Six Years Ago Will Stay Beside Them by veils Feedback: uselessantiquity@hotmail.com Rating: R Summary: The walls used to be a shade of white, she thinks, but now they are layers of grey and black, of words and photographs. On a dog-eared poster, a flying saucer hovers above trees and bold white lettering. She wonders if she still wants to believe, after all this. Notes: A million thank yous to elapses for the beta. and just so you know, I like this one a lot. --- The house sits quietly against tantrums of snow, creaking only once or twice as the wind seeps through spider cracks. It is aging, but strong. Winter is living in their corner of the world; white ices the porch steps, the guardrails, the expanse of the roof, and the earth is painted with shades of grey. Inside, a fireplace glows orange, a reminder of flames just burnt out in the early light of dawn. There is the faint sound of scissors and tearing paper from behind a dark brown door, the rolling of wheels across wood. Scully wakes to an empty bed and feels the cold as she remembers she went to sleep in one. If she strains, she can hear Mulder shift deeper into obsession, brooding in an office full of clippings that remind him of what he left behind. The pinpricks of age start as she sits up, wooden floorboards creaking at the premature hour when she stands. The kitchen light always flickers when she turns it on, a moment of hesitation before the bright glow settles into the crooks of the room. Wind unnerves the windowpanes, rattling them in the grey feeling dawn brings. Sometimes she wishes for the long light of summer, when the snow starts to last too long. The kettle boils slowly. As she watches steam rise off her tea and absently traces the knotted wood of the table, Mulder walks in, his eyes heavy with tiredness. "You've been up all night." "Couldn't sleep." He doesn't look at her. Mulder hasn't slept in over ten years. He is constantly awake, and he has been since Scully first knew him. She knows his mind works even as his eyes are closed and his breathing is a deep and even vibration at her back. "You're up early," he looks in the fridge, his hand flexing towards orange juice before he pulls away and shuts the door, his fingers empty. He rubs his neck as she watches him. "I've got surgery." Sometimes they talk in short sentences, abrupt at their ends. Sometimes Scully doesn't know how she lives with him; she remembers a basement office, and a poster proclaims I WANT TO BELIEVE. They were the days where she could go home to an apartment block, leave Mulder behind for a while. She can always feel him now, his presence hovering at the back of her neck, as ceaseless as the quest that still dogs them. She does not go to Mulder, she comes home to him. But her memories are filmy, now. It is harder to imagine what she used to have, and harder to think that she wants it back. Her Mulder that used to look to the skies for answers now looks at newspapers for validation the truth he once so desperately wished to find in spaceships is now spread across headlines in the media. The Scully who followed him is lost. He's back in his office when she emerges from the shower, and she lets out a long low sigh. Before she leaves, she goes in to see him, and he murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like Agent Scully, I presume as she opens the door. The walls used to be a shade of white, she thinks, but now they are layers of grey and black, of words and photographs. On a dog-eared poster, a flying saucer hovers above trees and bold white lettering. She wonders if she still wants to believe, after all this. Next to Mulder, a Buddha sits at the bottom of a fish tank and oxygen weed adds serenity; one small reminder of a temple in Chinatown and the paths she's lived her life across. The bronze has grown dull, and his knees are slimy green; with his presence, Mulder's given his fishes a religion. "I'm off, okay?" In a fit of domesticity, she kisses his temple, her fingers scratching the wiry hairs on his jaw. "I really wish you'd stop with this beard thing you're so set on." "I'm a renegade now, Scully. Gotta complete the look." She rolls her eyes and the door shuts with a disparaging click. William is a guilt that weighs on her bones. The antiseptic smell of the hospital envelopes her as she walks through the automatic doors, and she tells herself she's not trying to make up for everything she's lost. Nothing bleeds for a little boy who was born into a world she couldn't keep him safe from. She repents for her sins with every life she saves; stained glass and the tiny cross at the base of her neck a reminder of the faith she wants to hold onto. Mulder hovers, and doesn't understand. These days, it's only herself mocking the repeated intonation of I'm fine. She's always hated the taste it leaves, but it's a habit hard to kick. So she lives with the words tattooed on the inside of her cheek, pulling on scrubs and lab coats, wishing often for an FBI badge and the feeling of a gun at her hip. It's been three years since they left it all behind, and at the end of every December the thirty-first, Mulder tacks a new calendar on top of the old. A cheery reticulan scrawled in ballpoint marks the first day of the year. It is an echo of a routine they fell into only months after they moved in. Old problems buried in the wake of new, not solved, and only pushed away to avoid a loathed confrontation. On Mulder's good days, Scully notices a kind of contentment about him, and a fleck of the old Mulder shows through. (There was a day when she took the wicker basket to the shed for wood, the snow melting under a setting sun tinged red and Mulder threw the slush from the bottom of the steps at her. She glared at him on the surface, her eyebrow arched, though she's still inwardly thankful for his childish streak.) They have an attic, eerie but charming as all attics should be, filled with boxes Mulder doesn't want downstairs. When she can't find him in his office, he's up in the attic, his knees dusty with the regret of never sweeping. Sometimes when she comes home she can hear him shifting above her, the sound of cardboard sliding over wood, and she sighs. She goes up there