Archive of Our Own ^beta

The lake is rippling pewter under a clear, full moon.

“Mul–”

“Shh.”

A cool breeze rustles through the canopy above them.

“What are–”

“Shh.”

Scully settles grudgingly on her haunches, ignoring the pointed look from Mulder when her kneecaps creak in protest. She juts her jaw out and scrunches her shoulders up to her ears. What am I supposed to do about that, Mulder? She wants to say. We’ve been crouched here for over an hour. Her stomach growls in accord. And we skipped dinner.

She should have known, with his track record, that there was no such thing as a nice trip to the forest with her partner.

It was a beautiful forest, she’ll give him that. But there they were, hidden away from the pebbled shore, bushy brambles poking at all sides, and Mulder. Mulder in what she can only describe as the world’s worst Oscar the Grouch impersonator suit.

“Mulder why–”

“Scully,” he pleads. “Watch.”

He was going to watch her leave soon is what was going to happen. But she sighs, fiddles with the binocular lanyard around her neck, and waits.

At the two-hour mark, her stomach really growls. Loudly. The sort of growl that could, under certain circumstances—like, say, in a forest at night—be mistaken for a bear. A hungry bear.

Beside her, Mulder shifts. Digs something out of his backpack.

“Jeez, Scully. Why didn’t you say something?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Did she not—did she not—but then he—

—drops a sandwich in her lap. An apple. A bottle of iced tea. It’s not quite so iced any more, sweating in the humid night air, but it’s the thought, she supposes. He squeezes her shoulder briefly, rubs his palm down her back. Leaves it there.

Something in her begins to thaw in spite of herself. It’s the sandwich talking, she’s sure. A blood sugar rush. Nothing to do with the heat of his hand through her jacket.

You’re mad at him, remember? He’s had you out here on a Friday night for two hours, sitting in the grass and the mud and the bugs—God, the bugs—and for what? For—

A branch snaps somewhere up ahead and Mulder snaps to attention, his face as open and wondering as she’s ever seen it.

“Scully,” he hisses. “Scully, look! C'mon!”

There’s no stopping him. There’s never been any stopping him. He’s off before she can blink, crouch-running through the brush. She has no choice but to follow.

Federal agent, I’m armed, is her go-to. Stop, or I’ll shoot. But she doesn’t tell whatever it is that goes bump in the night that she’s packing, because all she can do right now is focus on Mulder’s haphazard path and keeping up with those legs.

She also still hasn’t figured out whether or not they want to make themselves known. But Mulder isn’t the subtlest creature and, as he barrels ahead of her towards the water, she decides they’re far past the element of surprise.

Before she breaks through the clearing, he beats her to the punch with a strangled “Scully!” and a splash. When she emerges, the world is still. Moonlight glints off sand smooth rocks. Seaweed makes a home in Mulder’s discarded Sasquatch suit. The trees hold their breath as Scully catches hers on the shore.

His pops up in the lake, some thirty yards out.

Oh you have got to be–

“Mulder!” She’s going to kill him. If he doesn’t drown out there she is going to kill him.

She swears she sees him smirk before he lifts a milky white arm to point across the lake. Arms crossed obstinately across her chest, she follows the path he lays out. She tries to listen through the sounds of the forest while she looks, tries to see, but there’s nothing there.

“Come on in!” he shouts, his voice so loud in the stillness. “The water’s fine! Come on, Scully!”

“Mulder!” How many nights have they spent like this, bellowing each other’s names in the wilderness? This is your life, Dana Scully. Make of it what you will. “I am not getting in this lake!”

He bobs and rises, treading water. If he can’t reach, there’s no way she’ll be able to. And there’s no way she’s going out into a body of water of indeterminate depth in the middle of the night. No way. No. Way.

“Fine,” he calls. “But you’re gonna miss it.”

He stares at her for another minute, something unreadable dancing over his face, reflected back murky in the black-glass water. Then he turns and swims away, his body long and lean.

She will not follow. She will not. No. Fucking. Way.

But.

What if something happens? She doesn’t know what’s out there. There could really be bears. Or snakes, maybe. Poisonous ones.

He’s a grown man, she tells herself. A special agent. He can take care of himself. He doesn’t need her to follow. Nope. Not at all.

He grows smaller, a dot in the center of the lake. She bounces from foot to foot, bites her lip, rolls her eyes skyward and prays for the best.

“Wait!” she cries.

Strips off her jacket.

Wades in.

He’s a much stronger swimmer than she is, she knows, but she’s gaining on him, fast. Water clings to her pants, her sleeves, her skin, and it’s like ice. Every so often she pauses to look over at where they left their things, more as a measure than out of worry. I have swum 30 yards from shore. 50 yards from sanity. 90 yards…

“Swim here often?” He says in a backstroke as she catches up to him.

“Mulder, do you care to tell me what the hell I’m doing treading water in a lake in a full suit on a Friday night?” She tries for a moment to find the floor, but cannot. He continues to swim, circling around her like a shark.

“How would I know? I ditched my suit.” She’s kicking her legs out beneath her, spinning to keep up with him as he floats on his back, strokes and swims, dips with ease.

“I noticed. But Mulder, just a minute ago we were crouched in the bushes for two–” She pauses. “You mean you ditched your Sasquatch suit, right?”

“Mhmm,” he hums, his circles fanning out away from her, towards the new shore.

“And…” she probes, watching as, not twenty feet in front of her, he stands. The water comes to his chest. His bare, bare chest. Something like anger swells in her. Something like that, but she doesn’t usually feel anger there.

“Come on Scully, don’t you want to see what we came all this way for?”

He has his hands outstretched, and sanity fades from sight on the other shore.

