Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

December 21st, 1999
Georgetown

The car idles at the curb side, buttery light from the streetlight above cutting through the dirty windshield and casting shadows across her face. Scully’s head lolls back against the headrest, mouth ajar, breath vibrating in her throat with a quiet rumble.

Mulder reaches over and tucks a wave of hair behind her ear, runs his thumb over the small pearl earring in her left ear, measures the precise angle of her mandible. She sucks in a breath as her eyes fly open and her head jerks. Awareness settles over her as she blinks away the sleep, relaxing back into his touch.

“I, uh, didn’t quite get you home by sunset,” he confesses, palming her cheek. Their faces are inches apart.

“You didn’t get me home yesterday, either” she replies without regret, covering his hand with her own.

The air in the car is thick and he leans, or she does, until the tips of their noses brush together. Up this close he can hear he tick of her wristwatch, smell the warm cotton-fresh scent of her deodorant, the fading bouquet of her shampoo. He presses his lips to hers and her mouth is open to him immediately, hot little tongue sliding between his teeth. His other hand finds its way to the back of her head, fingers digging into her hair and she moans into his mouth and bites his lip.

It’s not the first kiss they’ve shared, not even the first that has gone from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye. Since her return from Africa and his mental epiphany, they have tiptoed over the line from friends and partners toward something else.

By osmosis they have somehow reached the common agreement they are taking it slow. In the past month they have segued from the forehead kiss in his hallway to open mouthed kisses that leave them both gasping, and one make-out session in a Pittsfield motel that saw him jerking off with his back against the door the second he got back to his own room.

But Jesus. This kiss. A kaleidoscope of butterflies take flight in his stomach as her tongue probes his teeth for fillings. She laces their fingers together and holds his hand between them, tucked against her heart.

Time slows and his peripheral awareness narrows to the rise and fall of her chest, the slip of her hair through his fingers, the tickle of her nose against his cheek. A goddamn mariachi band could stomp past the car right now and he wouldn’t notice.

Slowly she retracts, soothing his bitten lower lip with her tongue before she finally leans back into her seat, breathing heavily. Hair falls across her forehead in choppy waves. She looks down at their joined hands. “Come with me this weekend.”

He runs his thumb across her knuckles, a silent request for her to elaborate.

“To my mother’s. Come with me for Christmas.” She chances a look at him and he can see the shyness in her eyes, the contraction in her jaw that exposes her uncertainty. It staggers him that after all that has happened there could be any doubt in her mind about his feelings.

Raising her hand to his lips he presses a kiss against her wrist. “Ok,” he says and it seems to him that she has almost stopped breathing.

‘Ok?”

His lips quirk in a smile and he squeezes her fingers. “Ok.”

She squeezes his fingers back and he is undone by the love in her eyes.

***

December 24th,
Alexandria

Mulder is waiting on his front step at the pre-agreed time with his duffle bag by his feet, one hand deep in his coat pocket and the other ferrying sunflower seeds to his mouth. The air has the crystalline silence of falling snow and he scuffs his toe on the ground until a black ‘M’ shines through the white.

Dipped headlights approach and Scully pulls to a stop in front of him. He spits a shell out and grabs his bag.

The inside of the car smells of leather and Scully’s perfume. She gives him a second to get settled before glancing over her shoulder and pulling out onto the street.

“How was Mass?” he asks, fiddling with the vents until a stream of warm air blows over him.

“Fine. My Mom and brothers took Mass up in Baltimore so they could get the boys in bed before nine thirty.”

“Bill and Charlie both got in today?”

“Bill and Tara today. Charlie and Sara have been here since Tuesday. They wanted to make the trip from Hong Kong worth it. It’s like a twenty-two hour flight.”

Mulder walks his fingers along the squashy plastic trim of the center console. “It must be a houseful.”

“7 adults, 4 kids staying over; my Aunt Olive for dinner tomorrow. And Father McCue,” they cross over the 11th St Bridge and she takes the exit for the 295. “And a partridge in a pear tree.”

“You’re sure there’s… room?” he asks and mentally slaps himself. Since his round ticket on the brain-surgery express a preternatural calm has settled over him. All the concerns about taking the next step in their relationship have simply faded, leaving only a quiet certainty that there is only one destination on this road they travel together. Now is not the time to start turning the map upside down.

“You’ll be bunking with me.”

Unexpected.

Mulder’s mouth flaps a couple times before he can form a sentence. “That must’ve been an interesting conversation.” Scully smirks, shrugging.

“Your Mom’s ok with that?” he presses when she doesn’t elaborate. He already feels a little hot under the collar at the prospect of sharing a bed for two nights.

“Missy was born December 1962. My parents were married in November ’62.” She glances at him but mostly keeps her eyes on the snow-covered road ahead. “Do the math.”

“Huh.”

‘Huh,” she agrees.

The wipers screak against the windshield as Scully tries, and fails, to find an optimum interval.

“I just hope you don’t take advantage of me in your girlhood room, Scully.” Please take advantage of me.

“The likelihood of that scenario is extremely remote.” Her lips quirk and he walks his fingers from the center console to the leather of her seat and scratches a fingernail at the seam of her slacks.

“Oh?”

“I never lived in that house when I was a girl.”

His next ‘oh’ is disappointed.

“I think it might be the same bed though,” she posits nonchalantly, and he lets out a playful groan that makes her smile.

The rear seats are filled with gifts and an exquisite bouquet of red roses mixed with gold pinecones and some green foliage he doesn’t know the name of. Mulder grabs a small neatly wrapped box from the nearest bag. He shakes it then holds it to his ear before peaking at the label.

“To Bill, Love Dana and Mulder”

“What’d we get him? A personality transplant?”

“Knuckleduster.”

He hopes she’s joking. “Let’s hope he doesn’t have use for it this weekend.”

Chapter Text

9.36pm, Baltimore

It had been false optimism to think that by taking an earlier Mass they would have the boys settled and in bed by 9.30pm.  Charlie and Sara are doing laps of the house trying to get three jet-lagged and over excited children ready for bed.  No sooner do they seem to have rounded up two, then the third has disappeared.  Margaret Scully hears her youngest son’s voice booming from somewhere upstairs, “So help me God, Michael Scully, if you don’t get your butt in this bathroom and brush your teeth, Santa’s not going to be bringing any presents!”

Margaret wanders through the dining room, already set for tomorrow, through the living room and the den, straightening cushions and collecting dirty glasses as she goes.   The house is decked to the nines.  If Bill were here, she knows he would be rolling his eyes and complaining that the old wiring can’t cope with so many strands of fairy lights or that all the candles are a breach of the Maryland fire code.   The house hasn’t been this full since her own children were teenagers.  Only Charlie and Dana ever really lived here, and Dana for barely a year before she started medical school, but wherever they were in the world, all the Scully children headed home for Christmas. 

In the kitchen, Tara is heating a bottle for Matthew.  “Maybe those candy canes in the car weren’t such a good idea.”

“A house like this should have some life in it,” Margaret says, as she stacks the glasses in the dishwasher.  She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of wine.  “Although I think a glass of wine would help us all relax.”  She takes a glass from the cabinet and tilts a second at Tara, offering.

“God, yes!”

Margaret pours and they clink glasses before each taking a large sip.

“You know, I was just thinking that this is the first time all the kids will have been back together since before Bill died.”  She takes a sip of wine.  “Of course, Missy was here then too.”

Tara squeezes her arm and Margaret smiles and pats her hand, determined not to become maudlin about what was lost, and focus instead on the blessings she has.

From under the kitchen table, there is a scuffling noise.  Margaret ducks down and finds Charlie’s youngest son, Michael, sitting cross-legged in his pajamas eating from a box of raisins.

“I’m going to stay up to see Aunt Dana,” he informs her confidently, like he has any say in the matter.

“She’s going to be here soon, sweetheart.”

“With her boyfriend,” Michael adds helpfully

“With Fox, yes,” Margaret agrees carefully.  Over the top of the table she catches Tara’s eyebrows flicker with amusement.  Her daughter-in-law has never harbored the same animosity toward Fox as her husband.  Where Bill is hot-headed, Tara is calm.  Where he is judgmental, she has a live and let live attitude.  It’s a miracle they’re so happy together, and Margaret credits the success of their union with Tara’s deft handling of her cantankerous husband’s fickle moods.  And the fact that he spends ten months a year at sea.

When Dana had phoned at the start of the week to ask if she could bring Fox, Margaret had been icing a Christmas cake and listening to Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols.  She’d tucked the phone against her shoulder as she molded sugar paste into holly leaves.  An invitation to Holiday celebrations had been extended to her daughter’s partner many times over the years – but truly she had never anticipated it might one day be accepted. 

“He’ll stay with me,” Dana had told her – actually using a very similar tone of voice to her bed-dodging nephew.  “In my room,” she clarified, in case there was any lingering doubt.

Margaret had set down the icing and rested her hip on the kitchen stool.  “So it’s like that now?” she said at last.

“It’s like that.”  A pause, and then softer.  “I’d really like it if you would be happy for me Mom.”

“Oh honey, I am happy for you.  I’m just surprised.”  Which wasn’t a lie, exactly.  

She had known since the first year they worked together that Dana saw him as more than a colleague.  Her youngest daughter always played her cards close to her chest, but it was clear that in Fox she had found a true friend.   And when she was missing, Margaret had looked at the broken man before her and known that friendship was the least of it; somewhere along the way a procumbent love had grown.  Oh, sure, she’d have had to be blind to miss the heated looks they gave one another – truth be told, she’d suspected ‘the forbidden’ was half the attraction for them.  That had certainly been the case in the past for Dana. 

But later, years later, when Fox knelt by Dana’s bedside in New York, Margaret realized she had been wrong.  This love had roots.  Roots so deep, she doubted either of them would ever excise the other from their heart.  And while she had not actually expected them to ever act on it, she doubted there could ever be anyone else for either of them.

This life Dana is living isn’t what she had wanted for her daughter, but with time and prayer, she has come to accept that they are Dana’s choices to make.  Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

The doorbell signals the arrival of Dana and Fox, and Michael darts from under the table scattering raisins.

By the time Margaret arrives at the door, Dana is holding a six-year-old boy with his arms and legs wrapped around her and Fox is standing a few steps back, laden with bags and sporting a nervous look.  Snow dusts their shoulders, and she ushers them both in so the door can be closed.

“We’re running a little behind schedule.  The boys refused to go to bed until they saw you and I think they’re all still a little jet-lagged,” she explains, kissing Dana’s cheek and then turning to Fox.  “Welcome, I’m so glad you could come.”

He bounces from foot to foot on the welcome matt.  “Thank you for having me Mrs. Scully,” he says earnestly, and she can see the child inside him.  There is something decidedly Peter Pan-like about Fox Mulder.

***

Mulder is hiding in the kitchen when Scully finds him, having been given the nickel tour by her mother, and narrowly avoided castration during his first run-in of the weekend with Bill.  The guy had shaken his hand and then all but wiped his hand on his pants.  He’d dug deep in previously undiscovered reserves of restraint and plastered a shit-eating smile on that left Bill eyeing at him suspiciously.  Mulder is determined to get through the weekend without embarrassing himself.  Or Scully.

“Hey,” she murmurs, sidling up to him until their feet are practically touching and she has to tilt her head back to see him.  She hooks a finger though one of his belt loops.  “You haven’t bailed yet?”

“Not until I’ve had the turkey I was promised.”

