Cells
by Emma Brightman
CATEGORY: V, MSR
RATING: PG-13
TIMELINE: Takes place during season seven, after "Millennium", but mentions the events of season eight's "Per Manum"
Many thanks to JET and Revely for beta, and for calming my nerves as I venture out here for the first time in five years.
* * *
He's been thinking about cells lately, a bizarre parade of images wending their way through his mind. Sperm cells and egg cells fused in Petri dishes and test tubes, padded cells whose walls can't block the sound of a thousand cacophonous voices, the prison cell in which he's kept his heart for years, waiting, as always, for her to bail him out.
He thinks of movie cells, too, flashing before the eye at twenty-four frames per second, and of how much he wants to dust off his old high school yawn-and-stretch move, snaking his long arm around Scully's compact warmth in a cool, dark theater. He imagines how good it would feel to lift the weight of the world from her tense, weary shoulders, if only for a few hours.
This last thought comes a few weeks after the in vitro 'didn't take', when he suddenly realizes that in some strange, fleeting way he has been inside her body. That she asked him to be the father of her child, and that perhaps her request was the jailbreak he'd been waiting for.
* * *
She seems surprised but not displeased by his invitation, which is all he'd allowed himself to hope for anyway, so he makes his plans, keeps it casual. Pizza and a movie at his place Friday night -- nothing two old friends can't do without a second thought. Normal friends though, he finds himself worrying, healthy, well-adjusted people, not the two of them, with their scars and their secrets.
He tries not to dwell on that thought for long. Some new, unknown part of him is yearning for normal and he wonders, not for the first time, just what they did to his head, what they took out or put in.
He spends almost an hour at Blockbuster Thursday night on his way home from work, searching for the right thing, afraid that whatever choice he makes will give him away. The bored blue-shirted clerks watch him, suspicion mixed with apathy, as he circles, trench coat flapping around him, from Romance to Action to Comedy, then back to Romance again for the sixth time in forty-five minutes.
"You guessed it, kids," he wants to say, "I'm trying to rip off this crappy ten-year-old copy of Moonstruck. You'd better keep an eye on me." He watches as they laugh and talk, neglecting the growing line of fidgeting, impatient customers so they can flirt with each other, and he feels damned old. Certainly far too old to be obsessing over a date like the shy, inexperienced teenager he once was.
Screw it, he thinks, as he pushes his way out the Exit door. He'll just have to make do with his meager collection at home. Bad '50s sci-fi or bad '80s comedies, he doesn't have much in the way of home entertainment any more. His other, more infamous video collection went into storage months ago in a gesture of hope after Padgett tipped Scully's hand.
Now, much later, after insanity and Africa, after spaceships and the undead, after a midnight kiss and attempted procreation, he still can't quite let himself believe Padgett's words to be true. But he wants to believe. He's surprised to find he's never wanted to believe anything more.
* * *
She arrives at his door at exactly 8:00, along with the pizza delivery guy with whom she rode up in the elevator. They're spared any awkward first-date greetings in the ensuing shuffle of Mulder paying for dinner and wrestling with a hot pizza box, so Scully slips into his apartment with a simple hello.
By the time he shuts the door and puts the pizza in the kitchen her jacket is next to his on the coat rack and she's wandering around his apartment, examining his possessions as if she hasn't seen them a million times before.
"Nice place you've got here," she says, picking up and putting down books, peering at the fish in his aquarium. She's wearing a blue blouse the color of her eyes, and it strains across her breasts when she reaches for the fish food on a high shelf and sprinkles a little into the tank. The mollies and goldfish swim to the surface as if drawn to her beneficence, eyes wide and mouths gaping, and he feels exactly how they look.
She's been dressing in that prim-but-provocative way for a while now, lacy black bras visible beneath snug white shirts, leg-baring skirts instead of pantsuits, v-necked sweaters that seem intended to point him in the direction of exactly what he's been missing all these years. It's hard for him to imagine she's trying to send him a message, but sometimes he has to wonder.
"Thanks," he says, hoping she doesn’t notice how gravelly his voice has become. "It ain't much, but it's home."
Her smile is nervous, and he realizes this must be just as strange for her as it is for him. "So what are we watching? I'm almost afraid to ask," she says.
"I couldn't decide on anything at the video store, so I figured we'd make do with something from the Mulder collection. The Day the Earth Stood Still? Night of the Living Dead?"
