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April had brought the rain—the on-and-off storms, with their veiny lightning cutting through ash-tainted cloudbursts.
It’s like a monsoon out there, she’d said on the second day of the month, watching the downpour threaten to break through their only window to the world aboveground. He remembers she had stood under it all day, chin pointed at the sky, eyes shut, almost as if summoning the gods for a potential flood to come in and wash the two of them away. Unafraid of a consequent voracious current carrying their years of work far into oblivion, for a second time.
Still, better than a fire , she’d mused, distracted, after his third half-hearted admonishment about the dangers of standing underneath glass that hasn’t been so much as glanced upon by maintenance since, at least, 1993. Not with what sounds like hail and hell comin’ a-knockin’, Scully. But this faraway Scully would only draw in a new breath, long and dense, enough to briefly fog half an inch of the window pane.
For April had also seemed to bring with it a quiet impatience. Eye rolls of sky-blue and lifts of her eyebrow that struck more purposefully, and registered on a higher frequency.
One time, she had aimed both at a faulty motel tv-set whose image he had been unable to slap into not-grainy; two times at mushy fries, served as a side dish at two different roadside diners in two different states, because When you name a place Crispy, Mulder, it breeds expectation. The second place had been called Pond Joint, because it was near a pond and it was a joint, but its visibly time-stricken pale-yellow neon sign refused to light up anything but the d, the o, the n, and the t, so, really, he should have known better than to park on its desolate lot. Three times he had had the distinct feeling she’d rolled her eyes at something he’d said. Or did. Or thought.
Yet aside from the occasional field trip, Mulder had hardly seen her since the fourth month of the year had come swooping in, finally doing away with endless, if equally gloomy-looking, March. Scully would spend her days in the building’s library, doing research and typing up reports. Catching up on paperwork, Mulder, which you should consider doing some time, by the way. It can’t always be fun and games, you know.
He knew. And so he would pick a book, any thick book, off a shelf within her eye range and take it down with him to a glumly, Scully-less office.
Unless — unless it was raining.
When it rained, Scully would stay in the office. Under the window. One elbow digging into the metal filing cabinet to his left, her lips pursed in contemplation of … what was it that day? He could never tell. And he’d been hesitant to ask, in case she’d manage to throw fun and games into a sentence, again.
Sometimes she would absent-mindedly pace back and forth in front of the projector while he was putting on what he thought was one of his best persuasive acts, and Mulder would pause his exposition and watch the blotches of rain reflected from the window freckle her face, before running like little tiny streams down the slopes of her cheeks and spill onto her tailored suit.
The new month had also carried with it what felt like an unending parade of ill-looking salads bathed in inedible sauces she’d inhale without once looking up, and a slew of cases he’d found himself unable to render interesting to a seemingly half-absent Scully.
And then — and then.
Mulder had found her on the first dry day, breathless and happy to see him, as if she’d actually missed him as much as he’d missed her: with his fists clenched to fend off the empty longing, and his molars aching.
Come on, I’ll make you some tea, she’d said, like a peace offering after a war. A war he’d conceded long ago. A war she had won roughly around the same time maintenance had last looked at the only air-imbuing crack in their office wall.
I’ll make you some tea, she’d said.
And all he’d been able to think about, as they drove back to his place, was that it couldbelovecouldbelovecouldbelove.
So just like that, on its ninth, fateful day—if you believe in that stuff—April had somehow managed to bring him Scully. Warm and alive, and drumming beneath his fingertips.
He’d awoken at the first sign of thunder, at the first thud of heavy raindrops against his window, to find she had been waiting for him. A waiting like seduction.
She’d been sitting on his bed, her gaze kind and intent, and her hands had silently traveled the length of his chest to cradle his jaw on both sides, and Mulder had made himself comfortable inside all that touch, the sea of it blanketing him. Embracing him.
Her aloofness of the previous days had disappeared, the roll of her eyes now an indicator of his successes rather than his failures, her brows lifting only when he would kiss her with his eyes open, as if fearful that the dark might steal him away from all of it.
Somewhere in his stupor, he remembers asking, What was in that tea?, and Scully had slowly lifted her face from the crook of his neck and smiled at him through a curtain of red hair and the dim, gray light of an early morning, to then gently kiss him back into plethoric bliss.
