Inhaling The Different Dawn
by Aloysia Virgata


DISTRIBUTION/FEEDBACK: aloysia.virgata@yahoo.com

You can check out my site
at http://undertherug.insatiable-mind.net/Aloysia.htm

RATING: PG-13

CLASSIFICATION: Vignette; Mulder/Scully Romance, angst 

SPOILERS: Trailer/minor new movie spoilers. Mostly speculaton.

SUMMARY: My take on what might have happened between
The Truth and the new movie. Heavy angst. 

DISCLAIMER: Not mine, Chris Carter, 1013, no
copyright infringement intended, all that stuff. 

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is dedicated to Scarlet Baldy,
my indefatigable beta. We were discussing scenarios for the new
movie and I mentioned thinking they might have been in a
marriage/domestic partnership post The Truth. And the living together
aspect of the relationship went off- track, but that they stayed very
close with one another. Scarlet said she'd like to read something like
that. So this was my thank-you gift to her for hours and hours of beta
reading. The title is her own by way of Emily Dickinson.

Scarlet says: To be given a story, when you value the written word as
much as I do, is already a deeply moving experience in itself;  but
being given the very story you wanted to read about  - well, what do
you know? For once in my life, I am at a loss for words... Oh, and go
ahead, blame me all you want.


Author's Notes continued at the bottom; spoilers contained therein.


************************************


"It's him," hissed Alice to Lydia. "Go get Dr. Scully."

Lydia rolled her eyes and then craned her neck around the nurses'
station to see him.

"He looks like sex on a stick," cooed Alice, who had four children
and a husband who did not wear his leather jacket as well as Mr.
Mulder did.

"He looks like trouble," observed Lydia darkly. She had never been
married because she kept falling in love with men who looked bad
and dangerous like Mr. Mulder and they invariably broke her heart.
"I wish he wouldn't come here."

"Go get Dr. Scully," repeated Alice, hoping Mr. Mulder would turn
around because she liked the way his butt looked in his jeans.

Lydia sighed and wandered down the hall and into the break room
where she saw the back of Dana's tawny head. She walked over and
tugged the long, mussed braid. "Hey girl." 

Dana took a swig of coffee from her Styrofoam cup and looked up
from a stack of paperwork. "Hey yourself. Keep me company?"

Lydia crossed her arms and assumed a disapproving expression.
"He's here again. Your ex."

"What? Where?" She put the cup down on the long table and stood,
brushing the crumbs of a vending machine danish from her khakis.

Lydia waved her hand in the general direction of the nurses' station.
"Out front. Being pestered by Alice, no doubt. I'd have paged you
but I figured you'd want warning."

"Thanks Lydia."

Lydia grinned sympathetically. "Is he the one who bought you that
pretty new car?"

"It was an amicable parting," Dana laughed; not clarifying any further.
Not that she ever did.

"I guess so. He wants you back, Dana. Anybody can see that."

"We're just not meant to be married," she shrugged. "He knows it
better than anyone, believe me."

Lydia eyed her up, wondering what the story was there, but liking
Dana Scully too much to risk the friendship by asking. 

Dana gathered up her files and slid them into her backpack, which
she slung over her shoulder before scooping up her coat. "I was going
to get some food and head home anyway."

"...and you know, I just think it's a shame more people aren't as
open-minded as you," Alice was saying as she slouched against the
wall in her Tweety Bird scrubs. "My mother thinks I'm crazy, but I tell
you those crystals made all the difference for me. I had this
awful arthritis in my right knee and it just..." she trailed off as Mr.
Mulder's attention was jerked away.

"Mulder," said Dr. Scully in her smooth voice. Alice loved the way
they used their last names. She thought it was sexy and cosmopolitan.
Lydia thought it was weird and the sign of some kind of personality
disorder; at least on his end.

"Scully," he said, Alice and her crystals utterly forgotten. "I like your
hair."

Dana gave him a tired smile. "Why are you here?"

"Is it a bad time? I could come back later."

"Or you could call next time," Dana pointed out, pulling her cell phone
from her pocket. "It's always on."

He looked stung and she was immediately contrite. "I'm on my way
to get something to eat, Mulder. Why don't you join me?"