"UFOs or zombies?" The couch creaks as she settles on one end. "Those hit a little too close to home, don't you think?"
"Well, there's always Chevy Chase. Fletch, National Lampoon's. No -- Caddyshack! C'mon, Scully."
"How many years have you tried to convince me to watch that movie, Mulder? You might as well give up, it's not happening."
He chuckles. This is one of their patented Mulder-Scully routines, his attempting to impose his taste in movies on her the way she's always trying to persuade him to eat things made of soy. "One day you'll cave and you'll love it. You won't be able to stop laughing. Just wait."
She smiles, shakes her head. "You wish."
He does, but it's hardly number one on his list.
* * *
Fretting over movie choices turns out to have been unnecessary because Scully, unsurprisingly, has ideas of her own. He hears her cycling through the channels while he's grabbing beers from the fridge -- snippets of conversation, squealing car tires, melodramatic sobbing, violent explosions, and moans of passion following one after the other in quick succession.
Scully's not usually a channel-flipper, this much he's surmised thanks to countless paper-thin motel room walls between them over the years. She's a planner, he's fairly certain, one who reads the TV Guide and weighs her options, then chooses a program and sticks with it even through the commercial breaks.
"Easy there, Scully, you'll make yourself dizzy," he calls from the kitchen. He hears her quiet chuff of laughter and pictures her smiling sheepishly, anxiously licking her lips, stilling her twitchy finger. He shakes his head at both of them, wondering how something so simple can be so hard, how two such intelligent people can be so dumb.
He starts out from the kitchen, then realizes he doesn't know if Scully drinks her beer straight from the bottle or, ladylike, from a glass. He turns back, unreasonably annoyed. How can you be someone's best friend, someone's touchstone, and not know something this basic? How can you love someone completely and not know the first thing about their mundane likes and dislikes? He begins to feel like a phony, like he's making a mistake. Maybe they don't really know each other at all.
He gets a glass just in case, and tells himself that slamming the cupboard door was an accident.
* * *
After half a beer (drunk from the bottle) and another trip around the dial, Scully finally relaxes and makes herself at home, removing her shoes and curling up on the couch like a little baby cat. She'd kill him for thinking that, he knows, morphing from kitten to tiger in an instant, but he can't help his thoughts lately, his desire to protect her, to wrap himself around her and keep her safe. They've come too close to losing each other too many times. He's growing tired of their timidity when it comes to their feelings for one another. It's been a maddening, years-long game of Mother May I -- one step forward and two steps back.
Scully settles on When Harry Met Sally at the end of her remote control roulette, a chick flick if ever there was one, but he isn't about to complain. Not when he can feel the warmth emanating from her body close to his, and not when she laughs, a surprisingly girlish giggle in his ear.
He watches her from the corner of his eye during the deli scene, seeing her lips turn up in a tiny smile, the blush creep into her cheek as Meg moans and gasps so convincingly. It's too much for him, the sounds from the television and the sight of Scully in its flashing light, her pink tongue darting out to nervously wet her even pinker mouth. He's grateful for the darkened room and the crust-littered plate still on his lap.
She laughs again, a mirthful little chortle at 'I'll have what she's having', even though it's such an old joke and everyone's heard it a million times. And somehow he loves her even more than before, although five minutes ago he would have sworn that was impossible.
* * *
During a commercial break Scully gets up to use the bathroom, and when she doesn't return for a while he finds her in his bedroom, perched on the edge of the bed. She's holding his globe in her hands, slowly turning it on its axis, running a finger through the light layer of dust on its surface.
"There you are. I thought I'd lost you," he says from the doorway. She looks up at his words.
"It wouldn't be the first time," she murmurs. "Do you ever stop and think about it, Mulder? All the places we've been over the years?"
The bed sags as he sits beside her. Moonlight filters through the blinds, the only light in the room except what little there is from the living room, and it's hard to read what's in her eyes.
"We've put in a lot of miles," he says.
She nods. "We've been to almost every state. We even went to Norway together, remember?"
"How could I forget? It was my preview of coming attractions. Dana Scully: The Later Years."
"God, no," she protests, "I hope I age better than that. Why do you think I put that green stuff on my face at night? I've seen the future and it's not pretty."
"I don't know, Scully. I think you'll just keep getting more beautiful, wrinkles or not." He can hardly believe he's actually said the words, but it feels good to tell her, strange and yet completely natural.