Scully pinches him and he smiles.  She looks soft around the edges and he’s thinking of kissing her.  She might be thinking about it too, judging by how her eyes are mostly looking at his mouth.

“I think the boys are finally all asleep.”

“They’re, uh, energetic, right?”

“It’s karma for Charlie.  I think he was undiagnosed ADHD growing up.”

“I heard that,” a man who Mulder assumes to be Charlie shuffles into the kitchen like he’s a hundred years old.  “You could at least make sure I’m out of earshot before you badmouth my spawn.”

Scully drops her hand from his waist but she doesn’t step away.  “I was just going to make some tea, do you want?”

“I’ve got three kids under ten, who all appear to share more genetic traits with a hyperactive chimpanzee than they do with a human being.  I work 90 hours a week in a thankless and totally unfulfilling job making lots of money for very rich men who have no scruples.  My body things it’s already the day after Christmas, and I just flew to the other side of the world so that you could pick holes in my parenting techniques.  Do I look like the guy who’s choosing chamomile over whisky?”

Scully smiles and gets a glass and pours a healthy measure of scotch. 

Charlie accepts it with a grateful look and takes a large sip.  He sighs contentedly and then fixes his gaze on Mulder.  “Sorry dude,” he says putting the glass down and offering Mulder his hand.  “I should’ve introduced myself before giving you my life story.  Charlie Scully.”

“Fox Mulder.”

“So,” he says at length.  “You’re the guy.”  Mulder holds his tongue and Charlie gives him a long, appraising look.  Scully’s brother has their mother’s dark hair and heart shaped face, and Scully’s incisive blue eyes. 

“You don’t look like a complete asshole.”  Charlie takes another sip of scotch.  “Although neither does Bill, so we know looks can be deceptive.”

“Charlie,” Scully admonishes but her mouth twitches with amusement.  She hands Mulder a cup of tea and they sit down at the table.

“Oh what, you disagree?”  Charlie rubs his eyes and scrubs his hands over his face.  “I’m so tired, but when I lie down I can’t sleep”.

“Scotch is not going to help you sleep,” Scully advises, blowing over the top of her tea.

“If you’re going to be a fucking doctor about it, can’t you write me a script for some Ambien?”

“Take some warm milk and have a hot bath.”

“I’m not 5 years old Dana,” he gripes and sighs, and then to Mulder.  “I’m not normally this miserable.”  Mulder makes a sympathetic noise.  “I’d introduce you to my wife but she’s passed out on the bed still wearing her clothes.  Lucky bitch.”

“I was surprised when Mom told me you guys were coming.”

“She really turned the thumb screws this time.  And to be honest I have a meeting in New York after Christmas about a new job.  Sara and I are kind of done living with three chimpanzees in what passes for an apartment in Hong Kong.  Mom’s downstairs cloakroom is bigger than our kitchen.”

“That would be brilliant,” Scully remarks touching her brother’s hand.

“Yeah.  Well.  At least New York is still far enough away that Mom would need to call before she visits.”

“She’s not that bad..”

“Really Dana?”  Scully catches Mulder’s eye and has the grace to blush.  He remembers her whispered phone calls when she was on sick leave after her cancer, She’s driving me insane, Mulder.  And later when she was recovering from being shot, I’m thinking of Thallium, Mulder.  Not enough to kill her, just enough to make her GO HOME.  The M.E. will never think to look for it.  He hadn’t questioned the logic that if the poison didn’t kill her, the M.E. wouldn’t be doing an autopsy.

 “Well, I’d love to stay and chat but Santa still has deliveries to make.  And those cookies aren’t going to eat themselves.”  He drags himself to his feet with a long groan, and then rests a hand on Scully’s shoulder.  “It’s really good to see you, Sis.”  They share a smile and he cuffs her gently on the cheek before shuffling out of the kitchen.

***

12:09am

Mulder lies on his side facing Scully, who he can tell is turned toward him only because he can feel the soft puff of her breath on his face.  Her room is at the back of the house where no streetlight reaches, and it’s only after several minutes that he can even make out the curve of her shoulder.  Around them the house settles, the creak of someone passing by on the landing, a distant toilet flushing, murmured voices fading slowly as sleep prevails. 

“When did your parents move here?” he asks, voice barely more than a whisper.

“Summer of ‘81.  I’d already started at Berkeley but my father wouldn’t let me stay on the West Coast on my own so I had to switch to UMD.  I was so pissed, when it came to applying for medical school I wouldn’t look at anything east of Chicago.  I was only here for a year before I started Stanford.”

Mulder smiles at the thought of 18-year-old Dana Scully, desperate for independence.  “I guess I never thought of you as a Californian girl before tonight.”

“If the FBI hadn’t come along I’d probably still be over there,” she admits.  It’s been a long time since he could imagine his life without her in it.  It’s been a long time since he even tried.

“So, this was your girlhood bed,” he says after a pause, working his hand under the blanket to rest on her hip.  She hums a response.  “Did it see much action?”

A snort.  “What do you think?”  If he concentrates hard and doesn’t blink, he might just be able to make out the gleam of her teeth.

“Your Mom showed me the pictures Scully, you would’ve been beating them off with a stick.”

“Hardly,” she says, edging closer to him and nudging him with her toes.  Head to head, her feet barely reach his knees.

His hand ventures further in exploration. “I’m not sure what she was trying to achieve showing me a photograph of you on a surfboard, wearing a bikini, when Bill was standing right there next to us.  I swear to God, he was watching my crotch for signs of life just so he had an excuse to punch me.” 

“Poor Mulder,’ she murmurs as he nibbles along her jaw.

“Hell yes, ‘Poor Mulder,” he affirms, “My brain went into meltdown, I couldn’t decide whether it was worse to drool over you or feign indifference.  It seemed like either way I was fucked.”

“Fucked, huh?” she says in low voice, shifting her elbow so Mulder can cup her left breast in his hand. He rocks his hips into hers, adding to the warmth building in his groin. 

Scully’s fingernails score his back and one knee drifts over his thighs.  “I don’t particularly want to have sex in my parent’s house,” she says in direct contradiction to her actions. 

“I paid attention to the Starr depositions, Scully, and according to the President, the definition of what does, or does not, constitute sex, is highly equivocal.” 

She huffs a laugh that ends on gasp when his mouth closes over her satin covered breast and he starts to pluck at the buttons on her pajama top. 

“Jesus… Mulder,” she warns, pulling on his shoulders.  His hand stills and he sips at the corner of her mouth, first one side, then the other.

“Do you trust me, Scully?”

A small sigh.  “You know I do.”

Mulder presses one more kiss to her mouth and trails his lips down her chin to her neck.  His teeth graze the fraught columns of her neck as she tilts to give him better access and he thumbs the buttons of her top one by one, until he can brush the top open and place his lips over her suprasternal notch.  He ends up with a mouthful of cross instead.

Before she can react, he’s propelling himself out of bed and fumbling for the lamp on the dresser.

“What are you doing?” she asks, leaning up on her elbows, forehead crinkling in confusion.  Navy satin barely covers her breasts and her chest is mottled pink.

He shucks his t-shirt and tosses it over the lamp, dulling the light, and then approaches the foot of the bed.  He grabs the blankets and tugs until they drop to the floor at his feet.  Scully’s eyes have taken on a wild sheen which he expects is mirrored in his own.  “I want to see you,” he answers, climbing onto the bed on his knees and crawling over her until she has to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact.  “I don’t want,” he nips her lips with his. “To miss.” Another nip.  “A fucking second of this.”

Scully lurches for his mouth and swallows the final sibilant hiss.  He props himself up on his elbows and threads his fingers through her hair. 

Together they are animalistic.  This has already blown the make-out session in Pittsfield out the water.  He’s mindful of their location but he can’t help himself groaning into her mouth when she sucks on his tongue. 

She lets go of his head long enough to let him tug the pajama top from her shoulders and toss it aside, and then her hands go right back to sifting through his hair.  He always suspected she had a thing for it, certainly never misses an opportunity anytime he gets bumped on the head.

Slowly he drags his tongue down her chest and over one nipple and then the other.  They swell and harden in his mouth.  He glances up and she’s watching him with hooded eyes and flushed cheeks. The tips of her fingers tease his ears gently, and it’s a marvel to him that hands which are strong enough to kill a man or wield a scalpel with infinite precision, can also bestow a touch so tender that his heart beats double time.

Leisurely, he makes his way down her body, scraping his nails across her skin and then laving the red marks with his tongue.  He worries the taut muscles of her abdomen with his teeth and then drags his lower lip from the drawstring on her pajamas to the dip of her navel.  He sucks on the proud points of her iliac crest and grasps a breast in each hand, pinching her nipples until she is panting and goosebumps cover her skin.

By the time her pajamas and panties hit the floor the air is heavy with the scent of her arousal.

Mulder settles himself between her thighs and blows air over the slick line of her sex and her back arches off the bed.  “Oh my God..” she whispers, clawing at the sheets.  Oh my God, he agrees, unable to quite believe that he’s about to do this. 

She crackles under his mouth and after a few broad swipes of his tongue, it is clear she is already perilously close to the edge.  Christ, he himself has never been so close with his pants still on.

He slides a finger into her, then two, and drags them out of her like a question mark.  Above him, she sounds like she is running a marathon.  He spreads her open with his other hand, fingers sliding over the sticky folds, and purses his lips over her clitoris.  She is as thick and sweet as salted caramel.

“Oh fuck! Jesus don’t stop!” Scully chokes out, hands flying to the back of his head.  She isn’t loud but the house around them is silent.  With a flicker of panic, he takes the hand that was holding her open and presses his tacky fingers against her lips.

In the next second, time stretches out. 

Scully’s takes his fingers into her mouth.  He can feel the rough texture of her tongue on the pads of his fingers, the sharp edge of her teeth against his knuckles.  He sucks hard on her clitoris, plunges his fingers deep inside her, and she surges beneath him. 

There is nothing but air between her ass and the wings of her shoulder blades.  Her thighs are rigid against his ears and her inner walls clamp down on his fingers with the same pressure as her mouth does.

His world goes black.  His hips rock against thin air and he shudders as comes. 

And comes. 

He is peripherally aware that he is groaning into her sex like he’s been shot, but he has lost the wherewithal to care.

Mulder collapses on his back.  His pulse is a hummingbird in his chest and his muscles feel like stretched toffee.  Beside him, a laugh bubbles in Scully and she covers her face with her hands to stifle it.  He crawls up beside her, caressing her stomach, her arms, with long strokes meant to sooth rather than excite.  Her nipples could still put his eye out.

“That was fun,” he says with a smile and slowly she lowers her hands.  Her own expression is one of awe.  She looks punch-drunk and stupefied.

“Jesus, Mulder,” she manages after a fashion, and he scatters kisses along her neck to hide his smile. Dear Diary, today I rendered Agent Scully speechless.

When the pace of her breathing has normalized, she reaches for him, fingers toying with the drawstring on his pajamas.  “That ship has sailed,” he admits, catching her hand.

“Wh-?  Oh!”

He leans over to kiss her.  “That was unbelievably hot,” he whispers.

“That was… I can’t… I mean…” she traces the lines at the edge of his eyes with her fingertips and her mouth curves in a smile.   “I think you short-circuited my brain.”  Her voice is higher than normal, girlish almost.

She looks so beautiful lying there, effervescent eyes and flushed pink skin.   His heart feels like it’s too big for his chest. 

Scully smooths her thumb over his lower lip.  “What is it?” she asks, voice approaching its normal tone as higher brain function returns to her in increments.