Mulder remembers thinking, before falling asleep to the rise and fall of Scully’s spine against his chest, that the one thing he was sure he would need April to do for him now, was for it to keep raining.
—
Outside his apartment, at roughly five minutes to seven a.m., April is a boundless winter.
Mulder braves the naked corridor weather in his improv naked corridor suit—a cushion pulled in haste from where it laid on his couch—and thinks briefly of Scully’s remarkably long strides for her tiny stature, as each step of her heels echoes outside his door, and disturbingly away from it.
By his calculations, she’s two-and-a-half strides to the elevator when the cushion he’s pressing to his groin in the name of decency threatens to slip from the grip of his suddenly ice-cold fingers.
“Scully,” he calls out, to hear his own voice echoing in the empty hallway.
Scully doesn’t immediately turn around, but she stops nonetheless, and Mulder hears the faltering in her breath, long and dense, though not of the same build as the one she’d fogged the office window with all through the previous week.
When she does turn around, with traces of what looks like restlessness adorning her features, he notices her green sweater is inside out—the stitching showing where she’s coming undone—and she’s fumbling to put on his jacket instead of her own. A look of deep concentration on her face, like she’s attempting to solve the equation that might bring sense to the conundrum of the jacket having grown three sizes overnight.
“Where are you going?” he asks, out of curiosity as much as concern.
What he really wants to ask, absurdly, is it’s still raining, you should be staying. Why aren’t you staying if it’s raining?
They’ve just made love, and although he likes to think he’s fairly good at it, he knows he can’t have been so good as to completely throw her and make her forget how to wear her own sweater.
Or could he?
Nah. If Mulder knows something about the female body it’s that it has enough mysteries to make the odd X-File envious, and Scully’s still brand new to him, after all. He’d be tooting his own horn (pardon the pun) a little too loudly if he believed he’d made her reach that kind of nirvana. Though he knows for a fact he’ll go out trying.
Scully finally answers, in a string of breaths that shudder the same as her hands do, half swallowed by the too-long sleeves of his jacket,
“Just. Someplace.”
He smiles.
“Yeah, that’s where I hear most people usually end up when they’re in motion.” Mulder chuckles, in an attempt to lighten the mood and hide the irrational fear brewing in him that maybe she’s leaving because of him. Of something he may have inadvertently done. Or said. Or thought.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, trying to sound as unworried as possible, only to find his voice is shaky, too. The cool morning air seems to be pushing him back into the warmth of his apartment. That, and the very real, impending threat of other early risers in the building catching him in his state of indecorum. “Besides that jacket which, frankly, should have been shipped off to Goodwill … two weeks ago Tuesday.”
He watches her inspect the jacket again, a whole five-foot-two of insouciance, like she’d known it was the wrong one all along.
“Goodwill would want this?” she asks. There’s a light, surreptitious smirk on her lips as she holds the ends of his jacket in mock despondency. It dislodges an invisible knot in his throat.
Mulder tilts his head then. His hand not holding the pillow to his groin upturns its palm, and waves its fingers briefly in a come here gesture.
“You’ll think I’m crazy, Mulder,” she prefaces as she makes her way back to the threshold of his apartment, in noticeably smaller strides. “But I need to go back there. To make sure it was real.”
Once she’s within reach, Mulder cradles her against him in the crook of his elbow, refusing to let any distance between them grow, lest it become another liminal space. All the while maneuvering their now joined bodies back into the safety of his apartment. Once his door closes behind them, he asks,
“Make sure what was real?”
Still refusing to let go of Scully, Mulder returns his trusted cushion to the couch and drags the two of them into the bedroom to retrieve a pair of boxers. His arm untangles from her shoulders and blindly searches for a hand to hold, reluctantly giving it up only a few times throughout the putting on of his underwear.
“The visions. What I told you about last night. All of it.” She hesitates. “The temple. I need to go back to the temple. I need to find it again. To make sure it’s there.”
Remnants of sleep cloud his memory and his thoughts, and Mulder needs a second to recall their conversation of the previous night, when they had both been drunk on warm tea and sleep. Before he can fully make sense of it, Scully speaks again.
“I don’t know. You probably thought I was high last night. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Scully,” he interrupts.
“No, I mean it, Mulder. Maybe I was high. It would explain a lot. Would explain all of it, actually.”
