Chapter Text
Chapter One
Memory: 1984
Mulder is packing his suitcase to return to Oxford after a summer spent split awkwardly between his parents’ homes when his father unexpectedly comes into the bedroom. He watches his son fold his shirts and smokes a cigarette. Mulder waits.
After a minute his father clears his throat. “I should have talked to you more about girls,” he says. “It’s probably too late now, but I hope you’re smart about it.”
Mulder doesn’t look up from his suitcase, tucking socks methodically in between folded shirts. His father takes an audible drag.
“It’s easy to make mistakes,” his father continues. “Don’t get attached too soon. You’re a… well, you’re kind of an idealistic kid. Soft. Don’t marry the first girl you fall in love with.”
By this point in his life, Mulder has already been in love. He might have gone on to marry her, had she been willing. Had she not broken his heart. His father knows nothing of this, of course. Mulder continues to pack without responding.
“You’re old enough to understand that I made some mistakes in my own life,” his father says. “A man makes a bad choice, and he’s stuck. He’s not … satisfied. For years. I don’t want the same for you.”
A deep well of anger pits in Mulder’s stomach, thinking of his silent and broken mother, but still he doesn't speak.
“I guess what I’m trying to say, Fox, is that there’s no point in trying to be a good man,” his father continues. “That’s a waste of your efforts. There’s no such thing as a good man. The more you try to be good, you only get trapped, compromised. The best thing to do is try … to avoid entanglements.”
Mulder lets out a very slow and silent sigh. Avoid entanglements. He isn’t surprised this is his father’s dating advice, but it depresses him nonetheless.
“Anyway. I know you probably have your own ideas about things. You’re not a kid anymore. But that’s my two cents.”
At last Mulder looks up. He realizes he’s been clenching his jaw. “Okay,” he says tightly. “Thanks, Dad.”
Nodding, his father sucks on the cigarette, regards him for a moment, and leaves.
Mulder looks down into the suitcase and notices his body is trembling. With anger, with fright, with unexpressed need. He can barely calm down enough to continue packing, but he does somehow.
The absolute last thing he’d ever intended to do was follow his father’s advice. But later, he realizes that somehow he did anyway.
January 1994
The forecast is predicting at least a foot of snow, possibly more: a record-busting winter storm for metro D.C., the local news breathlessly proclaims. Scully dutifully checks in with her recently widowed mother, but both Bill and Melissa are still staying there, so it’s decided there’s really no need for her to drive over.
“Jesus, she’s not still working, is she? Tell her to go home before the roads get bad,” Bill grumbles audibly in the background of the phone conversation. He probably thinks it’s now his role to needle her about her job, she realizes. He’s presumed that the mantle has fallen on him.
“You’ll be careful, Dana, won’t you?” Her mother’s grief has been manifesting as anxiety, as though the sheer unpredictability of the world has rattled her to the core. “Don’t drive if you don’t have to.”
“I won’t, Mom. I’m already home, actually.”
“Will your partner check in with you? That’s what partners do, right?”
“Probably,” says Scully. She doesn’t say that Mulder is still recovering from his gunshot wound—that in fact she’s considering whether she should check in on him. This would mean she’ll probably end up driving in the snow.
“Oh good,” her mother says. “That’s good.” An odd little pause. “I’d like to meet him, you know. Your partner.” Scully, who has been putting up dishes in her kitchen cabinet, freezes in place, plate midair. “Your father would have, too. He understood the importance of a good shipmate.” Her mother’s voice has begun to unravel a little. “Anyway, you should invite him for dinner sometime.”
“Oh,” Scully says, beginning to move again, putting the plate away. “That would be… maybe I will.”
It’s unimaginable, Mulder making conversation with her mother. The idea unsettles her.
“Tell Dana to call and update you this weekend so you don’t worry,” comes Melissa’s firm voice in the background.
“I will,” Scully promises her mother. “I’ll call tomorrow and let you know how I’m faring in the snow.”
“Just stay inside,” her mother says again. “Nothing risky, Dana. Warm and cozy.”
