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Very early in the morning he takes Scully’s car and drives to North Carolina. It’s a dick move, because he showed up asking to sleep on her couch and then stole her keys before she woke up. It’s an even bigger dick move because she’ll have no way to get to work.
But as he sees it, he had to do it. He has no car himself anymore. He has no wallet with which to rent one. No friends who would drive him. At least no friends who would drive him and not tell her.
He doesn’t know why the small plot of Mulder family graves feels like an important place for him to visit, or why it feels like he needs to visit it right now, today, this morning. Actually, he’s been told it’s where he’s been spending the past few months. So homesickness, maybe?
Or maybe he just wants to touch his mom’s gravestone. And Samantha’s. A really selfish whim for him to indulge on week two of being newly undead, not to mention a risky one. He doesn’t even have a valid driver’s license anymore. An overzealous North Carolina traffic cop could really upset the apple cart.
But all that completely, cosmically just doesn’t matter. Mulder knows emotional numbness. He has had experience with several gradients of it before, dating back to early adolescence. But this? This takes the cake. This lack of feeling is a whole new level.
He sees all of the very good reasons not to steal Scully’s car and drive to North Carolina that morning—he understands them perfectly and could articulate them if someone asked—but they’re so far away from him that he can’t touch them, much less feel them.
He’s looking at them from miles above, like he never came back from orbit at all.
Anyway, she will be fine. Angry, frustrated, yes, but unharmed. The new partner will come pick her up for work, Mulder’s sure of it. He sounds like a considerate guy. Above reproach, she said.
Scully has given him a new cell phone, something sleek and small and silver. She gave it to him so that he could keep in touch with her—in case of emergency, she said. He turns it off somewhere around Prince William State Park, when the sun is just beginning to rise.
The sky is steel gray when he arrives at the cemetery, and there’s a misty rain hitting him in the face as he ambles over to the Mulder plot. Theirs is a small segment of an open field of headstones, but as he approaches it, he can see it looks particularly verdant and lush this morning. Fertilized by the flesh of all the dead Mulders, he supposes.
He instantly recognizes this as a poetic but fundamentally inaccurate statement. It’s really only his mother’s body fertilizing anything here. His father’s and sister’s corpses are not here; his father’s is actually enriching a cemetery in Massachusetts, and his sister is, well, precise whereabouts unknown. If Skinner hadn’t been such a pain in the ass about digging him up, his own body still could have been here. Contributing to something useful for a change.
Given his recent residency, he’d thought it might feel extra familiar around the old plot—something like visiting your former apartment, maybe—but it really doesn’t. He only recognizes it as the location of his dutiful semi-regular visits to pay tribute to his dead family. A nice place, but not a comfortable one.
As he comes closer, he sees there are fresh flowers on the ground before the headstone—for his parents, for his sister. Even his own ruined grave, which still stands there eerily with freshly upturned soil before it, has the same bouquet placed incongruously next to the earth-spattered headstone.
Three arrangements. He leans down to examine the flowers, feeling the petals lightly with his fingertips. Pale pink tulips, baby’s breath. There is a small card attached at the bottom of the arrangement with the name of the florist.
He recognizes the name, the mortuary florist; a little bell rings in his mind.
Could it only have been a year ago he arranged for flowers to be placed on his mother’s grave monthly, automatic debit? As if through mottled glass, he remembers the conversation over the phone from his apartment. The solicitous tone of the florist, her southern accent. That was shortly after his mother’s death. He’d only arranged for flowers for her. Not in his father’s name, not in Samantha’s, and certainly not in his own.
An elderly man in a dapper striped suit and bow tie, shoulders slightly stooped, is visiting a grave at the next plot. He sees Mulder and points a finger towards the clouded sky.
“Not a good day for this, is it?” He has a slight southern accent, a twinkle in his eye.
“I guess not,” Mulder says.
