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It comes as no surprise that Scully’s freezer is just as organized as the rest of her life; neatly-labeled tupperwares of equal sizes sit stacked one on top of the other beside one or two bags of frozen vegetables and a pepperoni and mushroom premade pizza. Sundry other items scatter the lower shelf: a loaf of bread, what looks like a half-eaten fruitcake, and in the back corner, wrapped in saran wrap and sealed in a small ziploc baggie--
“Hey Scully, what is this?”
“Hm?” She looks up, tucking a wayward piece of hair behind her ear. She has traded her austere suit for a loose-fitting button-down and leggings and pulled her hair up in a blunt ponytail like she used to do much more when they were young.
We’re still young, he supposes, as she moves to the other side of the table to inspect the thing he’s found.
“You know Scully, if I didn’t know any better I’d say that’s an edible.” He is smirking, his undershirt untucked from his slacks, any sense of formality long forgotten when they’d entered Scully’s apartment two hours earlier to find that her refrigerator had stopped working and was leaking all over her kitchen.
“Well not without defrosting it first, that’s for sure.”
A smile quirks the corner of his mouth. “No, not inedible, an edible. As in--”
“Oh my god!” She snatches it from him so quickly she almost drops it.
“I’m sensing a story in here somewhere.” Mulder’s grin is so wide it practically splits his face in two.
“Oh my god I can’t believe I still have this!” He watches as a flush rises on her skin, starting at her neck and traveling up to her cheeks.
“Scully, you were a pothead!” He is beside himself.
“I was not,” she assures him adamantly, turning the small package over and over in her hands. “My roommate was, in med school. She made these things all the time and gave me one for Christmas two years ago as a gag gift.”
“I can’t believe you were a pothead.”
“Mulder, please.” And then, a second thought. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
He gives her one of those looks she gives him all the time. “Come on, Scully.”
She sits down at the table to inspect the brownie, and Mulder can’t shake the image of Scully in an oversized sweatshirt, passing a bowl around her study group circle, the sharp flash of the lighter igniting for the briefest of moments her smooth features, not yet touched by the worries of government conspiracies, dead sisters, and missing time. In his vision she is very beautiful.
In real life she is very beautiful.
She is struggling valiantly to maintain her composure as she says, “Well even if you were to accept the remote possibility that I could have been a frequent indulger of cannabis--”
“Were you?” he goads.
“No,” she says firmly, and he believes her. Not that it would matter if she’d been some mega-stoner. “Even if you were to accept that,” she continues, “it’s not like this would do us any good now, I’m sure it’s… gone bad by now, or something.”
He crosses his arms and leans back against the kitchen counter. “I wouldn’t be so sure. People make batches of cannabis butter and freeze it for months at a time for later use.”
“Who’s the pothead now?” Her smile is wry and her eyes are bright.
“I’m just saying… it’s Friday night, we’re both young and beautiful--”
“That’s debatable.”
“What do you say we defrost this thing and see if it still works?” After the sentence is out he feels they’ve been here before: encountering a problem that they are likely going to have different opinions on, suggesting his solution, which she gives pause, bites her lip, and then inevitably says--
“Mulder, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Even if the pot’s gone bad you still get a decent brownie out of it.”
“If it has gone bad you’re looking at a nasty case of food poisoning, best case scenario. And I don’t know about you, Mulder, but spending this weekend over the toilet wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind?”
They don’t really, as a rule, talk about their weekends. About what they do when they’re not together. Partly, he thinks, because it’ll make them realize they both live incredibly dull lives when they’re not chasing after monsters and things that go bump in the night together.
“Fine,” Scully says with a shrug, as if she hasn’t thought about it at all, really.
They leave the brownie to thaw on a plate on the countertop, almost forgotten as they sift through the rest of the refrigerator, placing essentials in the small portable cooler she’d pulled out of the back of a closet. They toss the rest.
“What would you do for a dollop?” Mulder asks, shaking a half-used tub of Daisy sour cream at her.
