Chapter Text
1. The University was being cheap. That was the first thing. Piggybacking off the hard work he’d put in: years worth of toil to arrange this meticulously set-up dig. If they wanted to send a team to study advanced medical uses of the vast biome of the Amazon rainforest, they’d do far better sending this approaching medical team into the interior. His team—his dig—was practically on the outskirts. The forest around them had already been explored and researched, catalogued and referenced. The real biological finds—the cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer—would be found in the unknown, in those places even the aboriginal people hadn’t stepped. The University was being cheap, plunking in a science team on a completely separate mission than his own, just to save some cash. That was the bottom line.
If it hadn’t been so oppressively hot so early in the morning, he might not have been quite so irritated. As it was, he stood on the bank of the river and ran an already sweat-soaked handkerchief over the back of his neck, willing the putting little outboard Evinrude to chug a little more quickly upstream. It was hot and stiflingly humid, and he’d wanted to be at the dig two hours ago, before the heat of the day set in. Too late, that.
The incoming medical team—if you could call it a team—seemed to consist of only one person. A short-statured wisp of a woman (if the high, top-knotted messy red bun was any indication of sex) who sat low in the backseat of the approaching riverboat, surrounded by expensive-looking cases filled with technology that probably wouldn’t operate well in the humidity. He blew an irritated raspberry and shuffled his feet in the muddy squelch of the riverbank.
The driver, a stout block of a man, hefted a rope at Mulder as they approached, which he caught easily and wrapped around a nearby tree.
“Tudo vai bem?” Mulder inquired as the man cut the engine and grunted an affirmative.
The passenger stood, keeping a hand on the side of the little tin vessel, its stern fishtailing out into the current. Mulder stepped up and held out a hand, which she grasped gratefully. He pulled and she took a confident leap, landing lightly on the ground next to him.
“Dr. Mulder, I presume?” she said on a light breath, looking up at him with a small smile, having to crane her neck to do so. She had astonishingly blue eyes, a color he’d only seen once, in an ice-cave in the far north. He shook his head after a moment and realized that he was still holding her hand. He dropped it, nodding.
“I thank God, doctor, I have been permitted to see you,” she finished, quoting the journals of Henry Morton Stanley.
Mulder outright laughed. He was smitten immediately.
2. “Be careful with that!” she’d barked, as Langly handed out her equipment to a couple of waiting locals that had been working on the project for three years.
Mulder held up a calming hand.
“You’re working with archeologists, Dr. Scully,” he said softly, “my team has the gentlest hands in the Southern Hemisphere.”
She quirked one side of a grin at him even as she threw a worried look over her shoulder at her equipment.
“Come on,” he said, giving her sleeve a gentle tug, “let me show you around.”
He showed her the latrine first, watching her face carefully for a reaction, but she just nodded nonchalantly and kept walking. Then the mess, and the tent where she’d be working when she wasn’t in the field.
“And this,” he said, taking her to an empty patch of jungle, “is where your bunk will be. My apologies that it’s not set up. There’s no female barracks and we were told you wouldn’t be here until next week. The radio communique we got this morning informing us of your arrival came as something of a surprise.”
“I’m eager to get started,” was all she said in response.
Mulder walked on and she followed him.
“I’m afraid the only empty cot is in my tent,” he said sheepishly. “Dr. Byers headed home for a funeral last month and we’re not expecting him back until March. I’ll be sure yours is set up right away, but it takes some time as we have to build a platform first. Have you done jungle field work before?”
“I flew here from Borneo,” she said. “It’s not a problem.” With that, she flipped back the tent’s outer curtain and ducked inside like she owned the place.
She never did move out.
3. Scully’s father had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and hadn’t lived long enough to see her graduate from medical school. She would not let it happen to anyone else if she could help it, she’d said. She worked like a woman possessed.
Against all advice, she would march into the jungle alone and be gone for days at a time. When her grad students finally arrived, they couldn’t keep up with her, and she’d frequently leave them at base camp to work on the equipment (which, Mulder was not really that pleased to report, did have a tendency to malfunction in the miasmic humidity and heat of the Amazon basin). Occasionally she could be talked into taking one of the local hires with her, but she felt bad taking workers that Mulder’s project funding paid for, and anyway, they weren’t trained in her science, she would tell him.
“I wish you wouldn’t go out on your own,” he murmured into the cup of her ear one night, a trickle of sweat running from her hairline and onto the tip of his nose.
She turned on the cot, a feat, considering its fairly narrow dimensions, and pressed her forehead against his, the flimsy pillow damp beneath them both.
“I’m careful,” she whispered, and threw a leg over him, her dewy mons pressing into the naked flesh of his thigh.
“It’s not safe-” he began to protest, but she’d captured his lips with her own and he fell headlong into the lush heat of her—whatever concern that had been on the tip of his tongue lost to her rapacious mouth as it trailed a slick path down his torso and latched, vitae and greedy, around the rigid length of him. It was bliss. She was bliss. If he had ever thought he knew love, he was wrong.
4. The whole camp knew they were together. Her tent had become a kind of catchall storage area, and it’s not like nylon canvas could contain the breathy moans of their pleasure. That and she’d just plunk down and sit on his lap whenever the only camp chair available around the mess tent was the one with the tricky leg.
Anyway, what happened in the field stayed in the field, unless it was up for peer review.
“Are you guys going to get married or something?” Mulder’s newest grad student asked one night when the air had actually cooled enough to take the edge off of everybody’s temper. Beer had arrived with their latest resupply and Frohike had syphoned off some LN2 to cool it and it was frosty and rich and maybe the best thing Mulder had ever tasted aside from Scully’s skin.
Scully, from atop his lap, merely shrugged and took a leisurely sip of brew. Mulder pictured it sliding down her throat, the cold blooming into her belly and he dry swallowed, then leaned forward and kissed her shoulder.