“Maybe it would.” Mulder grins. “But then you forget I’m a firm believer in the unexplained, Scully.”
Her eyes light up.
“So you don’t think I’m crazy?” The hope in her voice widens his smile as he shakes his head and presses a damp kiss to her forehead. “I want to go back there, Mulder. I barely slept, my mind kept going back to it, even when I tried thinking of something else. It’s like it needs to make sure it exists. That I didn’t dream it.”
He offers her a cheeky grin. “I’m wounded. I thought it was something else that had kept you from sleep … “
Scully balls her hand into a fist and punches him lightly in the ribs, eliciting a fake oof.
“Will you come with me?” she asks, timidly.
“Of course.”
Because of course he will. Because there’s nowhere she might ask him to go that he won’t follow. Because the way she’s asked, low and shy, and like she was trying desperately not to let him hear it, made him want to build her a temple right there, with his two hands. One sharp-edged, anvil-hefty brick at a time.
Because there’s nothing he wouldn’t re-build or invent for her, should she need him to.
With a careful hand, he lifts her chin and, almost experimentally, places a docile kiss against her lips.
“Let me just get dressed. I think my uh … every appendage is about to freeze solid.”
His body relinquishes contact to rummage through his closet and he’s in the middle of throwing on a clean shirt when she asks,
“Mulder?”
“What?"
“What if … what if it’s not there?”
Mulder shrugs, holds out his hand for her to curl up her own in once more, and asks, “Does it matter? If it was real to you, if it was there when you needed it to be, does it matter, Scully?”
Looking up at him, she looks doubtful, dithering.
“It will be there,” he reassures her, squeezing the hand she’s given him as if to say If it’s not there, I will be. I always will be.
Scully nods, and as he vanishes into his bathroom to rid himself of his disheveled … everything, he hears her call out to him from outside.
“Mulder. Your jacket.”
“Keep it. It looks better on you. Goodwill will live.”
—
The temple is there, but they don’t find it straight away.
Chinatown is bustling with Monday morning activity and the streets fill with people and vendors and delivery trucks that block passages and entryways and keep streets from easy view.
Twice they make a left turn that leads them outside the area and down a one-way street that requires a four-step u-turn, under the reproachful gaze of a fortune teller setting up his business on the very curb Mulder invades, again, in order to successfully get them out of there.
“Maybe your suggestion of finding a parking spot and walking around instead isn’t entirely without merit, Scully.” And before she has a chance, he turns to her sharply as he positions the vehicle for a right turn out of the cursed cul-de-sac. “Do not roll your eyes at me,” he chides, and watches out of the corner of his eye as she quietly giggles in the passenger seat.
They find the temple on foot, after a man on a bicycle nearly runs over Mulder.
“Hey,” Mulder interjects, but Scully’s hand on his forearm makes him turn to look at her and forget the near-accident.
“Mulder, that’s the same man.”
“The same man?”
“He nearly drove into me yesterday. As I was following her to … "
“Following her? Following who? The mystery woman? Scully?”
But Scully’s already dodging the dim sum street vendor like someone who’s done it before and turning the corner. It’s all he can do not to lose her in a crowd that seems to purposely gather behind her and steal her away.
He catches up with her in the small man-made garden beyond the first, unremarkable door. His hand carefully slips up the sleeve of his jacket to find hers. The red door she’s about to push open looks strangely both ominous and enticing.
“We’re not about to get murdered, are we?” He chuckles, but Scully’s already stepping inside what looks, from where he stands, like a small, dark room, lit up only by enough candles to please a pyromaniac.
A couple of people are scattered across the room, kneeling or sitting in apparent prayer or meditation, and the same eerie silence he had noticed upon entering the garden seems to grow in magnitude now, pressing in from the four walls enclosing them.
Within that same silence—even their feet seem to have gone strangely mute as they walk around the bowed heads and backs of the few present worshipers—Scully leads him to a corner of the temple, where Mulder frowns suspiciously at two cushions, lain side by side as if counting on their arrival.
The temple is small enough that they’re not entirely hidden from sight, but the shadows forged by the burning candles around the room provide a somewhat comfortable sense of privacy.
“So this is it?” He speaks at a volume apparently too loud for a temple, because as he sits on the cushion next her, everyone turns their head to look at him, which seems to amuse Scully greatly.