The first flakes of snow descend lazily over Alexandria. Mulder watches in a sullen huff through his blinds, wishing he were at work, wishing he were with the Gunmen in their filthy paranoid frat house. Wishing that he were anywhere else, really, anywhere besides alone in this apartment.
He hooks the blinds with his finger and bends them down, trying to lean over to evaluate traffic on the street below. This movement unexpectedly hurts. He winces and places a hand on his leg, where the bandage still covers the consequence of his failure to heed Boggs’ warning.
Years ago, when Mulder first wrote the profile on Boggs, he was a different man. An overgrown boy, really: eager to be noticed for his intellect, eager to be praised by people in authority. Fine work, Agent Mulder. You’re going places.
That people-pleasing iteration of Mulder is so long gone that he can’t really remember what it felt like to be inside his head. He wonders what his go-getter younger self would think, knowing that his much-lauded Boggs profile was wrong.
No. Not wrong, maybe, but incomplete. It was a snapshot of Boggs before his first brush with death, before something otherworldly touched him, leaving him marked with psychic ability and a strange new empathy.
The profile described him well as a deeply evil human being, but he was more than that. He was an X-file. Which Mulder, of all people, missed.
And Scully didn’t. Scully didn’t. She believed, at least a little.
He is discovering that his new partner is a deceptively complex text, a holy book with no easy exegesis. During this case, Mulder misread every line. She had moved around him pale and stricken, still tender with grief, lips resolute. Eyes somehow seeing what they normally did not. Never saying exactly what was in her heart or in her mind. She was completely opaque to him.
The flakes whirl and puff, growing in intensity.
His experimental side prompts him to wriggle his fingers through the blinds to touch the glass of the window. It’s so cold it stings his fingertips. He winces and immediately shoves his hands under his armpits to warm them.
Right now, with the storm bearing down, he probably should be less introspective and more actively worried about his physical well-being. He doesn’t have a ton of food in the apartment, which is a fairly significant problem. He’s still not up for going out on long grocery sojourns through the snow. If takeout can’t make it to him, he’s in trouble.
Idly he walks to the fish tank and picks up the canister of fish food to read over the ingredients. Squid meal. Earthworms. Probably shouldn’t share a meal with the mollies.
Maybe I should order twenty orders of General Tso’s chicken right now, he considers. It’d probably make it here before the full impact of the blizzard, and I could live off that for a week. He wonders how long it’s actually safe to eat leftover Chinese food, if you keep it in the fridge.
His thought process is interrupted by a knock on his front door. He suspects it’s the building super, reminding them to leave the faucets dripping tonight.
Instead, it’s his partner: all business, lightly dusted with snow.
“Mulder,” she says briskly. She has powdery flakes spangling her hair, the mulberry-colored knit hat on top of her head, the surface of her coat. “Let me in. I’m freezing.”
“Sure,” he says in surprise. “Hey.”
She’s carrying four large brown paper bags, full of food. Instinctively he moves to help her carry them, but she nudges him away with her hip. “You’re not supposed to lift anything,” she reminds him. “The stitches.”
He takes a quick peek into an open bag. She’s brought him groceries. He stands amazed as she edges past him, making her way towards his kitchen.
It isn’t the first time in the months of their partnership that Scully has seemed to read his mind, responding to his cue without him having to ask, but he is still utterly bewildered by it. He is, apparently, not a difficult text for her.
“How did you know I needed food?” He calls after her into the kitchen.
“You did, didn’t you?” She is busy putting food away in his fridge. “Mulder, what is this in this jar? Pickles? How old are these?”
“Probably best to throw them out,” he says diplomatically.
“From careful observation, I have my suspicions that you never cook,” she says, putting some cheese in the fridge. “Forgive me if that’s off base. Based on that assumption I bought you some jarred spaghetti sauce and pasta, sandwich fixings, eggs. Are you capable of making eggs?”
“Of course,” Mulder says, affronted. “I can cook. I just don’t. And I’m recovering from surgery, Scully.”