She walked briskly down the hall to the elevator, Mr. Mulder loping
beside her on his considerably longer legs.

"You know he's good in bed," Alice said when the elevator had
closed.

"Yes, he probably is," Lydia was forced to concede.


************************************


Mulder followed her into the bright cafeteria, surveying the groups of
doctors and nurses and concerned family members as they clustered
around the blond wood tables. Scully was negotiating with the guy at
the sandwich counter.

"No substitutions," he said firmly.

She gave him a steely look. "I don't like Swiss and you have a whole
stack of Havarti right there."

"No."

Scully leaned over the counter. "Give me the damned cheese. I'll pay
for the extra slice."

He glowered at her, unable to find a loophole, and Mulder saw that
he put both kinds of cheese on her sandwich. She flung her money at
the register and stalked off with the tray.

"Jesus," she said, pulling out a chair at a table by the windows. "You
would not believe the people who work in here."

Mulder turned his chair around backwards and straddled it, watching
her arrange herself.

"So what's up?"

"I like your new car," he said. 

She laughed and removed the rogue Swiss before starting in on her
sandwich. "You always said BMWs were bourgeois."

"They are. You make it work though. And red! I never thought you'd
go for a little red number. Though you know I would." He twitched
her braid and she colored a bit.

"Not today, Mulder. I'm drained. Why are you here?"

"I miss you," he said simply. "I want you to come back."

She sighed, knowing it had been coming. "How's the kitty?"

"Oh, you know. Fat and surly. He misses you too. Clawed up your
bathrobe - the pink one you left because it clashed with your hair. I
told him he was a good boy." 

"What a terrible cat," she said fondly. 

"Scully..." Mulder said. "I want to try again."

She shook her head.

He reached across the miles of table between them and ran his fingers
over the white ridge of her knuckles. "You have to let him go.
He's...he's gone." Mulder didn't look at her when he said it.

"We're not talking about this," she snapped, snatching her hand away
from him.

"There's nothing you could have done, Scully. It was a car accident.
It's been almost three years and I just..." His head dropped to his
chest. "I just need you." 

She stood up, trying not to let the tears spill down her hot cheeks.
How dare he come here and do this, she thought? "You don't need
me, Mulder. You just don't know how to be alone on someone else's
terms."

He leaned forward, resting his head in his hands and gripping his hair.
She saw the glint of his wedding band on his right ring finger. A lump
rose in her throat and she unconsciously ran her thumb over the bare
place on her left hand. Sometimes she still felt the weight of her own
ring there like a phantom limb. She stroked the top of his head.

"I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't want it this way either."

He looked up at her, his eyes dark and strained. "You're really
happier like this?"

"I'm not unhappy."

"I did that? I made you unhappy?"

"Mulder, come on," she implored. "We've hashed this out a hundred
times."

"I'm selling the house and I need you to come fill out some
paperwork with me," he mumbled, jabbing her discarded cheese with
a spork.

"You're selling the house?" She felt unexpectedly sorrowful and sat
back down.

"It's too full of memories." He glanced at her. "And the neighbors ask
to borrow things so they can see if I've started keeping piles of
newspapers and stuff around. They always thought I was crazy. That
I wasn't good enough for you. I guess they feel vindicated now,"
he said bitterly.

"No one thought that," she told him, although she didn't actually have
any idea. They had mostly kept to themselves. "So, um, where will
you be living now?"

"I bought an old house on a big piece of land. A few acres. Thought I
might plant that vegetable garden you wanted," he added hopefully.

She rubbed her eyes sleepily, grateful for waterproof mascara. "Don't
do it on my account. I have a black thumb. You still working for that
detective?"

He shrugged. "It got pretty boring. I never cashed most of the
paychecks anyway. Good old mom and dad. Their investment guy
still doesn't know what to do about my indifference. I think I scare
him."

She smiled at him, wanting to say something wise and tender but
having nothing to offer. "You should move back to New England,
Mulder. You always loved it there. Did you go to the beach house
yet this year?"

"It's not the same without you," he confided.

She looked down, remembering the last time they'd been there. 