“This is it,” she whispers, practically in his ear. “This is where I saw … all of it.”
“Remind me,” he mouths back, brushing his lips against the tender part of her earlobe. Opportunity waits for no man.
“I saw … “ She pauses, draws in a breath, and seems to fix her eyes on the tall, golden Buddha resting against the opposite wall. She leans into him again.
“Do you believe in fate, Mulder?”
Mulder studies her face, and wonders if she’s in search of a serious or less serious answer. In true Mulder fashion, he tries the non-serious route first.
“Is this about the man on the bicycle? Because he looks like he might just do that to everyone passing by. All day, every day, Scully. Like a job. I bet he even gets paid for each person he manages to knock over.”
“Mulder.”
Okay, so she wants a serious answer. He nods and purses his lips. “I believe in … happenstance.”
She raises an eyebrow. “As in coincidences.”
“As in … things that happen because of circumstance. Because of several other things colliding, fusing, coming together to create a different, new thing.”
“Are we together because of circumstance, then?”
He looks at her in half-shock, but she wears a smile that says it might just be fun and games , the good kind this time. So he indulges her.
“We’re together because … ” Mulder exhales. This is what she must feel like when he’s trying to convince her of alien crops in England and creatures under her bed. Nobody knows how they get there, but get there they do. Unanswerable questions. Not in any simple manner, anyway. No matter how very real both of those things are.
Still, he says, eyes cast to his hands because it’s true, and what is one supposed to do with one’s hands when confessing the truth, “Yeah. Okay. Maybe you’re meant for me, Scully. I’d sure like to think you are.”
“So…” she smiles sweetly and drops her chin pointedly on his shoulder. “Fate.”
He grins. “Yeah, yeah. Where convenient.”
“Ah.”
“I think we find ways to make sense of everything that happens to us, Scully. Of every choice we make. Out of a need to perhaps reassure ourselves that we’ve made the choice we should have made. I think fate, or pre-determination, is the easiest culprit. Nobody can prove its existence, just as nobody can prove its non-existence. It’s like … God. Or Buddha, isn’t it?”
“Or aliens.”
He’s about to protest when he feels her shoulder bump against his, and turns to catch the corners of her lips folding upwards before she leans in to press a soft kiss on his mouth.
“Scully, in a church?” he chastises, all the while scooting closer, closer, to feel their hip bones brush. Mulder drags his thumb over the thick of her sweater’s seam and thinks of himself coming undone this time, with each thread his finger trails.
Scully holds up her hand, palm out, and levels it with the eyes of the Buddha statue, hiding them from view. She kisses him again.
“I don’t think you know how this God thing works, Scully.” But he covers her hand with his own to thicken the makeshift blindfold and becomes the willing culprit of a third kiss.
“The thing is,” he continues once they break apart, his tone more solemn now, “to believe in pre-determination, I’d have to believe that everything that’s happened to us, this far, to you and me, it all had to happen in order for this moment, right here, to happen. Samantha being taken. Your sister. Your cancer.” He pauses, and then with a tender squeeze of her waist, whispers, “Your Emily.”
Scully’s eyes grow sad for a moment, as he knew they might, and he’s quick to lean into her again, causing the bridges of their noses to collide in leisurely, unrushed Eskimo kisses this time.
“Is this why you’ve been so distant lately?” he finally asks, trying not to let his relief show at realising none of his irrational reasoning was correct.
She looks at him. “I have been distant, haven’t I?”
Their voices are still no more than faint whispers that float back and forth in the inches that separate their mouths, but she's all he can hear.
“Yeah,” he admits “it’s been … ” Mulder casts his eyes low, swallows into a dry throat with a half-shy smile. “Hard.”
He’s in the middle of trying to figure out what to do with truthful hands again when he feels one of hers rake gingerly through his hair.
“I’m sorry,” she sighs. “I think sometimes I forget … I stop being able to make sense of things. When we run into a difficult case, or some that aren’t even cases, I question everything. Like the Szezesny case with the drowning. And then the crop circle case …”
“Hey now, that had all the makings of a real case.”
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head in true Scully form.
“Mulder, it did not.”
“Did, too,” he counters, like a stubborn five-year-old who forgets his opponent is much better at this game than he is.
“Did not."
“Did, too.”