“Mulder.” She doesn’t swim closer, but she doesn’t swim away. She’s having trouble here. It’s an unprecedented situation. “You’re…”

He climbs higher along the bank, water dipping to his waist. His abdomen is taut and shiny-wet.

“Smart enough to not get all my clothes wet? You really should have thought this through, Scully.”

He’s toying with her. He’s naked. They’re in a lake. It’s the middle of the night. And he’s toying with her.

“Thought this through? Thought this through? Who dragged who out here with no information? Who has followed blindly—again!—against all rational sense? Tell me, Mulder. At what point did I have time to think this through?”

Her voice is high, just this side of screechy. This is my panic face, he had said once. This is her panic voice. She can feel it, lodged there in her throat. And lower. Much lower.

He softens. Wades back in towards her. She wants to swim away. She wants to swim closer.

“You trust me.” It isn’t a question. It doesn’t need an answer. “Please. Just come on. We’ll look and then we’ll go. I promise.”

When she relents, it has nothing to do with the broad slope of his shoulders or the way his hair looks, tousled and wild. It’s because of the sting in her thighs from treading water. Not the narrowing of his hips. Not the muscles in his back, rippling as he leads her ashore. Not that.

They climb out of the water and she does not look at him. She has never not looked at something so aggressively before. She turns away and rings out her shirt as best she can, dumps mineral-heavy water out of her boots.

“Ah, come on, doc.” The lilt in his voice says he’s enjoying this. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

And sure, that’s true. Nothing she hasn’t seen before in hospital beds, in near-death experiences. In times when he’s been sick or injured. Never like this. So alive and strong and—and virile.

Virile, Dana, really? Who are you?

He nudges her gently by the shoulder, turning her towards him. She keeps her face tilted upwards. Do not look. Do not look. She looks instead at the sky. The moon. So round. Full? Close enough. Blame it on the moon. Blame it all on the moon. The insanity, the impulsiveness, the pull in her blood like the tide, urging her in in in.

“If it would make you feel better,” he says, and god help her, he really sounds like he’s trying, “you could always even the score.”

It’s the worst idea he’s ever had. The absolute worst. There’s no way. No. Fucking. Way.

And yet, standing here before him, soggy and shivering with her suit plastered to her body, she feels more naked than she’s ever been. More bared, somehow. Vulnerable.

She takes a deep breath. Looks him in the eye. Nods once.

Her shirt makes a heavy, wet sound when it lands in the mud.

They walk side by side in perfect synchrony. He slows his gait to help her keep up. Together, they avoid looking at each other entirely. It somehow puts her at ease.

God they are ridiculous.

“Mulder, where are we going? And I swear to god if you shush me again…”

His chuckle is easy and light, bouncing off the face of some unknown cliff they walk along. The rocks rise above her, with trees above them. Damp seaweed clings to the rocks down low, some at eye level, where the water’s left them behind.

“Are we in a grotto?”

“Not yet,” he says, and she briefly looks up at his face to see a smile there. He chances a glance at her before turning his eyes forward again. “Nearly there.”

The rocks grow steeper and the trees disappear as they walk further into the cave. The pebbles that had given way to mud and dirt return to beneath her feet, submerged in parts by an inch or two of cool water.

It’s a Friday night in early September and she’s walking willingly into a grotto, naked and, in spite of herself, awestruck. It’s definitely the moon.

They walk in silence, Scully’s neck craned back as she takes in the cavernous space. She doesn’t know when they passed the entrance, but suddenly the walls curve what must be 40 feet above them. The sounds of the forest are swallowed in the concavity. Light grows fainter, but her eyes adjust. Around them, shallow pools of water gather at the base of stone islands. One island is graced with a beam of moonlight, perfectly slanted and oblong.

Her mouth falls open, and beside her, seamlessly, wordlessly, wonderfully, Mulder takes her hand. She finds herself atop the island, bathed in light, and yet again tracing with her eye an invisible path Mulder sets with a milky arm. This time, he points straight up. Her neck cranes back and she gasps as she takes in the enormity of the night sky as seen trough the oculus.

“Wait for it,” he whispers. Suddenly, brilliantly, a streak of light darts across the sky, between the stars.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

Another flash lights the sky, this one almost green. It leaves a tail in its wake, phosphorescent and glowing like a comet. But she’s seen comets before. Meteor showers, too. And they never looked quite like this.

“Is it…” She can’t bring herself to finish that sentence, but Mulder catches on and chuckles, squeezing her hand.

“Extraterrestrial? Only in the sense that it’s not on earth. No, Scully. No aliens tonight. This is a one hundred percent scientifically explainable phenomenon.” He squeezes her hand again, leaning in close enough to brush her damp shoulder with his. His voice drops an octave. “Or it would be. If anyone could explain it.”

“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs as another flash, just a little bit red, splits the stars.

It’s like watching fireworks, almost. If fireworks were a thousand times more powerful, a hundred thousand times more natural. The scientist in her wants to construct a ladder to the heavens, to drag telescopes and computers and cameras into this grotto and quantify every spark, every flare.

But the woman in her, the woman standing here stripped to the bone, without pretense or identity, is content to watch. Wants only to watch. A snatch of poetry comes back to her from her undergrad days.

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

She understands.

“I’m sorry,” Mulder says after a minute, voice church-soft and close. “I really did think we might see something in the woods tonight. Before this.”

She shakes her head. The cramp in her legs, the bugs crawling into her shirtsleeves feel a thousand miles away right now. She hazards a glance at him to find him already watching her, eyes as unreadable and luminous as the unexplainable scientific phenomena in the sky.

Words seem too little. Too much. She squeezes his hand, threads her fingers more firmly between his. He nods once and traces her thumb with his.

They tip their faces back to the sky and watch.