“Never going to skip it, though,” the man says, looking down tenderly at the headstone he’s facing. “She’s my girl. She’ll always be my best girl.”
Mulder nods, uncertain what to say. The slightest prick of something, though, makes its way through the numbness. It catches him off guard.
The man smiles at Mulder. “I’m not sure I’ve seen you here before,” he says. “Are you a family member?”
“They’re my parents,” Mulder says, gesturing to the headstone with their names in front of him.
“Oh, I see,” the man says sympathetically. “I didn’t know there was another son. I’m sorry about your brother.”
Mulder blinks once, slowly, realizing that the man is gazing at the upturned grave of Fox Mulder. It’s impossible to explain, so he doesn’t try.
“How is your brother’s wife doing?” asks the man. “I’ve spoken to her a few times.”
Again Mulder blinks, focusing his stare on the man. “His wife?”
“I admit I’ve worried for her, out here all by herself. Does she have people to watch out for her? So sad to lose her husband when she’s expecting a baby.” He sighs. “She told me her first name, but I’ve forgotten it.”
“Dana,” Mulder says softly.
“Yes,” he says. “Like a war widow from another age, that woman. So stoic. I’ve never seen her cry, but that’s almost worse, isn’t it? She looks like there’s just nothing left in her.”
“Yeah.”
“We talked sometimes. About losing your spouse. It’s not an experience many share. You?” Mulder shakes his head. “You’re very fortunate. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Mulder doesn’t say anything.
“Were you and your brother close?” the man says kindly.
“No. Not really.”
“You must watch out for his widow, though?”
“I don’t think… I don’t think I’ve done a very good job of that.”
“I’m sure you will,” the man says gently. “We’re not ourselves, right after a death.”
Mulder nods heavily, gazing at his family’s headstone.
The florist’s shop is empty, with only a single silver-haired woman wiping off the glass case. Mulder walks in feeling as he always does now: like he isn’t really there, like he’s looking at all these lavish arrangements of peonies and gardenias and roses from a lofty distance.
He shows the woman the cards for the arrangements on the Mulder plots, and he explains where he found them. “Can you tell me whose account is paying for this? These are my family members, and I’m not familiar with what’s been arranged.”
“I can try,” she says affably. “We have this all on the computer now, so that supposedly makes it easy.” She sits down at a computer and opens it up, her eyes darting across the screen.
“Mulder, you say, sir?”
“That’s right,” Mulder says. “Teena, Samantha, William.”
“Well, let’s see, at first it was one arrangement for Teena Mulder paid for by her son Fox, but the son died, very sad. Then that account was taken over by Mulder grandchild, looks like.”
“Grandchild?”
“That’s the note I have—grandchild will take over. At that time two other arrangements were added, too.”
“Grandchild,” Mulder repeats stupidly. “You don’t have a name on a credit card?”
“I do,” the woman says. She looks at him sideways. “But who are you, exactly, sir?”
“I’m a family member.”
“Then shouldn’t you know?”
“I want to take over the account,” he says suddenly. “I want to pay. I’m the one that should pay.” He feels his pockets for his wallet, but of course he doesn’t have one. “Uh, I don’t have my card now, but I’ll call back, and I’ll switch it over.”
“Well, all right. The credit card now is a Dana K. Scully,” the woman says. “On behalf of Mulder grandchild. So you might want to talk to her first.”
“Yeah,” he says, remembering the three arrangements of pink tulips, of baby’s breath. “Yeah. Okay.”
“She’s the widow,” the woman explains. “The son’s widow.”
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes taking in the elaborate floral arrangements behind the woman’s head. They’re spilling over with intense color, fiery blossoms like beaks of exotic birds, feathery stalks shooting out the top. Someone’s gaudy way of expressing their feelings, he supposes. “Yeah, I know who she is.”
Mulder sits in Scully’s car, parked on the street outside the florist. It’s really raining now, which is frustrating, because he had wanted to walk to the Mulder plot one more time before driving back.