He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out, so he pulls her to him until her head rests on his chest and they are wrapped together.

Chapter Text

After a 6.30am wakeup call that the dead couldn’t have slept through, the older kids are playing with new toys in the den, while Matthew plays with the wrapping paper.  He smooths each piece out as carefully as a two-year-old can, and then delivers a piece solemnly to each adult, handing it over with the gravity you might reserve for a Communion wafer or the Dead Sea scrolls.

Bill is monopolizing most of the kitchen table as he pores over the instructions for a Fisher Price farm set which looks like it has more components than the space shuttle.  He sighs frequently and has rotated the pictogram more than once.  Mulder would offer his help, but he suspects Bill wouldn’t need instructions in order to tell him which hole he could shove tab B into.  Tara, wisely, leaves her husband to it, and sips her coffee while chatting with Margaret and Sara about the two kindergartens they are deciding between so she can return to work in the Spring.

“It wasn’t even a consideration in the 60’s,” Margaret muses, accepting a scrap of giftwrap from Matthew and patting him on the head.  “Not many women had careers, and if they did then they didn’t continue them once they got married and had children.” There is a vaguely wistful tone in her voice which surprises Mulder.  He always had her pegged as a real June Cleaver.  But then he hadn’t really had her and the illustrious Bill Scully Snr. pegged as the type for a shotgun wedding either.

Scully offers Bill a piece of formed red plastic that could be part of the roof.  Or the side of a tractor.  He takes it off her and looks down at his instructions blankly.  She rotates the piece in his hand and a flicker of recognition passes over his face. 

“Didn’t you and the Captain ever discuss you going back to school?” Sara asks and Margaret smiles.

“Honey, no one ever really discussed anything with the Captain.”  Bill snorts but doesn’t say anything.  “And besides, what was I going to do with a degree in chemistry?  I know it’s common now for both parents to have careers but in those days it just wasn’t.  By the time Dana was born, we’d already lived in five different houses – there was no way I could’ve finished school and gotten a job.  I’m not sure I would call it a choice to stay home with the kids, but it was what we needed for our family and I’m glad I did it.”

Mulder watches Scully as she quietly hands another piece of barn to her brother and taps the corresponding piece on the instruction sheet.  He can tell she’s listening to the conversation around her, but she’s very careful to avoid eye contact with anyone, and thereby the risk of being drawn into the discussion. 

The subject of children is no longer verboten, but the wound still smarts.

For a long time after Emily, after the failed IVF attempt, she would blanche at the sight of a baby.  He doubted she was even aware of it, but he was.  The barest twitch of her jaw, a subtle shift in her shoulders and he would scan the surroundings until he found what had set her off.  It became a personal challenge to spot the babies before she did and position himself so his body blocked her view.  He developed a sixth sense for pregnant women.  On a red-eye home from Iowa, a fortnight after the implantation failed, he’d slipped the flight attendant $100 to switch their seats when he realized the woman already sitting in their row was heavily pregnant.

“I know, Mulder,” she said, one day late in August, eyes scanning the hieroglyphics of a lab report as she balanced it against the edge of her salad box.  They were lingering over lunch at Mulder’s favorite deli, sitting outside in the dappled shade of a lush acer, as they worked on a casefile for a ViCAP consult.  Or Scully worked.  Mulder sucked on the ice-cubes from his tea and waxed lyrical about the pertinence of extispicy while he tried to dissuade her attention from wandering to the table beside them, where a woman who looked very much like AD Cassidy was fussing over what appeared to be a new granddaughter.

It was 98 degrees in the shade and her arms were bare, deltoids flexing as she leaned back in her chair and tossed her fountain pen down on a photo of splayed entrails.  Her hair gleamed in the sun, methylene blue eyes unfettered and open as she regarded him.  It was an emotional state which neither of them usually lingered in for long and Mulder prayed for transience.

He tugged on his tie.  “Well of course, in this case the term more accurately would be ‘hepatoscopy’.”

Scully’s head tipped to the side and she squinted in the sun.  He was fooling no one, least of all her.

“I see what you’ve been doing.”

He swallowed his ice-cube and rested both his hands palm-side down on the table. 

“I’m not going to break,” she said softly.

“I was scared you might.”

Seconds ticked by and he was beginning to think nothing more would be said on the subject.  Pigeons cooed in the branches above them and the S2 deposited a half-dozen sweaty Government employees on the kerb before pulling away a hiss of rubber and exhaust.  Scully’s hands, third-scale and freckled in the late summer sun, covered his.

“I didn’t ever stop to think about how it might affect you,” she admitted, “I mean we talked about what it would be like if it worked,” a sigh and a glance at him from under her eyelashes, “But not if it didn’t.”

He turned his hands so they were palm to palm with Scully’s.  “At first I wanted it for you,” he confessed, the words like rocks in his throat, “But then somewhere along the way I started to want it for me too.” 

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes shining as guilt creased her forehead, and he started to shake his head before the words were even out her mouth.

“No!” he said, desperate to make her understand.  He pulled one of her hands to his mouth and pressed his lips to her fingertips, tasting salt.  “I want it for both of us,” he whispered against her skin.

Her shoulders shuddered as she took a breath, “Mulder -” she said thickly, voice coming unglued.

He kissed her fingers again, “Never give up on a miracle, Scully,” he said, reprising his promise of months ago.  She offered him a tiny nod and a watery smile that he could tell she was trying to mean. 

Somewhere between then and now they’d started to put the pieces back together again.

Somewhere between then and now she had started to smile at babies again.

“Is it true you can die from lack of sleep?” Charlie asks, sinking into the seat next to Sara.  He drops his forehead on her shoulder with a pained sigh and she pats his head.

“Anecdotally,” Scully replies.  “There was a study on rats in the late ‘80s.  After four weeks of total deprivation the mortality rate was 100%.”  She positions a sticker of a cat licking its paw with micrometer precision.  “They failed to determine the actual cause of death though.  Possibly something to do with their immune systems becoming so depressed that gut bacteria spread throughout the body.”

“So just make sure you drink your DanActive and you’ll be fine.” Bill clips the last piece of roof on and holds the barn up with a satisfied ‘Ta-da’.

Margaret hands Charlie a cup of coffee.  “Didn’t you sleep any better, sweetheart?”

“Not really Mom,” he replies, accepting the cup and adding three spoons of sugar and a glug of cream.  He selects a croissant from the basket on the table and licks icing sugar from his thumb.

“But you know, I swear I heard Santa arrive.”

Margaret laughs, “Oh really?”

“Yeah, he must have stubbed his toe coming down the chimney because I heard him groaning.”  Sara bites off a smile and elbows her husband but he’s undeterred. “Did anybody else hear that?” he asks, looking around kitchen innocently.

Mulder takes a sip of coffee to hide his face.  Scully’s expression is neutral but a flush rises high in her cheeks.  He dare not even look at Bill.

“No?  Just me?”

“Oh well you know these old houses, all sorts of strange noises,” Margaret says, either oblivious, or letting it slide.

Matthew toddles up to Mulder and holds out a scrap of gold paper like a page from the Book of Enoch.

“Is that for me?” Mulder asks, glad to have somewhere to direct his attention.  He leans forward and accepts the paper.  Matthew smiles around his pacifier. 

“Dana, I have the receipt for those sneakers if the fit isn’t good,” Margaret says.

Mulder nudges Scully in the ribs.  “I might head out for a run in a bit, if you wanted to break them in.”

Scully narrows her eyes at him.  “No thanks.” She has refused to exercise with him since their second case together, when he convinced her to join him for a run around Marriette Field.  He was an asshole back then, not inclined to make any allowances for his new partner.  If anything, he had picked up the pace and run faster than he normally would just to test her.  Scully, being naturally competitive and never one to admit defeat easily, had kept up with him for almost seven miles, running as hard as she could.  When he finally came to a stop, she had been so winded she’d ended up hurling into a garbage can.

“You sure?” he asks invitingly, squeezing her knee under the table.  “I’ll let you set the pace..”

She catches his hand and flicks an eyebrow, wets her lips, and if he didn’t know better he’d think she was flirting.    He’s not very good at reading her recently, she keeps doing unexpected things like sticking her tongue down his throat beside the filing cabinets or inviting him to family events and holding his hand in front of her Catholic mother and her over-protective big brother.

“Bill was going to take a run this morning, weren’t you Honey?” Tara volunteers, cheerfully. 

“Uh, I guess,” he mumbles, looking like he would rather extract his own toenails with a pair of pliers than go running with Mulder. 

Beside him Scully looks amused, but she doesn’t let go of his hand.

Mulder sips his coffee, sizing Bill up, and wonders whether he can outrun another Scully.

***

Hot water sluices over his shoulders and back and down his burning hamstrings.  Bill, it turns out, is actually faster than he looks.  In fact, for the first few miles, Mulder had to push himself to keep up.  But whereas Bill slowed as the miles clipped by, Mulder found his groove.  In the end they were pretty evenly matched, and while the run was completed in near silence, it was peaceable.  Bill seems to be able to keep his dislike of Mulder at a low simmer.

So engrossed is he in his thoughts, Mulder doesn’t even realize someone has come into the bathroom until the shower curtain swishes to the side and Scully steps into the tub. 

A very naked Scully. 

“Are you lost?” he asks, looking down at her.  Steam billows around them as cold air rushes in with her.  Barefoot like this, the height differential is pronounced, and he feels like a giant towering over her. 

She slides her hands up his chest and stands on her tiptoes to nibble at his chin.  “No, I know exactly where I am.”

His hands flail around in the air before landing on her hips, as the fingers of her right hand trail down his stomach to tease his rapidly awakening cock.

“Anyone else know where you are?”  

“Everyone’s busy.  No one care’s where we are, and I..” her mouth closes over his Adam’s apple and she sucks. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

So this is what Scully with an active sex life is like, he thinks as she looks up at him with hooded eyes and flushed cheeks.  God, but she is beautiful.  Droplets of water collect in the dips above her clavicles.

“I don’t think we can blame any moaning on Santa this time,” he says fanning his fingers across her hips and marveling at how incredibly narrow her waist is.  The globes of her ass fit perfectly in the palms of her hands and when he squeezes gently she moans into his neck.

“Better keep quiet then.”  She gives his throat one last lick and then drops to her knees in front of him, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the base of his cock while the fingernails of the other dig into his ass muscles.  He barely has time to register what’s happening before she draws him into her mouth and sucks hard. 

His knees buckle and he grabs at the slick tiles for balance.  An unintelligible sound comes from his mouth and she looks up at him, a mix of amusement and affection in her eyes.  In all the blow jobs he’s had in the past, no one ever looked him in the eye while doing it.  But Scully’s eyes are locked on his as she relaxes the suction and lets him slip from her mouth, before pressing the flat of her tongue against the underside of his cock and licking him from base to tip.  It’s one of the most intimate sexual experiences of his life.

He cups her face and brushes wet strands of hair from her eyes with his thumbs.  Her lips close around him again and she has to drop his gaze in order to take him deep into her mouth until he is prodding at the back of her throat.

Her head bobs up and down in concert with her hand and Mulder tries hard, he really tries, not to thrust into her mouth.  His eyes drift closed and he droops back against the tiles.  “Oh God, Dana,” he breathes, her name feeling strange in his mouth.  She hums around him and the noise reverberates through him, causing the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end.  Her hand drifts away from his ass and when he drags his eyes open, he sees that it’s now between her legs. 

He jerks into her throat at the sight of her getting herself off while his swollen cock slides in and out of her mouth. 

