Visitor (12/13) by leiascully Email: leiascully@gmail.com Distribution: Ask, please Rating: T for non-explicit sexual situations and some swearing Categories: SRA Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance Spoilers: XF Revival speculation (spoilers through series and IWTB) Summary: Mulder tries to put his life back together after Scully leaves him. Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended. Author's Notes: Stories from all fandoms are archived at http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully. + + + + 12 - Fortune The dog happens by accident. He's running a new route one day and he passes a farmer's market and suddenly there's a dog bounding joyfully along beside him, wearing a red vest and dragging a leash. It's some kind of mutt, medium sized, with longish hair and one rakish ear. He slows and stops and catches hold of the dog, which wags and nuzzles at his fingers. A disheveled volunteer in a similar vest dashes up. Her nametag says "Alondra :)" "I'm so sorry!" she says. "It's his first time out at the market and I got distracted and he's really strong and...." "It's okay," Mulder says. "He seems like a nice dog." He offers the leash to the volunteer. She takes it and tugs gently. The dog sits down on Mulder's foot. "Oh," she says in a weak voice. "I haven't done this a lot before." She pulls on the leash, but the dog just leans against Mulder's leg and pants. "It's really okay," Mulder reassures her. He takes the leash back and the dog jumps up. They walk back to the other volunteers with their red-vested dogs, which cheerfully proclaim "I'm adoptable!" Several of the dogs have dollar bills poking out of pockets. "So this guy's available to adopt?" Mulder asks. "He sure is!" Alondra tells him. "And we're doing ten dollar adoptions all weekend!" "Must be fate," Mulder says to the dog, who looks up at him with bright eyes and a lolling tongue. He fills out the paperwork that afternoon and stops at PetSmart on the way home for everything a dog could need. The dog noses around the house and flops down on the rug near Mulder's feet with a sigh, gazing up with soulful eyes. Mulder tosses him a treat. "You need a name, buddy," he says. "It was fate that we found each other, so how about Kismet?" The dog's tail thumps the floor lazily. "Kismet it is," Mulder says. + + + + He has to get a lint roller to keep the dog hair off his suits, but it's worth it to come home to a house that isn't empty. They run in the mornings and walk in the evenings. Kismet quickly learns to answer to both "Kis" and "Mutt", and Mulder entertains himself by trying to teach the dog to play dead to the cue of "Invasion!" He buys a new vacuum. Kis watches him pick up all the dog toys and pile them on the cushion, and then drags them all all over the floor as Mulder tries to sweep up the worst of the hair. But it's fun. It's comforting. Having a dog feels right. He's been taking care of himself for long enough; it feels good to be in a place where he has the energy to care for something else. He's too busy at work to tell Scully about it, working under a deadline while she's up to her elbows in students and corpses. He texts her a picture of Kis sleeping with his head on a stuffed dinosaur, but she doesn't text back. A few days later on the weekend when he's running with Kis in the park and there she is, running the other way. She's got her hair pulled back into a ponytail that bounces and she looks sleek in her running clothes, a small water bottle strapped to her hand. "Fancy meeting you here," he says as Kis dances at the end of his leash, straining toward her. Scully crouches down and ruffles Kis' ears. She looks up at Mulder. "Must be fate," she says. "Funny you should say that," he says. "This is Kismet." "You didn't name him Iced Tea?" she teases. Sweat gleams on her collarbones. "That's the next dog," he says. "Either that or Yankee." She stands up, sending Kis into further raptures. "That's a big step, Mulder." Her eyes are soft. She sips water from her bottle and gazes thoughtfully at him. "I've got long legs," he jokes. "He's definitely cuter than the fish," she tells him, reaching down to scratch Kis' head. "Harder to clean up after, though," he says. They look at each other while Kis makes happy little grunting noises and wanders from hand to hand to be petted. "Going my way?" he says at last. "I think I was," she says. He clicks his tongue at Kis, who comes to heel, and they settle into a comfortable pace. "Doesn't seem like your usual route," he says. "I hadn't run it in a while," she says. "Sometimes you miss the old neighborhood." He doesn't ask her if that means she's coming home. He knows better. "I'm sure it misses you," he says instead. "Scenic views." He cuts his eyes at her ass, which is shown off to great advantage by her skintight running capris. She rolls her eyes at him. "I'm sure there are other views for them to appreciate." "Scully, are you flirting with me?" he asks in a mock-scandalized tone. "Some things will never change," she says, shaking her head and making her ponytail bounce. "Is that good or bad?" he asks. "Good," she says, "when they're the things I loved about you before." She runs all the way back to the house with them, and comes in to refill her bottle. She kisses him in the doorway as she leaves, lips hot against his. He watches her go and licks salt from his mouth as Kis whines from the cool kitchen floor. + + + + They are professional at work: no more pinky promises in the hallway, in full view of their colleagues; no hushed conversations in