AO3: ElizabethJaneway1158. Love Voyager but focusing on my OG love: MulDog and Dr. Sculls. Here to shitpost and fic write. Drop me a message. Share a shitpost. Let's goooo.
Fic prompt: Scully tells Mulder that he's her best friend. Bonus points if it's Season 5 or earlier.
Good news: it's season 2.
When Mulder wakes up, Scully is sitting beside his bed. She smiles and it’s like the sun has come out in his windowless hospital room. She balances an issue of JAMA on her knee and rests her pen on it.
“Hi,” he rasps.
“Hi,” she says, passing him a plastic cup of water. It’s room temperature and vaguely redolent of chlorine, but he drains it dry. The cup makes a hollow noise as he sets it back on his bedside table, his movements a little clumsy. The simple act of drinking has exhausted him. He sags back into the thin pillows. The mattress is stiff and uncomfortable underneath him. But he’ll be all right. Scully’s here.
For a moment, he just basks in the glow of her smile. He doesn’t know what time it is, but Scully has brought the golden hour with her. He would swear he can feel the warmth of her fond regard on his chilly skin. He turns toward her like a sunflower, his head heavy on his neck.
“You need to rest,” she chides gently, but she hasn’t picked up her pen again. That’s the sign of a serious Scully who’s no longer willing to entertain her convalescent patient. He knows her hospital-based tells rather better than he’d like. A specific crook to her brows means he isn’t out of the woods yet; a particular twist to her lips means she’s sick of his shit. But today he’s getting this smile like sunshine. Radiant.
She turns her head to look at something. Abruptly, he feels the weary cold striking out of his bones. The blanket covering his bed is pilled and worn, and the sheet is a little scratchy. He longs for the thick blanket he keeps on his couch. His toes are so chilled that they ache. He wants a duvet to wrap around himself and a hot water bottle for his feet, like the ones he had at Oxford, and he wants to sit in front of a roaring fire and drink a hot toddy while Scully explains the latest developments in medical whatsits and theraputic thingamabobs. Her voice is as warming as whiskey.
“Remind me where I am?” he says, just to hear her talk.
“At the military hospital at Eisenhower Field,” she tells him. “You were airlifted here after your shenanigans on that submarine.”
“Shenanigans?” He snorts. “That’s a weird way to say ‘crucial mission of international or possibly intergalactic import’.”
“Shenanigans,” she says in a firm dry tone. “I blame it on your antic disposition.”
“I can tell a hawk from a handsaw however the wind blows,” he says.
“Hmm.” She studies him. Heat blooms across his skin where her eyes touch him. “That’s not what your performance reviews say.”
“Those are confidential, Scully.” He pretends to glare at her.
“That’s why they put the ‘I’ in ‘FBI’,” she quips, and he can’t help grinning at her. His dry lips pull, the skin flaking a little. She pours him more water from a pitcher and passes him the cup. When he’s finished drinking, she pulls a tub of Blistex out of her bag and offers it to him. He dips a finger into the hollow her fingertip has made and smears the paste over his mouth. His lips tingle. It’s the medicated formula, with its whiff of camphor. He hands the little pot back over and she caps it and drops it back into her bag.
It strikes him, like a sliver of light has lodged in his heart, how precious she is to him. How glad he is that she’s here in this strange cold hospital room. It’s been so long since he’s known someone well enough to share lip balm with them. It was probably Samantha, a twist-up cherry Chapstick jammed in his pocket for when they were chapped by the sea air. But Scully shares her things, her thoughts, as easy as breathing.
“What did I miss?” he says.
She looks at him with mournful eyes. “I wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you, but….” For a moment he tenses, uncertain, but the hint of a smile in her eyes tips him off to the joke. “Mulder, you missed the Super Bowl.”
He relaxes back into his insufficient bed. “That’s fine. I’ll just borrow your highlights tape.”
She laughs softly. “Missy was so mad about that. She didn’t understand at all.”
“I don’t think she likes me.”
“She likes you,” Scully objects, but she’s too honest to leave it unqualified. “Mostly.”
“I should have brought bonbons, huh,” he says.
“A nice amethyst crystal would have been more up her alley,” she tells him. “Maybe one of those singing bowls.” She shakes her head ruefully. “She gets protective. You’re not easy to explain.”
He tries to pretend nonchalance. “What did you tell her about me? Least favorite rental car chauffeur? Most dramatic slide show reveal?”
She ducks her head and shakes it from side to side. “I’ve had worse chauffeurs. I tried telling her you were my partner, but I don’t think she understood. It didn’t make sense to her, the things you did while I was in the hospital. The way you sat with me. Colleague didn’t seem to cover it. Not even partner.”
“So what did you say?” His mouth is dry again.
“I told her you were my best friend,” Scully says in a quiet voice. There’s some depth he can’t plumb in the way she says it, but she’s smiling like she’s holding something close.
“Good,” he says. He reaches out and taps the edge of her journal with one fingertip. “When you spring me from the joint, we can go down to the boardwalk and get those puzzle piece necklaces. And some salt water taffy.”
“Now that’s a worthy welcome-back gift,” she teases. “A little out of season, unfortunately. I don’t think it’s boardwalk weather today. Not in this hemisphere, anyway.”
“Remind me in the summer,” he tells her. “I owe you.”
They chat for a while. She makes him sip more water and sees him helped to the bathroom. She checks his temperature with the backs of her fingers and prescribes him another blanket, promising to return in the morning. He senses the potential for contraband rations: an Egg McMuffin concealed inside an innocent handbag, maybe even a hashbrown if she feels sorry enough for him in his refrigerated state.
He catches at her hand as she turns to go. “Scully. You didn’t tell me who won.” It’s a flimsy excuse, but it’s all his muddled brain can manufacture.
“The 49ers beat the Chargers.” She rubs her thumb absently over his knuckles. Probably some kind of diagnostic, like when she pushes her fingers through his hair. He wonders what secrets his body reveals to her. “Good night, Mulder. Get some rest.”
He slides quickly into sleep once she’s gone. His mouth still tingles like the kiss of a salt breeze. The creak of the bed reminds him of gulls calling in the distance, and he follows them down into a dream of summer sun glinting off Scully’s hair and making her eyes crinkle. Her fair skin is the color of the sand; her eyes are the sea and the sky, an endless blue horizon that calls him out of his body and into some blissful eternity. In his dream, her lips taste like taffy, and they are both healed.
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