Steps
by Lilydale

* * *

Email: lilydale10@yahoo.com

Timeline: "Home Again" post-episode

Category: MSR

Summary: He silently profiled her for years, quietly filing away 
everything about her and trying to understand.

Archive: No. But ask me nicely and I'll probably say yes.

Disclaimer: Do people do these anymore? The characters you
recognize are not mine.  They belong to 1013 Productions, Chris
Carter, and Fox.

Notes: Big thanks to Anjou for the read-through and insights! More
notes at end.

* * *

Journey is playing on the radio, so Mulder does not understand why
he isn't feeling much better than he actually does. He cracks open
his eyes, glances to the left, and remembers.

Scully is driving him home after the scattering of her mother's
ashes. He had driven them there, but her eyes became more
focused, her limbs became less jellied under his hands, as he held
her while sitting at the shore.

He did not ask about her channel selection of The Big 80s. Instead,
over miles and miles, he mentally ran through channels she could
have chosen instead, slotted songs he knew she liked into each of
them, considered the big band music he knew her father loved and
her mother loved in turn, debated the merits of lyrics versus
orchestrations in a speeding car void of words, and listened for her
insinctive emotionally raw sighs when this song played but not
when that song played.  He eventually chastised himself for profiling
Scully, before opening his eyes.

He silently profiled her for years, quietly filing away everything
about her and trying to understand. He only discovered when it was
both too late and not late enough that Scully would never make
sense to him, she would only make everything else make sense. He
has loved her with this quiet passion for a very long time.

They do not speak the entire drive home.

Scully stops the car at a haphazard angle in front of the house.
Sitting in the car, they turn to each other. She shows a ghost of a
smile and has a dampness in her eyes. His face, he thinks, is
carefully blank and open for whatever she needs it to be. He gives
her a slight nod before stepping out of the car and walking toward
the house.

He's already up a few porch stairs when, to his surprise, he hears a
car door open and the crunch of hard heeled shoes on pebbles and
dry, browned grass. Mulder stops, turns around, and sees Scully
standing a few paces from the car. Her face now gives his blankness
a run for its money.

Mulder raises his arm out to her. Like electricity to a lightening
rod, Scully arcs toward his outstretched fingers. As she draws 
near, her hand starts to rise just as he begins to sit on a step 
with his hand falling to his side and patting the space next to him.

She sits too. They do not touch.

After a minute, Scully says, "Do you know why my hair is red?"

He was not expecting that. "I assume it has something to do with
you being a witch. The truest witches were often claimed in
medieval Europe to have hair of fire. Red hair was so uncommon
that it was deemed unnatural, only something someone having
otherworldly connections could bear." He pauses as he recalls his
own dark wizardry and wonders if Scully is doing the same.

"My father and his brother," she says without missing a beat, "had
red hair. Their mother did too. I only saw my uncle a few times as a
child. He was in the navy like my father, and the paths of our
families almost never crossed. But I knew he had red hair."

"Melissa had red hair too," he softly offers.

"Yes. Melissa had red hair too," she agrees. "Mom always said that
was how she knew we were really his, Daddy's girls. We had the
Scully hair. Charlie didn't."

There's a pause as Mulder waits for Scully to continue, but he
senses she's hit a contemplative wall. He asks, "What does Charlie
look like?" Mulder realizes he's never seen so much as one
photograph.

"Like Bill. But shorter. And with a heavier scowl."

"Heavier than Bill?" He widens his eyes, contorts his mouth, and
makes an undignified eek noise.

Scully chuckles, which prompts Mulder to sneak a side glance to see
her eyes crinkle and her cheeks blush. Laughing makes only Scully
blush, as if her body is innately embarrassed by such an apparent
display of emotion. Which it probably is, even when displayed to
him. Other emotions make her blush too. The number of times he's
seen her cheeks blush is now up at the infinite, but that feels
inadequate, and far away.

She says, "Charlie was never easy. I'm sorry he didn't come out here
for Mom, for you to see."

"For you to see, you mean."

"That too."

A beat.

"I'm sorry about your mom, Scully."