She ducks her head, and he wonders if she's blushing. She traces the raised coastlines of the continents, her finger finally settling on Antarctica. "You went there for me."
He reaches over to take her hand, moving her finger until it touches the Ivory Coast. "And you went there for me," he says, his voice a little rough to his own ears.
"In terms of distance you still win," she says. He chuckles, almost missing her next words. "I would have gone a lot farther than that, you know," she whispers. "I would have gone anywhere."
He blinks against the sting of tears in his eyes, remembering how her voice had reached him clearly through the dissonance of a thousand others. How the fathomless depths of her devotion, protectiveness and love had staggered him even in his catatonic state.
Whether that love translated to being in love he hadn't been able to judge, perhaps because she hadn't sorted out those feelings for herself yet. Scully was always a little slower to accept the farfetched possibilities in their lives.
"Come on," she says. She puts the globe on the nightstand and stands up, tugging on his sleeve. "We're missing the movie."
* * *
Another small revelation tonight, a piece of trivial but somehow essential information revealed. His ascetic partner, a woman who lives on dry salads and frozen tofu abominations most days of the year, is an ice cream connoisseur. She can reel off the ingredients and milk fat contents of her favorite brands as easily as she reels off autopsy results, dissecting each nuance of flavor the way she dissects a body. The fact that she regularly denies herself many things that could give her pleasure makes him sad, but he hardly has room to talk.
He scrapes his frosty spoon against the bottom of the bowl, a tinny, hollow sound on the cheap dinnerware. It dawns on him that he's had these dishes, hand-me-downs from his mother, for almost twenty years, chipped bachelor dishes trimmed with seventies-style green and gold. Other men his age have sets of flowery wedding china and the wives to go with them, but he doesn't want that, does he? He never has before.
He feels content and happy sitting next to Scully, and the sudden pain comes as a surprise, beginning between his eyes and slowly unfurling to spread a dull throbbing ache across his forehead. He rubs between his eyebrows with two cold fingers, taking a moment to classify the feeling.
"Just an ice cream headache," he says, seeing Scully's look of concern, grateful it's the truth. "I'm fine."
"You're eating it too fast, Mulder. The blood vessels in your head are expanding and contracting." She's licking Chocolate Swiss Almond from her spoon like it's the best thing she's ever had in her mouth, and he's sorely tempted to make some smart remark. She knows it, too, and gives him a look before he can say anything. "It's like having a migraine," she says.
Migraines he knows about these days, blinding headaches that set his stomach churning, seasickness times ten. His doctor tells him they're to be expected; after all, nobody quite knows what was done to his brain. So far he's managed to keep them from Scully, but he's afraid it's only a matter of time before he has to stop the car and let her drive because flashing lights blur his vision, or she discovers him hiding from the pain in a darkened room.
Scully rubs her cream-slicked lips together as she finishes her dessert, eyeing his vanilla with lustful intent.
"So, Scully," he says, offering her his last spoonful. She tries to take the spoon from his hand but he won't let go, and she finally relents, craving for once outweighing the need for control. "Do you think it's true that a man and a woman can't be friends? That the sex part always gets in the way?"
Her eyes widen for an instant as he slides the spoon from her mouth, so briefly that most people probably wouldn't have registered it. But he's not most people and this is Scully; he notices and he's pretty sure he's pushing his luck.
"It's just a movie," she says in her best I'm-not-going-there tone as he stands up from the couch with a leathery squeak and takes their ice cream dishes into the kitchen.
"And not just any movie, Mulder -- a romantic comedy," she continues as he comes back into the living room and sits back down beside her, a little closer than before. "Probably the least realistic film genre ever. I hardly think all the complexities of, of gender relations and sexual mores can be summed up in one silly movie."
A perfectly Scully answer, he thinks as the credits roll. Rational, logical, and determinedly avoiding the personal edge to his question.
He smiles and nods, bumping her shoulder companionably with his. He can wait, he thinks. He's waited this long and besides, when you're trying to get a rare, wild creature to come to you, you don't want to make any sudden movements. Despite what some people may think he's actually a pretty patient guy.
Scully sighs, seeming relieved he let her off the hook easily. She rewards him by scooting over an inch, until her thigh is pressed up to his. Her head tilts to rest on his shoulder and they watch sitcoms for an hour, her laughter a bright tumble of sound vibrating through his body.