“Toss,” she instructs crisply, inspecting a carton of strawberries.
When he lifts the lid of Scully’s kitchen trash can he sees the outer wrapping from a package of pantyhose sitting on top and suddenly feels like he’s intruded on something very personal. For all the emotional vulnerability they only show to each other, there are still some things they don’t do.
“Mulder?” Her voice, always somehow mellowed and warm. “You okay?”
He drops the sour cream in the trash can and flashes her a smile. “Yeah.”
X
She cuts the brownie neatly, precisely, with a knife pulled from the block beside her stove and divides it up onto two small plates.
“Some for me, some for you,” Mulder says in an almost sing-song voice. Off her look, he clarifies, “It was a thing my sister used to say.”
She seems satisfied with this answer and settles across from him at the kitchen table. “Are we really doing this?”
“Moment of truth.”
They raise their brownies and tap them together. He feels like he should say slainte or l’chaim or I love you or something, but he doesn’t. He takes a bite of his half, leaving at least another bite left, but when he looks across the table he sees her plate is empty. She struggles to keep her mouth closed as she chews her half of the brownie.
“Why did you eat the whole thing!” he shouts through a mouthful.
“Why didn’t you!” she practically shrieks, nearly unintelligible past the food.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve had one, I wanted to start slow!” It’s the truth. He hasn’t had marijuana in any form since undergrad, at least not that he knows of, and he’s not in the habit of intentionally addling his brain at any rate.
She’s risen from her chair, one hand on her hip. “Well eat the rest, I don’t want to be high by myself!”
“Is this the peer pressure my mother warned me I’d experience in college?”
“Dammit Mulder!” She paces the kitchen while he finishes his, watching the flush rising in her face. “How did I let you talk me into this?”
“The same way I talk you into everything else: with my boyish charm and dashing good looks.”
She ignores him. “I mean what if they’re doing random drug tests next week at work? The last thing we need is a failed urine test, Mulder. They’d shut us down for good, best case scenario.”
“Don’t worry, I know a guy.” He doesn’t, although he supposes it’s not out of the realm of possibility for the Gunmen. Is he trying to impress her? With what, his ability to cheat a drug test? Are they seventeen? Sometimes she makes him feel like they are. Sometimes she makes him feel impossibly young again, younger than they’d been when they’d stood in the downpour on the side of the road over a spray-painted X. And she had been so very young then.
“How could I have been so stupid?” she says, more to herself.
“So you’re a paranoid pothead, huh Scully?” he teases.
“I’m not being paranoid, I’m being rational,” she insists. He sees a decision cross her face, flicker in her eyes, and then she gives a curt nod and says, “I’m going to throw up in the bathroom.”
She leaves him in the kitchen where he is slowly becoming acutely aware of every sound in her apartment: the thrumming tick of the clock, the muffled tread of footsteps above, the dull click of Scully flicking on the bathroom light down the hall. He rises slowly, feeling heavy in a way that he knows means he is high.
She hasn’t closed the bathroom door, and he hopes he doesn’t have to see her bent over the toilet, one hand sweeping her short hair back from her face, the other gripping the edge of the bowl, her knuckles the same ghostly color of the porcelain. He has seen too much of that in the past six months and it’s over now, it’s done, he fixed it, she fought, she’s fine, she’s going to live, but he’ll never be able to unsee her like that, somehow stronger in her weakness, somehow more beautiful in her illness. Or maybe he’d never fully realized it until then and she’d always been this pillar of strong, gorgeous gentleness.
But she is not jackknifed over the toilet, mercifully. She stands at the sink, looking at her toothbrush as if it’s stranger than anything she’s seen working on the X-Files. She must hear him in the doorway, because she turns to him and cocks her hip and asks completely seriously, “What the fuck is this?”
X
He feels his weight in space very distinctly on the couch. Every nerve ending in his body feels connected, grounded, rooted to the place he sits. He feels like a tree.
