her hand up for him to hold.

Mulder woke up with a poisonous film on his tongue and a ringing in his ears, an automatic alarm set off by the taste of fermented alcohol that a bad decision or five had been made. He looked down for other signs of disaster. His socks were sweaty, his shorts and t-shirt twisted and flipped like a rubberband around his waist. But Stella lay curled in her robe beside him like a perfectly coiffed kitten, in exactly the position he’d last seen her. She snored very quietly and he reached for a pillow, stealthily lifting her head and sliding it underneath for support. He remembered now how they’d wound up there.

He’d gone back to the bedroom when she said she was done with her bath and he'd waited, using the guise of privacy as he tried to figure out what to do. Surely, she’d tell him to leave and then he’d be up all night wondering whether she’d chase that piece of glass to the bottom of the garbage pail, or create another, or find a toenail scissor or a tweezer or a pencap… Stella is not weak. She does not need me. Whatever rendezvous she had planned with the glass shard was between her and it. He could not save everyone, as Scully always said. But maybe, in this case, she wouldn’t have said that at all.

To his surprise, Stella had either wanted him to stay or lacked the energy to prevent it. She’d seemed almost oblivious to him as she tied her pink robe on and shook the water out of her hair. But when she laid down next to him, she turned toward him, scrubbed face resting on praying palms before she closed her eyes. She was even prettier this way, he’d thought, but was afraid if he said it to her, she’d think he wanted to fuck her or kiss her or keep her. He just wanted to stay, look at her until he felt she was okay. Well, what do you know? he’d thought. It had taken a risky sexual encounter, a broken heart, several drunken escapades, a tattoo and a fight, but Fox Mulder had actually made a new friend.

It was dark on his way to the bathroom. No doubt the sun was up, but the blackout shades kept any of it from getting in. Stella kept her sleeping quarters like a bat. He stubbed his toe on something, inhaled sharply to avoid waking her up. He closed the door quietly and took his shirt off at the sink, trying to keep it dry as he splashed water on his face. He didn’t even know Stella was awake until he turned off the faucet and heard her voice. Housekeeping, he figured.

“Ask if they have any of those little bottles of mouthwash?” he called. “Stella?”

When he came out, Stella was looking at the floor, blocking the view into the hallway. She reluctantly stood back and caught in the widening jaws of the door was Scully, staring at the space between them, a close-mouthed underbite, shoulders frozen to keep from heaving. There was that stubborn, wet look in her eyes, the one Stella had had last night, except on Scully it didn’t just make him want to cry too, it made him want to die, disappear.

Everything he could think of to say sounded fake in his head.

“It’s not what you think, Dana,” Stella said.

Which was exactly the kind of fake-sounding thing he’d been trying to avoid.

Scully scoffed at them both, but it was more like a feeble cough, devoid of its usual sand and grit. The color began to drain from her cheeks like California daylight. She shrunk back away from them, going down below the earth one thick, dramatic stripe of color at a time.

“It’s really not, Scully,” he echoed, feeling backed into a corner by Stella’s approach.

Scully pushed a folded pile of what must have been Stella’s clothes at her.

“What’s the matter?” she seethed. “Concierge busy?”

And then she turned and walked down the hall like she’d gotten the wrong room number. Stella shut the door softly and leaned a hand against it.

“Fuck me,” she whispered.

“You think you’re fucked? I’m the one who has to stay here. I have to keep working with her.”

“It’s not a competition to see who can be the most fucked.”

“It seems like that’s exactly what you think it is.”

“Don’t go back to being a child now.”

There was a fresh little retort right on the tip of his tongue, but he realized she was right. Quipping and arguing wasn’t useful to any of them. This wasn’t only her fault. It wasn’t even only his. It had taken all three of them to make the mess and would take all three of them to clean it up. Stella ran her fingers through her hair like she was late to a meeting, then pulled it back in such a way that suddenly it looked as if she spent all morning on it.

“What – what do we do?” he asked.

“I’ll go talk to her. On my way to the airport.”

“You’ll go talk to her.”

“Yes.”

“Now? Run after her?”

“No. Give her some time to calm down.”

“What do we say? You know what to say?”

“The truth, I suppose.”

He nodded.

“I’ll be leaving out the part about the bathtub,” she said and licked her bottom lip as she leveled an intense stare.

“You mean the glass.”

He took her silence to mean yes.

“Okay.”

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “I think.”

He felt a little cowardly as he got dressed, knowing Stella was going to fix this for him, that with all his knowledge and experience of Scully’s feelings, he was letting a perfect stranger take the hit. But none of the things he knew about Scully had prepared him for this. He wouldn’t even have known where to start.

“Will I see you again?” he asked as he watched her pinch and zip a skirt the color of a healthy human heart.

“Not on this trip,” she said. “But who knows what the future holds.”