corners; no perching on the corner of each other's desks. But they manage to see each other more, somehow. He'll glimpse her walking past, and her eyes will slide to him as she talks to someone else, or he'll take the long way to walk past her office and nod when she looks up. It's enough, to see her. When their eyes meet across the room, he'd swear he can hear her saying his name in that soft round pleased voice. He wonders if she can hear him. The picture on his desk doesn't look like two other people anymore. He can see himself in the silhouette that gazes down at Scully's heart-shaped face. This Mulder and that Mulder co-exist; he's found a state of equilibrium in himself, the triple point where past, present, and future are stable. It took him longer to figure out the way the universe weighs on him, but he's not the scientist. She'll forgive him for that. If he could tell their younger selves anything, it would be "Hold on". But their younger selves never listened to anything but each other's heartbeats, thudding quietly underneath the noise of the rest of the world. + + + + They start running together on the weekends, not by any agreement. She just shows up with her shoes on and they do loops until they wear out the dog. She starts to linger afterward. He makes coffee and they complain about the Bureau, sitting at the kitchen table, sharing croissants from Le Caprice or sacher torte from the Watergate Bakery (she seems thin lately and he worries in an abstract way, but she eats when they're together). He likes the way she goes straight to the cabinet with the mugs; she still remembers where everything is. He hasn't moved anything since she left, but she hasn't forgotten. She always leaves eventually with the excuse of a shower, but 9 turns into 10 turns into noon turns into afternoon, until they're eating lunch together and bickering amicably over the finer points of investigation. And sometimes she texts him to see if he's still in the office, and they have dinner after work, and sometimes he texts her to tell her about bar trivia, and they go and drink and pits their wits against the teams of college students whose names are all varyingly sophisticated innuendo, and sometimes he kisses her goodnight and sometimes he doesn't. August turns into September turns into October and the leaves are changing. Kismet romps through a drift of leaves and shovels them into the air with his face as they laugh, out of breath, and pass a bottle of water back and forth between them. "Is this working?" he texts her. "I feel like it's working." "It's working," she texts back immediately. "Score one for codependence," he texts. "You're incorrigible," she tells him. "Is that your medical opinion?" he asks. "A diagnosis after all these years," she says. He grins and taunts Kismet with a ball. + + + + For his birthday, she gives him a six pack of beer and a copy of The Lazarus Bowl. They watch it together on the couch with Kis draped between them, his head in Scully's lap. She scratches his ears with idle fingers as the movie plays out on the screen in front of them. "I'd forgotten how awful this is," she says. "I think I'm free-associating," he says. "God, Wayne Federman," she says, tucking her feet up under herself so that her shoulder cants toward his. "Can you imagine Skinner in college, making friends with that guy?" "College parties, Scully," he says. "Surely you've experienced them." "This may surprise you, Mulder," she tells him, "but I didn't go to very many college parties. The pre-med curriculum keeps you busy." "Not to mention rewriting Einstein for your thesis," he teases. "I'll never live that down," she murmurs, smiling at the dog in her lap. "I was charmed," he tells her. "If they were sending me a green agent to keep an eye on me, at least it was somebody smart enough to question the workings of the universe." "Or foolish enough," she says. It's the easiest thing he's done in a while, slipping his arm around her shoulders. Easier than breathing, easier than thought. "Not foolish," he tells her. Kis grumbles as she shifts closer, leaving less space between herself and Mulder. Mulder nudges gently at him and Kis heaves himself off the couch and lies down on his bed, looking resentfully at both of them. "What did I know at twenty-three?" she murmurs. "More than I know now," he tells her. "Time changes people." "But not so much that you don't know them," she says. "Maybe it depends on how far you go," he says. She shakes her head. "I like to think you can always come home, no matter how long you're away. That the connections between people can't be severed by distance or time." "I like to think that too," he says. She tips her face up and he leans down and rests his forehead against hers for a long moment. She sighs and it's a sweet sound. When she turns her head, it's to lay it on his shoulder. Her hand rests on his thigh. "This movie really is terrible," she says. "We had fun, though," he says. "California. Micah Hoffman. Dinner. Dancing. I have a confession, though, Scully." "What?" She doesn't lift her head, just settles deeper into the curve of his body. "I was in the bath when I called you," he says. "When I told you Skinner was taking a bubble bath. Skinman wasn't the only one who went Hollywood that night." Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her smile. "Me too." "Ah, Scully," he says with satisfaction. "We've always been like-minded," she says. "In our way." "We could have been in the bath together," he says, and smirks at the thought that he's testing the waters. "There's still time," she says. "The tub isn't as big here, though." "Any time you need me to make a run to Lush, Scully, you just say the word," he says. And it isn't as if she never left - there will never be a time that he forgets that she left. There will never be a time when he forgets how empty his life was, how empty his heart was. He had hollowed himself out and filled the space with half-truths and campfire stories and left no place for her. But she is here now, snug under the arch that his arm makes, not filling a hole, but adding a new dimension to the life he has reconstituted from the pieces that still fit. She is Scully and he is Mulder and it's the same as ever and nothing like it was before. On the screen, the Cigarette-Smoking Pontiff threatens the ersatz Scully, and the dead offer the faux Mulder a crown. They watch the amalgamations of themselves embrace and listen to the heavy breathing. Kismet looks up and then makes another grumbling noise and lies down again. "How did they know about the bees?" Scully asks suddenly. "I'm blaming Skinner," he says. "Did you tell him we kissed?" she asks. "We didn't kiss," he says. "Mulder," she says in that no-nonsense tone, "kissing was imminent." "Imminent, perhaps, but not consummated," he tells her. "Consummated or not," she says, "you must have told Skinner." "I don't remember telling him," Mulder hedges. "On the other hand, I did get shot. I might not have been in my right mind." "Hmm," she says. "Maybe Frohike had my hallway bugged," he suggests. "That does sound like him," Scully agrees. "For a number of reasons." "I don't know if that's the important part," Mulder says. She rolls her head on his shoulder and looks up at him for a long beat. "All right, I'll bite. What's the important part?" Scully asks. "It seems to me we never really got that first kiss," he says. "Logically our next kiss would be our first kiss," she says, sitting up. "New Year's, maybe. Not the millennium, might I remind you." "All these years later, still a math geek," he says. "But that's not our first kiss, Scully. We missed it." "Mulder, that doesn't make any sense. The first time we kissed was our first kiss," she argues. "But it's not the first time we were going to kiss," he insists. "That's what counts. There's a magic to the first kiss. A hallway in a hospital can't recapture that moment, Dick Clark or no." "That wasn't magical for you?" she asks, a smile hiding in the corner of her mouth. "It was," he says. "But it wasn't like the moment I knew I was going to kiss you for the first time, and I saw you knew it too." "I did," she says, and her voice is just a little huskier than it was before. "I had my hands around your face," he says, turning to demonstrate. "And you had your hand on the back of my neck." "I remember," she says. Her hand slips up over his shoulder, her nails scratching lightly around his neck. "And you looked at me with these eyes that see forever." "And you looked back at me," he says. "And you were a little afraid." "I was," she says. "But I wanted it. I wanted you to do it." "I was terrified," he says. "That you were going to leave. That I'd never see you again. That you wouldn't know what you meant to me. I told the truth badly, because I was scared." "I knew," she says. "I was afraid of the same things. But you leaned toward me, so slowly." "I wanted to give you an out," he says, following the stage directions for the scene they lived so many years ago. "Xeno's paradox," she says, her face drawing closer to his. "I thought you would never reach me, always coming halfway." "We've always met each other halfway," he murmurs, almost against her lips. "And then just as your lips brushed mine," she says, her breath hot on his skin. "A sting rang out," he jokes, but the words are muffled against her mouth as she kisses him with all the frustrated passion of their younger years, all their pain and their fear and their bone- deep need of each other. She pulls him down and he leans into her, his world bracketed by her hands and her lips, her tongue and her teeth a thunderstorm against his own. They are subsumed by each other, submerged, swept up in the crash and the flood of each other. He pulls her closer and she moans a little, and Kismet barks, and they break apart, laughing. "That's enough commentary from the peanut gallery," Mulder says, pointing, and Kismet barks again. "If it isn't bees, it's dogs," she says. "Just our luck, Mulder." "I feel lucky," he tells her. "Have we redeemed ourselves?" she asks, smoothing her hair. Her cheeks are flushed. "I think that's a definite yes," Mulder tells her. "I felt the magic. Did you feel it, Scully? Our first kiss." Scully turns off the movie. "I'd like to feel it again, with less interference." "Of course," he says. "I know how you like solid evidence, Scully." "I'm a scientist," she says demurely. "I prefer not to extrapolate from limited data. But I'm willing to hear your further thoughts on the subject of magic as related to first kisses." "Mutt, office," Mulder commands, and Kismet goes into his kennel, casting Mulder a slightly put-upon look as Mulder closes the door. Scully slips her hand into Mulder's and leads him upstairs and god, her lips and her hands and the way their bodies move in perfect time. It's everything the first time should be, and it only took them twenty years to get there. They are lucky, he thinks as he falls asleep. They are so lucky, after all. + + + + Feedback is welcome at leiascully@gmail.com. Stories from all fandoms are archived at http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully.