Fic: Every Year Without Knowing It I Have Passed The Day
Content warning: grief (canon character death: Bill Scully Sr.)
Thanks for checking in, @scapegrace74-blog. I promise things aren’t as dire as this fic is. <3 Title is from the W.S. Merwin poem For The Anniversary Of My Death.
He gets her a book - it’s wrapped in plain brown craft paper, but the edges are neat and it’s tied with a string. Her first name is written on it in a hand that isn’t his. The string is smooth cotton. She winds it around her fingers, red and white and red and white. She does her best not to rip the paper, even though it doesn’t have a pattern. There’s a logo from a local grocery chain on the inside. The book is used, the cover worn soft. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. When she opens it, it has quiet annotations in the margin: a tidy hand, the words in pencil and gently smudged by the friction of the pages.
“Thank you,” she says.
It’s her birthday. He doesn’t really mention it, just smiles in a way a little more meaningful than even his usual conspiratorial smirk, and takes her out to dinner at a place he knows she likes. She’s grateful for it. It’s her first birthday since her father died. It’s her first birthday he won’t call. She wants to think about that as little as possible. But Mulder marks the day like a pebble falling into a lake: a ripple that fades into stillness almost as soon as it began, and she finds that she can breathe as the warmth of his attention washes over her.
+ + + +
The X-Files is closed before her first Father’s Day. She meets up with Mulder at a museum in Baltimore. They both pretend to be wandering aimlessly through the rooms. He drops his pamphlet. There’s a note scrawled under the map: what ho, apothecary. She tries not to laugh, tries not to sob. His shoulder brushes hers as he leaves. She slips a piece of paper into the pocket of his coat.
Who calls so loud?
He’ll read it when he steps outside, in some café or bar, and he’ll smile. That doesn’t fill the hole in her heart, but it’s something.
She wonders if he calls his father.
+ + + +
There almost isn’t Christmas. She’s gone for months, and then they’re in quarantine. She almost wishes there hadn’t been Christmas. Christmas is hard, with her father’s empty place at her parents’ table. Her mother’s table. But the priest is there - some other kind of father - and her brothers, and Missy. Charlie made a special effort, she thinks, because she was nearly lost.
Mulder doesn’t do much in the way of Christmas. She knows that. She longs for him anyway. He’s a candle in the window of her soul, the promise of home through the cold.
She calls him after dinner from her mother’s phone, drowsy with wine on the couch, the receiver tucked warm between her cheek and her shoulder. She knows she’s murmuring nonsense as Mulder regales her with the latest in Christmas conspiracy theories, something about Knights Templar and holy blood, something about calendars and pagan rituals and the way that faith endures.
When she gets back to the office, there’s a gift on her desk. It’s in a crisp paper bag. She pulls out a crinkling wad of tissue paper with a Martha’s Vineyard sweatshirt in it. She unfolds the fabric to find a lovely glass bowl, small enough to fit in the cup of her palm.
“The shop was out of bubble wrap,” he tells her.
The bowl is greenish blue, or bluish green: the color of light through water on a calm day.
“It’s beautiful,” she tells him.
“They said you can keep your jewelry in it,” he offers. “Or...paperclips.”
She smiles so she does laugh, so she doesn’t cry.
+ + + +
New Year’s is hardest of all. Mulder invites her to the Lone Gunmen’s shindig, and shows up at her place when she politely refuses. They watch the ball drop. Mulder leans in and kisses her on the cheek. His lips are warm. They toast to a new year and a fresh start with a tiny bottle of champagne and then he leaves, giving her space. She’s already fragile as an eggshell when they go to Minnesota, to the cold, to Pfaster.
+ + + +
She will understand, years later, why a bride brings back her murdered groom. She will understand the vacuum an absence leaves. When she got her wisdom teeth out, she couldn’t stop sticking the tip of her tongue in the holes they left. Grief is the strange new balance of pressure in her memory, like the way her ears won’t pop in a plane. Sometimes swallowing can banish it. Sometimes the feeling lingers, painful, internal in a way that can’t be ignored.
Christmases will always be hard, but she has Mulder for most of them. They have each other.
Together they will mark a thousand unworthy anniversaries with gestures too casual to matter: their parents’ deaths, her abduction, his abduction, the days they lost their son.