He came to stand behind her and waited in vain for her to look at him in the mirror. Finally, he threw his arms around her shoulders, squeezing her and pressing his cheek to her hair. Stella was stiff, spared only a pat on the arm. But as he went to back away, her fingers tightened like ropes around the cylinder of his forearm, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw two wells of gratitude where her eyes used to be.

He waited at the office. The office was home base. Every argument they’d ever had on the full spectrum of silly to serious had ended with them shuffling in that door like a locker room, dusting themselves off, shaking hands over the desk. If Scully forgave him, she’d come in.

He’d hear the elevator doors squeak open and chug shut, hear her sensible shoes humble the hard basement floors. She’d come through the door – the door. Goddamit, why had he never put her name on the door? Well, it didn’t matter now. He’d been not doing things for years with regards to Scully. A nametag was hardly going to fix it.

She would come in, if not for him, than for herself, just to make a point, just to keep things moving along. He practiced believing in things for a living, was one of the best in his field. Surely he could put his faith in this one earthly concept. But that one day of waiting for Scully – of organizing and cleaning and pretending to read for so long that real words started to seem fake – seemed longer than his entire career at the FBI.

She was going to come in.

But if she wasn’t, then Stella would call.

Alas, no one came, and the only person who called was Skinner, sounding annoyed and bewildered, as if he’d just read a case file Mulder didn’t remember turning in.

Scully had called in sick. To him.

Scully didn’t call in sick. Sometimes she called in other things – abducted, wounded, hospitalized, sure. But in those cases, Skinner was the last to know. Why the hell was Scully calling him? Mulder began to stammer.

“Well, sir, we uh, we’re both trying to follow protocol more. In fact, she may have even stayed home sick just to practice it. Like a drill.”

Skinner hung up on him.

So went the pretense of reading and began the very real practice of freaking out. Mulder began to strip everything that had a protective surface. He scraped the yellow off his pencils, chewed the cuticles off his thumbs, peeled the aglets off his shoelaces. He considered calling Scully, but he was worried it would make it worse. He considered calling Stella but he had no way of doing so.

Suddenly, it occurred to him. They were still together. Stella had been plotting it all along. She hadn’t offered to go to Scully on his behalf, she went on her own. She was going to whisk Scully away to England with inside-baseball orgasms and promises of regular hours and clean cars and never having to hunt aliens again, all because he hadn’t had the balls to explain himself. He broke a pencil in half, then spent the rest of the afternoon wiping ink off of everything when he realized it wasn’t a pencil.

At some point the sun fell and whatever meager outdoor light had been coming in the tiny window disappeared. He turned on a desk lamp to drown out the bleakness of the overhead fluorescents and the little dollar-store bulb Scully had once bought showed off, turning tricks, picking up shadows of dust particles three at a time and juggling them.

He found some files but his eyes hurt when he tried to read. When he opened the desk drawer to look for his glasses, it stuck, and when he shook it, a tube of lipstick rolled forward like a shiny penny. He took it out and pulled off the cap, ran the perfumed wax scent under his nose, perched it at the center of his desk like a tawny monument, a postmodern statue of liberty. Give us your tired, your poor, your aliens yearning to breathe free.

So this is what it was like before Scully, this is what it would be like after her.

He’d fallen asleep on the desk when the phone rang again, the tube of lipstick clutched in his hand and an alarming streak of color across his palm.

This time, it was Stella.

“I’m at the airport.

“In DC?”

“No, in London. I got in and missed you so terribly I had to call before I even got home.”

He didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. And he would appreciate even less in a moment.

“I thought you were long gone.”

“I decided to take the redeye instead. I needed more time.”

Mulder gritted his teeth and steeled himself not to ask what she would need so much time for. He wasn’t exactly the king of apologies, but even he knew they didn’t take all goddamn day.

“She’s not angry with you anymore,” she said in a tone that referenced the debt he owed. She had told him she would calm Scully down and she had. It was none of his goddamn business what that involved or how many hours it took. “Or me, for that matter.”

She couldn’t help herself.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Thank you.”

“Have you gone home, taken a shower, changed your clothes yet?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Although…

He glanced down at the ink all over his shirt, the lipstick on his cuff.

“You need to leave the office and go to her. Go now.”

“What do you mean? Is she okay?”

“Tell her how you feel.”

“I –-“

“Mulder, listen to me. Stop wasting time.”

Mulder heard a voice on the airport’s PA system. Next thing he knew, he was humming and mumbling as Stella rushed them through their second goodbye. He got the feeling she wasn’t used to having to issue more than one per person. There was a moment’s hesitation, and Mulder waited to make sure she had nothing left to say, no more advice to bestow, something more than just stop wasting time. He would take any of it, all of it, even considered begging for it in the split-second that passed. But there was nothing left to hear. Stella was already gone, presumably forever, and she’d taken all her secrets about Scully with her.

Part IV

#wtid #stella and scully #stella and mulder #the fall fic #xfiles fic #crossover #novel length fic #myfic #stella gibson #dana scully #fox mulder #the fall bbc

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