Be Mad or Chill
Title: Be Mad or Chill, Obsessed with Angels
Summary: 'cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold'
Spoliers: DeadAlive
Disclaimer: I disclaim it.
Beta thanks go to tree , who lent me her eyes when mine were too close to the words to focus. What fine vision she has.
*
She comes by his apartment one evening early in the spring, wanders through room by dusty room, her coattails frisking in the shadows. He isn’t there.
It doesn’t take long before he comes roving in, hands occupied with groceries, a carton of chocolate milk, an apple with a bite out of it. It’s quite the feat of prestidigitation. She stands straight, desk window behind her to the right, casting her in half silhouette. She hadn’t been listening for his feet in the hall - hadn’t registered the teeth of a key turning in the lock - hadn’t expected him. He turns from closing the front door and halts mid-step when he sees her, his grocery bags swinging out in front of him. To him she probably looks wraithlike - a small amorphous phantom. She ought to set him straight but finds herself momentarily mute.
“Scully.”
“Mulder.”
The shuffle of his feet is familiar. “Are you, unh- is everything okay?” It’s almost as familiar as the tentative tenor of his voice. He’s so unsure these days, whether he ought to be rushing to her side.
“Everything’s fine.” She’d been feeding his fish when he came in. She hasn’t turned on any lights since she’s been here, not one. It’s gotten dark. “Actually, I was just about to leave.”
She expects him to move into the kitchen, for a light to come on, finally, now that he is home. She expects brightness and noise - the suck of the fridge as it opens, closes, and some kind of inquiry about her presence. Some kind of answer. Instead he tromps straight through into the living room to stand at the other end of the coffee table, and frees his hands from the grocery bags that have wound themselves into cords around his fingers. “You were?”
Freed, he slips easily between the coffee table and the couch. She looks down at the mysterious bounty on the table and takes a step away. It’s a new compulsion, this need to give him space, and even as she moves backwards, closer to the wall, and her heel scrapes inelegantly over the floor boards, she doesn’t understand it. Mulder is by definition a zombie, now, but that hasn’t anything to do with it. She’s glad his propensity for self-reproach hasn’t caught him on to such a ridiculous notion. Mulder is still Mulder, which may have a bit more to do with it. Because what if she’s not still Scully? An equally ridiculous notion, surely. He takes all the space she gives him and then some, watching her with his usual (unusual) expressionless patience.
Her pulse is hot in her throat, but she holds his eyes and doesn’t move any further. She thinks of divergence, convergence - that before there was fear of the world’s edges, there was myth of a serpentine river, Okeanus encircling the earth - faith in confluence. It’s something Mulder would think at a time like this, not her. When she drops their gaze at last he falls back a step and drags his groceries closer across the table, rustling through them noisily. “There wasn’t anything in the fridge but frozen peas, carrots, and corn, so I did some shopping.”
“And refreshed your memory of what a centerfold is,” she notes. There is a magazine, rolled protectively down the side of one of the bags. He plucks it out and tosses it face-up onto the couch: TV Week.
“Nah, those come in subscriptions. They don’t expire ‘til June.”
She faces him with a look that says, definitively, ‘Mulder…’. She wonders at how he boils everything down to a series of flippancies, all their poorly dubbed and careful conversations. What their mouths say and what they mean has become more and more incongruous. It’s an intuitive code between them alone, and since his return she worries they are losing the intricacies of it, with no one to carry on the tradition.
“Apple, Scully?” He holds it out to her with a small, beguiling smirk, and leans in close, close, close. His eyes and the waxy gleam of the apple are similarly marbled by the closeness of the fish tank’s teal glow. The small fruit is blushing in his hand. She can smell the richness on his lips, teeth, tongue: red delicious.
Oh god.
Two weeks ago this Saturday she made a visit to the graveyard. People kept telling her she ought to, coaxing her, ‘Speak to him, Dana’. The ground was stiff with frost, grass blades whitened. She brought along a lunch she wouldn’t eat and lay down in the sunlight on his grave. The day warmed. The people bringing flowers left flowerless. The smell of overturned earth was strong and, mute, she closed her eyes.