one day and he is buried in Polaroids, photos of blurry scenery and blotches in the sky. He looks tired in a way that he never used to, the marks around his eyes are deeper and there is a weariness about him. He is kneeling, half in grimy shadow as she joins him. There's a photograph in the carpet of them he's created, their younger selves caught in conversation on the edge of a wide lake framed with trees. "I like your hair better now." His voice, a low rumble from lack of speech, rolls across her shoulders. "Well, it suffers less at the hands of crocodiles masquerading as sea monsters now, Mulder." Her voice is quieter than it should be, and he only nods. She moves to get up, to leave him to his devices but he stops her with a pull on the hem of her shirt and his lips at the side of her mouth. He lies her down upon layers: clothes, photos, dust, wood, concrete, earth; his thumbs caress her thighs. They're getting too old for this, being unexpected, having sex on hard timber floors. But there's unease in Mulder, a need to anchor himself. She can't remember the last time they had sex for a reason that made her smile, though Mulder seems less melancholy as she kisses his temple before slipping back downstairs. She hopes that somehow he'll mend. The transitions of the seasons do bring about a change in him, and she knows as the snow thaws into the bright green of spring, he will become annoyingly buoyant, worrying on the edges of her nerves. It's the winter that makes him brood; he hibernates in an office filled with memoirs, though the moping always lingers as a shadow of his demeanor even in the warmer months. The first of March sees him out of bed before Scully, and she cracks an eye open in bemusement as he shuffles blearily to the bathroom door, though eventually she goes back to sleep until her alarm. Mulder is absent when Scully walks into the kitchen, and the place has a breeze through it, a feeling of something unsullied; irises spread around the mouth of a vase filled with water, and the windows open out into a sky that will soon dry the ground. She finds him as she's heading out the door, and it's not where she expected him. After seeing the flowers on the table, she'd assumed he would return to his office; wrap himself up in the recluse he now fit the coat of so well. But he's sitting on the porch railing, his bare feet swinging above the ground. It's shaded, his face is half-dark and difficult to read, but she feels contentment coming from him, a feeling she's felt in his presence only momentarily before. His long legs fold over the railing and he jumps down to follow her to her car, the puppy not wanting to be left behind. Her bag thumps onto the passenger seat, and she turns an eyebrow on him as her own door opens, the metal chilly around her hand. "Do you have to go to work today?" he shifts, and then his fingers spread over her skull. "Mulder, I always have to go to work." His hands drop, but he grabs her fingers, and his skin is warm. She can see he doesn't want conspiracies today, to think on abductees and stain his fingers with the ink of hard-hitting analytical reports. He wants spring and Scully and flowers in a hand-painted vase, to sit on the porch and pretend nothing else exists for a while. A younger Mulder grins with a cut class with me, Scully, and an older one echoes him, the lines around his mouth a little stronger. He concedes to opening the gate for her, and she swallows her qualms as she drives away from him. Summer, fittingly, starts on her day off. The sun shines like it will never set, and Mulder wants to go out and buy gas for the barbecue that doesn't work. Scully finds him out the back of the house hours later, his fingers black and his shoulders faintly pink. Her sunscreen warnings go unheeded, and she sits on the back steps to watch him pretend he can think like a handyman. Mulder doesn't build, he breaks. They're both surprised when it flickers to life, and his grin is far too self-satisfied. His hands clasp her knees, smearing dark grease in the depressions of them, and he tastes like oil, sweat and summer in the late afternoon shadows when he kisses her. "Scully, I think we should get a sheep. Or a cow, maybe." His fingers press at her thighs. "Maybe." The season is impulsive; they drive for miles one day, something that has an air of familiarity, until they find a lake, and she burns too quickly in the sun. Mulder is candid in his liveliness, and there's a pang when she looks at him. It's August, and fall is coming on the air. It doesn't approach, though. It seems to her that they wake up one morning and the trees are devoid of leaves, skeletons that strike against each other with dry cracks in the gusts of frosty air. Summer is quickly forgotten in the wake of dark russets and oranges; the ground is damp and the colour of browning fruit. Mulder gets nostalgic, living in days where he had a sister, FBI issue weaponry and an office in a basement. He is moody, and his fingers spend too much time catching around her wrists. She still tells herself she's just fine, and they sweep their problems under an overburdened rug. She begins to curse their habits: as the snow falls, they don't talk, he mumbles his sentences and kisses her clumsily; he is somehow regretful of his non-communicative ways, though she'd thought he hadn't noticed. He holes himself up, a bear in hibernation, and she pretends. She goes to work, she comes home, and she's never surprised when there's no morning newspaper. This is what spans six years after everything, in an old house on the fringes of nowhere. But there is one day she will always remember as different, in the winter that is spreading itself across the weeks to the end of January oh-eight, when she walks up a hospital hallway to the face of a boy she doesn't know that she can cure. A man stops her, and FBI issue crosses her mind. She cuts him off barely two words into his sentence, and her second thought is for Mulder, dead more than once because of these people. She doesn't want to help them, she doesn't even want to listen to the agent talk, but she can already see herself opening the office door when she gets home. They want you back, Mulder.