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Weddings are supposed to be a happy occasion. Their own wedding, ten years ago, had been happy enough – the two of them, a justice of the peace somewhere in Oklahoma, rings bought from a pawn shop exchanged in a courthouse they probably couldn’t find on a map these days.
A reception at a roadside Mexican joint, a toast with margaritas, another stop on another dusty highway leading to another dead end. Still, they were happy then, weren’t they?
It’s been so long that Dana Scully can’t remember for sure. She was happy when she was his partner, and happy when she was a doctor. Happy enough. The time in between, when she was a mother but not a wife and then a wife but not a mother…it seems like a blur to her now. She can’t honestly remember if she was happy then. She remembers specific moments when they were happy, driving through Monument Valley in Utah and taking pictures on a disposable camera, or Mulder dragging her away from yet another shady contact to get on a boat and get soaked at Niagara Falls. She has a picture of the two of them in clear raincoats, holding on to each other and laughing, their hair plastered to their faces by the mist swirling around them, and she knows that at that particular moment, she was completely in love and delighted with the man by her side.
Sitting at a table in a fancy country club in North Carolina, watching her youngest brother dance as a professional photographer snaps photo after photo, she can’t help but wonder if happy is only a fleeting moment caught on film that people spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture.
She danced with Mulder once, and somewhere in the files she never bothered to unpack when she moved out of their house, there’s a comic book illustration of the two of them smiling. She doesn’t remember being particularly happy at the end of that case, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s captured in pen and ink on paper, and that’s as close to truth as they’ve ever gotten.
And in the pictures they’ll get from the photographer, Charlie and his new wife will see the two of them smiling as they stand next to her mother and Bill and Tara, and maybe they’ll believe that everyone was just as happy on this day as they are.
It’s a nice thought. A better wedding gift than the three place settings she bought and wrapped, then signed both of their names on the card before shipping it to her youngest brother.
***
He doesn’t know why he’s here. The invitation came to their house, and he’s not sure what it says about her that she didn’t tell her family that she was no longer living there. He doesn’t know what it says about him that he accepted for the both of them before he even told her that her youngest brother was getting married.
She didn’t even argue, just pressed her lips together and sighed in that Scully way, then told him that he needed to shave and get a haircut before the wedding.
As if that were the root of their problems, his grooming habits.
Still, he did as he was told, and he’s more or less presentable in a suit that he hasn’t worn in years, sitting next to her as Bill Jr. gives a man-of-the-house toast about his youngest sibling. Mulder never liked Bill, but he likes him even less now. Even when they were on the run, Scully still called Charlie once a week without fail. He doubts Bill even knows why Charlie dropped out of his MBA program at UCLA. Doubts that Bill knows this isn’t the first of Charlie’s weddings they’ve been invited to. Doubts that Bill knows that Dana isn’t the only black sheep in the family.
Bill doesn’t care, because Charlie is doing The Right Thing with The Right Woman, and Bill has been alternating between proud claps on the back to his brother and glares across the family table to his sister’s husband.
He shouldn’t have come, and he knows Scully wishes he wasn’t here, but he couldn’t stay away. Her family may be flawed, but it’s hers. And her family has been his since long before he put a ring on her finger – it’s been his since the day he walked into the mortuary to pick up the headstone that read Dana Katherine Scully.
After all, how many marriages can say that they survived death doing them part?
***
Her mother leads Mulder to the dance floor, once the toasts are done and the wedding party has had their obligatory dances. Maggie Scully had dreams for her daughters’ weddings, going dress shopping, reserving the Officers’ Club at Annapolis. This wedding isn’t the same, but she’ll take what she can get, and what she can get is a dance with Mulder. It smarts a little bit that it’s to Beyond the Sea. Scully wishes she had the guts to tell her mother that she wasn’t the only one who felt gypped. Watching Charlie’s new wife dance with her father stabbed at Scully, so much that for a second she could barely breathe.
She might have left then and there, if it weren’t for Mulder’s fingers pressing into her thigh. Knowing that he was there, for the moment at least, was enough to keep her tears at bay. She could pretend to be happy.
She can pretend now, as her partner-slash-husband-slash-ex waltzes her mother across the dance floor. Years from now, when Maggie has only photos to remember this day by, she hopes that her mother smiles when telling friends about dancing with Mulder. Weddings should be happy memories.
The Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma had been nearly empty at 3pm, but they had a full staff, and a full bar, and a mariachi band. Mulder tipped them ten bucks to play an Elvis song, and it was the worst rendition of I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You Scully had ever heard, but they still danced on their wedding day. Maybe one day, she’d be old and gray and be the one telling anyone who would listen about her wedding day.
***
Mulder has a crumpled-up $20 in his pocket, which he shoves at the bandleader. He doesn’t know which song to request – Beyond the Sea had already been played, and Cher is so…1997. He wants to ask them to play one of her favorite songs, but when the bandleader asks, he realizes that he has no idea what her favorite songs are.
No wonder she left him.
He does know one song she loves. Not because that damn mariachi band played it in that Mexican joint the day they’d gotten married, but because he felt the vibration of her humming along with the melody as they swayed in the aisle of that Oklahoma City restaurant.
“Can’t Help Falling In Love With You,” he says, and the bandleader winks as he shoves the $20 in his rented suit pants.
“Sure, we hear that at every wedding.”
He bristles at that, that anything about his relationship with Scully is so mundane. Books were written about falling in love, movies were made about it. From the moment cavemen discovered pigment, they drew paintings about love on ancient walls, waiting to be rediscovered and recounted in archaeological journals, but none of that measures up to what it means to love Dana Scully.
He doesn’t even have words to describe what it means to love Dana Scully, so he simply offers her his hand and pulls her close to him as the band plays the opening notes of the song.
She’s stubborn, his partner. His wife. Back ramrod straight through the first two verses, then she softens until she’s pressed against him, once again humming along with the melody.
He might not know her favorite songs, but he knows when she’s happy, and she’s happy right now.
With any luck, the photographer is nearby and will capture this moment on film, because his Scully needs scientific proof of happiness. Mulder, though, he remembers everything, and he’ll file away this dance, along with every other second of their time together.
He can’t forget any of it, because being with her is the only time in his life when he’s been happy as well.