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Sentience returns to her in stages. First, before she even opens her eyes, the astringent bouquet of industrial detergent and antiseptic, then the metronomic chirp of a vital signs monitor and the distant squeak of rubber soled sneakers on worn linoleum. Her thoughts are imprecise and muddled, cleft images returning to her like under-exposed photographs. Skeletons and dental x-rays. Angela and Wallace Schiff sitting in Mulder’s living room. Ivory roses and the sheen of polished wood. Mulder dead, and then alive again.
Scully could have been unconscious for a day or an hour, time dilating while her mind’s eye traversed a hundred scenarios and her body slowly chymified underground.
Through cracked eyes she sees a waffle-weave blanket the color of a starling’s egg covering her body and starched white sheets; Skinner dozing at her bedside, rumpled suit and careworn face creased at the brow even in sleep. Is this real, she wonders, nipping the soft web of skin between her thumb and index finger with the nails from her other hand. It smarts, but then the mere act of breathing had been excruciating when she’d thought Mulder was dead, and that had turned out to be a delusion of epic proportions.
Her face feels tight with the hot prickle of sunburn. She drags her dry tongue uselessly over chapped lips, throat crackling as she swallows.
Skinner stirs and lurches upright in his chair. “You’re awake,” he says, pushing his spectacles up his nose with his middle finger.
It takes great effort to force a word past her parched lips, and when she does her voice is splintered. “Mulder?”
“He’s ok.”
“Where?”
“He’s upstairs in the high dependency unit.” Her head flies off the pillow, neck muscles wavering like overtightened piano wires, and Skinner presses an enormous bear-paw to her shoulder, pushing her back into the starchy pillow. “Relax, he’s fine. It’s just a precaution – he was in the ground longer than you. I spoke to him earlier and he was making about as much sense as normal, but he’s ok.”
“There’s a saprophytic fungus in that field,” she rasps, vowels corked by the arid landscape of her throat, but determined to get the warning out.
“We’re on it. Fish and Wildlife, the North Carolina State Health Department. There’s even a mycologist down from the Smithsonian.” As he talks, Skinner holds a plastic cup of water up to her and Scully sips enthusiastically through the straw, the sluice of tepid water relieving her aching throat.
“It's carnivorous. The spores it releases have a soporific effect,” she tells him with less than full control of her sluggish tongue. “Inducing a state of torpor while the mycelium digests the prey."
“Well, the area’s been sealed off. No one else is in danger.” Scully feels her heart rate slow. “Mulder said something about hallucinations?” Skinner asks, face inscrutable.
Scully’s brain backfires, scattering her thoughts like pigeons. She rubs two fingers gingerly down the raw center line of her forehead, IV line dragging on the pilled blanket, and wishes she could reach inside her head to grasp the scattering thoughts and pull them back into some kind of order. She knows intellectually, if not instinctively, that nothing she remembers between leaving the Boone County morgue in the Coroner’s truck and waking up moments ago, was real. What little she does remember is contradictory and fractured.
“Yes, maybe.” She is overwhelmed and confused to the point of prevarication. “Or vivid dreams. I’m not sure.”
Skinner looks at her for a moment and then stands. “Get some rest Agent.”
She watches him leave, fatigue blurring the edges of her vision. Her eyelids might as well be ballasted, and she lets them drift shut, slowly surrendering to the orthopteran hum of recirculating air.
***
The drone of crickets, the repetitive trickle of cycled water. The aggressive grind of tires on asphalt and impatient blare of a horn in the distance. Humidity curls the tips of hair that is impervious to the $50 Kérastase anti-frizz serum she douses it in before blowing it out.
A half dozen baby mallards frolic at the edge of the reflecting pool, mother floating serenely nearby, giving the illusion of great disinterest, but poised to defend if anyone or thing gets too close. Two of the brood playfight, splashing and chasing one another and squawking a high-pitched little quack when one or the other gets a nip in. The smallest duckling practices his diving technique, head bobbing below the surface and fluffy butt waving in the air, kicking his webbed feet as he tries, and fails, to submerge that unsinkable tail.
“Is that seat taken?” Mulder hovers off to the left, shirtsleeves rolled up and suit jacket hooked over a shoulder with one finger. He looks rumpled and sweaty in the early evening sun, and her eyes are drawn to the patch of skin at the base of his neck where the top button of his shirt is undone, exposing the tongue sized notch in his neck.