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he whispers, when she makes a choking noise, but she doesn’t stop her ministrations on his cock. 

Her mauve nipples are taut peaks against the milk-white of her breasts and her forehead is creased in concentration as she edges them both closer to orgasm.  It’s the exact same expression she has when she’s working on a problem, and he knows he will never look at her across the office again and see her wearing it, without remembering this moment.

His fingers dig into her shoulder, urging her on.  “Scuh..scuh,” he gasps, feeling his climax bearing down on him.  He couldn’t stop now if Bill burst in and waved a gun in his face. His balls contract and her hand stills between her legs and she moans against him, throat rippling around his cock as he erupts into her mouth.  She might as well be sucking the very marrow from his bones.

He sags back against the wall, heart thundering, and holds out both his hands to help her rise.  Her knees are pink from the hard enamel tub and he gathers her to him, bearing her weight as her arms wind around him.

The ‘I love you’, when it comes, is sweet and uncomplicated, whispered into his neck like a devotion.

Chapter Text

Christmas dinner at the Scullys’ is not for the fainthearted, or those with small appetites.  Two and a half hours in and the children have been excused but the adults still linger, wine and laughter flowing freely. 

Mulder really had not known what to expect when he had accepted the invitation, but truly he had been made to feel welcome in Margaret Scully’s home.  There is clearly a deep love and affection between mother and children.

He could well imagine that the atmosphere in the Scully household would have been very different depending on whether Captain Scully was at sea or not.   The impression Mulder had built up of the Captain was of a demanding and rigid man, big on duty, who loved his children but found it hard, Mulder expected, much like his own father, to express it. 

That one union could produce three – four including Melissa – such different personalities, was a marvel to Mulder.  But then parenting seemed to be a bit like freezing ice cubes.  You could use the same tray and water from the same tap and on the outside the cubes might look the same, but a thousand times over when you looked closely no two ice cubes would be the same.

But for all their differences, there was a camaraderie between the siblings borne of shared experience.

He tentatively drapes an arm over the back of Scully’s chair, thumb stroking the curve of her bare shoulder.  Candlelight dances over her face and she smiles into her wineglass as Charlie works toward the punchline of a story about a party the teenage Scully children had thrown before leaving San Diego. 

“Mom and Ahab were over on the East Coast – looking at this place I think – and Bill and Missy and Dana hatched a plan to have a ‘farewell California’ party.  I was just a baby, dragged along for the ride –“

“Ha, you were the one who convinced Hunter to bring all that weed,” Bill interjects, and then ducks his head contritely toward his mother.  “Sorry Mom, Father McCue – listen the other way.” 

Father McCue just chuckles, not remotely perturbed.  Margaret seems shocked to learn about the wayward Hunter, “Captain Jones’s son?  He was such a nice boy!”

“He did five years in Federal prison for distribution,” Scully says over the top of her glass and Charlie whistles.

“How’d you find that out?”

“Richard Johansen told me.”

“He always had such wonderful manners.”

Bill chortles, “Dana certainly thought so.” Scully mouths ‘ha-ha’ at her brother and then glances at Mulder, a flicker of embarrassment crossing her face.  He squeezes her shoulder and smiles.  Seven years together and he realizes that for the first time he’s seeing her as Dana.

“Anyway, the party was an enormous success until Bill and Hunter decided to jump off the roof into the swimming pool -”

“Billy!” Tara laughs, clearly feeling shocked to find that her straightlaced husband had not always had a pool queue rammed up his ass.  Mulder could identify.

“Commander Burrow’s wife called the cops. Dana and Missy somehow managed to convince them it was just end of the school year high jinx, and they just told us to turn the music down and left.”

“The officer was fresh out of the academy, he was probably just sorry he couldn’t join in,” Scully supplies.  “He gave Missy his phone number.”

There is laughter around the table and Margaret presses her hands to her face.  “I had no idea.”

“It’s true, the Bishop from your former Diocese in San Diego did comment that the confessional only took half as long when the Scully’s moved away,” Father McCue comments and Margaret briefly looks horrified before recognizing the joke.  The laughter redoubles and the priest pats her on the hand.

The conversation meanders as the meal is cleared away and dessert and coffee brought out.  Aunt Olive seems to be rather taken with him and clearly missed her calling as a CIA interrogator.  She reminds him of his mother’s sisters, the Kuiper twins, WASPish but well-meaning.  “’Mulder’ is Dutch isn’t it?” she asks, serving him an enormous portion of trifle he doesn’t have a hope in hell of being able to eat.

“Yes that’s right.”

“Jewish?”

“Mhhmhh,” he agrees, shifting in his seat to try to ease the pressure around his waist.  Scully returns from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and settles down in her seat next to him.  Under the table her hand finds his knee.  The touching is a new addition and he likes it.

“So Christmas isn’t really your thing then?”

“My mother’s family was Baptist.  We celebrated all the holidays.”

“I didn’t know that, about your mother,” Scully says and he shrugs.

“Neither side was overly devout.  Samantha and I were just glad for the chance to get presents at Hanukkah and Christmas.”

Her eyes are soft as they cast over his face.  It’s nice to be able to share good memories about his sister occasionally.

Margaret beckons Dana into the kitchen and his eyes follow her out of the room, admiring the way her dress hugs the curve of her ass and her toned calves flex as she walks.  When he turns back to the table, Aunt Olive is smiling knowingly at him.

“Dana is certainly a beautiful young woman,” she remarks and he flushes, embarrassed to have been caught ogling, but sensing that the older woman harbors no animosity.

“Yes she is,” he agrees.  Yes she is.

***

The sun has not quite set yet and the gloomy grey sky looks laden with unshed snow.  Father McCue and Olive have left for D.C. with plates full of leftovers, and Margaret leans back in Bill’s ancient leather wingback in the garden room, watching out the window as Charlie and Bill corral their boisterous sons out into the yard to burn off energy.  Fox trails behind them, a third wheel between the two brothers, but he catches the football Charlie tosses his way and responds to something Charlie says with a retort that makes him guffaw.

“Can I get you anything Mom?  Coffee?” Dana’s voice breaks her reverie.  Her youngest daughter stands in the doorway, hair new-penny bright in the light from the kitchen beyond.

“I’m good, honey,” she says holding out a hand to Dana, who comes to sit on the arm of her chair.

Together they watch the boys playing outside.  A game of touch football is underway and Michael catches a long-ball tossed by his Uncle and makes for the end zone.  Fox grabs the boy like a football himself and starts running.  Michael squeals with delight and they cross the goal line to a cheer from Bill and good-natured calls of ‘cheat’ from Charles.  Fox grins as he deposits the boy back on his feet and they high-five.

Beside her Dana smiles softly and Margaret squeezes her hand.  “This will be our last Christmas here,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I decided I’m going to sell the house this year.”  Surprise ripples across Dana’s face.  “It’s much too big for me, the maintenance…the memories.”  She smiles to reassure her daughter, “It’s time, honey.”

“Where will you go?” Dana asks, probably assuming she’s about to announce a cross-country flit.  The truth is, she has considered moving back to California, but as much as she would love to be nearer to her grandchildren, Margaret is an East Coast girl.  She followed Bill to the other side of the world and back again, but her heart beats in time with the cold waves of the North Atlantic.

“Into the District I think.  The drive in to St John’s gets longer every year.  It would be wonderful to be able to walk to Church.”

Dana inclines her head thoughtfully, “That makes sense,” she says, but Margaret wonders if she truly understands.  For all her cool-headed pragmatism and logic, Dana was always the child who felt the biggest wrench when it was time to move, the one who pined for the home that was no longer. 

“I’m so pleased Fox decided to come with you,” she says after a moment, “I know these past few years have been hard on you both.” 

Hard is the understatement of the century.  She has given up trying to make sense of the things that have happened to her daughter over the past six years.  She could never admit it to Dana, who so desperately craved her father’s approval, but there have been times when she had thanked God that Bill was gone, that he was spared the wretchedness of seeing his baby girl abducted and tested on and dying from cancer and hurting, and through it all been absolutely powerless to help.

Dana ducks her head and licks her lips.  Guilt washes over her face.  “I’m sorry Mom.”

“Oh sweetheart, I don’t want you to be sorry,” Margaret says with a gentle smile, resting a hand on her daughter’s wrist.  “I want you to be happy.”

Dana’s pulse flutters under her fingertips.  She looks out the window, watching the boys, but mostly watching Fox.  “I am.”

Her youngest daughter is normally so self-possessed and serious, her face rarely betraying her feelings.  But watching her with Fox since they arrived last night, Margaret has seen a new side to her.  The soft curve to her lips, the flush to her cheeks, the warmth in her eyes whenever she looks at Fox; Dana is so obviously in love, and it is a wonderful, special thing to behold.

“Go outside,” she says nudging Dana’s hip, “Bill has been on his best behavior but I’m sure Fox came to spend time with you, not your brothers.”

Dana presses a kiss on her forehead and rises from the arm of the chair.  “Thanks Mom,” she murmurs.

Moments later, Margaret watches as Dana picks her way carefully across the lawn in those perilously high-heels she insists on wearing, her black overcoat wrapped tightly around her.  The sky is darkening rapidly, the far end of the garden where the lawn gives way to trees and the Patapsco River beyond, almost completely obscured.  Snow has begun to fall, swirling around and glowing in the glare from the coach lanterns.

Fox’s face lightens as she approaches and he walks over to meet her, intersecting her path by the edge of the woodstore.  Even in heels, Dana barely reaches his shoulder.  He tugs the lapels of her coat up, bracketing her jaw and, after glancing round to check no one is looking, he leans down to press a quick kiss on her lips.

Yes, she wishes that the path of Dana’s life had been smoother, but her daughter has always had the faith, whether in God or in her partner, to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  And slowly but surely, that seems to be leading her home.

***

Bill watches Dana and Fox.  Mulder, he amends mentally, rolling his eyes at the ridiculous affectation. They are partially obscured by the woodstore, likely have no idea anyone can even see them as she pulls him down into another kiss.  Jesus, have they no shame – he can see her fucking tongue.  He’d suspected they were sleeping together years ago but it was still something of a shock to have it confirmed when he and Tara had arrived the day before and Mom told him Mulder would be joining them.  Until now he’d always held out hope that Dana would eventually come to her senses and put an end to this co-dependent liaison once and for all.  But one thing has become clear over the past twenty-four hours: Fox Mulder is going nowhere.

“Bill, where’s Mattie?” Tara leans out of the French doors, and he drags his eyes off his sister and her partner.

“He’s right here -” He was right here, but as he spins on the spot, Mattie is nowhere to be seen.  “Mattie?” he calls, and then louder, “Matthew?”  He turns back to Tara and can see   alarm growing on her face.  “He was right here.  Charlie, can you see Matthew?” he calls to his brother, who is about twenty yards away with Michael and Jack.

“I thought he was with you!”

Dana and Mulder materialize beside him and Tara is down the steps in an instant, calling out for the boy.

“He was literally just here a minute ago.”

“I’ll check the gates,” Mulder says, and Dana tells everyone to spread out, a little needlessly as the whole family is now in the garden calling for Matthew, even his mother in her slippers.  Bill can feel the panic rising inside and he swallows against the bitter taste of it.

Fox returns.  “The gates are bolted; he couldn’t have gotten out the front.”

“The woodstore?” Dana suggests and they check it.  And the toolshed, and the arbor that a little boy could easily hide under, and the dozens of shrubs and planters that fill the garden.  The sky is almost black now, although the moon gives some light, and Dana and Mulder are shining flashlights around that they’ve produced from their pockets.  Tara fingers dig into his arm and he looks down into her tear-streaked face.