He wants to see the flowers there again, now that he has this strange piece of information to roll over in his mind. He wants to look at the tulips on his mother’s grave and think about why they’re there.
On behalf of Mulder grandchild. Flowers for one dead family member sent on behalf of another who is currently unborn. Living Mulders apparently don’t need to be involved at all.
The rain pours down the windshield in gleaming streaks. There is a rumble of thunder. Mulder should drive back to D.C., go back to return Scully’s car. His eyes fall on the silver cell phone sitting next to him on the passenger seat, silent and accusing.
When Mulder’s mother died, he’d become preoccupied with thoughts about the afterlife. Growing up he’d never believed in it, not even as a little boy listening curiously during his father’s family’s tepid Presbyterian church services. His inconsistent education in Judaism on his mother’s side never really touched on what happens after death. But his experiences in recent years, on the X-files, had opened up multiple windows on post-death experience. Conversations with those who are gone. Reincarnation. Hauntings. He could no longer dismiss the notion.
Not only that, Scully believed. And as he clung to Scully, as her fingers ran soothingly through his hair as he sobbed against her for his mother, he wondered if her firm belief in heaven could somehow transfer to him, just as his belief sometimes did to her. He’d prayed that it might. Maybe, he’d thought, it would be a comfort.
Later, they found out Scully’s beliefs were true. In a way. There was a better place, and Samantha was there. Happy and safe. That was a comfort, an unbelievable comfort. He remembers a different kind of weeping. A different kind of clinging to Scully.
None of that seems real to Mulder now. He tries to access the specific sense memory of his grief for his mother, his joy in discovering a happy afterlife for his sister. Sitting in Scully’s car, watching the rain surround him, he knows that he used to have those emotions, but he can’t remember what they felt like.
He soothingly rubs his own arms, up and down, willing himself to come back, come back.
He thinks he can remember one thing. What it was like to cling to Scully in those moments. The play of her fingers in his hair.
He falls asleep. He’s woken up by a firm, insistent rapping on the driver’s side window. He opens his eyes and focuses on the pale face distorted there behind the glittering raindrops.
Scully, disheveled with wet hair, her forehead creased in a frown. She’s calling his name through the glass.
He unlocks the door and gestures for her to come around to the passenger side. Another dick move, considering it’s her car.
She opens the passenger door and maneuvers herself gracelessly into the seat. He forgets every time he sees her now that her abdomen is so large. That yes, she is really and truly knocked up.
For a moment she just sits there, breathing heavy, facing the dashboard, dripping water all over the interior of the car. Her head is bent, just slightly, and rain plops off the ends of her hair.
He expects her to be furious. It seems the fitting emotion. He knows that, from back when he had emotions.
“Mulder,” she says: voice low, not especially angry. “Before I say anything else, I just want you to know that I don’t have any expectations of you.”
“Expectations?”
“I don’t know what’s going through your mind,” Scully says. Her voice is level, but her eyes, staring straight ahead through the front windshield, are very wide and wet. “I have no idea. But if this is about the baby. I know you might not be ready for…” Her gaze slides to him. “Well, I want you to know I have no expectations.”
He realizes what she is saying. She thinks he is running off because he is afraid of her pregnancy, because the idea freaks him out.
“It’s not about your baby, Scully,” Mulder says. He looks over at her in time to register that his statement of clarification has somehow hurt her. She has the look of someone who has just been struck across the face. He can’t really make sense of it.
“Okay,” she says, barely more than a whisper. “Then what?”
“Scully, I’m sorry,” he says, sighing wearily. “I thought your partner could give you a ride to work. I thought I’d return your car by the end of the day.”
“My car,” she repeats stonily. “You think I was worried about my car.”
“How did you get here?” Mulder wonders. He glances around out the windows. “Did your partner drive you?”
