Chapter Text
“The very plausible state of Oregon,” he said, and Dana grinned, careful not to let him see. Because what a relief—that he’s funny and likable, that he’s handsome and intriguing, that he wears his passion at his throat the way she wears her gold cross. She believes so hard in science, in medicine, in doing the right thing, and the FBI has been a parade of one black suit after another willing, desperate even, to change their principles according to popular opinion—jockeying for position, shoving each other out of the way to stand in the light.
And here’s this strange, vibrant man down here in the dark, and he wants to believe.
He said her name, Scully, like an insult at first. He made her laugh there in the basement; he’ll make her wonder later, in the sky. When the turbulence starts, when every other soul trapped in that rattling steel pipe feels that their world had gone topsy-turvy and might fall straight down—even her, even precise, logical Dana Katherine Scully—he’ll simply open his eyes and look at the ceiling. When it ends, when he turns and looks at her (his face from below; she could twist her fingers in his hair, pull just tight enough for his mouth to drop open), he’ll have some quip to make, because that is his default setting, apparently. Irreverence. Humor.
He was startling in his beauty, in his eagerness. She should have known at, “Now that’s a credential—rewriting Einstein,” but it was couched in so much defensiveness, so much glib nonchalance, that it sounded like an insult. She chose to take it that way, as a challenge, as a question that she wanted to answer over and again—yes, I deserve to be here; no, you don’t scare me.
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She was a spy, and Mulder knew it, and he was pretty sure that she did, too. But spy or not, there was something else there, something honest and pure. Maybe that was why they’d chosen her—because they knew he was a sucker for a woman of conviction (but how did they know that?), doubly so if she was small enough to fit in his pocket and carried a handgun that she sheathed, along with her claws, in polite company.
He suspected it when she caught the difference in medical examiners. The first three victims with no strange markings—but there they were on the fourth. And he had long-buried files connecting the girl to cases in other states. Scully was sharp, she had potential for the work, and he wanted to be hard enough for her to whet herself against.
When she stopped arguing with him about the x-rays, the blood typing, he began to wonder why she was really there. The easy answer, because they assigned her to you, came immediately to mind, but now there was reason to believe, he wanted to believe, that for her, it might be more than that. That there was more to her.
He challenged her after Peggy O’Dell threw herself from her wheelchair—“What is going on here?” she’d asked. “What do you know about those marks?” And he’d shot back, “Why—so you can put it down in your little report?” She didn’t go cold, didn’t draw herself up to her full diminutive height and distance herself. She told him, all independent purpose and ruthless determination, that she was there to find the truth, just like him. He believed that she believed herself.
But when she came to his door, robed in thin bedtime red and asking him to look at something, that’s when he knew for sure. She may have come to his cluttered dungeon on orders from on high, but she came to his motel room because she trusted him. (She wouldn’t have, if she could have known what he couldn’t help thinking at the sight of simple white cotton, her bra peeking out from the v-front closure of her robe—what he was thinking even though he knew that she wasn’t there to take his shirt off, to bite him on the chin, to scrape her nails up his spine and moan into his mouth)
She trusted him (even though she shouldn’t; even though he didn’t trust her) because despite his attempts to keep her at arm’s length—to convince her that he wouldn’t slip up in front of her, that he wouldn’t give her anything to use against him, that she should go back to where she came from—she had somehow (already) learned that he would never hurt her on purpose.
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She was on the wrong side of the country, and there was something so darkly wondrous, so spooky and ominous about this place. She didn’t frighten easily, but when she found those bumps on the meat of her back, the fear that slipped its fingers around her throat was so tight, was so overwhelming, that she barely had her robe tied before she flung open the door.
When he saw her standing there, his eyes widened, and through the fear she felt something else, something she’d thought of as long turned cold and dead inside of her. Careful, Dana.
But she wasn’t careful; she was frightened. And on the other side of the fear, she knew without having to think about it that she could strip fully naked and lay in his bed and still he wouldn’t touch her unless she asked him to. It was heavy, heady, powerful. Reassuring. She felt him circling her as she pulled the robe down, knew his eyes dipped down to her breasts, to the bare stretch of skin between her bra and her panties, knew they looked away briefly but then returned (like the tide, against their will) to the curve of her hip, her back.
He knelt behind her, a feather-light brush of his hair grazing her lumbar spine, his fingers breath-gentle against her skin as he examined what turned out only to be mosquito bites. When she turned and crushed into his chest, she knew she was pushing it, knew that ninety-nine men out of one hundred would take advantage of this opportunity—would wrap their arms around her and pull her tight against them, lift her chin and tell her it was going to be okay, then use the closeness for something else. She wondered if she’d have minded if he had. Would be lying if she’d said that wasn’t part of it for her.
But he was singular, she’d known that all along, and instead of turning her vulnerability into a breach that he could slip into, he told her to get comfortable, and put a blanket over her, and lit all the candles he had, and sat on the floor. Created a little haven for them, a flickering kingdom of naked truths that, she knew without asking, he hadn’t shared with anyone in a long time.
He tipped his head back, exposing his throat. She held his gaze, and she touched his arm to comfort him, and she wondered at the darkness that drove him, and worried that she would find that there was room for her in there, as well.
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She laughed in the rain—overcome with the ridiculousness of it all, with his ridiculousness, and the indisputable facts that proved it not absurd, but remarkably, irrefutably the truth. He had managed to shock real laughter out of her, and it felt like a prize, like a treat he’d been given for being a good boy.
He already knew the sound would live in his head for days, that he would return to it again and again, a secret fountain. Somewhere at the base of his skull, he was vaguely aware that he could accidentally spend the rest of his life trying to make that sound bubble up out of her again. He would learn every trick she taught him; he would sit when she told him to, and wag his tail when she looked at him, and lay his ears back against his head when she was displeased. And his tongue would hang from his mouth with desperate pleasure if he could ever make her laugh like that again.
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