* * *
At midnight they stand in the doorway, whatever spell the TV's blue light had cast dissipating, and say their self-conscious goodnights. Scully's keys jangle in her restless hand and Mulder shifts from foot to foot, trying to decide on his next move. In the end he goes the safe route, bending to kiss her cheek just as she rises on tiptoe to kiss his, their heads colliding with a dull thud.
"Ow! Shit, I'm sorry, Scully." He rubs at his brow and sees her doing the same to hers. "You okay?"
"I'm fine, Mulder," she says. She smiles up at him from under a curtain of hair, and they both chuckle at their ineptness at all of this. "Don't move," she orders, closing the gap between them.
She takes his head in her hands, pulling him toward her, her eyes searching his. Her thumbs stroke his cheekbones and he's sure she's going to kiss the knot forming on his forehead, but she surprises him by touching her lips to his instead.
At first the kiss is as chaste as the one they shared on New Year's Eve, but then she opens her mouth and presses her body up against his as his arms go around her. She tastes dark and sweet, like chocolate ice cream, but much, much hotter. Her tongue slips against his and it's all he can do to stay upright.
"For the record, I do think it's possible," she puffs into his chest afterward, catching her breath. Her fingers are twisted up in the cotton of his t-shirt.
"What is?" He strokes the back of her skull, runs his fingers through her hair. She has drained all non-Scully thoughts from his brain.
"For a man and woman to just be friends," she clarifies, looking up. "I mean, look at us all these years. It's definitely possible. But not always desirable."
She kisses him goodbye, on the forehead this time, and instructs him to put ice on the bump before he goes to sleep. He stands, hands braced against the door jamb, and speechlessly watches her walk away.
* * *
He's never given much thought to his bedroom before, but lying there with an icepack pressed to his head he sees it as Scully must have earlier. With its minimal furnishings and piles of books, sports equipment, and Nikes in the corners, it's a drab monastic cell that hasn't seen a woman's presence in more years than he cares to count. His ancient sheets are pilled and rough against his skin as he tosses and turns, searching for a comfortable position. He wonders if shopping for bedding Scully might like would be getting ahead of himself.
He's dozing off and almost ignores the phone when it starts to ring, but a quick glance at the caller ID tells him it's Scully. He picks up, mumbling his name into the receiver.
"Mulder, it's me," she says. Her words are slurred and drowsy in his ear, and he imagines her wearing silk pajamas, lying loose-limbed in bed with her eyes half closed. "How's your head?"
"It's cold," he replies, scrunching the pillows behind his back and sitting up against the headboard. "And still spinning a little."
Worry creeps into her voice. "What do you mean?" she asks. "Are you feeling dizzy or nauseous?"
He takes the icepack off his head and drops it on the nightstand. "Relax, Dr. Scully, I feel fine. I just meant…well, that was some kiss. I think I'm still a little oxygen-deprived."
"Oh," she says quietly.
"It did happen, didn't it, I'm not imagining things?" he asks. "Because I'm pretty sure I've had that dream once or twice before. Maybe hallucinated it when we were trapped in that fungus last year."
"It was real." She pauses for a moment before continuing, as if deciding how much more to say. "Real, and even better than any of the times I've dreamt it before."
"Yeah?" he rasps. "Wow. Seven years together, Scully, and you still manage to surprise me."
"Believe me," she says, "The feeling is entirely mutual. Anyway, I had a nice time tonight. It's…well, the past few weeks haven't been easy for me. But tonight helped. Thank you."
"I'm glad," he says. Her simple acknowledgement is the most she's said about what she's been going through since telling him the IVF failed, and he's touched. "You're welcome here anytime, you know. Not just when you have to burst in and rescue me from whatever stupid thing I've gotten myself into."
She exhales a laugh. "Goodnight, Mulder. Maybe next time we'll watch one of your movies," she says, a smile in her voice. "But not Caddyshack."
"Aw, Scully, you don't know what you're missing," he laughs, thumbing off the phone and sinking into the pillows with a sigh. For once it seems he's done something right, given her something she needed and lightened her load, at least in a small way.
He hopes it's a sign of things to come. After years of masking their feelings with stilted words and fleeting touches, they deserve a little happiness, a little normalcy. Even if their definition of normal is different from anybody else's.
end