Work Text:
The bartender stopped listening almost as soon as Scully got started, and the woman sitting on the barstool next to Scully’s has taken off a long time ago, but Scully remains unperturbed.
“I’m supposed to be the practical one,” she says into her glass of gin and tonic. Her voice is a little above normal talking volume. “I’m supposed to keep him in line, y’know?” She digs her thumbnail into the cheap, pitted wood of the bar. “But sometimes we witness things that get into my brain and do an endless loop like a…um.” Scully snaps her fingers in a haphazard pattern. The bartender comes back from serving a customer and raises his eyebrows at Scully as he passes.
“Need something?” he asks as he scoops ice into two plastic cups.
“That word.” Scully snaps her fingers again. “That word for a song.” Scully frowns. “A song in your head.” Someone from down the bar calls for the bartender’s attention, and he takes off again. Scully peers into the melting ice cubes clinking around her glass like she’ll find the answer floating in there.
“An earworm?” a voice to her right suggests. Scully looks over and scowls.
“Speak of the devil and he shall come,” she accuses. “What’re you doing here?”
“I got a call from someone who sounded remarkably like you telling me to come here.” Mulder leans on the counter and peers into the glass. “But maybe she was an imposter.” Scully frowns, then sighs.
“No, that was me.” The memory swims back to her through the gin and tonic. She squints at Mulder. “I called because I don’t think I should drive.”
“Dana Scully, everyone,” Mulder says to the handful of people nearby. “Drunk off her ass and responsible enough to call for a driver.” He taps the glass. “How many?”
“Ask him.” Scully jerks her thumb to the bartender.
“Excuse me,” Mulder calls out, one hand coming down to rest on Scully’s shoulder. “Can we close up this tab?”
“Several, at least,” Scully says.
“You’re a hundred pounds soaking wet; I say two drinks.”
“I have muscle mass,” Scully braces her crossed arms on the bar and rolls her head up to meet Mulder’s face. “And I ate today.” He’s laughing at her; she can see it in the eyes. “Shut up,” she says. The bartender swings by and slaps a receipt on the bar. Mulder, the cheat, snaps up the paper and holds it out of Scully’s reach.
“I win,” he announces, squinting at the paper. “Two gin and tonics.”
“No, definitely more,” Scully protests. She saves herself the embarrassment of trying to match Mulder’s reach and settles for thumping his chest.
“I’m sure you could up the ante if you practiced more,” Mulder assures her. He tosses the receipt back onto the bar and fishes a handful of bills from his pocket to plop on top.
“No, stop, what are you doing?” Scully snatches at the bills, but Mulder slides them out of her reach, and before Scully can react the bartender has swung past to scoop up the pile.
“You can owe me a pizza or something,” Mulder promises her. He touches at her back. “C’mon, it’s getting late.”
Scully putters her lips and slides off the stool. She winces when her feet meet the ground. Her feet have swollen, as they sometimes do with alcohol, and these shoes are one of her narrowest, pointiest pair.
“You okay?” Mulder asks when Scully takes a step and hisses.
“Yup.” Scully braces herself against Mulder to pull her shoes off. “Okay,” she straightens with them hanging from one hand. “Yell if I’m about to step on broken glass.”
“Want me to carry you?”
“Golden stuff there, Mulder; you should go into stand-up.”
She can hear him laughing as they leave the bar, he with one hand hovering at her back like he thinks she might tip over. Scully isn’t inclined to tell him otherwise. The outside air is shockingly crisp and lacking cigarette smoke. Scully takes a deep inhale. “You know you shouldn’t have said that Cancer Man was the Gestapo officer,” she says.
Mulder shifts; she can feel him looking at her. He probably has that slightly resigned, slightly defiant expression that always rings with a touch of kicked puppy. Scully hates that expression; it makes her feel like the bad guy.
“Oh?” he says after a long moment. They reach his car, and Mulder unlocks it but doesn’t open the doors. Scully doesn’t either. They stand beside it and study one another. Scully can tell she’s lost a few inches without her heels.
“It’s so clearly you projecting your own associations,” she says. “Seriously, how much more blatant can you get than a Gestapo officer? Might as well say that Cancer Man is Hitler reincarnated and call it a day.”
“I do wonder sometimes,” Mulder says. His voice has gone quieter.
“And then Samantha as your son,” Scully continues. “I mean, that’s very clearly you expressing your wish to protect her, probably also reflecting the fact that the last time you saw her she was a child. Now, you’re an adult and she’s still a child in your mind and the urge to protect has become parental in nature.”
Mulder looks down at her; the corner of his mouth twitches. “And Melissa?” he asks. “I shouldn’t have had any connection to her. I’d met her days before.”
“You’re attracted to her,” Scully says after a moment. She hadn’t planned on bringing up that name. “And her Civil War personality prompted you to—“
“The names though, Scully,” Mulder interrupts. “And the bunker. How did I—“
“I’m not saying…you don’t need to jump to the conclusion that you had a past life, that’s all. Maybe you’d read those names somewhere. It could happen.”
“Too many coincidences.”
“Not every improbable event is proof of...” Scully loses her balance and has to lean on the car. “Damn it,” she mutters. Louder, “I’d be able to argue this better if I wasn’t sloshed.”
“I know. I get to hear your well-thought-out rebuttals every day, remember?” Mulder opens the passenger door and Scully obliges by sliding into the car. She tosses her shoes into the foot well and leans back in the seat. She can smell the salt from sunflower seeds practically waft from the upholstery. Mulder clacks open the opposite door and slides in, starting the engine with a low roar. They pull out of the bar’s parking lot.
“So how do you interpret your role in my vivid hallucinations?” Mulder asks, flipping the blinker.
