Chapter Text
It's weird watching people live when you're dying.
Like the woman by the drink table. She's blonde, and thin, and beautiful, and she runs her hand down a strange boy's shoulder as she laughs. She doesn't think about a future with this boy, besides the immediate. Maybe they'll kiss, maybe they'll fuck, maybe they'll even go for breakfast the morning after, but that's all too far away. Right now, their moment is suspended between this touch and the next. In Scully's experience, the only people who don't concern themselves with tomorrow are those who are certain there will be one.
Scully hasn’t “lived in the moment” since her diagnosis. Now her life is just upcoming numbers. Four hours until the next pill. Seven days until the next checkup. Three weeks until the next MRI. One year to live.
She drinks.
The stuff in her cup is some obscene, greenish mixture of what they’d called ‘jungle juice.’ She wishes she’d grabbed a beer instead, but this will get her drunk faster, and that’s the goal.
A pipe is passed her way, and she takes a hit. She never used to smoke, but, well, they don’t call it medicinal for nothing. Over the summer, before she’d convinced her parents to let her go back to school in the fall, her mom walked in on her smoking a poorly rolled joint of some ditch weed she paid too much for from the neighbor kid who knew she didn’t know any better. Instead of getting mad, her mother broke down into tears, mumbling something about, “you really must be in pain,” before kissing her forehead and saying, “let’s not tell your father about this.”
Now she has access to the good stuff—college kid stuff. She’s not sure where it comes from, and if she’s at a party where she doesn’t know anyone, she always says it’s her first time, and they let her smoke for free.
She knows some of the people at this party, but mostly they’re strangers. Her lab partner from human anatomy class invited her as an apology for showing up to lab hungover and throwing up on their day three experiment results. Scully almost made a snide comment about being busy Saturday redoing lab notes because data had been compromised, but her lab partner seemed genuinely sorry, and Scully isn’t vicious, just irritable. Besides, she likes parties. She doesn’t socialize much, but it gives her something to do other than pouring over schoolwork, trying not to think about the misbehaving cells in her head.
There are a few party regulars. Tom Colton, a frat boy with a criminal justice major who once got drunk at a party and told Scully he would “plow her until she couldn’t remember her name.” Sean Pendrell is also there. He and Scully frequent a lot of the same groups, and while he also may want to plow Scully into name un-recognition, he is much more subtle about it. Or at least he’s a gentleman about it. Or at least he usually brings the beer Scully likes to social gatherings, and so she considers him a friend.
The crowd is mostly upperclassmen, so the only people who are flat out plastered are the handful of freshmen, and one or two (or three or four) of the seniors who just can’t bring themselves to give a fuck about papers due on Monday.
The party hasn’t been going that long. No one has dissolved into hysterics yet, or challenged anyone to a wrestling match in a desperate attempt to prove one’s masculinity. Still, the night is young, and Scully’s got her eye on a secondary education major, who has spent the better half of an hour eyeing a guy Scully can only assume is her ex. Surely, she’s a shoe-in for a mental breakdown.
She sits like this for some time. It doesn’t bore her. She likes observing. Part of her—which might just be her therapist intruding on her thoughts again—thinks it’s because she’s trying to insert herself into the lives of the ones with life left to live. The truth is probably simpler than that. She’s always been a bit of a wallflower. She’s comfortable here.
Around eleven thirty, the Secondary Ed major starts yelling at the Ex, and a group of boys, including Tom Colton, start sloppily playing beer pong much too close to the couch Scully is sitting on, so she decides it’s time for a cigarette break.
She gathers herself and steps out onto the empty balcony. The weather hasn’t quite made the transition all the way into fall, even though it’s already early-October, so the air has a lingering humidity under the cool breeze, and Scully takes off her top jacket. She leans against the railing and drags on a cigarette, because she’s dying and she can, and she looks at the moon.
The only moon phase she can accurately recognize is a full one. She knows all the terms, but she always gets waxing and waning mixed up, which she knows is ridiculous because she can tell every bone in a human body apart by name, but she’s always preferred biology and chemistry more than astronomy, anyhow.
Still, she likes the night sky, and while she might not be an avid student of it, she has an appreciation for the vastness of space. She likes that her scientific laws are universal, plus there’s something about the incomprehensibility of space that makes her feel like she’s not missing out on as much as she feels like she is. At least not any more than anyone else. She may die long before the secrets of the void are fully discovered, but it’s a pretty safe bet everyone she knows will too. It’s a comfort.
“You trying to count all the stars or something?” A voice comes out of nowhere, knocking Scully out of her introspection. She jolts, turns, and sees a boy sitting in the shadows in the corner of the balcony.
“Jesus,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone was out here.”
“Sorry,” says the boy. “Nobody out here except the psych department’s most uninvited. To parties, that is.”
“So, what? Did you crash this one then?” Scully asks, recovering quickly.
“Surprisingly, no,” says the boy, getting to his feet. “I was actually invited to this one. My guess is someone lost a bet,” he adds, shrugging. He joins Scully at the railing.
Now that he’s out of the shadows, Scully can see him properly. He’s tall, and carries too much weight in his shoulders, making him slouch forward slightly. He has a defined profile (read: big nose), and is dressed to the nines in a sweater embroidered with a big alien face that he either made himself, or bought at some thrift shop. He has the potential to be attractive if you gave him a few years and some weights to lift.
“Why’d you even come, then?” Scully asks. “I mean, no offense, but if you’re here because of a bet, and you’re sitting alone outside, why be here at all?”
The boy raises his arm, flashing Scully the beer in his hand. “Free booze,” he says simply. Scully laughs in spite of herself, and the boy grins at her. “What about you?” he asks. “Why are you out here all alone?”
“Hm, well, some of the guests were attempting to turn the party into very loud couple’s therapy, and there were a few too many drunk frat boys hanging around, so I thought I’d get a little air.”
“Ah, yes. The magic of alcohol, always making people act like they’re the worst.”
“Magic has nothing to do with it. Alcohol just lowers inhibitions and judgment, so in actuality, alcohol makes people act more like themselves, meaning that, quite possibly, people are just the worst.”
Now the boy laughs. He throws his whole body into the action, and his grin is wide enough to show his teeth. It looks ridiculous on his lanky frame, and also a little endearing.
“That is very possible,” he says, dangling his arms over the railing. “But I’m way too stoned to think that deeply about it.”
“Oh, no, I agree, I’m completely baked,” Scully says.
“Gotta love a girl who gets philosophical when she’s high.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it philosophy, necessarily. Perhaps pessimism?”
“Maybe it’s just Truth,” the boy says, capitalizing the “T” in a melodramatic voice that makes Scully roll her eyes even as she smiles. There’s a natural pause in the conversation. “Name’s Mulder,” says the boy, breaking the silence.
“What kind of name is that?” Scully asks.
“Well, it’s a last name. My first name is Fox.”
Scully laughs. “What kind of name is that ?”
“I know,” the boy—Mulder—says. “That’s why I go by Mulder. Lesser of two evils.”
“Guess so.”
“You gotta name?”
“Scully, if we’re going by last names,” she says. “Dana if we’re going by firsts.”
“Scully? Like the sportscaster or something?”
“Or something,” Scully says.
“I like it,” says Mulder. “So what are you in for?”
“You mean what am I studying?” Scully asks and Mulder shrugs. “I’m pre-med.”
“Ooh, aren’t you something,” Mulder teases, but she can tell he’s impressed. “So, what, you want to be some hotshot doctor when you grow up?”
“Haven’t thought that far ahead,” Scully lies. “You said you were in the psych department?”
“For now, yeah. I’m mainly interested in behavioral science, so we’ll see where that leads me come grad school, which is a whole other can of worms. Where are you thinking of going?”
Scully immediately regrets this conversation. It’s the same one she’s forced to have with every new person she meets. “What are you studying?” is innocuous enough, but “what are you going to do with it?” never sits well. “Nothing,” she wants to say. “I’ll be dead before I ever get my degree.” The reverse isn’t any better. Scully wouldn’t call herself a jealous person, but she can’t help but feel a bit bitter listening to people talk about the futures their certain of. She supposes she could just tell the truth. She could tell the Mulder kid that due to a little mass in her nasal cavity, she will never get to be a doctor—but her premature expiration date is a little heavy to lay on someone she just met, and besides, if he told her, their conversation would be effectively over, and he would leave her with a few awkward stammers, and that awful, awful look that people only dish out when they simultaneously pity you and are glad they aren’t you.