“I borrowed a car,” Scully says with precision. “I had the Gunmen find the last cell phone tower your phone pinged. I put two and two together. I’ve been … I’ve been physically sick with worry, Mulder. It was only months ago that I … How am I supposed to know what you’re…”
She stops. Tears are silently streaming down her cheeks.
“I’ve been thinking that this behavior is PTSD, that it’s trauma,” she says in a fragile voice. “But am I wrong? Do you need to be free from me? Is this deeper than…?”
She stops again. “I’m sorry,” she says, pressing her sleeve to her eyes. “I’m sorry. Just give me a second.”
He watches her fight her tears, and to his surprise, some sensation pushes through. It hurts a little. It reminds him of the feeling he had when talking to the man by his wife’s grave in the rain this morning. “She’s my girl. She’ll always be my best girl.”
“I don’t want to be free from you,” Mulder announces abruptly, surprising even himself. His voice sounds too loud.
Scully looks at him incredulously and wipes her eyes again. “Okay,” she says.
She’s looking at him warily, expectantly, as though she assumes there will now be some explanation forthcoming.
“I never want to be free from you,” he adds, voice softer. He closes his mouth in confusion. He’s talking without thinking, and he tries to determine how those words feel now that he’s said them.
They feel right, he decides. Like a starting place.
“Then why did you leave in the middle of the night with my car?” she asks. “Why did you come to Raleigh? To the cemetery?”
He just shakes his head, blinking at the steering wheel.
“You’re not trying to … you’re not trying to go back, are you?”
Now Mulder turns abruptly to her and studies her face. Scully habitually tries not to show her fear, even when she is in fact very afraid, but he can see that her mouth is drawn now, her lips bloodless.
“I don’t think so,” Mulder manages. “No.” He reaches out and takes her hand in his, linking fingers. She is the only starting place that makes sense, the only spot in the world he is feeling anything at all. “I just needed to … see my family, I guess. Even if they’re dead. It was selfish, I know. But can you understand that at all?”
Her stare hasn’t wavered. “Your family isn’t dead, Mulder.”
It takes him a moment to understand what she means. Of course his family is dead—they both know his mother and father died; they both know what happened to Samantha.
Grandchild will take over, he remembers. On behalf of Mulder grandchild.
His eyes hold hers. He doesn’t dare blink.
“You were pregnant when I left,” he says. “Weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Her eyebrows flicker together briefly. “Of course I was.”
“Of course you were,” he repeats. His eyes drop to their linked hands again. “I, uh, thought so, but I didn’t…” He starts again. “I didn’t know for sure until the woman at the florist said the flowers on the graves were sent on behalf of the Mulder grandchild.” He shrugs helplessly. “I had to think about it. I thought, I don’t know any Mulder grandchild.”
A beat. “You don’t know one yet,” she says. Her tongue darts out over her lips. “I want you to.”
There is a faint rumbling thunder somewhere outside.
“Yeah. I … want that, too,” he says. He doesn’t know how to think of himself as someone with children. He can’t help but look at her rounded belly, thinking of how disorienting and strange it is. That someone else related to him is under there, growing under all the protective layers of Scully.
Mulder swallows. “Paying for those flowers. For my family. It was really … nice of you, Scully.”
“Nice?”
“Yeah,” he says, puzzled by her sharp tone.
She sucks her teeth in frustration. “No, it wasn’t,” she says. “It wasn’t nice. When I called to arrange it with the florist, I was really angry with you, actually.”
“You were…?”
“Angry you’d left me to go to Oregon, angry you left period, angry you’d been hiding this fucking disease from me, angry you’d had this flower arrangement and this gravestone in Raleigh and I knew nothing about it.”
“Well, you arranged flowers for my whole family anyway,” Mulder says. “I’m grateful.”
Scully places both hands over her face, trying to compose herself. She removes her hands and looks at him. “I didn’t arrange them for your family,” she says. “I arranged them for mine. For the baby’s.”
So sad to lose her husband when she’s expecting a baby.
“Okay,” he says hesitantly. “Yeah.”