“It’s ok sweetheart, he’s out here somewhere.”  He hopes like hell he sounds calmer than he feels. 

“Oh God, Bill,” his mother calls, “The river!”

“But it’s fenced?”

She looks sick. “Part of it came down with Floyd in September.  I didn’t get it fixed yet.”  

It’s not even a conscious decision to start running, but suddenly he is.  Dana and Mulder lead the way toward the back of the garden with their flashlights and Charlie yells at his sons to stay with their mother.

“Mom, you wait here too, in case he comes back,” Bill calls, scrambling through the undergrowth where the manicured lawn gives way to long grass and brambles, and then pine trees.  His mother hovers at the edge of the lawn, arms wrapped around her middle and her face white in the light of the moon.

“Here, here,” Mulder shouts, finding the section of fencing which had been downed in the storm.  He doesn’t wait for anyone to catch up, just clambers through the narrow gap, shouting for Matthew.

Bill is a few steps behind him, with the others following.  The ground is frozen underfoot which makes running easier, but the undergrowth is dense and thorny and he can’t believe Matthew made it far.  But then where the hell is he?  Beyond the back of his mother’s garden, there is a strip of wild land about fifty yards wide, thick with pine trees and overgrown flora, which leads to a ridge concealing the river.

His pulse soars when he catches sight of a torn strip of fabric clinging to low branch, the same red as Matthew’s coat.  “Matthew!” he bellows, but there’s no reply.  All he can hear are the voices of the others, his pulse hammering in his head, and as they get closer, the roar of the river. 

Up ahead, near the top of the ridge, Mulder comes to an abrupt stop.  “Quiet! Listen!” Bill skids to a stop, Tara bumping into his back and bracing herself against him with a hand on his shoulder.  Mulder’s flashlight casts around, highlighting barren branches, tangled vegetation, but no Matthew.

Dana and Charlie have stopped about fifteen feet to the left.  “Mulder, what is it?” she calls, her flashlight landing on Mulder’s face.  He is squinting, straining to hear, and his breath condenses in silver clouds.

“I heard-” a faint cry interrupts him, and he is moving again, dress shoes slipping as he scrabbles over the ridge.

Bill leaps over a rotting tree stump and is over the ridge seconds behind him, Matthew’s name rolling from his tongue in a liturgy. 

His pulse goes into overdrive when he sees his son and for a second, he can barely breathe.  Matthew is clinging on to the end of a downed tree which has fallen partially over the river.  The roots are pulled from the ground, grasping at the air like a gnarled hand.  Angry black water rushes by, barely two feet below Matthew’s dangling boots.  Mud cakes his coat and pants, and blood trickles down from a wound on his hairline.  His son is crying and when he catches sight of Bill he cries harder, calling for his father.  It’s hearing his name that kickstarts Bill’s respiratory system again.

Matthew shifts on the trunk, trying to move toward his father and he slips and grabs back onto the bark with both hands.  His cries are loud even over the roar of the rushing water.

“Jesus.  Don’t move Matthew!” Bill shouts, “Stay still buddy, I’m coming.”

Mulder is already sliding down the slope and scrambling around the contorted roots.  It’s clear the tree is not strong enough to support the weight of an adult. Hell, it looks like it could give way at any second.

Mulder doesn’t even hesitate, he plunges into the water, giving off a strangled cry when he sinks up to chest height.  The water could only be a few degrees above freezing, patches of ice catch around the edge in amongst the reeds and fallen branches.  “Hey Buddy, it’s ok,” he reassures through gritted teeth as he struggles to propel himself along the trunk toward Matthew.  After a few torturous steps his foot slips out from under him and he is under the water, completely submerged apart from his hands while his body is smashed against the knotted wood.

“Mulder!!” Dana cries out from the top of the ridge, voice shrill with anxiety.

Bill climbs over the root and is about to leap into the water too when Mulder pulls himself back up, spluttering.  He shakes water out of his eyes, “Bill don’t, it won’t hold both of us,” he shouts. 

Bill hesitates, leaning forward impotently but understanding that one wrong move could send the tree, and Matthew, flying into the icy water below.  He calls meaningless platitudes to Matthew instead, forcing a calmness into his voice that is the antithesis to what he feels inside.

Tara, Dana and Charlie are at the base of the tree now too.  Barely a minute has passed since Bill first laid eyes on Matthew but it feels like a lifetime.  Mulder drags himself against the flow of the water to where Matthew is and holds out his hand.  “C’mon Matthew, grab my hand,” he urges and Matthew looks to his father, face beetroot and tear streaked.  Blood trickles into his right eye.

Literally nothing matters to Bill more right now than getting his son back in his arms.  “Go on son, go to Fox!” he pleads, trying to smile. 

“Take Fox’s hand, honey” Tara begs, and Matthew edges forward slowly, reaching out a tiny mittened hand.  Mulder grasps it tightly and begins to drag himself back toward the water’s edge, coaxing Matthew to slowly crawl along the trunk with him.

As soon as he can reach him, Bill snatches the boy up in his arms.  “Oh God, Matthew,” he breathes into his son’s hair.  Tara paws at him, pressing kisses all over his wet face, and the child cries with shock.  The wound on his head seems angry, and blood soaks the collar of his coat, turning the red fabric black.

Beside them, Charlie and Dana haul Mulder out of the water and Charlie shucks his coat and wraps it around the other man’s shoulders.  Dana’s hands are all over him, checking for injuries as she kneels beside him.  “Mulder,” she murmurs, and the way she says his name conveys a whole conversation.

“I’m ok,” he stammers, barely able to get a word through his chattering teeth. “Go, go,” he pleads.  Dana hesitates but when she looks at Matthew she nods.

“I’ll get him back to the house,” Charlie promises, and reluctantly she lets go of her partner and rises.

Chapter Text

Back in the house, they bring Matthew into the kitchen.  He’d stopped crying after a few minutes in his mother’s arms, and now sits with his head against her chest, sucking his thumb.  Blood and tears track down his cheeks and Tara holds a damp cloth against the wound on his forehead.  Her own face is wet with tears, and Bill squeezes her shoulder.  His hands are shaking from the adrenaline.

Dana tosses her coat over the back of a chair and kneels on the floor in front of Tara.  Her pantyhose are laddered, and her hair is wild.  Sara comes in from getting Dana’s medical bag from the car and hands it over to her. 

“Matthew, sweetie, I’m just going to shine a light in your eyes,” she says, checking his pupils.  “You’re such a good boy,” she reassures him, smiling.  

His mother rinses out a fresh cloth and hands it to Bill.  Her eyes are fraught, guilt adding ten years to her face.  “I’m so sorry Bill.”

Bill accepts the cloth and wraps an arm around his mother’s narrow shoulders, pulling her against him in a brief hug.  “Mom, it’s not your fault.  I -” he has to swallow to be able to get the words out, “I should never have taken my eyes off him.”  If Mulder hadn’t found him when he did.. he can’t even bring himself to finish the thought.

Dana takes the bloody cloth from Tara, handing it off to her mother, and with gentle fingers palpates the swollen gash over Matthew’s eyebrow. He cries out and pulls away from her.  “I know, honey, I’m sorry, almost done,” she sooths.  Her entire demeanor is calm and controlled; not a single movement is wasted.

Bill hovers anxiously, feeling like he is on the verge of hyperventilating.  He forces himself to take deep breaths.  “Is he ok?”

Dana tickles Matthew’s toes and he offers her a tiny smile.  “I’m pretty sure it’s just a superficial wound but I’ll perform an ENT exam to check for any signs of a basal skull fracture.”  She pulls out an otoscope from her bag and moves toward Matthew but he fusses, starting to cry. She immediately backs up and smiles.  “Hey now, nothing to be scared of.  It’s just a special light for your ears and nose.  See?”  She shines the light on her hand to show him.

Matthew looks unconvinced.

“How about we do Daddy first?  Bill, come here.” Dana gestures for him to get down on the floor and he scrambles to get down on his knees, grateful to have something to do.  “See sweetie, I’m just going to shine the light in Daddy’s ear.  And his nose,” she unclips the speculum and demonstrates to Bill to open his mouth, which he does.  “And then in Daddy’s mouth.  Oh wow, Daddy had M&Ms for dessert!” Matthew looks interested now.  “Do you think if I shine the light in your mouth I can see what you had?  Shall we try?”

With a little coaxing, Dana manages to complete the rest of her examination.  She rocks back on her heels and looks between Tara and Bill.  “There are no indications of an underlying skull fracture.  His pupil reactions are normal, verbal responses are as oriented as you’d expect for a two-year-old who’s just had a very traumatic experience.  Motor responses are perfect.”

Bill feels his breathing slow a little and he blinks back tears of relief.  He presses a kiss on Tara’s shoulder and she leans into his touch.   

“Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the hospital and get a scan or something?”

“Honestly Tara, I don’t think it’s necessary.  I know it seems like a lot of blood and it’s quite frightening, but I see nothing here that would prompt an ER doctor to want to run a CT scan, and you could insist on one, but it would be traumatic for Matthew and for you.”

Tara nods, looking at her husband for reassurance.  “Honey, he’s already really shaken.  Hours in the ER aren’t going to help him.”

Suddenly the side door bangs open.  Mulder limps in, his arm slung over Charlie’s shoulders.  He looks half frozen, clothes clinging wetly to him and his lips literally blue.  Margaret quickly pulls out a chair for him to collapse on.  “Fox!”

“How’s the little guy?” he grinds out through clenched teeth, shivering uncontrollably.

“He’s gonna be fine,” Dana says and she looks Mulder over, the air of detachment wavering for the first time.  “Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’ll wait in line.”

She looks at him a second longer, judging how badly off he is and then closes her eyes briefly, collecting herself, before Dr. Scully is back in control.  “Charlie, help him get out of those clothes or he’s going to get hypothermia.”  She turns to Tara, “I’ll clean his wound and dress it now.  Butterfly stitches would hold this together but if you want to avoid scarring, sutures would be better.  I have everything I need… I could do it here if you want?”

Tara looks up at him and he looks down a Dana.  “What would you do?” he asks, the if it was your child, going unspoken.

“I’d do the stitches.”

“Ok, do it.  I trust you Dana,” he says and holds her gaze for a moment.  Their relationship hasn’t always been easy, and maybe he’s starting to realize that a lot of that has been his fault.  It’s been so easy over the years to dismiss her choices in his mind like she’s still the little girl who cried when she shot the snake.  He and Charlie had mocked her that day, dismissed her as a ‘girl’ and called her a coward.  Watching her now, his eyes are wide open; she grew up to be smarter, and tougher than both of them.

“Hey buddy, you’re going to look like me,” Charlie tells Matthew, pointing at his eyebrow which is bisected by an old scar.  He and Sara have manhandled Mulder out of his clothes so the poor shmuck is sitting in the kitchen in his shorts.  He looks too cold to care, barely managing to mumble a thanks when Sara wraps the thick Amish quilt from the back of the sofa in the den around him.

His mother brings over a mug of hot tea but Mulder’s hands are shaking so badly it sloshes over the sides of the cup when he tries to take it from her.  She holds it to his mouth while he sips then presses her hand against his cheek.  He looks up at her with grateful eyes and nods his thanks.  Or possibly it’s just a muscle spasm, he’s shaking too hard to be able to tell if any of his movements are voluntary.  She resettles the blanket around his shoulders.