She gestures to the bench beside her and he sinks onto it. Even though there is room to spare, he sits close enough that their thighs brush when he stretches his legs out in front of him. “I should warn you,” he says, scratching the seam of her skirt with his fingernail, “I’ve been experiencing psychedelic visions.”
She ducks her head to hide her smile behind a curtain of hair. “How do you feel?” she asks after a moment.
Mulder runs a hand over his pinked cheek, “Now the glow from the chemical peel has almost worn off, I feel ten years younger.”
Scully resists the urge to roll her eyes; there’s some truth in his assertion – three days out of the ground on a fluid resuscitation protocol, silver sulfadiazine cream liberally applied twice a day and Mulder looks at worst, like he’s spent a little too long in the sun. She, on the other hand, bypassed sun-kissed and moved straight from fire hydrant to a bad case of atopic dermatitis.
She says his name like she’s talking to one of her nephews. Tell me the truth, Michael, did you steal the chocolate bar from the candy drawer?
“Scully,” he replies solemnly, tucking his chin in so his overbite is more pronounced.
“What happened to us?”
“What do you think happened?” he says, emphasizing the pronoun.
She summarizes the key points like she’s giving a report to Skinner, all but ticking the facts off on her fingers. She stayed behind in the morgue to run tests on the sludge while Mulder went out to the field where the Schiffs were found to investigate, and became incapacitated. She followed him out there a few hours later.
Mulder nods along.
“I remember stepping on some mushrooms when I was looking for you, most probably that act discharged basidiospores into the atmosphere, which I ingested, rendering me unconscious. The following morning, after we were both reported missing, Skinner and a biohazard team pulled us from the ground, where it seems we were being slowly digested by a humungous carnivorous fungus.” Not a single day during her near twenty years in school had prepared her for the point where she would have cause to utter these words with a straight face, and they emerge from her throat reluctantly, her tongue dragging over hushed sibilants.
“And what else?” he prompts.
She shrugs, frustrated. “I don’t know what else you want me to say, Mulder. Those are the facts.”
“You don’t remember having some pretty vivid dreams?”
“I don’t really see how dreams are germane to solving this case.”
“Far be it for me to tell you the science, Scully, but I’m pretty sure the toxicology tests are going to show that we were under the influence of some kind of hallucinogen.”
“I agree with you, I just don’t see how our intoxication is relevant.”
“You’re missing the point Scully -” Mulder says, and his face has that rigid, smug look that makes her want to slap him.
“Well by all means, Mulder, elucidate me. Since 98% of the time, you know best anyway.” She is annoyed with herself for giving credence to his dubious statistical assertion by making reference to it, and even more annoyed that she’s allowed her emotions to bleed into her voice. It had stung the other day when he dismissed her contribution to their work as nothing more than a perfunctory dance.
Mulder scoffs at her, oh so amused whenever he thinks she’s losing her cool. “Mutual dreaming,” he says, like it’s an actual fucking answer and not the mark of a lunatic.
“What?”
“The process whereby two individuals experience the same dream around the same time. Closely linked with dream telepathy, where the participants are able to communicate with one another.” He rambles on at length about the findings of some quack who wrote a book, and a couple of old X-Files from the 1970s that Arthur Dales worked on, and Scully pinches the bridge of her nose to try to quell a rising sense of irritation.
Mulder opens his mouth, and she cuts him off before anything ludicrous can pass his lips. More ludicrous than what already has. “The compound we were exposed to is almost certainly isomorphic to LSD. Surely you can see that what we experienced was just the delirium of two heavily intoxicated individuals?”
“You don’t find it at all strange that we had the exact same dream? At the same time? You don’t remember me hiding a Grey in my bedroom? Or shooting Skinner?”
Frustration drives Scully to her feet and she paces a few steps away from him before turning back. He squints up at her, early evening sun glinting in his eyes.
“Mulder, what you’re saying is pure conjecture. Anxiety, paranoia, delusions - they’re all well-known side effects of LSD. It’s entirely plausible this could’ve given way to a phantasmagorical experience. But to suggest -” she breaks off when he starts laughing at her. “Why are you laughing?” she snaps, settling her weight on one hip and folding her arms across her chest.
“Because in my dream, the moment I knew it wasn’t real was when you opened your fucking mind for a second and believed me.”