“I feel like a tree,” Scully says, not turning to look at him beside her. As if she could read his mind. As if they are so inextricably connected at this point that if he thinks one thing she’ll think it too, like Siamese twins joined at their cerebral cortexes.
“A tree?” Mulder repeats.
“Yeah.”
They are quiet for a moment. Maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe no time at all.
“What kind of tree?” he asks.
“A weepy, weepy willow,” she says warmly, laying her head on his shoulder. “Weepy weepy.”
“You’re the least ‘weepy’ weeping willow I’ve ever seen,” he says, tucking her hair behind her ear so he can see her face.
“Maybe you don’t see me when I’m weepy.” She is uncharacteristically prideful and smug and it gives him a warm feeling in his belly.
“I’ve seen you weepy.”
“Name one time.”
“I don’t want to,” he says. “I don’t like it when you’re weepy.” He doesn’t say that he hates to see her weepy, that the way her chin quivers as her eyes become impossibly watery but don’t spill over makes him angry and sad at the same time. They are high so he doesn’t say that, but he thinks it. He thinks he wishes they were high more often.
“I wish we were high more often,” he says, liking the warm weight of her head on his shoulder.
“Right?” she agrees. And then, picking up a thread from what feels like hours ago, “If you were a tree, what would you be?”
“What kind of tree do you think I am?” He is curious to hear her answer.
“A California Redwood,” she answers immediately. “You’re tall.” She pulls her head away from his shoulder and looks at him like she’s only just realized this. “You’re so tall.” Then her eyes narrow in suspicion. “Is that normal?”
“At last the secret is out,” he says conspiratorially. “You’ve cracked the biggest X-File of all, Scully. I’ve been in disguise this whole time as the member of an alien race much taller than our own, sent to earth to create a population of human-alien hybrid super babies to tower over the scrawny humans and eventually exterminate them.”
He has more where that came from, but stops when he sees her smile slowly sliding down her face and her brows knit together. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t joke about that,” she says seriously. She reaches up and feels his forehead, a physician even in her inebriated state. “You’re a person,” she says, almost to herself, as if she’s deduced this merely from the laying on of hands, her scientific raike that shapes and orders her own personal cosmos.
“I’m a person,” he assures her, holding up his hands in surrender.
“That’s exactly what you would say if you were an alien,” she whispers, but seems satisfied with this declaration. She is desperately cute when she’s stoned. She is desperately cute all the goddamn time.
“If you were a constellation,” she asks, “what would you be?”
He can hardly believe she’s said it, can hardly believe that the world hasn’t turned upside down, but he says, “Well my star sign is Libra…”
“That’s not what I asked.” She says it frankly, straightforwardly, speaking like she always speaks, but there is something different in her eyes, something open and uninhibited and terrifying.
“I get to pick?” he asks, trying not to watch the way she shifts on the couch and how it makes her shirt ride up, almost exposing the smooth skin of her stomach, her hip.
“You always get to pick,” Scully says simply, meaning the collective you, and he supposes that’s quite true.
“Well if I get to pick, I’d like to be Orion.”
“The Hunter,” she says mysteriously, narrowing her eyes. She mimes drawing back a bow and arrow.
“Or the Bison if you subscribe to Lakota mythology,” he corrects, and she rolls her eyes.
“You are a hunter,” she tells him. “You’re always looking for something.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure if the Greco-Romans were thinking of UFOs and little green men when they envisioned their mighty hunter,” Mulder says, not without a hint of his typical self-deprecation.
“How do you know they weren’t?” she challenges, her eyes sharper than the intake of breath he involuntarily draws.
“Is this all I’ve needed to do all these years to get you to believe? Get you high?” he teases, and he looks away from her as she stands up and stretches, catching a glimpse of her tattoo before she puts her arms down.
She ignores him and says, “Missy always said I was Pisces.”