************************************


Sex on the piano. He called her Vivian and she called him Edward
and they laughed and made terrible, campy jokes about her being a
kind-hearted hooker out to inspire his cold, industrialist heart.

He played Fur Elise while she wore his shirt and drank his father's
excellent Scotch.

She straddled his back and rubbed almond oil into his shoulders until
he flipped over and grabbed her as she shrieked. He called her Mrs.
Mulder and she called him Mrs. Scully. They ended up naked in the
Atlantic.

They'd found William three months later.

Mulder had tracked him down just a few weeks after he turned three
and a half. Scully threw a cut-glass vase at the wall when he told her
he'd done it. Then they'd gotten on a plane to flyover country.

"We could get him back," Mulder had told her. "I never signed away
any rights."

She shook her head. "It's not right to take him away."

He knew that.

They sat huddled in the rental car, watching hungrily as their son
played with a dog of nondescript appearance. William still had big
blue eyes and his hair was fine and chestnut colored. He was
graceful, being possessed of his father's long limbs and easy
athleticism. He carefully moved an errant cricket to the grass
before running down the sidewalk.

Scully had smoked a pack of cigarettes in the 36 hours they were
there. She coughed rustily on the plane back home. Almost six
months later they bought a train table and a set of electric trains to
have shipped out to where he lived with his family and his dog in
their wholesome Midwestern existence.

He never got it, him and his family and his dog having been killed in a
car accident three days before it arrived. An 18-wheeler ran their
minivan off the road. 

Just one of those things, the highway patrolman told Mulder when he
called about the story in their small- town newspaper. Drunk driver.

Mulder, having died once before, felt as though it were happening
again. The cold crept over him, settling into its familiar haunts.

Scully drank almost a fifth of vodka and spent an entire night vomiting
into the bathtub while Mulder held her hair and told her lies about
how he didn't blame her for any of it.

She had been disappointed to wake up the next day; certain that God
could not hate her so much as to make her keep on living.

"I wish I were dead," she'd said to no one. Mulder had left just after
dawn, running until he was dehydrated and lost.

He didn't say much to her when he found his way back. Just offered
her a jug of Gatorade and a blank face.

She didn't tell him she was sorry.  

They continued like that for nearly four months - existing - drifting in
and out of one another's way. Scully was in the second year of a
pediatric residency and was gone much of the time anyway. Mulder
finished the basement and started filling up a series of filing cabinets
with newspaper clippings.

Their anniversary rolled around and he stared at the only picture from
their wedding, the ice in his glass rattling loudly in the empty house. 


************************************


They'd done it on a whim when Kersh had sent word that the
government was not pursuing any charges and they could come
home. 

He'd gone to a jewelry store and used a credit card for the first time
in years. Bought two platinum bands and drove out to the animal
shelter where Scully worked. She was calling herself Lauren Atwater. 

Mulder walked in the front door and watched her silently for a
minute. She wore cutoffs and an old t-shirt, her hair pulled up into a
long ponytail. She was stacking bags of dog food with her lean,
muscular arms. "Agent Scully!" he called.

She froze, looking terrified, and stared at him like the lunatic she was
certain he was.

He walked over and got down on one knee, offering the ring up to
her on his pinkie. "Well, what do you say?" 
 
"I say you're out of your mind."

He rose, lifted her up, and kissed her in front of her co-workers, all
of whom appeared as mystified as she. "Kersh says we're clear."

They'd driven to the mayor's house because he was also the justice of
the peace and gotten married in their t- shirts and shorts. The mayor's
wife had loaned Scully her own veil and Scully grinned dazedly at the
camera while Mulder beamed down at her from under his Knicks hat.

Then they went to Aruba where Scully burned horribly and fell in love
with Blue Curacao

Got a nice house in Fairfax County while Scully wheedled and
Skinner pulled strings. She started her residency and came home
brimming with happiness. They spent money freely - though not
carelessly - to make up for what they'd endured. They never talked
about 2012.


************************************

Scully had come home late and found Mulder in the overstuffed chair,
gazing at the picture as he gripped the frame too hard. She froze in
the doorway.

"What happened to them, Scully?" he asked of her; not looking up
from the snapshot.

"They didn't know any better," she said tiredly.

"Do you still love me?"