“At your funeral,” Scully continues, “I looked down, you in your family plot … and I said to Skinner, ‘He was the last.’”
Mulder’s forehead creases. It’s stupid, but he hadn’t completely visualized that Scully must have attended his funeral. Of course she did. Imagining the reality of that is another little painful skewer.
“Do you know what Skinner said?” she asks. “He said, ‘I don’t think Mulder was the last.’”
“Because he knew about the baby?” he guesses.
“No, Mulder,” she says. “Not because of the baby.”
Not because of the baby. He lets that sink in.
He tries to think about how to explain to her what’s happening with him. He knows he should, but his capacity for language is starting to fail him.
“For days after that,” she says, “I didn’t feel anything at all. For …weeks. Sometimes I wondered if I was dead, too. If this was what hell was like.”
That’s it, he thinks, amazed. That’s exactly it.
“What did you do?” Mulder whispers. “What helped you?”
“I guess I kept thinking about the baby and me being the last,” she says, her eyes widening. She leans towards him a little, as though sharing a secret. “Truthfully though? What really helped?”
He’s surprised to realize there are tears in his eyes, too. He nods.
“You came back.”
His mouth forms into a tiny smile then, and he sees her reflect his smile back. And although their smiles are fleeting, they’re a reminder of another feeling, something else he’d forgotten.
“Let’s go home, Mulder,” she says roughly. “I’ll buy you a pizza.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sounds like a plan.”
“You want me to drive?”
“What about the car you drove here? Don’t you need to drive it back?”
“We’ll worry about it later. The Gunmen will help us. Or Doggett. Let’s just go home.”
He slowly nods his agreement. He’s not sure what she means by home—his or hers, together or singly—but he’s ready to do whatever she wants at this point. He hands her the keys, preparing to make the jog in the rain around to the passenger side. She’s the one with the valid driver’s license, and it’s her car.
But Scully doesn’t take the keys. She’s been distracted by seeing something in the back seat. She points. “Mulder, what in the world…?”
“Oh,” he says. He’d forgotten. It seems strange now, difficult to explain. “I picked those up for you.”
“Picked them up? Where?” Scully reaches back and lifts a bundle of damp and slightly-muddy flowers: pink tulips, baby’s breath. As if by instinct, she raises a tulip to her nose and sniffs it experimentally.
“Off my grave, actually,” Mulder says.
Other women might have recoiled, but Scully only raises a curious eyebrow. “These are from your grave?”
“Yeah,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “I figured they were mine, so it’s not really stealing.”
Scully looks at him in disbelief, still holding the single tulip against her cheek.
“And you paid for them, after all,” he adds. He’s hit with a sudden rapid-fire burst of feeling, emotions he remembers all too well: guilt. Regret. Self-blame. “I would have gotten you a better flower arrangement, to say I’m sorry. But … I don’t have my wallet anymore.”
Wide blue eyes stare back at him. Then, to his surprise, she bursts into dark laughter.
“We should get you access to your money again,” she says weakly, wiping her eyes. “And a license, a car. Since you’re officially living.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Probably so.”
“Not today.”
“No, I was promised a pizza.”
He’s about to open the door to switch places again when she grabs his sleeve.
Surprised, he waits as she leans over to touch his face. He’s taken aback. She hasn’t touched him much since the hospital.
Her expression is intent and serious, and she lets her fingers run over the stubbly contours of his cheeks and jaw, which have so recently been cratered by the scars of death. Her fingers wind up stroking his hair gently, gently.
She doesn’t say a word, but her lip begins to tremble.
Mulder just remains still, letting her do what she needs to. It’s probably the least he can do. Besides, he can’t deny it. Something in her touch is nudging him closer, bringing to life another emotion.
Before they drive away, he notices she turns around from the driver’s seat to arrange the bedraggled bouquet in the back seat possessively. And Mulder’s heart continues its slow descent back to earth.