“Why are you allowed to use your star sign?” he asks petulantly, adoringly. She makes him feel everything all at once.
“I didn’t make the rules,” she says, shrugging. “She just said I was Pisces through and through.”
He thinks of the dozens of books he has on the cosmos, the hundreds of articles he’s read on star clusters and galaxies, and how he wants to show them to her, wants to pour over them together until they find a constellation that is Scully, until he knows the map of her.
Marijuana makes him awfully poetic, he thinks.
“Let’s go find out what I am,” she says.
“Beg pardon?”
“Let’s go up on the roof and look at the constellations and find out which one I am.” Her lackadaisicality of the previous half hour seems to have evaporated, replaced by a sort of manic restlessness that can only be satiated, apparently, by climbing on her roof.
“You live on the first floor, how are we going to get up there?” Mulder asks, the irony of the situation not lost on him. Is he really the one questioning her crazy idea?
“I have the key to the apartment above mine.” Everyone does, don’t you, Mulder? she might as well say. She pads to the kitchen and rummages around in the junk drawer. “It was up for grabs for a while and I was thinking about buying it so the tenants gave me a key. They travel a lot anyway. I water their plants sometimes.”
She pulls a dull brass key from the drawer and holds it aloft like the thing that will save the world. Maybe it will save his.
He rises to his feet, his body still heavy in space, still blissfully uncontrolled, and follows her out her apartment door and upstairs to the second and top floor. He’s always liked her building, finding it one of the nicer apartments he’s seen in DC, even for Georgetown. It feels more like a home than his does, than anyone’s does. Or maybe it’s just her. Maybe they’ve known each other for so long that the two syllables of her name have become synonymous with home.
The apartment above Scully’s is set up much like hers, from what he can see in the dark. While the taste in furniture is a little more edgy, the layout is essentially the same.
“Come on if you’re coming.” Her voice comes out of the dark like it so often does, behind him, beside him, in front of him, everywhere. He follows her to the back window, which she deftly pries open, her hand only fumbling for a moment with the lock. She has much more ease climbing out and up the fire escape than he does, and it’s one time he curses his long legs.
“You okay?” she teases when he finally surfaces on the roof beside her. They are standing on a slight slant, looking towards the rest of the neighborhood and not the street, away from the city. He’s always appreciated the government mandate of low-to-the-ground buildings in the capital city; he can see more stars that way. Once, years ago, he’d teased her saying she’d been drawn to DC because all the buildings were conveniently Scully-sized. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her so mad she laughed.
She laughs now as she almost loses her footing and finds balance at his elbow, using it to steady herself. They slowly sink to sitting, and then she lays supine, her hands behind her head. He can see her bellybutton if he looks, but he doesn’t. Not really.
“If I’d have known we were going to be stargazing I would have brought my charts,” he jokes, and she hisses a soft laugh between her teeth, her eyelids fluttering heavily over her bright eyes. If she were a constellation, the beauty mark beginning to take form on her upper lip would be her Polaris.
“You know Scully, maybe you’re not a constellation at all,” he says, the thought coming to him suddenly. “Maybe you’re a star.”
She smiles without showing her teeth, but he thinks that is his favorite way to see her smile. “I don’t think I’m high anymore, Mulder,” she says, looking a little sad about it.
He honestly can’t tell if he is anymore, if he is woozy from the brownie or the strange exhilarating rush of the evening, the way time moved so quickly at first and then not at all, and now how he can practically feel the earth spinning beneath them. He is not sure if that is drugs or Scully, the way she sometimes giggles with her tongue between her teeth when she really forgets herself.
He knows he loves her, some days in different ways than others, some days with a carnal passion that is difficult to ignore, and some days with the simple warmth of heart that makes him want to never stop going on adventures together. Sometimes he loves her the way you love a place you vacationed to as a kid. Sometimes he loves the thought of her more than anything else.
But the love is always there. It is there now when she reaches up to nudge his arm and say, “But we can still stay up here, if you’d like.”