Matthew’s cut doesn’t look quite as bad now Dana has it cleaned out, and he barely squeaks when she administers a couple of shots of lidocaine.  While she waits for it to take effect, she turns her attention to Mulder.

“Hey,” she says, leaning over him to check his pupil responses with her penlight.

“Hey,” he replies.  Her hands are running through his hair as she checks for trauma.

“Did you bang your head at all?” she asks and his head spasms in a negative motion.  She has him follow her finger, which he does shakily, and then pulls back the blanket so she can check his upper body.  “Any pain anywhere else?”

“My shoulder.”

Dana presses into a bruised patch on his right shoulder, above what looks like an old gunshot scar.  “Ow!” he says flinching away from her.

“Sorry,” she apologizes in a low voice, flattening her hand over the area for a moment, before returning her hands to his hair.  “You’re sure you didn’t hit your head?”

She’s checked his head for injuries three times now and Bill’s starting to suspect that running her hands through his hair is actually more a self-soothing ritual than a medical necessity.

“I know you hope it might knock some sense into me, but no,” he stays stiltedly, and she huffs.

“You should take a warm bath, bring your body temperature back up.” 

Mulder’s lips quirk in a way which suggests he might say more on the subject if they weren’t in a room full of family. 

“I’ll go run a bath upstairs, and then Charlie can help you,” Margaret volunteers, and both Mulder and Charlie look alarmed.

“Dude, just what I wanted for Christmas.  Some one-on-one naked bath time fun with my sister’s boyfriend.”

***

He’s been lying in tub full of bubbles that smell of rosemary and eucalyptus for over an hour, replenished the water twice and thinking about it for a third time.  He finally stopped shivering about twenty minutes ago.

There’s a light tap on the door and Scully pokes her head round.

“Oh,” he says as she comes in and closes the door behind her, “I thought you were Charlie.  He promised to come back and scrub my back.”

She smirks over the top of a bottle of Heineken, takes a sip and hands him the bottle.  “I bet he did.”

The beer is cold and welcome as it slides down his throat.

“How’s Matthew?”

“He’s going to be fine.  Three stitches, I don’t think it will even scar much.  He’s just had some Tylenol and bottle of warm milk, and Bill and Tara are trying to get him to settle.”  She looks at herself in the mirror, plucking a stray leaf from her hair and finger combing the strands into submission.  She sighs and pulls a face of displeasure.  Mulder can’t imagine what she’s looking at that she doesn’t like; everything he can see looks pretty damn good.

“Did he say anything about how he got down by the river?”

She licks her finger and swipes at the smudged mascara under her eyes.  “Not really, he’s pretty confused but it seems like he just wandered off, and then fell down the embankment.”  She looks over at him.  “Thank God you found him when you did.”

Mulder offers her back the bottle and she takes a long sip, exposing the arch of her milky white neck.  He sinks a little lower in the tub.

“Just lucky that tree was there really.”

Scully passes him the bottle and sits down on the closed lid of the toilet.  She looks down at her ruined pantyhose, “I should buy shares in fucking Wolford,” she sighs.

Propping one foot on the edge of the tub, her hands slide under her dress and start to roll what turns out to be a thigh-high stocking down her leg, revealing inch after inch of smooth skin.

Mulder’s head drops back against the tub and he is thankful for the bubbles. 

He’s considering whether this is a purely practical endeavor, or if there’s an element of flirtation, when she drops her newly bared foot back to the floor and raises the other leg to repeat the process.  From this angle he can see almost all the way up her skirt.  When he drags his eyes back up to her face, she’s watching him.

“You’re a tease,” he says, and the bubbles are no longer a match for his bobbing erection. 

She arches an eyebrow at him and slides off the toilet onto the floor beside the bath.  “How are you feeling?”

“Stirred up.”

“How’s the water?  It’s not too cold is it?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer before her hand is dipping under the bubbles, fingers trailing over his aching shoulder and down his chest.  “Feels ok to me,” she muses, scratching her fingernails over the trail of hair leading down from his navel, and skittering down the underside of his penis to gently grasp his balls.  His toes curl and he grips the side of the tub tightly.

“Yeah, feels good,” he agrees roughly.

“Good?” she qualifies.

“Un-fucking-believable.”

She draws his penis away from his from his body and curls her fingers around him, pumping firmly.  Her hand feels so different to his, smaller, softer - but her grip is tight and every few strokes she pauses to tease his frenulum and run her thumb over the tip of his cock.

She leans up on her knees until her lips are brushing his antitragus, “I want it to be the best you ever had.” 

He is already reduced to gurgling and when her teeth graze over his earlobe he has to bite his lip and think of Skinner in lycra.  He squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself not to thrust into her hand.  Sensing how close to the edge he is, she relaxes her grip fractionally and sits back on her heels.

“You’re so beautiful,” she whispers and he cracks his eyes open.  She is watching him with naked affection.

He palms her cheek, “I think that’s supposed to be my line.”  And God she is, the wisps of hair curling round her cheekbones in the steamy bathroom, the enthralling apices of her clavicles.  The delicious curve of her tipsy nose.  The shine of her pink tongue darting out to dampen her lips. 

She works him deliberately, no sense of urgency, studying his face with her canny eyes, cataloging every hitch in his breathing, every muscle twitch. 

“Like this?” she breathes, eyes fixed on his.  He covers her hand with his and shows her how to stroke him, deep down to the base and then twisting as their palms close over the glans.  Together they stroke him, and he doesn’t dare blink.  Her eyes are dilated.  Deep tarns of lust, almost Prussian in the dim light of the bathroom.

“I love you,” he pledges, and she leans into his touch, placing a kiss on his inner wrist.  She doesn’t have to say the words, he knows she loves him.  It’s written in the fine lines around her eyes.  She shows him with every stroke of her hand.  She tells him every day when she stands opposite him and makes him work for the answers.

He doesn’t drop her gaze, not when her pace picks up and he can’t seem to get enough air in his lungs.  Not even when her face blurs and pinpricks of light explode behind his eyes.  He just keeps his left hand curled around her cheek and rides out the orgasm with her.

When he comes back to himself, she is stroking his chest and the water in the tub feels considerably cooler.

“OK that was definitely up there.”

“Up there?” she asks, flexing an eyebrow.

“Unquestionably top ten.  Top five even.”

“It sounds like I need more practice,” she says, biting back a smile and bracing herself on the side of the bath while she rises stiffly to a standing position.  She’s spent a lot of time on her knees today, but he wouldn’t dare mention it. 

“I’d be happy to help you with that.  In the spirit of teamwork.”

She gives up hiding the smile and gifts him with one of her goofy, wide grins.

“I feel like I’ve got the upper hand on the scoreboard here,” he says, fingers maundering over the hemline of her dress, dipping under the soft fabric to stroke the even softer skin of her inner thigh.  “You sure I can’t even up the score a little..?”

Her eyes flick between his eyes and his mouth and her lips quirk at him.  He can tell she’s considering it. “Hmm, it’s still early innings.  I think I’ll catch up.”

She tucks her hair behind her ears and leans down to kiss him, drawing his lower lip between hers and sucking gently.  Pulling back, she runs her thumb over the same lip and he kisses it.  “You earned it, I’ll see you downstairs.”

Chapter Text

When they finally have Mattie settled for the night, Bill heads down to the den where he can hear laughter.  Charlie is sprawled at one end of the sofa, with Sara’s feet in his lap.  Dana is sitting kitty-corner in a leather armchair in front of the fire, one foot tucked underneath her.

“Mom in bed?” he asks, dropping heavily onto the other sofa.  It’s only a little after 9pm but it feels much later.

“She’s on the phone with the Aunt Viv,” Charlie replies, tossing a chocolate covered nut into his mouth.  “Mattie asleep?”

“Yeah, eventually.  Tara’s zonked too.”

Sara smiles over at him.  “It’s been a hell of a day.”

“Hey, it’s the man of the hour!” Charlie calls, “You defrosted yet?”  Bill looks over his shoulder.  Mulder is hovering in the doorway, hesitantly drumming his fingers on the framing.

“Yeah, just about.”  Mulder glances between Dana and the one empty seat, next to Bill on the sofa.  He opts to sit on the floor in front of Dana’s chair.

“You ok?” she asks quietly, brushing his hair back from his forehead.  He nods, and they share a protracted look which seems to contain a subtext known only to them.

It’s the thing he noticed about them when he first saw them together in the hospital years ago, that his mother had mentioned even before he had ever set eyes on Fox Mulder.  He had been glad he was on the phone and she couldn’t see him roll his eyes when she told him about this ‘special bond’ his sister shared with a man that, as far as he could tell, was more than a few cards short of a deck.  After a while, he’d stopped trying to hide his utter dislike for the guy, and it had taken all his effort to contain the growing frustrations he felt with Dana too.

He could not fathom what hold Fox Mulder had on his clever, pretty sister, whose brain made connections like lightening and who was honorable to the core, that she would risk life and limb, time and again, to remain by his side.  And not just her own life, but Jesus, that godforsaken job had led to Missy’s death and still she’d refused to quit.

He didn’t know what they were mixed up in at work, by all accounts it was some high-level Government conspiracy BS, but it made no sense to him that she would throw away any chance at a normal life for an infatuation with a guy who, half the time, didn’t seem that into her.  She’d followed him all over the country, she’d dropped everything to go running whenever he called and yet he was nowhere to be seen when she was wasting away from cancer, skin and bone and face the color of cotton, getting beaten up in stairwells while he ran off to God-knows-where chasing aliens.

Dana had been at death’s door before he showed up at the hospital with a computer chip and a story straight out of a Michael Crichton book.  Bill had stood by in disbelief when she, a woman of science, trusted him enough to put it in her neck.

And yet.

And yet, he had watched from the shadows of her room, unseen, when Mulder crept into her room that same night and wept silently into her hand.  When, shoulders shaking, he whispered his love into her hair and begged her not to leave him, to hold on, to forgive him.

And yet, against all probability, the chip worked.

Here she is, two years after she should’ve been dead and buried; strong and healthy, a vibrant, beautiful woman who seems content with her path in life.  More than content, she seems happy. 

No one in their family would ever have expected her to end up with a man like Fox Mulder, but he’s reminded of something his father used to say whenever the Navy gave new orders and the family had to up sticks again.  He’d said it the day Bill shipped out to the Gulf as a newly minted Lieutenant. “Ours not to reason why, Son.”

Ours not to reason why. 

Life’s always been pretty simple to Bill; serve his country, honor his wife, protect his son.  His stomach clenches when he pictures Matthew’s terrified face looking up at him as he clung onto that tree earlier.  Another minute and he could have been swept away in the frigid current of the Patapsco.

And Mulder hadn’t hesitated. 

This man whose values he has questioned, whose judgment he has doubted, did not give a second thought to his own safety before he plunged into the river after Matthew.

“Bill?” Dana is looking at him with a frown and he realizes he’s been staring.

He shakes his head, “Sorry, long day.  I’m gonna get a drink.”

In the kitchen, he leans over the sink and collects himself.  He’s not used to feeling this swirl of emotions. 

Ours not to reason why.

None of them, not even Fox Mulder with his obsession with the paranormal, can go back in time and change the past.  They are where they are.  Dad’s gone.  Missy’s gone.  But Dana’s still here.  Charlie’s making noises about coming home, and Mom is in great shape and loving life.  He has a wonderful wife, and the child they always longed for.  Maybe it’s enough. 

