Road Markers by anythingbutgrey Pairing: Mulder/Scully Author's Note: Many thanks to ava_leigh_fitz for the beta and the title. Timeline: Post-The Truth; Directly Pre-IWTB. Spoilers only through The Truth and super vague speculation based on previews for IWTB. Feedback: mylittletornado at gmail dot com Summary: There are anniversaries she can't shake. Dates have, over the years, many years, worked their way into her mind as an internal clock. Mulder manages to stay put for two years. She starts waking up to bright light mornings with his arm around her and wondering if today is the day he'll finally propose. It doesn't happen. That's okay with her, she's fine with waiting and sometimes she can convince herself that the institution of marriage is too formal and fragile a system to enter into anyway. She's fine with waiting. But then he leaves again, as quietly and inexplicably as just after William's birth, and this time she decides she can't wait anymore. True, it takes her over six months to come to that stubborn decision, but, Dana - once she's set in her ways, as Mulder knows best, it takes years to shift her mindset. Years and irrefutable proof. The weeks tick by. He gives no notice, no word, no birthday cards without return addresses. So she gets her life started again as a little doctor in a little town. She likes it there with all their New England manners and frozen winters and penchant for seafood. She moves into her apartment two months after she decides to stop waiting. Once the boxes are finally unpacked, she stands with a glass of red wine and a hand on her hip and thinks, Good. - There are anniversaries she can't shake. Dates have, over the years, many years, worked their way into her mind as an internal clock. There's the day she began working with Mulder, the day she first kissed Mulder - really kissed Mulder, the night they first slept together. There's no day she realized she was in love with him - that realization was so slow moving that no specific date can be assigned to it. William's birthday always burns the most. She calls in sick that day, every year. It's a pattern she would have noticed in anyone else, but the people at the hospital are not her, and they do not notice these things she notices. She works overtime the anniversary of the day Mulder left for the last time, does not allow herself to get distracted by the what ifs of picket fences or the neighbors who would always wonder why they can't shake calling each other by their last names. The days between these days are fluid and effortless. The anniversaries are the punctuation marks that break up one week, month, year to the next. - It takes surprisingly long for the FBI to notice her out of hiding. Eight months, two weeks, four days since she came here, two dark suited agents show up at her door - one male, one female. She does not think of Mulder and a tired, cramped office not built for more than one, but was still somehow shared with two. Dana remains calm and imagines getting away from the interrogation and back to her apartment where she will have cookies and peppermint tea. It is Christmastime. Her tree is bright and normal, her stocking on the mantle-piece is store-bought and normal, her life is normal. It's been a long time since anything in her life has touched on normal, so long that sometimes she thinks of normalcy as something deserving capitalization, Normal, like a proper noun, a place or a name. The agents throw around vows of convictions and accessories, but she knows nothing about Mulder, and while they could still lock her away, it seems that someone at the FBI is watching out for her still. They border on midnight when a sudden phone call pulls the female agent out of the room. When she returns with a whisper in her partner's ear, he runs a hand through his hair and says, "Doctor Scully, you are free to go. We'll contact you with any further questions." The next day at work she fakes some excuse for her sudden sick day. No one asks questions - the brilliant Dr. Scully gets a lot of free reign around here. - A former military man, Louis Naives, comes onto the ward with chest pains. It's not a problem, she treats him easily, but he has to stay on the ward for a week for treatment. His stomach bounces when he laughs, the heavy wrinkles around his eyes crinkle at the slightest expression. He tries to make her smile with a diligence she hasn't seen in a long time. Louis calls her Super Scully, like she still saves the world on a daily basis. "Don't you have a fellow?" he chuckles as she flips through his chart. "No," she responds with an unconvincing smile. Louis' smile is too sad for a stranger watching her. It makes her feel pathetic, like her loneliness she so often ignores is on public display on a glass showcase. "Too bad," Louis says. "You've got some fire in you. And I'm not talking about your hair." She laughs a quiet chuckle, but it's something and feels comforting in the Massachusetts Spring. She has no friends here. It doesn't surprise her. The only friendships she has ever had she merely stumbled upon. When Louis is discharged she almost misses him; he was the