She felt cross and impatient with him. "I thought I was the one who
should be asking you that."

"That's not a very good answer," he told her.

"It wasn't a very good question."

He looked at her carefully. "We're just about all we've got left," he
told her. The Scullys had all but shunned them both.

She walked over to him and got down on her knees; laying her head
in his lap. The glass of the picture frame was cool against her cheek.

"He was our baby," she said. "He was never our little boy."

Mulder licked his dry lips, tracing the long curve of her neck with his
finger; liking the way his ring caught the light. "You did the right thing,"
he told her. "I know you know that, but you have to realize that I
know it too."

She shivered. "Does it ever stop hurting?" Knowing it didn't. Still
missing her sister.

He closed his eyes. "No. It never does. But it hurts less. You don't
think about it all the time after a while."

"I told him about you every night before bed," she said, her voice
muffled by his leg. "He knew your picture."

He felt his heart break.

She got up and wiped her eyes, then went into their bedroom and
pulled a box from the top of the closet. They looked at the tattered
copy of Goodnight Moon. The tiny blue pajamas. The lock of
cornsilk hair.

They buried the box under the wild cherry tree in the yard.


************************************

She brought home an enormous Maine Coon from the
Humane Society for his birthday in October. She wanted them
to love something together. One of the cat's ears was missing a tip
and his eyes were two different colors, but Scully thought he was
enchanting.

"What are you going to name him?" she asked, knuckling the cat's
furry head as he purred appreciatively.

"It'll come to me," Mulder said solemnly. "You can't rush these
things."

Later that week the cat snuck into the box of donuts Scully had
gotten to bring to the hospital. They found him yowling in the kitchen,
dusted with powdered sugar and sticky with jelly filling. Mulder
named him Homer. 


************************************


Mulder broached the idea of adoption not long after. Scully refused
immediately.

"I can't," she said. 

I won't, he heard.

He couldn't stand the sight of her sometimes; knowing she was caring
for other people's children. He stopped calling her at work and his
clippings crept slowly up the walls like ivy.


************************************


"This isn't working," she blurted out one morning as Homer wound
around her ankles.

Mulder looked up sharply from his laptop, where he was checking
news feeds of the paranormal. "Excuse me?"

"This life we have, Mulder. When's the last time we had a
conversation that didn't have a thousand unsaid things in it? I looked
in your office the other day," she said. "You're restless."

"Scully?"

"I want a divorce," she told the cat.


************************************


Mulder didn't protest when she called an attorney. He helped her
move her things to her trendy new condo and bought her a bottle of
Johnnie Walker Blue for a housewarming present. She invited him
over to drink it with her on her birthday and they ended up in bed.
He stayed for breakfast and did the dishes when she went to work.

He showed up at the hospital later that night with cartons of Chinese
food and chatted with Alice while she flirted back. Lydia glared at
him disapprovingly, but he didn't care.

He thought Scully looked cute in her scrubs, but she didn't usually
wear them. She had on pinstripe trousers and a black sweater.

"You look nice," he told her.

"We're not married anymore," she reminded him.

"You may reconsider," he said, holding out the fragrant bag. "Happy
birthday."

She smiled and led him to the elevator, leaving Alice to wonder why
you'd divorce a man who looked like that and brought you dinner and
still wore his wedding ring, even if it was on his right hand.


************************************


"Come up to the beach with me, Scully." She was scratching Homer
under the chin while Mulder changed the oil in his car under the
broiling June sun. She hadn't been over to the house for a month.

"I don't think it's a good idea."

"You can have your own room," he said awkwardly.

She smiled. "It's not that, Mulder." Unsure of what exactly it was.

He slid out from under the car, grease-stained and sweaty. She
resisted the urge to smooth his hair because she couldn't touch him
without feeling like she was on fire.

"I miss you," he told her.

"I can't stay," she said. 

She went to work and lost herself in other people's pain.


************************************


They went out to dinner in August and when she hugged him
goodnight, she found her hands sliding under his shirt and her mouth
on his collarbone. 

"Scully," he said hoarsely as he pulled her shirt off in her hallway.

She laughed and fumbled with her lock as he unhooked her bra. How
easy it is not to care what other people think of you, she realized. 