Bill opens the box of Yamazaki that Charlie and Sara gave him for Christmas and pulls out the bottle.  He peels off the gold foil cap and then digs out the good glasses from the cupboard and assembles it all on a tray.

When he walks back into the den, Charlie perks up at the sight of the whisky.

“I thought we could open this,” he explains setting the tray down on coffee table.  He pours a healthy measure into each glass and then offers the first one to Mulder.  “I want to say thank you for what you did today.”

The guy looks so shocked he doesn’t immediately reach for the proffered glass, “Anyone would’ve done it,” he says quietly, and Bill senses, without false modesty.

Bill shrugs, “But it was you.”

After a beat, Mulder accepts the glass and Bill hands out the others.  He holds his glass up, the burnished amber liquid sloshing in the light of the fire.  “To family,” he says and has to swallows against a thickening in his throat.  “And Mulder.”

The toast is echoed around the room and they all drink.  Holding the whisky in his mouth and feeling his tongue burn, he meets Dana’s gaze.  They will never speak of this, he knows that from experience, but the gratitude in her eyes is humbling. 

He will try to be a better man, a more tolerant man.  One who is worthy of the people who are in his life.

***

A few hours later, they are on the final dregs of Bill’s Japanese whisky.  Bill is horizontal on the sofa, snoring softly.  Charlie and Sara haven’t moved much but now that his mother has gone to bed, he’s propped his feet him on the coffee table.

Mulder leans back against Scully’s chair and into her touch as she scratches her fingernails along his scalp and under the collar of his t-shirt.  She’s grown increasingly tactile as the evening has worn on and the whisky bottle emptied.

“Kind of ironic that the sailor of the family is the one who can’t hold his liquor,” Charlie says, his mouth soft around the consonants.

“You’re one to talk,” his wife says, reaching behind her to pat sloppily at his shoulder.  “I’ve lost count of the number of cabs I’ve poured you into over the years.”

“Babe, I told you if you married me, I’d give you a life of excitement.”

“I didn’t marry your skinny ass for excitement,” she snorts.

“Why did you marry me then?”

“Because you knocked me up in grad school and convinced me, probably through hypnosis or by tricking me into drinking one of Missy’s special ‘herbal teas’, that it would be romantic to get married and live in a shitty apartment while we both worked two jobs, finished school and tried to raise a baby.”

“Like you didn’t love every minute of it.”

He likes Charlie and his wife.  They are well matched and have an easy camaraderie that that envelopes everyone around them.

“Dana and Mulder lead a life of excitement,” Sara muses.

Mulder laughs.  He’s holding Scully’s right foot in his lap, thumbs digging into the arch as he massages her foot and runs his fingers around the fine bones of her ankles.  He swears he can almost hear her purring behind him.

“Yeah, getting shot at and censured is probably the kind of excitement you can do without,” Mulder comments.  He skims one of his hands up Scully’s shin and rubs his thumb in the hough of her knee.  She slides down a couple of inches in the chair and pushes her foot into his crotch.  If she weren’t so inebriated, he doubts she would do this in front of her brother and sister-in-law.  If they weren’t so inebriated, they probably wouldn’t be oblivious.

“The frequent flyer hospital miles I could do without,” Sara concedes.  “But having a job that stimulates you?  Doing work of value? That’s very appealing.”

Scully’s toes curl around the bulge of his fly and he grabs her foot firmly in warning.  The only thing stopping his erection from taking full flight is a fifth of a bottle of whisky and the fact he’s already come twice today.

“I thought you loved your job?” Scully asks.  Her fingers have trailed to the front of his collar, teasing his collarbone.

“I do… it’s just pretty boring really.”  She looks both Mulder and Scully over mischievously, and smirks, “And Dana, no one in finance looks as hot as you two.”

Charlie looked up from trying to drip out the last few drops of whisky into his glass.  “Hey, what’s he got that I don’t?”

Sara appraises Mulder while she swallows the last of her drink.  “A gun and a six-pack.”

“Pfft.  Who needs a six-pack when you’ve got one of these?” Charlie asks, holding up his hand and wiggling his fingers.

“Don’t be lewd Charles.”

“Who’s being lewd?  One flick of one of these bad boys and millions of dollars have moved.  That’s real power, babe.”

After a few moments, Scully squeezes his shoulder.  “C’mon, let’s go to bed,” her voice is made gravelly by the hour and the alcohol.

He rises cautiously to his feet, feeling his balance upset by the alcohol.   Scully, surprisingly, seems steadier as they bid their goodnights, although the pronounced sway in her hips as she leads him from the room hints at her intoxication.

It seems like they hit every squeaky floorboard on the way to the bedroom.  Outside their room, he grasps her hips and pushes his nose into the fragrant hollow of her neck and she mews impatiently.

Finally, the door is closed, and he leans back against it while Scully staggers a few steps further into the room and then spins to face him.  Her eyes look feral as they rake over him.  She reaches behind her and draws down the zipper on her dress before shrugging it off her shoulders.  With a slight tug the fabric slips from her body and drops to the floor at her feet.

“Christ Scully,” he wheezes, unable to get enough air into his lungs as he takes in the sight of her standing before him in her underwear, breasts heaving over the top of the lacy cups of her bra.

“You’re driving me crazy, Mulder,” she confesses throatily, taking small steps toward him.  “I thought it would be easier after we…”

“Fucked?” he supplies, scraping his fingernails against the grain of the door.

She huffs a breath, a blush rising in her cheeks, but her eyes flash at his choice of world.

“We haven’t fucked yet,” she whispers, stopping in front of him.

The rigid peaks of her breasts brush against his abdomen.  “Only you and Bill Clinton would call what we’ve done ‘not fucking’.”

She drives her fingers into his hair and dragging his head down so she can reach his mouth.  Without preamble, her tongue sweeps into his mouth, probing the recesses of his teeth and cataloguing his fillings.  He moans and grabs her ass, hoisting her in his arms so they can stumble back toward the bed.

Her soft body yields under him and he sinks into the embrace of her open thighs.  She fumbles between them with his fly and the button on his jeans.  Mulder arches his back to give her space, and so he can reach the silky skin of her breast.  He pulls the cup of her bra down until one rigid nipple is exposed and runs the pointed tip of his tongue over the puckered flesh.

“Yeah, yeah,” she croons into his ear, shoving at his jeans and boxers until she can catch them with her foot and kick them down his legs.  His cock pokes at the heat of her center, only a scrap of lace separating them, and he rubs himself against the slick fabric until they are both moaning.

“Dana?”  A tap on the door.  “Are you awake?”

Scully freezes under him, “Tara?”  Her fingers bite into his shoulders, “What is it?” she calls, slightly breathless, but sounding remarkably normal.

“Mattie has a fever, he won’t settle.”

“I’ll be right there.”  When Tara’s footsteps recede, she tilts her head back in the pillow and sighs in frustration, “Jesus.”

Mulder drops his forehead down on her shoulder.  “When we get home tomorrow…” he promises, kissing the skin there.

“You better believe it.”

***

“Another pancake Fox?”

“I really shouldn’t,” Mulder says leaning back to let Margaret slide it onto his plate, nodding when she waves the plate of crispy bacon in his direction too.  Across the table, Scully nurses a cup of black coffee and a hangover.

“We’re going to head into the City later to show the boys the Christmas Village.  Do you and Fox want to join us?” Margaret asks her daughter.

“No!” Scully blurts, and then forces a fake laugh to cover the faux pax.  “I mean, thanks, but we need to get back.”

“Are you sure Scully?  We could?” he offers, and her wide eyes telegraph him a message to shut the fuck up.

“Remember, Mulder, we have that .. thing.. we need to..” she eyes him meaningfully, glancing at her mother to check she hasn’t deciphered into the subtext.

Charlie strolls into the room, looking more chipper than he has the whole Holiday.  “Someone’s phone’s ringing in the hallway,” he says, snagging a rasher of bacon from the plate and biting into it with relish.  “God it’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can do.”

Scully frowns at Mulder and he holds his hands up.  “Not mine, I turned it off,” he says.  There was no way he was risking the wrath of Bill by ruining Christmas with an inopportune work call.

Scully hurries from the kitchen and he can hear her muted voice.  When she doesn’t return in couple of minutes, he follows her into the hall.  She’s listening down the line, rubbing her forehead with her left hand.  Judging by the twist of her mouth, she doesn’t like what she’s hearing.

“OK Sir, I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she says and disconnects the call.

“What’s up?”

She turns to face him. “There’s been what looks like a mass suicide at a compound in Kentucky.  The local forensics teams are overwhelmed; Skinner needs me to go and help with the recovery.”  She loops her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest.

“This could take days,” she sighs.

He kisses the top of her head.  “I’ll be here waiting for you.”

She inhales deeply and when she exhales, her breath warms his chest.  “Do you get the feeling the odds are stacked against us?”

“Always,” he smiles.  “How do you mean?”

She looks up at him with a melancholic smile.  “I mean, if we ever get into bed, properly, without any interruptions or family listening in.. the world will probably end.”

He rubs their noses together.  “What a way to go though, Scully.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 7

December 30^th, 5.32pm

“Well, that was a waste of time,” Mulder worries a sunflower seed between his front teeth and waves thanks to the guard who lifts the barrier for them to exit the carpark. 

“Mulder, the guy voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric hospital.  It’s not exactly a day spa in there.”  Scully’s phone trills and she fishes it out of her inside pocket while still looking at him.  “He obviously has some serious personal issues – is it really surprising he doesn’t want to get involved in this case?” 

“Scully,” she says into the phone, turning toward the window.  “Agent Macbride, what can I do for you?”  A pause, before she twists her face and gives off a frustrated groan.  “You’re kidding me?  How is that even possible, 19 people don’t just die spontaneously from heart failure on the same day.”

Mulder zones out while she prattles on with Macbride about toxicology results and what has, or hasn’t, been tested for.  His mind wanders back over the meeting with Frank Black.  On one level, he has some sympathy for the man; he knows all too well the toll working in ViCAP has on a person.  But he can’t imagine ever turning his back on a case when lives are at stake.

Scully disconnects her call and sighs.  “I have to go back to Quantico.”

“Tonight?”

Since leaving for Kentucky the day after Christmas, she hasn’t stopped.  She and the local ME had performed 29 autopsies over three days, and then she came straight from the airport to the cemetery this morning.  She looks wiped out and wan under the high-mast lighting.

“Can you drop me off?  It should only take me a couple of hours.”

Mulder glances over his shoulder and indicates, putting his foot down to cut in front of a beaten-up Subaru and make a hasty left turn.  A horn blares behind them.  Scully seizes the grab handle as they peel around the corner.

“The sooner you get there, the sooner you get finished.”

“I’d sooner get there alive.” 

Four mile markers pass by before she looks at him sideways. “Necromancy, Mulder?”

“I said before there’s a long tradition of necromancy in the Christian church – but actually the history goes back way before Christ.  The earliest account of necromancy in literature was Homer’s Odyssey, y’know Scully.” He purses his lips around a fresh seed, sucking the salt off before continuing.  “Modern interpretations assume malicious intent but actually there are many examples in history where necromantic practices stemmed from the desire to communicate with a lost loved one.”

“Well, there’s a definite malevolent undertone to this case.”

“Yes,” he agrees, “And the one thing that all literature seems to agree on, is that the voices of the dead are strongest soon after death.  If this does have something to do with the Millennium Group, we can’t ignore the significance of tomorrow’s date.”

Scully ponders this for a second.  “You think there could be another..” she hesitates, trying to find a more mainstream designation, before giving up and settling on ”..resurrection?”