closest thing she has had to understanding in a long time. Her mother's phone was definitely tapped, probably still is, even after all this time. That probably hurts the most. Even the very origins of her are cut away from her in some ways. - Approaching year two, a doctor from oncology asks her to coffee at the Starbucks downstairs. She does not think about how she hates oncologists. His name is Peter, his favorite author is Dickens, and he likes to laugh about how he's really rather disappointed that Charles won't be releasing any new titles soon. He has never held a gun. She likes that. He prefers dogs to cats, has a slight southern drawl from his formative years in Georgia, and can't quite place why he decided to move up North with all its frozen winters. It is Christmas again, the only punctuation mark in her life that does not center on the lives of people she has lost. He is patient with her silences, and there are many - after all, there's over a decade of her life she fills with vague gaps in information. They go to ballets and hockey games and medical conventions. She refuses to see any movies about aliens and he assures her that he too finds the mere notion entirely without merit or scientific basis. Sometimes she wonders if she loves him just because of who he isn't, and most of the time she decides it doesn't matter, because she does love him. When she closes her eyes she can picture them with 2.5 kids who also love science experiments. The thought of this always makes her smile, a rush through her toes and a finality of it all, as though, at last, she could stop moving and find at least one thing to keep her tethered. - After one Friday night date with Peter, she finds one Fox Mulder loitering outside her apartment building. Peter is holding her hand when she first sees Mulder, and that is the hand that quickly jumps to her throat when she recognizes his form in the shadows. "What's wrong?" Peter asks, stopping and turning to her. Dana just shakes her head. Mulder steps into the lamplight in a too-familiar trench coat and she gasps again, even louder this time, like the sight of a ghost who can't possibly be there by any logical calculation. Peter looks to Mulder and then back at Dana, a frown deepening. "Do you know him?" She nods without speaking. Mulder steps forward to five feet in front of them, still a safe distance where she can resist the urge to reach out to him. Somehow she expected him to look different, older and graying and weary. He does look weary. "Hi," he says. His hands lift into the air in a small shrug and fall back against the front of his pants with a clap. She can't tell if the shrug is an excuse or an apology and knows she won't accept either. "Hello," she says in her most formal of tones. If she keeps thinking, You are but a stranger to me now perhaps it will become true. Mulder's eyes tick to Peter. He steps forward with an outstretched hand and Dana instinctively steps back, maintaining distance. "Fox Mulder," Mulder says, shaking Peter's hand. Peter introduces himself in turn. Dana watches the way their hands grip tight in competition. When they break apart, both men return to watching her, waiting for her to say something, but she can't think of any appropriate words. Mulder's hands are in his pockets. "Can I talk to you?" The breath that escapes her mouth whistles between her teeth. Feeling Peter's eyes on her, she stares at the ground, because she knows looking up would be dangerous. Gravity would pull her eyes straight to Mulder, and she can't afford that, not with Peter still with his hand quiet and protective on the small of her back. A loud, angry part of her demands she refuse, but something inside her that is still soft, soothing, and calm, reminds her that there's closure she needs. The note he left upon departure was short, and solemn, and I'm sorry, but I have work to do. I'll be back when I can. When he first left, she sometimes found herself doodling his words across blank pages without meaning to. A conversation about it would be nice, and so she says, "Sure." Dana is sure to kiss Peter goodbye before she goes upstairs. The kiss is long. Her eyes are closed. Mulder doesn't look at her again until they get inside her apartment. He turns in circles, looking at the white cabinets, the black countertops, the wood floors, the leather couch. He runs his hand over the furniture. She sits in the chair across the room and watches him, waiting for him to speak, back to waiting for him. It makes her stomach rumble like an ulcer raging free. "How are you?" he finally says with his back to her. She blinks. "Fine," she says, dragging out the word with a silent question mark. He turns to face her. The light from the kitchen spills into the living room where she sits, and the lamp on the table next to her is on, but he seems dim, standing between the places those sources of light reach. He still prefers the dark. "It took me a while to find you," he says. That's lie, of course; he just wasn't ready to find her. She didn't use an alias for that specific reason, just in case. That was a reckless decision, the FBI could find her easily, but