“God, don’t be such a newb,” drawled Langly, pressing his glasses into his face compulsively.
Mulder knew what Langly meant. They’d all seen their share of field romances that fizzled the second your boots stepped back onto University soil, though something about Scully felt different; the way their minds worked together, the way she felt in his arms.
“I’m married to the job, bro,” Scully said, but reached back and squeezed the skin just above Mulder’s hip. He kissed her shoulder again.
“D’you tell her about the helo data?” Frohike asked, looking at Mulder from his own camp chair. The little man sat low and back in it with his shoulders hunched up, and Mulder thought he looked a bit like a toad, or an ogre guarding a burial mound.
They’d gotten the funding from a billionaire alumni to fly a helicopter over the whole of the basin in this sector of the Amazon, using light detection radar. Basically, it shot out billions of lasers as it flew overhead that were able to penetrate the rainforest’s canopy and map the landscape below.
“You had a chance to analyze it?” Scully asked, craning her head to look at him squarely.
He nodded, smiling. He’d been saving this to tell her especially.
“And you were able to combine it with the satellite data?” she asked, excited.
He nodded again. “Sóis,” he said, smiling. The settlements they’d found took their name from the Portuguese word for ‘sun.’ They were round villages, all with remarkably similar layouts, with elongated mounds circling a central plaza. When seen from above, they looked like the rays of the sun. “Pre-Columbian.”
She jumped off his lap, spilling half her beer in the process. It dripped down the bare skin of her knee, unnoticed.
“Are you kidding?!” her excitement made him giddy.
“It gets better,” he said, and she cocked her head, waiting for him to elaborate. “They’re laid out like the cosmos,” he said, giving her a full-watt smile as he rose out of the chair to stand in front of her. “We’ve already plotted three different villages, all laid out in the exact design of southern constellations.” Her mouth dropped open. “Canis Major, Hydra, and Crux Australis.”
She launched herself into his arms, practically squealing—something he’d never heard her do—and he held her, looking around at the smiling faces of the other scientists in the mess. The find would make his career, and her excitement for him touched him profoundly.
5. Martim, one of their local hires, came careening into camp, breathing so hard he had to put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. His face was a mask of anxiety and fear. Mulder felt dread bloom in his gut, and he dropped what he was doing—actually dropped the computer tablet he was holding to the wet forest floor—and ran over to the man, grasping him firmly by the shoulder.
“Martim?” he said, “O que aconteceu?”
“Dr. Scully,” the man heaved, his accent thick. He could still scarcely breathe.
“Where is she?” Mulder didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to translate from English. “What happened?”
“Hurt,” the man wheezed, “she’s hurt.”
It took nearly thirty minutes to assemble a rescue party, and they had to let Martim rest for a bit and give him food and water before he could take them back out into the jungle where he’d left Scully. Mulder was beside himself by the time they finally started off, impatient as a recalcitrant child, sick to his stomach with worry.
It took three hours to hack into the area where she’d been doing her search, and a further twenty minutes of calling her name before they heard her weak call back.
Mulder raced ahead without thought to obstacle or danger, and skidded to a halt when he was practically on top of her. She was leaning back against the base of a large tree, holding onto her right ankle, which she had elevated on her left knee. There was a length of rope beside her and a climbing harness around her butt and waist.
“Scully,” he panted, falling to his knees beside her.
She smiled at him weakly, her face pale and sweaty.
“I think it’s broken,” she hissed, pointing at her ankle.
“What happened?” Mulder asked, as the rest of the rescue party trundled in behind him, pulling off backpacks and other equipment. Someone handed Scully a bottle of water.
“I saw a fungus I’d never seen before growing on the bark midway up this tree,” she said after guzzling half a bottle of Arrowhead. “The carabiner failed on my descent.”
“Oh, Scully,” Mulder said, reaching out to tuck a damp lock of titian hair behind her ear.
“I got the sample, though,” she said with a tired, but victorious glint in her eye.
They weren’t back into camp until well after nightfall.
Mulder picked her up from the field stretcher and carried her into their tent, depositing her gently onto her cot. Langly came in behind him and handed him two fresh cold packs before ducking back out without a word. Mulder popped them to activate the chemicals and pressed them gingerly on either side of Scully’s ankle.
“I’m going to call for a medical evac,” he said quietly.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, grabbing at his hand and squeezing it. “Mulder, don’t you fucking dare.”
“Scully, we’ve got to follow protocol here,” he said, trying not to sound put out.
“Do not take me out of the field, Mulder. Promise me.”
“Scully-”
“Promise me!”
“How will you even work?” he said a little desperately.
“It doesn’t need setting or surgery,” she said, gesturing to her injured limb.
“How do you know that without an X-ray?”
“I’m a medical doctor,” she said, breezing past his question, “I can secure it with supplies we have on hand. I can work from my cot for a few days and make crutches out of tree limbs. Please, Mulder,” she said, and he could feel himself relenting, even if it would get him in trouble. “Please.”
He sighed, and she smiled up at him weakly, though he didn’t say a thing.
“Thank you,” she said, and closed her eyes, relaxing into her pillow. “Thank you.”
Six weeks later the canvas of their tent ripped back and the greenish glow of leaf-filtered sunlight shone into the murky, damp depths. Mulder rose from where he was resting on his cot and looked to the entrance. Scully stood there, armpit resting on her improvised crutch, her hair a rich autumn frizz around her head. Her eyes were wide and shining, and there was something incandescent about her in that moment -- an energy pulsing from her that lit his soul from within.
“Scully-” he started, but she held up a hand to silence him. Her hands were shaking.
“I found it,” she said, her voice breathy with the triumph of discovery, “Mulder, I found it .”