They scarcely made it to her bed and when she came, her skirt was
around her waist.

"Delilah," he teased.

"Show-off."

Mulder took it as a challenge and carried her into the shower. He
lifted her against the slick tiles, thrusting into her under the pounding
spray where the lack of friction had her at his mercy.

She left scratches down his back and he was faintly dismayed when
they healed.


************************************


Mulder's birthday arrived and she bought him the collector's edition
of Star Trek on DVD.

"Scully," he said. "Are you coming on to me?"

She grinned and poured him another glass of wine. "Sorry," she said.
"I don't date geeks."

"I'm not asking you for a date," he murmured into her neck.

She sighed, wondering what kind of woman she was when she let him
unbutton her jeans. She wondered why it mattered.


************************************


And here they were again. The early December dusk like a bruise
outside the window and Mulder sprawled in the birch cafeteria chair,
all dark and brooding in leather and denim and cashmere.

"You should come see my new place sometime," he said. "It's kind of
a fixer-upper, but I think you'll like it. Very rustic."

She took a bite of her sandwich. "I'd like that, Mulder." From the
corner of her eye, she saw him tie a plastic straw in knots.

"What is it?" she asked warily.

"What's what?" His face was a little too innocent.

"There's something else on your mind. Fifteen years together, Mulder.
I can tell."

He batted his lashes at her. "I don't know what you mean."

"Yeah, yeah. Spill it."

He took her hand, running his thumb against the slick surface of her
nails. "Skinner called. There's this...case."

She groaned. "No."

"And this agent - Agent Whitney - she specifically requested my help.
And Skinner asked if I'd talk to you."

She rose and shrugged into her camel overcoat, pulling the rubber
band from her hair and shaking the braid loose with her fingers. She
leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. "No."

"Scully, it can't hurt just to take a look. We'd be consultants. That's
all."

She tugged on a pair of black calfskin gloves, grabbed her backpack,
and took a last bite of the sandwich before heading from the cafeteria
towards the lobby. Her heels clicked like distant gunshots and
Mulder followed behind her as she pushed the door open and
walked towards her car. Their shoes crunched in the snow.

"Just come over and see what Skinner sent, okay? Just look at it,
Scully. This guy's taking women and killing them and you should
really..."

"I'm done chasing monsters in the dark," she said with the note of
finality he knew so well.

He reached out and caught her sleeve. "I'm sorry."

She whirled around, her long hair flowing like molten copper under
the streetlight.

"What?"

"I'm sorry for coming here. For upsetting you."

She stepped closer and watched their breath mingle in a frosty cloud.
"It's never been about you," she told him, twirling the fringe of his
scarf in her gloved hand. "You have to know that."

He did.

"Scully," he said, because he liked saying her name. He held her
porcelain face in his hands and she smiled sadly.

"You're the only one who calls me that now," she whispered. "I feel
like two people."

"Maybe you are." He leaned down and kissed her, and she put her
arms around his neck. 

"Come over tonight," he said. "I'll make you dinner and you can tell
me how I'm spoiling Homer and what a bad cat he is."

"Okay," she agreed.

He stepped back and watched her in the cone of yellow light. Snow
was starting to fall again and it clung to her like lace. It was an
unusually cold December.

"Mulder?" she said, something hesitant - anxious - in her voice.

"Hmm?"

She reached into her collar and pulled out the fine gold chain. She'd
strung her wedding band on it with the cross and he felt his chest
warm in the stinging wind.

"New necklace?" he asked, smiling.

She took his hand. "It's the same one I've always worn." She
squeezed his fingers and then walked to her car, which was bright as
blood against the falling snow.


************************************

The End

************************************


More Author's Notes: I really and truly did not plan to kill Bambi
when I started writing this, but it just sort of wrote itself and nothing
else quite worked. I couldn't see Mulder and Scully completely
separated after all they'd been through because it simply did not ring
true for the characters. Nor could I see a situation where things were
safe enough for them to come back, but where they wouldn't try and
get William back somehow. So this is where the story went when I
tried to make those things come together.

Loved it? Hated it? Hate me? Let me know!
aloysia.virgata@yahoo.com