“I don’t want to talk about school,” she says as casually as possible. “I mean, I’m high, I’m drunk, and it’s Saturday. Surely you can think of something more interesting to talk about.”
“Hey, I was just following social convention—majors, superficial future plans—these are things normal people talk about, right?”
She doesn’t miss the way he excludes himself from the normal person category. “I don’t like to devote my time to social convention,” she says.
“I don’t doubt it.” Mulder clicks his tongue a couple times, thinking. “Hm, okay, you want something interesting?” He points up to the sky, and Scully follows his finger. “See those three stars there?”
“I see a lot more than three,” Scully says unhelpfully.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “But those three in a row? Diagonally? The ones that look like half an arrow?”
She searches. “Mm, yeah, I guess I see them. ”
“That’s Orion’s belt. Once you find those three stars you can find the whole Orion constellation. It’s also known as the Three Sisters, although it’s misleading. The stars are named Alnitak, Anilam, and Mintaka, but Alnitak is actually two stars, the main one being a blue supergiant.”
Scully grins and has to resist the urge to say, “so what?” Instead, she says, “interesting,” in a voice she hopes sounds sincere. Mulder’s laugh suggests it doesn’t.
“I don’t know, you put me on the spot. That’s the best I can come up with on such short notice.”
“Most people don’t spout astronomy facts when they’re put on the spot,” Scully points out.
“Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited to parties,” says Mulder.
“Oh, Dana, there you are!” Scully’s lab partner steps out onto the balcony. She glances at Mulder, brow furrowing a little. “I just wanted to let you know I was heading out.”
“Already?” Scully asks, checking her watch. “It’s not even midnight.”
“Yeah, well, I got study group in the morning,” Lab Partner says unconvincingly.
“Are Coltan and those creeps hitting on you?” Scully asks.
“Endlessly,” Lab Partner admits. “But I do have to get up early. Don’t worry, you can stay. They’re cool with you being here.”
“Are you walking back to campus alone?”
“I was gonna.”
“I’d feel better if you let me go with you.” Scully barely knows this girl, and if she’s honest, she’s not even 100% sure on her name, (Miranda? Or maybe Melanie? She knows it starts with an M), but she isn’t letting a drunk girl wander around downtown by herself. She knows what can happen to a girl when she’s alone, even if she hasn’t been drinking.
“You sure? I mean, you don’t have to,” Lab Partner says, poorly covering up the fact that she’s just as uncomfortable with going solo as Scully is at letting her.
“I’m sure.” Scully turns to Mulder, who has his back against the railing and is quietly observing the interaction. “I gotta go,” she says. “Thanks for the star facts.”
Mulder grins again. “Anytime. You should hear the stories I got stored up about the Pleiades.”
Scully gives a soft, breathy laugh, and nods. She follows Lab Partner back inside, and doesn’t notice leaving her jacket behind.
---
“Why were you talking to Spooky?” Lab Partner asks once they’re well down the street.
“Who?” Scully asks.
“Spooky Mulder?” Lab Partner says like that should be enough explanation. “That dude you were getting chummy with?”
“Didn’t seem that spooky to me,” Scully says, a little defensive, and a lot confused.
“He’s a class A freak,” says Lab Partner. “Honestly, I’m surprised you’ve never heard of him. He’s that guy that made a fuss about that dumb sorority pledge last fall. You remember? The one where they got involved in,” Lab Partner makes air quotes. “The Occult?”
“Uh, I vaguely remember hearing about that,” she says. There was a student death last year—that she remembers clearly—a sorority girl was found dead in the woods. Scully heard rumors it had to do with witchcraft, which she immediately ignored. “He was involved in that?” she asks.
“Not directly,” says Lab Partner. “But he is the one that kept those stupid rumors flying around. Apparently he thought it was all real.”
“What, that those girls were attempting to do witchcraft?”
“No, that they were actually witches.”
Scully laughs. “Right,” she says. Lab Partner gives her a look. “Seriously?” she asks.
“I told you, he’s a weirdo.”
“Seemed nice enough to me,” Scully says, and Lab Partner shrugs.
“Doesn’t mean he’s not a freak.”