“Mulder, don’t,” Scully groans.
“What?”
“You’re the psychologist, not me.”
“And?” Mulder swings the car to the right.
“A father and a commanding officer,” Scully throws up her hands. “Jesus, Mulder, what do you want me to say to that?”
“I’d take it as a compliment if I were you,” Mulder says. Scully glances over and finds him contemplating the road. “If we’re reading this as a projection of my associations, then I guess I see you as someone to look up to. Someone to respect.”
Scully rests her temple against the window. The alcohol is starting to abate now, and the chilly glass is welcome. “I feel like I follow you into battle more than the other way around,” she says.
“Probably just circumstantial,” Mulder says. “Just a dint of chance that I was the one who started sniffing around in the X-Files first.” Mulder looks over. “I follow your lead plenty.”
Scully laughs, a loud, braying sound.
“I do,” Mulder says, unperturbed. “I listen to you, Scully, whatever you think otherwise. And you’ve taught me so much. How to approach the X-Files, how to think about these phenomena, how to give them credence.”
“Seriously?” Scully realizes she is smiling. Mulder raises his eyebrows back.
“Don’t act so surprised. I’ve said this before.”
“I know, but I can stand to hear it again. Some days, Mulder, the things you say.” Scully shakes her head.
“Sorry, Pop,” Mulder says, then actually giggles when Scully purses her lips at him.
They pass through stoplight after stoplight, the traffic a mere trickle around them. They approach Scully’s part of town. When they near Scully’s house, she speaks before she can stop herself. “But you really think it’s like that?” she asks. “Souls looking for one another from one lifetime to the next?”
Mulders sighs and pulls at his mouth. “It borders on religious,” he says. “But I think, after what I’ve experienced, I have to lean toward yes.” He pulls into her driveway and brings the car to a stop. Neither of them move. “It was that clear, Scully,” he says. “That vivid. I’d been in that field before.”
“And that triggered you into recognizing Melissa?” Scully asks. Mulder doesn’t answer for so long that she wonders whether he’s decided to shut down the conversation. But when she looks properly, Mulder is staring at her not in annoyance or anger, but what she recognizes as thoughtfulness.
“It was like a more immediate version of meeting you,” he says. Scully shifts so that she faces Mulder better. The car hums beneath them. “People have all kinds of words for that,” Mulder says. “For first meetings where you feel like you’ve found an old friend.” He taps aimlessly at the steering wheel.
“That doesn’t mean we lived in World War II…oh, hell with it.” Scully scrubs at her face.
“Something I said?” Mulder leans forward.
“Ninety-five percent of me is positive that this past life nonsense is exactly that. Nonsense.”
“And the other five percent?”
“I can’t get the idea out of my head. It’s like a record, this constant rhythm of me trying to figure out how it would work, who else I might know from another life.”
“Ah. Hence the earworm.” Mulder leans back in his seat and slides his hands up his thighs. “Sorry about that, then. I wasn’t trying to give you an existential crisis.”
“It’s not an existential crisis.” Scully picks at the edge of her jacket and tries to sort out her thoughts through the alcohol. She wonders, in an oblique way, whether she’s somehow jealous that Melissa is the recurring husband, wife, lover. She recognizes that plenty of people would suggest that, the ones who like to spread gossip about what Agents Scully and Mulder get up to in the basement office. But that’s just the thing. The idea that Scully might have been a father or a commander to Mulder in a past life somehow sits better with her. It feels more tangible.
“If you and Melissa are supposed to be this…this love across the ages, how come you only met for a handful of days?” Scully finally asks. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“I don’t think this happens according to fairness,” Mulder says softly. “It just happens.” He traces the steering wheel for several seconds before speaking again. “I think that there’s this idea that romantic love is somehow the best or strongest love. And I think that’s a result of biology; our bodies’ desire to mate. Romance and sex are often linked.” Scully watches the finger follow the wheel, round and round, chasing its own afterimage. “But probably in the world of…of souls, biology doesn’t matters. It’s just bundles of energy making connections with one another. Vibrating on the same frequency.” He smiles slightly at her. “So, a daughter’s love for her father doesn’t have to be lesser than her love for a spouse.”
Scully meets his eyes, then rolls in her lips.
“Maybe Melissa and I missed out this time around,” Mulder says. “But last time, we had enough time to get married and have a child. Last time, you were shot and left in the street. This time, we get to work together. We get to bring down the one who shot you. And maybe next time we’ll only meet briefly, but I’ll get to spend more time with… with Samantha, and you’ll get to spend more time with another soul that you only meet briefly this time around. If we’re lucky, Cancer Man won’t meet any of our lives at all.”
Scully feels her mouth twist into a small smile. “You know, this is why people like religion,” she says. “It can make dying seem almost hopeful.”
“I can see the appeal,” Mulder allows. “I’ll remember that next time I get the urge to bash the Church.”
Scully lets a laugh escape her. She looks at her house, quiet and dark, and stirs to move. “I’d better get to bed. Thanks for the ride,” she says.
“Of course.” Mulder is looking at her with soft eyes. Scully reaches out and squeezes his shoulder.
“I’m glad our souls decided to be friends for so long,” she says.
Mulder tilts his head. “So you believe it?”
“With two gin and tonics in me? I can believe just enough.” Scully grabs her shoes and opens the door. “’Night Mulder. See you Monday.”
“’Night.”
Scully scoots out of the car and shivers when her bare feet find the pavement. She hurries to her door and pulls out her keys to unlock it. When she opens the door, she turns back and waves at Mulder to show that he can leave; she’ll be fine. Mulder’s shadow waves back. Scully hovers at the doorway to watch the car back out of the driveway and rumble away into the night.