Scully deflates at this, spine flagging and shoulders folding inward as her will collapses under the weight of his depressing assessment of her. She turns away from him and walks closer to the edge of the pool.
After a moment Mulder comes up behind her. “I can’t be something I’m not Mulder,” she says quietly. His hands slide around her waist, tucking under her still folded arms and holding her to him. “I need more than just a theory. I need evidence.”
His breath tickles the humidity-stricken hairs curling against her cheek. “I know you do. I need you to need it too.” His chest pushes against her back as he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I had my head up my ass the other day,” he rumbles directly into her ear, and she presses her lips together in agreement. “I know how important you are to our work. I bring you a theory, you ask the hard questions and force me to work for it, and we shake it all together and what comes out the other end is usually a pretty solid explanation that Skinner can choke down without needing a Pepcid.” The tip of his nose traces the helix of her ear and she can hear the wet crackle of his smile. “You’re the special sauce in our partnership, Scully.”
“Mulder,” she murmurs, a verbal eye roll, but as much as her burst of self-doubt narks her, the truth is she feels better for his reassurances.
His lips quirk against her ear, an imagined kiss, and he squeezes her around the middle. “You know Scully, if I remember correctly, it was you who first realized we were hallucinating.”
She sighs an unhappy little sigh. She remembers that too, but it still makes no sense at all. Dreams cannot be shared.
For a few moments, they watch the family of ducks splashing about, his chin resting on her shoulder.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Scully.” She complies and after a beat he continues, “Breathe in and hold it for a count of four, and then let it out slowly.”
“Why?” she asks, frowning but keeping her eyes closed.
“Just do it,” he instructs, exasperated, and Scully does as she’s told.
She feels by the rise and fall of his chest against her back that Mulder is modulating his own breathing to hers. Infinitesimally, her body relaxes into him. “That’s good,” he murmurs into her ear. “Just breath in….and out… in… and out… and remember…” he slides his right hand across her stomach and pulls her by the hip into the concave of his body, “It’s hips before hands.”
“Wh-?” Scully’s eyes fly open and she blinks in confusion. It’s no longer sunset, and they are no longer standing on the Mall.
It’s dark and they are on a baseball field.
Scully looks down and her charcoal suit has been replaced by a suede jacket. Her hands are wrapped around a baseball bat, and Mulder is wrapped around her.
“Mulder, what the hell is going on?” she twists out of his pseudo-embrace and turns to face him.
“What’s the matter Scully, you don’t like baseball?”
Scully feels like her brain is a hairsbreadth from shutting down – the events of the past few days have exceeded her RAM, corrupted the hard-drive of her mind, and she literally cannot process the events unfolding in front of her.
She stumbles back a few steps until her back is against the chain link fence, and covers her face with both hands, pressing her fingers into the sockets of her eyes until she sees flashes of color. She drags her splayed fingers down her cheeks and Mulder is still standing there in his Grey’s jersey. “I don’t understand,” she whispers, “How you’re doing this.”
Mulder cocks his head and edges closer to her. “What am I doing?”
“We were just by the pool,” she squeaks, on the point of hyperventilation. She sags against the fence and forces herself to slow down her breathing. Mulder nods.
“We’re dreaming?” It comes out as a question but of course, it has to be a dream. It couldn’t be fucking real. She lets her hands fall away from her face and anchors herself to the wire fence with curled fingers. It’s the only thing holding her upright. “So, this isn’t real?”
“Real is kind of a subjective concept,” he says, giving her the sort of encouraging smile she would give to a particularly slow student when she taught at Quantico.
“Are you having this dream too?” she asks hesitantly.
“Yeah.”
She has a sudden panicked thought. “We’re not still in the ground, are we?”
“No, we’re not still in the ground,” he says with a slight smile, combing his eyes over her face. She’s always had a low tolerance for other people knowing more than she does, and his calmness is starting to piss her off.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when we were admitted to the hospital, a nurse who looked like the love child of Atilla the Hun and Marge Simpson fitted a catheter, and she was none too gentle. I’ve dreamed some weird shit in my time, but I’m not a masochist.”
Jesus, maybe she is tripping. “That’s hardly scientific.”
“My dick feels like she rammed a telegraph pole up it.”
Brain already low on resources, it takes a herculean effort which does not go unnoticed for Scully to keep her eyes on Mulder’s face.
