The way my friend just posted a picture of a lighthouse like it was nothing and here I am preoccupied with the sea and it’s associated imagery at every turn
The trip home from the manicured neighborhoods of Arcadia will be a long one, for many reasons. Coast to coast flights on the Bureau’s tab are measured in economy of the dime, not time. It’ll be well past midnight by the time they reach their own beds.
They’re Mulder and Scully again, although they still look like Rob and Laura. She admitted that the sweater sets came from her own mother’s closet. He’d simply walked into a department store and bought what was on the mannequins.
The jokes about being married were like grenades. He couldn’t stop. He just kept pulling the pins and lobbing them one after another. And she took the hits, over and over and over. She’d be safer if she just left him.
He chances a fleeting look her way, expecting to find her sleeping. But she is awake, that telltale eyebrow lifted as she works through some impregnable knot in her mind.
There is something broken between them, he knows this. A cord was severed and now the ends are too short to meet again. He misses her. She’s right in front of him, but he misses her desperately.
Kissing her that night, her lips tasting like vodka and stale cigarettes, was a mistake. He knew it the moment he did it. She looked up at him and with just a few words, completely separated his soul from his body and left him standing in his doorway like a gutted carcas on a hook.
There is a lot they don’t discuss. A lot that they should.
“It’s real, you know,” she says, out of nowhere.
He’s almost startled to have her start a conversation.
“What is?”
She holds up her hand, flashing the wedding ring at him. Platinum, a marquis cut stone, one carat at least. Several, smaller stones around it. It’s probably worth five grand. He fancied himself an ametuer gemologist for a brief moment a lifetime ago with Diana. He bought her a half carat princess cut on on a white gold band. She hardly ever wore it, even after the wedding. She took it with her when she left.
Scully drops her hand and looks down at the ring for a moment, her brows knit in contemplation.
“Strange,” she says softly. “A ring without a wedding and a marriage with no vows. Who’d’ve thought Walter Skinner would be the one to hand me a wedding ring.”
It makes him squirm, to hear her talk like this. He grinds his molars and swallows back the acid rising in his throat. She slides the ring off of her finger and deposits it in her pocket.
Those weren’t vows he made that day in his fateful hallway? Didn’t he carry her like a bride through the bowels of a spaceship? Didn’t he kiss her back to life?
“Is this the part where we hire lawyers and fight over who gets the Le Creuset cookware?” he deflects.
She looks up with an unreadable expression, those wide eyes searching his face like a map.
“That’s more your area of expertise.”
It happens so fast he almost doesn’t feel it. Until he does, of course. By then she’s already turned away and left him to figuratively bleed out.
Another 10 hours together including the layover in Denver and she doesn’t say another word.
The weekend slips by and he does not call her. Doesn’t show up at her door. Monday comes and they deal with it the way they deal with everything. They pretend it didn’t happen.
I have a really tasty Matt ask in my inbox and I had like a 500+ word response typed up and then Tumblr glitched and lost it all before I could save it to my drafts
Also, I super need to go to bed due to my deeply exciting week of standardised test grading starting tomorrow, but let me quickly state for the record that I am in no way prepared for the (hopefully inevitable) moment where we get new Liam Neeson/Qui-Gon Jinn in the flesh (or rather, Force ghost) content. Not in the least.
