Title: Uncharted Depths
Author: Mary Parker
Rating: tame
Spoilers: Agua Mala, slight spoilers for other S6 (Rain King)
Disclaimer: None of them are mine.  They're Chris'.  I don't get money.
A/N: This was written for my friend Anya.  

Scully was a daily miracle, a new blessing every day 
like some sort of strange calendar.  She had been a 
gift to him in the beginning from the wary Them, 
Sector Chief Blevins and his smoky companion.  A 
Trojan agent, full of science and logic.  Diana hadn't 
worked, so they'd sent him a short redhead with faith 
in God but no eye for the sky.  She had been so serious, 
sexy underneath the dumpy suit, surprisingly ready to 
go toe-to-toe with him on big issues like his sanity.

That had been the first miracle, the way she treated 
him like a friendly eccentric instead of a mad leper.  
The second miracle was when, in the chilly graveyard 
rain, he had puzzle-pieced his theory together for her 
and she had laughed, soaking wet and listening to him, 
delighted to listen to him.

He couldn't ever remember anyone taking that much joy 
in what he'd said, whatever the reason.

Her hair floats around her face in air-dried waves, 
still a little damp here and there in the curls.  She 
had been soaked in rain for his sake again, bonesoaked 
in a hurricane.  He is struck by the things she did 
for him.  This was a joyride, not even a case.  I need 
you, he said, and she followed.  Her requisite grumbling 
was a ritual they both ignored.  Now they are going 
home and she is fresh with the glow of success and the 
praise of cranky Arthur Dales.  She touches Mulder's 
collar from time to time, peeling away the fabric of the 
turtleneck to examine his lesions.  He cannot even think 
of it as her taking a liberty, he is so struck with 
wonder by her compassion and her skill.  Her fingertips 
are cool at his throat and he is pleased that she is so 
possessive of him.

Mulder had been watching Scully with different eyes 
since she had pulled him out of the Sargasso.  She 
was his knight in a designer suit come to his rescue 
again; she had scolded him when he woke and he loved 
her for that, that she never gave him an easy way out, 
and he told her so.  She brushed him off in her cool 
Scully way, but he saw the way she scrutinized him 
from across the room when she thought he wasn't looking.  
He could feel the blue wash of her gaze as it swept 
over him, the precise calibrations and measurements of 
her regard.

I love you, he wants to say again, when he sees her 
with the raw red bundle of the baby in her arms, the 
baby she'd helped deliver.

He had seen her with children before, with suspects, 
but generally he had not seen her around people that 
were not under investigation.  It was curious how he 
had never thought of that.  They had worked out a 
joint solitude, a space of familiar conversations and 
familiar silences.  He was staggered by her doctor's 
instincts, the immensity of her attention to strangers.

Mulder has found himself profoundly moved before by 
the sweep of her hair across her cheekbone.  He finds 
he is rendered speechless by the drip of her hair as 
she conducts impromptu surgery with a Leatherman and 
a ballpoint pen.  Even with his squeamish stomach, he 
is fascinated.  He wants to see her do it again, wants 
to watch her capable hands saving lives.  He has seen 
her do autopsies, impressed by the precision of her 
cuts despite the mortal nonchalance of her subjects.  
Her field master attitude in the throes of emergency 
makes him want to snap her a salute: he is amazed by 
her presence and the way she commands tall brawny men 
to do her bidding.  She just hits five foot three in 
her sopping sneakers, but he imagines she is ten feet 
tall when she bellows orders and brandishes her weapon.  
Her determination is reassuring: the building residents 
submit peacefully to her authority.  Scully takes the 
world out of skew.

If she is so passionate about the lives of bit players 
in their story, how must she be when she is operating 
on him?  Selfsame Mulder, whose skin she must prize 
somewhat, or else she would have left him.  Scully 
does not mince around the issues of their partnership: 
she ignores them or charges head on.  She lacks nuance 
at times and he loves her even more in those unguarded 
moments, those times when it is clear that she must 
care, somehow.

He thinks of her leaving him although she is sitting 
beside him in the hard plastic airport chairs.  She 
could get up to use the restroom and something on the 
flight board could catch her eye.  She could change 
her ticket, wing it to anywhere in the world, and be 
shut of him.  She could go to Berlin with her bad German.  
She could go somewhere tropical to wear sarongs and sip 
frozen drinks on her off time.  He tries not to think 
about that, Scully in a sarong.  He has enough trouble 
hiding his appreciation of her unrevealing suits.  
Scully could travel the world and find the safe, 
ordinary life she deserves and he would be sitting in 
this awkward chair waiting for her when she returned 
and sighed over his stasis.

Instead she stays to nag him about his eating habits 
and to occasionally fall asleep on his shoulder, and 
it gives him hope that the sun will rise again.

"Can we once go to Florida and not discover monsters 
in the uncharted depths and verdant woods?" she asks 
out of nowhere, doing the crossword in the paper he 
bought, her voice rich with amusement at the archaic 
twist to her words.  

"Sure," he says, trying not to sound startled.  "You 
want to hit the beach?  Get a little tan?  It's 
bikini season.  If anyone gets jellyfished, you can 
pull out your doctor skills again."

"Probably better to save up my doctor skills for the 
next time you pull an idiot stunt," she says absently, 
pushing the top of the pen into the soft underneath 
of her lower lip.  "Besides, I can't imagine you're 
in a beach mood right now.  Salt water would sting 
in those welts."

Mulder considers telling her the real motivation is 
the bikini.  He thinks he could say how much he wants 
to do nice things for her, how all these half-assed 
excursions are meant to be an entertaining challenge 
instead of an example of some latent homicidal/sucidal 
tendancy of his, but he thinks the Christmas ghosts 
have destroyed any hope of making her see it that way 
with their lovers' pact psychobabble.  With Scully 
sometimes he reverts back to adolescence, screaming 
lust running rampant along his veins hitched to a 
pathological need to seem impressive and worthy.

Their flight is called, and they file onto the plane.  
Mulder lets Scully slip into the window seat even 
though she will sleep the whole time, and he puts her 
bag into the overhead bin before settling into the 
seat next to her.  They jockey briefly for space on 
the armrest and she puts her shoulder against his arm 
and pretends it's not on purpose.  He thinks of the 
time they shared a bed in Kansas under the extreme 
duress of bovine-related hotel destruction and how he 
woke up with her feet against the backs of his calves.  
He wonders if she thinks about it too.  She has been 
more touchy lately.  The few inches of air that always 
separated them have diminished to a mere breath.  Scully 
leans away to arrange her pillow against the plane side 
in her fussy way, as if her head won't be lolling on 
his shoulder in half an hour, and his arm feels cold.

"Thank you, Mulder," she says, and smiles - smiles! - at 
him.  "I had fun."

I love you, he wants to say, but instead he smiles back.