“Can we please stop talking about your penis?” Scully mumbles, another phrase she never thought she’s utter. She has the sudden, mortifying thought of Mulder spectating on all her dreams from now on. God, it’s hard enough to look him in the eye the next morning when he doesn’t know what they’ve been doing in her dreams all night. She makes a mental note to have the doctor prescribe a benzodiazepine when she wakes up, cut this epic trip off at the ankles.
Unruffled and oblivious, Mulder swings the baseball bat by the knob.
“How did you, um, steer the dream just now?” she asks, still not convinced but rolling with it in the absence of all rational thought.
“I just focused my mind on where I wanted to go and -” he makes a ‘poof’ gesture with his hand. It surprises her that given the power of directed dreaming, Mulder picked something as innocuous as hitting a few baseballs in the park and not, say, insert them into a mental replay of Alien.
The dusty toecaps of his sneakers butt up against her boots and he taps the hilt of the bat on the ground beside their feet. “The effects of most psychedelics wear off within 24 hours, but that’s based on exposure to relatively small quantities. We were under the ground for hours so our experiences could last longer; we should probably enjoy it while it lasts.”
He hooks his middle and pointer finger through the wire diamond to the left of her head. “Where would you go, Scully?” he asks, swaying into her and back again, fabric of his jersey scuffing against the suede of her coat.
She remembers the night they came here for real. After being at odds with one another for best part of a year, after all the false starts and recriminations, that one night had brought them back together, filed away the rough edges so they could hold one another without getting hurt. She remembers the warmth of him against her back, the power in his arms as they swung for the ball. The way her coat smelled of his cologne for days afterward, and every time she opened her wardrobe, the scent melted her insides. Maybe Mulder’s not so crazy after all.
“Here’s good,” she admits softly.
Mulder nods, sucking on his lower lip thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t… award yourself a Nobel Prize or, I don’t know, be Director of the FBI for the day?”
“I don’t think so,” she whispers, forcing herself to look away from his mouth.
His eyes caress her face, “You looked so beautiful that night.” He moves closer still, so that his nose brushes her cheekbone with every word. “I really wanted to kiss you.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asks on an inhale.
“I’m a coward,” he admits, pulling back an inch so they are nose to nose. “And I wasn’t sure if it was the right time.”
She nods reflexively but wonders not for the first time what, exactly, it is that they’re waiting for. A sign from God? A grand gesture of some kind? If being cured of terminal cancer or following your partner to Antarctica hadn't been enough to kick them into gear, it might be time to review the assessment criteria.
“We could wait a lifetime for a perfect moment,” she murmurs, before she has time to reconsider her epiphany.
“So, if I hear you right, Agent Scully, you’re saying I shouldn’t overthink it?”
“Yeah, just… go with what feels right.” Every breath is shared between them, tips of noses circling, lips just barely touching as they hover open mouthed against one another. The baseball bat thuds to the ground and he hooks his other hand onto the fence, bracketing her head.
“This feels right, Dana.”
She hums her agreement, attention flickering between his eyes and mouth. He’s so close, she suspects if she licked her lips, she would be licking his as well. Her tongue snakes out to test the hypothesis and Mulder groans into the scant space between them.
“Dana,” he says more firmly and her name coming from him is discombobulating. She pulls back to look at him and –
“Dana, honey, time to wake up!”
Scully blinks awake to a kindly looking nurse leaning over her. “There you are! Sorry to wake you, hon, but I need to take some blood.”
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
***
A few hours later and with discharge papers in hand, Scully makes her way to the High Dependency Unit.
She finds Mulder sitting up in bed talking to Skinner. His hair sticks up like he poked his finger in an outlet and his face is a little shiny, but he doesn’t seem to bear any ill-effects from his time underground. He looks pleased to see her.
“Skinner’s just been telling me the FWS are saying the fungus covers at least ten acres, maybe more.”
“The honey mushroom in Oregon covers a couple thousand acres,” she says, setting her bag down at the foot of his bed.
“Yeah, but size isn’t everything. The Oregon fungus never tried to eat anyone.”
Scully starts to ask him how he’s feeling but a sharp Slavic voice cuts over the top of her. “Agent Mulder, one visitor at a time!”
Scully turns toward the speaker. The nurse is pushing six feet tall and almost as wide. Her white uniform strains over an ample bosom, and when she crosses her arms her biceps bulge. She could probably bench press Mulder. She wears no makeup on her wide, epicene face but her platinum hair is teased into a meticulously coiffed beehive. The nametag on her breast reads ‘Rose’, and this delicate little name could not be less fitting.