she has learned over the years to be a little reckless. "I didn't expect to find you all the way up here." Dana fiddles with the chain of her necklace. "It seemed logical to have a change of scenery." Mulder nods. "Have they found you yet?" "Yes," she says. "They let me go. They care a lot more about you than about me, anyway." They watch each other for a moment after that - not simply looking, but watching, observing, noting changes and similarities like science experiments. He looks remarkably the same - it shouldn't't surprise her, it has only been two years after all, but somehow she expected something drastic. She wonders if he notices any changes in her stature. She can't think of anything specific, but she's used to her face, after all. "How are you?" he asks again. Her eyes roll. "You already asked that." "I know," he says, sitting on the couch across from her. The lamplight reaches that point and makes his face clear. "But you didn't answer it." Mulder crosses his arms and leans back, waiting. She slips her right leg over her left and runs her finger along the condensation of the water glass at her right. She says, "I'm a doctor now. I live in this apartment. I call my mother every Thursday. I do not talk about my past. It's normal." "And Peter?" His eyes wear shields. Her eyes narrow to observe his reactions. "And Peter is my boyfriend." Mulder winces. That was expected, and somehow infuriating. It was his decision to leave, after all. "Are you happy?" he asks. "Yes," she says, and commands herself to mean it. She does mean it, most of the time. He nods again and she's still waiting for something like an apology. She looks down at her hand for the briefest of moments. She looks up when she hears something click, and that's when she recognizes the snapping shut of the door, and that, once again, he has vanished into the quiet night. The explanation she needs never comes. It will never come, she supposes. That night, she sleeps and does not dream. In the morning, over coffee, Peter asks how she knew Fox Mulder, and why he was looking at her like that. The coffee burns her tongue. She runs the scorched surface along the roof of her mouth, bristling at the sensation of a tongue no longer smooth. "An old friend," she says. "It was a lifetime ago, don't worry about it." "Did you love him?" Peter asks, and his voice is clenched like the grip around a wrench. Her eyes tick to the tabletop. "Once upon a time." A smile spreads across her face as she looks back up at him, her eyes displaying nothing but calm placidity. "Don't worry about it, he's not coming back anytime soon." That she knows. It almost feels like a relief, like the finality she was looking for. Peter never speaks of Mulder again. As far as she knows, he stops thinking about him too. - She dates Peter for a long time - a lot longer than she thought she could have a nice, normal relationship with anyone. There are still too many mornings, though, when his arms feel foreign to her. When it ends towards the beginning of year four, the end is much like the relationship itself - quiet, logical, a look at the facts and objective truths. Perhaps that was the problem. Love isn't supposed to be about facts and catalogues. She knows it's really about biological processes and hormones, but there's something else about it, something that should challenge the facts. When she and Peter break up, she does not think about Mulder. On occasion, she can picture Melissa shaking her head, saying, "It's high time to move on, Dana." She has been trying. She has, and she doesn't know why she can still find some threads of him still stitched in her sweaters. Only some threads though, and most of the time, really, she's fine. Just not always, and she thinks that's allowed. Allowed by whom - well, that's a question she doesn't ask. Life without Peter is lonely, she'll admit, with a hollow drum beating with heavy vibrations in her stomach. She holds her breath when the elevator passes the oncology floor, like breathing would bring Peter back into her life. She can't bring him back into her life. He doesn't fit into her world, the insanity and paranormal she still has not been able to shake. Sometimes she still reads the newspaper too closely, looking for unexplained circumstances and things that go bump in the night. Sometimes she still expects Mulder to show up with dark sunglasses and a smirk. Maybe he has some new partner who is also on the run, a brunette who wears too much eye makeup, who's too young for the job, who has got enough baggage to match his, who doesn't argue, who believes. - He does show up again, the middle of her fourth year in Massachusetts, six years since they ran. She has just stitched up a patient, and as she soaks her hands in anti-bacterial soap, a nurse tells her there's a man waiting for her outside. Dana does not allow herself to believe what she already knows until she gets outside the OR, and finds him standing there. This time he really does look weary. "Scully," he says, his tone professional and smooth, no emotions dancing through. There's a favor he wants to ask lurking there. She breathes in.