“Apples repel doctors, Mulder. Don’t you know your adages?” She takes the apple from him anyway, and nods towards his dinged up old fridge, which can be heard humming emptily from the darkness of the other room. “Besides, I thought you weren’t going to buy a bunch of produce after the last biological entity you found colonizing in there.”
He sniffs, his head tilting. “I didn’t, I only bought two.” He reaches down to the coffee table and rustles the second bag open. She peers in. His bounty consists of the two apples, two oranges, two bottles of Evian and a bunch of food in cans. Also, the long thin package of a toothbrush, though she distinctly remembers the one in his novelty cup being just fine twenty minutes ago.
"Playing host for a house ghost, Mulder?" she asks, fishing the toothbrush from the bag. He takes it from her and flips it over in his hands. The bag is right there, but he passes it back to her instead.
"Something like that."
Two weeks ago he was her fiercest kept secret. She was talking to him everywhere but on his grave, where he really was. He hasn’t figured out she talks to him while he isn’t there yet, but if she can’t stop soon she has no doubt he will. Now that he’s back she feels like a poppet, with loose stitches and button eyes. She is a walking incantation: ‘this is not happening, this is not happening, this is not -’
And only finally, as he embraces her, does she feel all the charm go out of her. Her arms, raised briefly in some absurd impulsive guard, fall away, limp at her sides. For a moment the only thing she can feel is the torrent of her blood. The apple she’s been given is forgotten until it thuds and wobbles to a still beneath the table, ignored. He whispers hoarsely into her hair, her ear, along her tense jaw, “Good things come in twos, Scully.” If he kisses her now she certainly may.
God, he is breathing, he is really breathing.
When the child kicks between them she doesn’t know who is more startled. They recoil, eyes wide and lips parted, Mulder looking at her stomach the way a boy looks at the frozen monkey bar he’s about to stick his tongue to. She warily smoothes a hand over her forehead. “That, uh - that doesn’t happen often.” Mulder nods with unseeing focus, the inward stare once reserved for moments of Holmesian deduction - an astronomical unit of distance flickering on the projector screen of his mind. His hands clench and release, clench and release. And then he looks up.
“May I?”
“Go ahead.”
He places his palm safely on the northern swell of her stomach, Tropic of Cancer level. She wants him to touch lower, Tropic of Capricorn low, lower than that. His hand is warm and stationary as they wait for the child to kick again. Beside them in the murky tank the fish dart by, flashing their orange sides through the silt. “Their filter needs a change,” he remarks. She licks her lip slowly, entranced by the glow that murmles through the algae.
Every time she’d come here, ostensibly to tend the fish, there’d been, instead, his soap-scum shower with the water that ran too hot too fast and scalded her knees before she could even get her hair wet; there’d been his foreign bedroom, fraught with tall boxes and dusty enough for her to taste the air like cloth; there’d been, always, his lingering curiosity for all things, which served as kindly doorman in his absence and had understood her own desperate need for this place - a place so bereft it alone could pull at her bereft heart, shifting her tides enough to keep her on her feet, though she could feel nothing else. She never did remember to clean the tank. Sometimes she’d left the building scurrying to her car with her hair still wet from his shower. Sometimes she even forgot to feed the fish - even that much.
“I didn’t think they were going to survive,” she murmurs, admits.
With the hand that is not on their child he takes her fingers in his. She watches, rapt, as he brings them to his lips, chivalry in his eyes; the code of all questing knights.
“Sc- ” he begins to say, but the alarm clock in his bedroom switches on quietly and interrupts. He shakes his head, dismayed when she looks for him to continue. “Must have set it for PM by mistake,” he says. He has been disoriented lately, they both have. After a while it switches off again.
They stand waiting.
*
The title and summary are both from Ginsberg's poem, Song. It's lovely, and can be found here.