She looks at him like she's about to deck him, and Mulder concedes with a grin, as he parrots,
“Did not.”
Scully relents then, too, and searches for one of his still inept hands to hold, brings their linked fingers onto her lap.
“I think I just … got too lost inside my own head. Trying to justify every choice that got me here, to where I am. That what I’m doing is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Did you? Justify them?”
She shrugs.
“I know I belong here. Right here. With you. Or at least, there's nowhere else I’d want to be.”
“So … Fate, then?” Mulder teases, with his heart raging against his ribcage and his hands at last purposeful. He casts his face toward her disapproving look and smiles back at it, fully unrepentant. Beneath their sight, he reaches for her waist, intending to pull her closer.
“Think about it, though. If we were to believe in pure fate, Scully, we’d also have to believe my trip to England to look for weird-shaped crop circles would have been written in the stars. And I’m not sure I want fate to justify my every dumb move, tempting as it may be to shift responsibility towards something that can’t defend itself. I mean, I forgot my keys inside my apartment the other day as I went out to buy milk. I was locked out for three hours before the third locksmith I called came around. I’d hate to know I was sitting outside my door for that long in the name of some greater purpose.”
“Unless … you were meant to call me so I could come kick your door down and carry you inside and feel like a hero for the rest of the day. Fate for the sake of altruism, Mulder.”
“I said I’d forgotten my keys, Scully. My dignity I remember to shove deep into my back pocket everywhere I go.”
“Ah yes, that explains it.” Then she asks, “Was that why you were late to the meeting with Skinner that morning?”
He nods. “Now I wouldn’t mind if that had been fate indeed, conspiring to rescue me from impending boredom.”
“But then we’d have to believe fate to be your friend only, Mulder, because I got there early enough to, out of my own boredom, sink my teeth into a stale croissant. I nearly chipped a tooth.”
“You must have done something to upset it.”
“How does one upset a croissant, except by pronouncing it wrong?”
“Fate,” he says. Scully grins mischievously. It's stupidly contagious. “You just want me to keep saying the word, don’t you?”
In the sanctuary, someone stands up, and the sound of feet and the door closing alerts them that they are the only ones left inside the temple.
“Come on, Scully. Let’s let Buddha sleep. I’ll buy you some dim sum around the corner. From that vendor you dodged like a ninja earlier."
He’s about to reach for her hand and help her to her feet when she stops him.
“Mulder, before we go. Can I just ask you to do something for me?”
“You can ask me anything,” he says, taking his place back on the cushion next to her.
“Close your eyes?”
He glances her way, suspiciously.
“Just for a quick experiment, I promise.”
“You’re going to kiss me on sacred ground, again? I really should not be condoning this but. All right.” He closes his eyes and puckers his lips. “Go ahead.”
Scully instead moves quickly to catch the tip of his chin between her index finger and thumb and when he looks at her, she has a soft but stern look on her face.
“Please? Do it for me?”
Intending to fully respect her wishes this time, Mulder stretches his back and redresses his posture. His arms stretch forward and he rests his hands upon his knees as he assumes the lotus position, to the best of his ability, which is to say as far as his long legs will allow.
He closes his eyes and breathes out. After a beat, she wonders, “Do you see anything?”
“I seee … weirdly shaped crop circles?”
She says, “Be serious.”
He hears her exasperated sigh and opens his eyes to find that she has closed her own, so he keeps looking at her instead. It feels like cheating, like breaking a children’s pact, but she’s the only vision he needs. The only thing he’s sure of. The only thing he’ll ever want his eyes and his mind to be able to see. Now. Every day. For as long as she’ll let him.
She says, be serious, and Mulder wishes he could explain it. Wishes he knew how to put it into words that there’s nothing that’s stacked up inside a cob-webbed filing cabinet in a forgotten basement office he’s ever wanted to believe in that he hasn’t wanted to believe in this a thousand times more; believe in her—belonging to him. With him.
So instead he just says, “You, Scully. I see … I see you.”
And later, after dim sum scarfed down with swigs of root beer, because the street vendor has run out of iced tea, and after walking back to his place with her hand in his and the words mustbefatemustbefatemustbefate swimming dreamily in his head, Scully will stay. Tonight. And the next night. And the one after that.
She’ll stay. And it won’t even be raining.