"I... I Think It Was a Gift"
Lemon aromatically wafting from the polished wood floors.
Mulder ducked back out, checked his door number, checked the hall. Ducked back in.
Bouquets, tastefully mingled in empty corners and atop lonely tables. The kitchen, spotless. The fridge, filled.
A menagerie of feminine scent, luring his fumbling, blunted edges ever deeper into an engulfing, enticing intoxication. The primal senses knowing what the brain would work to interpret-- colors blended seamlessly by a nature ancient humans learned to copy, bedecking their caves, caverns, crevices in splendor. Bejeweled with the colors of the earth, with intent.
For that’s what this was, he'd decided: a Dana Scully den of iniquity.
The bedroom itself a twilight zone of glaring, crude sensuality: bold, daring him to blink with its truant eye.
Mulder stared, brow wrinkling, at his old four-poster frame, wondering how it had emerged from the boxes of Diana’s odds and ends and the boxes of his late father’s sports gear and the boxes of pecked or pinched files and the boxes thrown in, just because, around his bed and his bike and his basketball hoop.
If this was Scully’s doing. The cheetah print comforter gave him pause, sent a chill of paranoia up his spine.
He could call her-- ask her how she beat him home and neatly unpacked his boxes and shoved the contents into proper storage places; ask her how her small frame had grasped his bed and shoved it, wheezing and panting, into its proper bedroom coordinates; ask her how she had time to buy flowers and rugs and stock his kitchen and scamper back home before his key unlocked the keyhole under his Number 42.
Or he could poke the cheetah print and wonder if it would tell him something neither human knew. Mulder poked; and it did, in its way: the cloth nudged forward at an angle, revealing its piece de resistance.
Mulder’s thumb was halfway through angrily banging in the Gunmen’s digits when another thought occurred: Diana, sending a message when she arrived to find him gone. A truce, perhaps. A sorry you’re no longer on the files, Fox gesture.
No, Diana was forthright. She would have tossed what Scully would have packed; would have kept a lone trinket and presented it to him when he walked through the door. “You still have this? You never were one to throw away the past.”
He wondered what Scully had thought, plundering through ancient history. Was glad there was nothing, really, left to plunder.
But it-- this-- couldn’t have been Scully: they’d driven to the desert and been turned away; he’d dropped her home and driven through the dark wondering how he could have mistaken a crank tip for the real deal. By the same measure, it had to be Scully: no one else knew he would be out this evening. The cheetah had his friends’ fingerprints all over it-- no doubt if he looked close enough, he’d see stains from Frohike’s tears-- but they weren’t the sole architects. Her taste rang sweetly from beyond the bedroom door, sweeping in tendrils of spiky lemon if he took a focused breath.
Had she pimped his friends-- exacting in her vision, wholly authoritative in what to order and where to place? Compromising where time and attention were limited, skimming her nails over a carefully scratched note to check one last time before she called him to meet her? Or had she hired someone, trusting to impersonal, skillful taste?
It didn't matter, either way. But it meant something specific from his partner. Something purposed.
Mulder threw his phone somewhere, threw his coat somewhere else, flung off his shoes and his layers and leaned, sat, stretched across the bed--
Scully had put the mirror up. Had he had that, too, all these years?
He lay there, waiting. Not knowing what he was waiting for.