“Put it this way, if I was burying someone right now I’d be putting a padlock on the coffin.”

Traffic on the I95 is not as heavy as it might be and they make good progress.  Before long he is navigating the twisting roads through the Marine Corps Base, dense woodland on either side of them eventually giving way to the metropolis of the FBI Academy. 

“I can wait for you?” he offers.

“No, it’s fine.  I’ll take a Bucar back to D.C.”

Mulder drums his fingers on the steering wheel.  They haven’t talked about what happened over Christmas.  He has no regrets - far from it.  Memories of their time together have pierced his concentration at the most inopportune of times during the week.  The sudden thought of her body moving under his; the heady taste of her sex on his tongue; the gentle scrape of her teeth on his dick – thoughts that have left him open mouthed and dizzy.

But still, the intervening days apart have proved fertile ground for nerves to grow and he feels an irrational shyness now.  His pulse quickens and he counts to ten before finding his voice.  “You, um, you wanna come over later?  When you’re done?” 

Scully hesitates, and he senses he’s not the only one feeling anxious.  He reaches across the center console and she takes his hand in both of hers.  The touch grounds both of them, as it has so many times in the past.  “I’d like that,” she replies softly.   

“Good,” he exhales and feels the flutter in his chest subside.  “I’ll make something.”

Scully smirks and he pinches the flesh between her thumb and forefinger.

“What? I cook!”

“Mulder, reheating leftover Chinese doesn’t count.”

“I can do other things too,” he chuffs, mentally slotting a trip to the market into his drive home.  If he has to rely on what he has in his kitchen cupboards, they’ll be eating out of date Campbells and stale crackers.

“Thank you,” she accepts earnestly and he nods.  He can do this.  They can do this. 

They can have normal.

Mulder pulls up to the curb outside the Forensic Science Research Center and he glances round.  For once the place seems quiet, most rookie agents gone for the holidays, and there’s no one to see them if he kisses her. 

Before he can move though, Scully lifts his hand to her lips and presses a kiss against his thumb.   The simple gesture plucks at something deep inside him. “I’ll call you when I leave,” she promises as she gets out of the car.

“Scully!”

She turns, one hand braced on the roof as she looks back into the car.

“Bye,” he forces out, feeling his ears turn pink with embarrassment, but Scully’s lips curve in a sweet smile. 

“Bye, Mulder.”

***

9.58pm, Alexandria

Mulder has just finished tossing the salad when he hears her rap on the door.  He wipes his hands off on a towel as he moves to open it.

“Hey, just in time,” he says, pulling the door open.  “I just put water on for the pasta.”

Scully is standing on the threshold.  She looks tired, even more than she did when he dropped her off, but her lipstick is fresh, and her hair looks newly combed.  In her hands she grips the handles of overnight bag and her hesitant expression grows when he glances at it.  She swallows, “I uh, I didn’t want to assume..”

“Get in here Scully.”

He helps her out of her coat and she deposits her bag neatly by the coat rack.  “It actually smells really good in here, Mulder,” she says, sounding surprised, as she looks around.  He’s excavated his tiny dining table, stuffing the piles of paperwork that usually cover it into the wardrobe, and laid it with the only two plates he could find without chips in them.  He looks at the humble little table, the mismatched cutlery and the flickering candle welded onto a saucer and suddenly feels stupid and unworthy.  His attempt to do something nice for her, to romance her, is pathetic when he looks at it through her eyes.  She deserves so much more than this, so much more than he can offer her.

“It’s stupid,” he starts to apologize, wishing he’d opted for Chinese take-out that they could’ve just eaten on the couch, but she cuts him off.

“I love it,” she whispers, finding his eyes with hers.  A half-dozen emotions eddy in the deep blue – shyness, affection, amusement, love.  Lust.

“Come and get a drink,” he says, pulling her toward the kitchen by her sleeve.  She pours herself a glass of wine while he pokes at the chicken he has baking in the oven and comes to stand next to him at the stove.  She leans her shoulder against his ancient Frigidaire and watches him fumble with a timer shaped like a pig wearing a chef’s hat.

“What are you making?”

“Um, it’s a lemon chicken thing,” he replies, dumping half a bag of penne into the boiling pan on the stove.

“What did it say on the packet?” she teases.

He raises his eyebrows at her.  “You’re busting my ass, Scully, but I don’t remember the last time you cooked anything.”

She takes a sip of wine and holds it in her mouth for a beat, tasting it, before she swallows.  “Cooking’s just chemistry, Mulder,” she says in that deceptively flirty voice that he loves.

“Chemistry huh?”  Their chemistry has always been explosive.  No one has ever energized, challenged, infuriated him like Scully.  No one but Scully has ever made him feel like his body was too small for the emotions within it.

He takes the glass of wine off her and sets it down on the counter, and then moves in on her, backing her up against the refrigerator until she has to tilt her head back to look at him.  He stoops to sip at her lips and after one, two nips, her mouth opens wide under his and her tongue sweeps over his bottom lip.  She tastes of mint and tannins and he moans into her mouth.  

Her fingers dig into his hair and he slides his hands under her blazer, around the soft curve of her waist and under the buttery fabric of her sweater.  The long muscles of her back dance under his hands and he wants to touch her everywhere at once.

She shrugs her blazer off, expensive wool landing in a haphazard heap by their feet and fumbles with his belt and fly.  It’s all happening so fast.  He shifts his hips back and drags his mouth from hers. “Wait,” he gasps and she lets go of his buckle and moves to the buttons on his shirt instead.

“No,” she says shaking her head, “No more waiting.”  She’s shoving the shirt off his shoulders and pushing the t-shirt under it up his abdomen, pressing her open mouth against the bared flesh of his chest.  Her breath is hot on his chest and she sweeps the flat of her tongue over his left nipple.

He shucks his t-shirt and then helps her drag her sweater over her head. The firm globes of her breasts hover in front of him, swollen nipples visible under the black lace cups, and he reaches behind her to undo the clasp of her bra while she works on the button of her slacks.  He wants to bury his face in her chest as the wisp of lace drops away, but she kicks her shoes off so she can step out of her trousers, and suddenly she’s four inches shorter and he’d have to be a contortionist to get his mouth on her tits.

“Here,” he nudges her sideways and boosts her on to the counter next to his draining rack. She pulls him between her open thighs and this inspired move makes her the perfect height to be able to kiss without straining his neck.  She works his belt again, getting his pants undone, and he cups her between her legs, hand sliding under the barely-there scrap of fabric, middle finger dipping between her folds and finding her swollen and hot.  The kind of swollen and hot that only comes when the arousal has been building for hours.  Her sticky juices seep onto his hand.  “Fuck, how long -?” he gasps into her hair, thrusting his finger deep inside her.

“Years,” she whines, rubbing herself against him and arching her back.  Her head bangs off the wall cabinet, eliciting a yelp.  They both laugh breathlessly, in awe of this new thing between them, of the freedom to finally give in to the passion they have each felt for so long.

He eases her panties down her legs and then four eager hands push his trousers down his thighs and help him find his way into her body.  His vision goes black at the sheer pleasure of feeling her surround him. Scully’s fingers dig into his back as he pushes inside, her breath catching in her throat.  She is so small, he feels like he’s splitting her in two.

Blinking until his vision returns, he brushes her hair back from her face and caresses her jaw with his thumb.  “Okay?” he asks, forcing himself to stay still while her body adjusts. 

“Yeah, don’t stop,” she pleads, raising her knees high on his waist until her heels are digging into his ass.  Her body opens up to him and when he hits the end of her, they both moan in wonder.

“Oh God,” she keens into his shoulder, and then again when he pulls out and reinserts himself. 

He speeds up, pistoning into her, knocking the breath out of her in little gasps as the sweet suction of her body drags him under. 

He can feel completion bearing down on him, but he can tell by the frantic grind of her hips and the bite of her fingernails in his shoulders, that she is on the verge too.  Just hold on, he begs himself, just a little longer.

He pulls her to the very edge of the counter, fingers digging into her ass as they slam against one another.  He is so far inside her she must be able to feel him in her throat.  Deep, deep within, her body contracts around his cock.

“Right there,” Scully sobs, “God, Mulder, right there.” 

She shakes in his arms and he loses himself in the hot, wet vice of her.  He buries his face in the sweaty curve of her neck as he shoots into her for what feels like hours.

Beside them, the timer rings.

“Chicken’s done,” he mumbles into her ear and she wraps her arms and legs around him tightly like she means never to let him go.

***

Scully sits on one of the dining chairs wearing his dress shirt, a few buttons done up for modesty, but leaving very little to Mulder’s over-zealous imagination.

“This is really good Mulder.”

Mulder takes the odd bite of his chicken, ignores the overcooked pasta, and watches her.  She is uninhibited, making enthusiastic noises as she digs into her dinner with gusto, not really bothering with conversation.  Her too-short hair falls around her face in gentle waves, not sleek like she normally wears it, but mussed from his hands.  One bare leg is tucked underneath her, the other is extended toward him, their feet resting together under the table.  Her makeup is almost gone and she has never looked more beautiful.

“I, um, I feel like I’m 18 again,” he confesses, a non sequitur, and she tilts her head thoughtfully, drawing her fork from her mouth and chewing slowly.  She licks a smear of sauce from her lower lip. 

“It wasn’t like that for me at 18,” she observes wryly.

“I don’t mean that,” he explains, then shakes his head.  “Well, that too actually, but I meant the whole thing.  I just feel so…” he pauses, searching for the right word.  “..hopeful, I guess.  I feel hope for the future, that you and I have a future together.”

Scully sets down her fork and clasps her hands in her lap.

“We both denied ourselves for so long, but now that we’re finally here, I want to shout it from the rooftops.  My name is Fox Mulder and I love you, Dana Scully.” 

Scully ducks her head and he can see the apples of her cheeks.  She looks up at him, smiling.  He feels goofy, ridiculous, and utterly, utterly enchanted by the loveliness of her.

“I feel the same, Mulder.”  She reaches for his hand, “Though I’m not sure I’d recommend the rooftop thing, if we want to keep our jobs.”

He cocks his head in concession, “Maybe I’ll keep the affirmations for private, but Scully, the craziest thing I’ve ever done is try to make myself not love you.”

They leave the plates on the table, and he leads her by the hand to the bedroom.  The next time, and the time after that, they take it slowly, learning every inch of one another.  She rises above him like a phoenix, his hands caressing the wings of her back, and she carries both their dreams with her.

It’s almost 5.30am when they collapse, side by side on his destroyed bed, tangled in sheets and covered in sweat.  He can tell by the slowing cadence of her breath that she has drifted off and he is almost gone too when his cellular rings.

On shaking legs, he stumbles to the living room and takes the call.  When he comes back, he brings Scully a glass of water and trails a finger down the ridge of her spine.

“Has the world ended?” she mumbles into her pillow.

“I think we’ve got about another 18 hours,” he says, following his finger with a few soft kisses.  Her skin tastes salty.  “There’s another body, in Maryland.”

She doesn’t respond, and after a moment he bites her shoulder softly.  “Scully?”

“I’m awake.”

“You wanna share a shower?” he whispers into her ear.

“Not if I wanna be able to sit down today.”

He kisses her earlobe and then reluctantly stands, his own long forgotten muscles aching.  “I’ll put coffee on.”

He’s almost out the door when her voice catches him. 

“I love you.”

Even a 5.30am wakeup call and a necromancer couldn’t piss on his cornflakes today.

Or so he thought.

The End