After Scully came out of surgery, Mulder was there waiting in her hospital room for her.
Mulder whispered her name to her, and Scully's eyes fluttered open at the sound. She smiled, a loopy, close-mouthed greeting, and clumsily waved a hand towards him. He caught it, and wrapped his fingers around hers. This was their secret handshake borne of heavy emotion and long hospital hours passed by the other’s bedside.
Here, Mulder and Scully's fingers claimed and held each other's, as if at the center of some sort of an interlocking spiral. Scully chuckled lowly, and then spoke indistinctly, murmuring to him. He leaned in to hear what she said.
"We're chiral, you'n'me."
"Chiral?" He asked. "As in the mathematical concept of two mirror images, whose objects are not superposable upon each other?"
"Mhmph."
A flutter warmed Mulder's chest. Scully. Only she could describe what he felt in such a mathematical metaphor. His affection for her bloomed every day.
"Like hands, y'see." Scully shifted, unwrapped her fingers from around his until they met palm to palm. His hands, much larger than hers, dwarfed hers in size, and yet Scully looked at them as if there was a magic to the two of them. As if what had only been appendages were now a synchrony. "If our hands tried to occupy the same space in the same direction, they wouldn't be symmetrical. But when pressed together like this... the symmetry reveals itself. You're my reflection, Mulder."
Startlingly Mulder felt near to tears. He took her hand between both of his and pressed a slow kiss to her palm, and then her hand to his heart. He admitted, "I know."
She smiled up sleepily at him. He leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead, and settled at her bedside to sit her vigil.
Scully, as ever, recontextualizing his world with her presence and her science. Scully and Mulder, as if they were two molecules, expanding the known definitions of partner.
(Ao3) Is it okay to dedicate a drabble to your mutuals? I have decided that it must be. Dedicated to @sentientsky and @actual-changeling, who encourage and inspire me <3
At the end of Alice in Wonderland Alice wakes up in her sister’s arms and tells her about her dream. Real or not, she was changed by the experience, and the story impacts her sister so much that her sister imagines it. I think Samantha woke up in her brother’s arms
Dana Scully meets her sister Melissa for dinner and opens a curious little blue envelope.
Scully sighs soundlessly as she sits against the red leather of a bar booth. She had a long day at Quantico, and her sister Melissa had called her on her way home from work. Melissa had wondered if she was available for dinner, and, wanting nothing more than to see her sister, Scully met up with Melissa at a bar of her choosing. Melissa’s hair was done up in a curly bun, and she clasped her sister’s hand in amiable greeting before ordering them both drinks. Now, they are sitting across from each other at a booth on this late July evening, two sisters eagerly catching up.
“And you know how Julene reacted,” Melissa says and sips at her drink, and Scully listens.
Scully hums as Melissa speaks to her at length, enjoying listening to her sister’s gossip. How Melissa keeps so busy while managing to be such a free spirit, Scully will never know. Melissa shifts from a story describing her college roommate’s birthday to discussing her work, and Scully, reminded of Mulder, reaches for her purse on the seat of the booth next to her while Melissa continues speaking.
Scully looks into her bag for the little blue envelope that had appeared in there earlier that day. Scully hadn’t noticed it until she had reached for her mobile phone to answer Melissa on her way home. Mulder had visited earlier that day, and its appearance in her bag, she figures, must align with his departure from Quantico. She tucks a well-manicured nail underneath the baby blue paper of the envelope, tears the paper, and removes the card contained within from the envelope. Melissa falls into silence and watches Scully as she removes it with interest.
The front of the card is illustrated with planets, ascientific and brightly colored. There is only one person this card could be from.
Scully opens the card.
The card’s inside is illustrated with a little, lone astronaut, floating untethered above the blue marble Earth. The background of the illustration is a deep blue expanse, spattered with miniature planets of their solar system and tiny, white twinkling stars. The Earth's moon is pocked and cratered, in its place close to the observer's point of view in the corner. In blocky yellow text, the card declares: You're out of this world! In Mulder's familiar hand, he has written a note to her atop the craters of the cardstock moon. Mulder, she knows, alternates between his formal, efficient cursive and the slanted print letters that cover the papers of their basement office. His card to her contains both.
To Scully,
Happy anniversary.
-M
The simple note is written informally, and the neighboring M is slanted and swooping, as if the change in angle and detail was meant to communicate a change in meaning. Scully reads its sincerity easily. She smiles down at the card in her hand, amused and pleased. Missy peeks over her shoulder.
“Oh, Dana,” gasps Missy, turning to her. “All this time?”
“What?” Scully asks, glancing at her sister. After examining Missy for a moment, she laughs to herself. Melissa had jumped to conclusions. She had seen Mulder’s coded message and taken it as a sign of romance. Scully ducks her head, face warming lightly, before looking back up at Melissa.
“Missy," she begins, shaking her head. "It’s not like that at all. Today is the anniversary of the moon landing. July 20th, 1969.”
Melissa looks at her sister for a moment, and then the card for another, and then back to Scully, understanding and amusement both coming over her expression. Melissa picks up her drink and relaxes against the red leather of the booth.
"You two are just birds of a feather, you know?" Melissa says. Ever the older sister, she says this in a tone as if pleased that Dana and Dana's friend Fox got along just swell. Melissa stirs her drink with her straw and the ice clinks against the glass. Aiming to tease Scully gently, she replies. "Not like that at all, hmm?”