“I bought some fruit and vegetables, but also”—she pushes a crackling bag of potato chips into his hands—“I know how you enjoy the snacks. And your damn sunflower seeds, obviously.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Really—thank you.”
She is moving around so quickly he can’t make eye contact. He wonders how she feels, how she is holding up. He doesn’t want to offend her by asking.
She begins piling non-perishable items on his kitchen counter. “If we get as much snow as they say, I won’t be able to stop by for a few days, so don’t forget to pay attention to how your wound looks. Change the dressing. Walk around the apartment regularly to avoid blood clots. If you have a fever, call 911.”
“Yes, Doc,” he says. “Are you going to stay and have some”—he picks up a cardboard box from the pile of groceries and examines it—“hot cocoa with me?”
She smiles, slowing her pace at last and folding her arms over her chest. “I’d love to, but no. I need to beat the storm home. I promised my mom I’d stay safe.”
“You should go now then,” Mulder urges. “It’s already starting to come down pretty hard, and the traffic will be terrible.”
“You’re right,” she says. “Okay. Don’t do anything unwise. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
She leans forward to embrace him, briefly, and he has the ridiculous notion she is about to kiss his cheek. “Take care,” she says brusquely.
Of course she doesn’t kiss his cheek. It’s Scully—who is probably taking extra care of him because work is her coping mechanism for grief—not some new woman he’s dating. The category confusion makes him feel a little ashamed, like he has been caught thinking something perverted.
She rushes out of the apartment, her dark coat trailing behind her. Once the door closes, Mulder notes the twinge of disappointment he feels. He’s simply attached to her. Something he wouldn’t have ever been able to predict when she first showed up. He’d actually doubted his ability to make new friends at all, and now here she is, anticipating he wouldn’t have food.
He walks over to look out the window behind his desk again. He’s surprised to see that the snow is coming down much harder now, and the wind has started to gust.
Visibility is poor. The temperature is dropping. Deep freeze tonight.
Thirty-five minutes later, Mulder is on his couch wolfing down a warm bowl of pasta and watching the local weather coverage when there is an alarming pounding at his door. The door frame seems to shake with the force.
He rises cautiously to look out the peephole and frowns. His partner, again.
He unlocks the door quickly. This time, she’s got no mere dusting of snow: she is crusted over with great slabs, veins of snow and ice creeping over her hat and coat and jeans and sneakers. Her face is wind-bitten; she is shivering violently.
“Scully.” He hurries her inside. “What the hell? What happened to you?”
“Car battery,” she says, her voice tight. “Dead a few blocks from here. I had to abandon the car and walk back.”
“You’re never supposed to leave your car,” Mulder scolds her, taking off her coat and knocking snow off her. “It’s the safest place to be in a blizzard. You should have called for help. Anything can happen to you out in the open snow.”
Her facial expression suggests this isn’t the right time for a lecture on winter weather safety from a native New Englander. “I need to warm up,” she replies, her teeth chattering.
“All right, of course,” he says more gently. “Go get out of these clothes and get in the shower. I’ll try to find you something else to wear.”
“I can’t stay here tonight,” she says, her tone approaching a whine, her words still clipped short with the shivering. “I’m supposed to be at home. I bought all these groceries. I have a good book. I’m supposed to call my mom tomorrow and tell her I’ve been careful.”
“Scully, it’s going to be okay,” he says reassuringly. “It could be much worse. I’ve got a sleeping bag somewhere around here. I’ll sleep there, and you can have the couch.”
“The couch,” she repeats, as if stunned.
“It’ll be a sleepover. We’ll tell ghost stories and do each other’s hair.”
“So pretty much like work,” she says, nodding, between her chattering teeth, “except with hair care.” She turns to walk towards his bathroom.
“Oh, hey, listen, if there are any magazines in there,” Mulder calls out, “they aren’t mine. Just don’t pay any attention to them.”
“You better have a bottle of wine, Mulder,” comes Scully’s voice.
***