"I know, Mulder. Thank you," she says, as she rests her palm on his
forearm.  He leans his towering head down toward hers. She leans
over and meets him halfway, their temples touching. He can feel
her heartbeats. They cycle and cycle, and he'd swear that his sync
with hers. She'd kick his ass with so many big money scientific
words and reams of journal articles if she knew he thought that was
remotely possible. But it's true, he thinks. They fall in step for a
good long walk.

She eventually lifts up her head, sweetly urging his away. "Go in
your house, Mulder. Get some rest," she suggests.

"So it's my house but our decision?"

"What? Yes?" The weight of her hand on him lightens. He's lost her.
He's a little lost himself, not quite knowing where that came from.

"You know as well as I do that this was always our house," he says.

Scully whispers a yes so softy he sees her mouth move more than
he hears the word. Even with that affirmative her eyebrows rise in
question and in anticipation of more. He suddenly feels very small
and shy.

He wonders, "Do you think William has red hair?"

"He didn't. You saw him."

"Yeah, but his head then was just a little ball of fluff. That's how
Samantha looked as a baby too. That's the Mulders."

She whimpers, "Our baby, Mulder."

"Is that why you keep calling it our decision? Our baby, our 
sacrifice to give him up?"

"Have I? Said that?"

He nods. Her hand that's still on his arm feels like it re-gains
Earth weight.

"Yes. No. I don't -- . It was a confusing time, Mulder."

They fall into such a profound silence that the rest of the land
seems to take notice. No bird songs, no rustling tree leaves, no
creaking of the house that always seems to have something shifting.

He breaks the bubble. "I get it, Scully, I do. You had my trust."

"Had?

"Have. Always. But you made the call."

She is still in the quiet bubble.

"It's okay, Scully. Your decision."

She stirs and pulls her hand off of him in a swift jerk. "I don't 
need your permission or condolences, Mulder. And certainly not at
this late time, years later."

He knows he is not being clear. Then again, she's not either. They
are a right pair. "It's okay, Scully. For it to have been your
decision. Decision for us. Made by you."

Her brows are rising again even as they furrow. How does she do
that? Those brows have a very large folder in his mental filing
cabinet.

"I just mean," he stammers, "at the time, when it was --"

"It was so hard, Mulder," she interrupts. "You weren't there.
Though you were there too." She looks down, shrugs. "William
didn't have red hair. You were there too."

The movement of her head down causes her hair to fall like a
curtain between them. She's had this long hair for years now, but
he still misses when it was shorter and he could see her chin, maybe
a hint of cheek, when she looked down, which she did often in lieu
of speaking or sharing or laughing in his face. He could tell when
she was about to speak after looking down by the way her chin would
slightly move just under her hairline as she loosened her lips before
she made the final rational decision to speak out loud. He could tell
when she was crying, always silently, by seeing a tear sneak down
her face and hang on for dear life. With this longer hair, he's on
the outside without a clue.

She says, "I saw him the other day, Mulder. William."

He yelps like a cat who's had its tail nearly clipped by a closing 
door.

"It was a dream," Scully clarifies.

Hallelujah, Scully's head is as muddled as his own.

"Me too."

Her head pops up, the curtain falls.  "Really?"

"He didn't have red hair, Scully."

He sees her cheeks blush. Her eyebrows had relaxed at some point
he missed. Her eyes raise to his, and they spark. "Guess he's not a
witch."

He speaks through a start of a grin, "Guess not."

They're grinning at each other now, sitting there on the stairs.
Things change so quickly when he's with Scully, he thinks, even as
they never change at all.

"Come on, Scully," he says as he feathers a hand against her
shoulder. "You've got tea inside."

He doesn't wait for a reply before he starts to rise. He knows she
will get up too, and then she does in a wave after him, the sine to
his cosine. His grin expands, as he stores that away to tell Scully
one day.

She has a key out before he does, opens the front door, and they're
in.

* * *

I can't believe I wrote fic again! Mulder was pretty quiet with
Scully in "Home Again," and I wondered why.

You can find most of my other stories at Gossamer: 
http://krycek.gossamer.org/author/14922-1.html
               
lilydale10@yahoo.com
February 12, 2016