Scully smiles into her own drink. As the waiter returns and Melissa turns to speak to him, Scully gently fingers the edges of the card. She examines it closely, admiring Mulder’s message. She wishes the little lone astronaut might find what they are looking for.
She slides it back into its blue envelope and tucks it into her purse.
trick or treat... could I also get a line from one of your fics?
Spring sees her blurred at the edges, and autumn, with its vacillating Virginian tendencies and dreary chilled humidity, dulls her senses. For all that they live in the margins, it is the harsh months that offer clarity with the blistering wind of an Antarctic ice sheet or the blazing heat of a July Texan sun.
Finally!! This has been in the works forever. There’s a bit of the first part below the cut, and the rest is on ao3 :) The original post regarding this WIP premise is here.
Dana Scully and her golden eagle daemon, Julienne, are suddenly transferred away from her teaching post at the FBI Academy to work on a unsolved case within a spooky division. In her assignment, she meets Fox Mulder and his daemon. As they race to solve cases that no one else will dare to handle, souls and consciousness collide.
With Julienne perched on her arm, Dana Scully exited Section Chief Scott Blevins office quickly, her new heels clacking sharply on the laminated floor as she did. A week prior, she had been notified that she was being reassigned from her place at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico to the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. headquarters in D.C. Until five minutes ago, the nature of this assignment had been unknown to her. Dana Scully, M.D., had been transferred away from her post as a forensic pathologist in the Quantico teaching laboratory to work with Fox Mulder, the famed psychological profiler turned man-with-a-mission.
That mission was, apparently, using Bureau resources to hunt for extraterrestrials. At least, that was what the gossip said, though Section Chief Blevins words in the office had nearly confirmed it. Dana wondered how large the purview was of the aforementioned area “outside of the bureau mainstream”. Though Agent Mulder was renowned for his skill in profiling and his additions to criminal psych literature, he had a less than charitable reputation in F.B.I. spheres. Called “crazy” by some and “spooky” by most, he had established his own department in hopes of explaining unexplained cases that he called X-Files—the department to which Dana and Julienne were now headed.
Dana walked to the nearby elevator and pressed the button on the wall with her free hand. The doors slid open to reveal a dismal old box with orange lighting that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. The doors slid shut, and the elevator thumped as it descended.
On her arm, Dana’s daemon Julienne, a golden eagle, ruffled her feathers upwards and swiped her beak over the tip of her wing. She was a regal bird with bright tawny feathers crowning her head and a massive dark auburn body. For a daemon of her form, Julienne was on the larger side, and towered to nearly a third of Dana’s own height. Her wings, though folded, alternated between a white patched pattern and a deep mahogany brown. Her beak was colored a black-tipped ivory and her eyes were sharp and golden. As Dana’s daemon, she was Dana’s complement and most trusted friend. Julienne looked over her curiously, inclining her head.
“Are you nervous?” asked Julienne. She was perceptive to her companion’s feelings, as all daemons were.
“I’m not nervous,” she replied.
“There’s a humming feeling. Dana, are you sure you’re not nervous?”
“I’m not nervous. Nervousness implies apprehension, and I’m not apprehensive.”
“Hmm,” hummed Julienne. “Are you excited, then?”
“I suppose so. Mostly I’m curious as to the nature of this assignment. Debunking seems straightforward, but what will we be facing?”
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see."
The elevator dinged, and the door opened into the basement hallway. The hall was dimly lit and bordered with metal shelves and old boxes of files. At the very end of the hall was a door to a basement office bearing a placard saying: Special Agent Fox Mulder.
Like the sound of her heels on the basement tile, she knocked on the office door.
Any lines from your wips that you think go hard/ you're really proud of?
There is an inclination in her to march up to his door and shove these papers into his hands. She wouldn’t say anything, but he would be able to read the pertinacity and gloating discontent on her face. You broke it. Aren’t you proud?
The thing about it. The thing about it. Is that Din would be the only one who knows. The whole story, I mean. Aside from Luke. Luke would be the one to tell him. And only him. Cause everyone else is too close to the story. Who could understand? Han, Leia? Leia loves him, Luke knows, but this is the one thing they’ll never fully understand each other about.
Rightfully so, of course. For all her virtues, Leia will never forgive anyone who was involved in what became of her planet and her people, never mind the person that gripped her shoulders as she watched.
They love him, he knows. He knows this fact as deeply as he knows his own. But that’s why they couldn’t understand; it’s a horrible story, you see, but it’s also one of light — the type of light you can only see if you’re standing right in the middle of it all.
It would only hurt to tell this story. Him, Han, Leia. But Din was never in it at all. Din loves, maybe not endlessly, but some of the deepest love Luke has ever seen. Ever been a recipient of.
It’s a peculiar thing. Din, ever stoic, ever soft, doesn’t have to understand to accept. He constantly faces the unknown and turns to meet it. With Luke, that just means stepping into the future with him, or placing his gloved hand in his, or listening to the story where Luke wrote the greatest fate, quietly supportive all the while.
Writing is like “how many ways can I get you to read ‘I love you’”. not a message aimed at you but the boundless concept of it. the text says i love you. the text says i love you i love you i love you i love you