Scully blinks slowly and turns back to Mulder. He is looking at her expectantly, eyebrows raised and she smothers a smile.
“Sorry Ma’am,” Skinner says contritely, tossing his empty coffee cup in the trash and preparing to beat a hasty retreat. “I’ll see you both back in DC on Monday. Try and stay out of trouble until then.” The nurse narrows her eyes and waits to make sure he really leaves before turning on her heel and stomping off to terrorize the other patients.
Scully lingers near the foot of Mulder’s bed, fingering the bulldog clip holding his patient notes. “How are you feeling?”
“They’re gonna discharge me later if the bloodwork is clear.” He pats the blanket by his hip, “Stay a while?”
She moves up beside him but doesn’t sit. “I don’t want to piss off Atilla,” she smirks, and he grabs her wrist and tugs until she stumbles down next to him.
“Atilla can bite my ass.”
“I’d be careful making assertions like that. She looks like she could swallow you whole.”
Mulder's fingers trail down from her wrist to weave their fingers together. Her thumb is smaller than his pinkie.
“So, I was thinking,” he says, “we’ve got four days to kill before we’re due back at work.”
She eyes him warily; only Mulder can look at an unexpected long weekend like it’s a bad thing.
“Maybe we could hang around for a few days.”
“Fish and Wildlife aren’t going to let you anywhere near the fungus, Mulder,” she warns.
“Actually," he pinches her hand, "I was thinking we could head over to the Outer Banks, see if we can find some kitsch little bed and breakfast, though hopefully not a haunted one since even hard-working FBI agents need a weekend off now and then.”
Slowly he lifts his eyes from their interlaced fingers and meets her gaze. His throat bobs, confidence waning the longer it takes her to respond. He clears his throat, “Just to enjoy some R&R,” he clarifies hastily, as if suggesting a weekend away together after seven years, a thousand lingering, hungry looks and two near-miss kisses, was jumping the gun. The only thing Scully wants to jump right now is him. Whatever the fuck it is that they’ve just experienced together, she is done pussyfooting around.
She leans over him, balancing her weight with a balled-up fist pressed into the mattress by his right hip. She’s wearing the creased clothes from her go-bag, and she’s out of contact lenses, forced to rely on an ancient pair of glasses she’d forgotten she even had. Her too short hair is a disaster, thick bangs escaping from a messy ponytail, but she feels bold and desirable, fuelled by the naked desire in Mulder’s eyes. She hums thoughtfully, tilting her head to the side. “You think they have any batting cages over there?”
“Uh, some parks maybe? North Carolina doesn’t have a major league baseball team, but they have some decent minor league teams. The Piedmont Boll Weevils and the, um, Hickory Crawdads.” She doubts Mulder’s brain is even engaged as he runs off at the mouth, a reflex action in times of stress. Or, apparently, arousal.
“Mulder?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
In the end she’s not sure if he closes the gap or she does, but their mouths collide and there is absolutely no preamble. Their tongues are sliding together, teeth clashing, and it may be the most graceless kiss she’s had since high school. But Jesus. This is Mulder, and he is leaning forward and hauling her body against him with a firm hand on her back and one in her hair. He bites at her lower lip and she comes undone.
“Oi!” they pull apart breathlessly like teenagers caught making out on the sofa. Mulder’s oversized nurse strides into the room, shaking her head and muttering in Ukrainian, “Otrymaty kimnatu..” She points at Scully and jerks a thumb toward the door. “You, out. And you,” she liberates the call-button from under Mulder’s ass and cancels the alarm. “Get some rest or you’re going nowhere, Romeo.”
Scully eases bonelessly off the bed and collects her bag from the floor. “I’ll be back later.” A bleeding hot rush of oxytocin is washing through her body and the heat in her cheeks has nothing to do with the subterranean acid bath.
“Scully,” he calls just as she’s about to leave, and she hovers, lepidopteran, in the doorway; a Crimson Callicore with fluttering heart and all five senses pricked.
He grins at her, teeth and all. “A friendly ghost would be ok.”
She can’t keep the giddy smile off her own face as she taps two fingers to her forehead in salute and heads down the hallway. As perfect moments go, this one feels pretty good.
End