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gingerteaonthetardis · 6 months

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MSR prompts you say? This is a bit weird but, an autopsy record has more than the autopsy on it. Mainly Mulder and Scully being ... well themselves. (Basically Mulder interrupts Scully mid Autopsy and she forgets to turn off the recording.) -disappears into the ether-

thinky!!! i had so much fun writing this, i hope you like it even if you don't really go here and i don't really know what i'm doing. <3 thank you for prompting me and for always being an incredible friend.

click here to read on ao3!

click here to send me another prompt!

warning for: lame ass gag names, brief objectification of a corpse, mulder being a sentimental dweeb (but what else is new), msr being sickeningly in love

for posterity

He finds it in a dusty box, crammed in beside VHS tapes and manila folders and a million other memories, and he can't help himself.

He presses play.

A static hiss. A crunch. The rush of movement through still, cloistered air.

He hears the recorder clicking into place, suspended over the gurney. He's seen it there before, hanging like a pendulum, poised to hear every word she speaks from every possible angle.

"11:32 p.m., August 1st."

Like so.

"Begin autopsy on unidentified white male, weighing… 198 lbs. in extremis. No immediately visible cause of death."

There's a puff of breath near the recorder, and he can picture her blowing it out between her full lips. Balanced on her tip-toes, leaning out over the body to get her closest approximation of a top down look.

"Subject appears to be between the ages of thirty-five and forty, and healthy. That is, he's in good shape."

He pops a potato chip between his lips with a crunch. She sounds flustered. Interesting.

"Uh, really good shape, actually. Well-developed pectorals, abdominals, and whew, that inguinal ligament—wait," she says, voice slipping out of its even, prim cadence, "what the hell am I saying?"

He snorts.

She sighs, and it's tinny but familiar. "Okay. Get it together, Dana… A visual examination of the epidermis shows multiple tattoos, relatively fresh. The newest, on the upper left thigh, is—" and her words go the tiniest bit muffled as, he assumes, she leans in close to the appendage, "—still slightly scabbed. Certainly less than two weeks old. It's in the shape of a… a reindeer head? A moose? Huh. How… cute."

Charmingly, she says it like being cute is an infectious disease an otherwise appealing corpse has been tragically inflicted with.

"Artifacts left at the scene suggest that the subject had some sort of fixation on body modifications, or perhaps needles in general. However, the extensive tattooed area makes it difficult to determine if injection of some kind played a role in his death, as initial findings suggest. I'll have to look beneath the surface. Beginning with a Y-incision…"

His nose wrinkles, and he's quite certain the next bit will put him off his chips, so he hurriedly presses the fast-forward button, zipping through a few minutes of audio.

It resumes on a splat.

"...heart weighs 520 grams, no signs of aching or breaking," she cracks to herself before clearing her throat. "Appears healthy."

He's always suspected she's like this when he isn't around for autopsies, looking over her shoulder and going green as a Painted Parakeet with car sickness, pitching theories at her like he's playing for the Mets. When she goes in alone, she tends to leave the morgue with a kind of tranquility about her—a counterintuitive freshness that even the stale scent of latex and bitter iron can't hide. Her smiles are a little brighter.

Perhaps, he considers, it is simply the opportunity to reconnect with what makes sense to her: anatomy, the body and the story it tells. Everything connected, with clear delineations of where each piece belongs along the way.

There is so little ambiguity in the arrangement of a person's organs. Mysteries cannot help but stumble forth to reveal themselves.

But it's equally possible Scully just likes her own jokes. Her achy breaky jokes.

"This is interesting," she interrupts him, as she so often does when he's on a roll. She doesn't even have to be physically present to do it. Her undercurrent of genuine excitement pricks at his ear. "There's some cirrhosis of the liver, atypical for someone who bears no outward signs of extreme alcohol usage or any of the other usual physical risk factors. Perhaps the subject was participating in regular steroid use, or—"

On the tape, a door swings open and closes on an exuberant thunk.

"Whoa! I didn't know we were getting a celebrity in." His voice crackles out from the speaker. "Or that Steve Reeves had so much ink."

"Steve Reeves is about seventy, Mulder."

His own startled laugh sounds very, very young and—he winces—tinged with an arrogance that can't be tamed, even by his partner's dry replies.

But past-him is too intrigued for self-consciousness. "You know who Steve Reeves is, Scully?"

"I have two brothers." Her tone has gone cool and inscrutable, the loss of her previous lightness palpable in a way that only a voyeur could sense. But she was always so careful with him, back then. "Do we have an ID yet?"

"No, not yet. Prints are still being processed. But the name given at the motel check-in desk was clearly false."

"Let me guess, 'Steve Reeves'?" Listening hard, he can practically hear her eyebrow twitching upward, the faint lift at one corner of her mouth.

"Try 'Mike Hawk.' Jeez, what's that a tattoo of?" he adds distractedly. "A Rorschach test?"

There's silence for a second on the tape, and he suddenly remembers this exchange. Vividly. "Oh my God," he mumbles, abandoning his chips in favor of rolling over on the couch.

He sets the recorder down cautiously, like it's a holy relic, and stares at it, grinning with his chin propped on crossed forearms.

"I don't get it."

"Don't get what, Scully?"

"Why would that be an alias?"

"Why would the name 'Mike Hawk' be an alias? Mike Hawk?" His words are tinged with an obvious grin. Probably smug, as is his wont. Some things never change. "Mike Hawk."

There's a snapping sound as Scully removes her gloves. He recollects how they caught on her fingertips, causing a bit of a struggle as she spoke. The beginnings of a blush had seeped into her cheeks, the sting of embarrassment her fair skin couldn't help but betray.

"Why do you keep saying it at me? It's a perfectly ordinary-sounding name, Mulder."

"Didn't you just say you had two brothers? Mike Hawk, Scully, come on. Known associate of the dirty devil Mike Hunt?"

"I think Mike Hunt was in my sixth grade class."

On the recording, he can barely speak with the effort not to laugh. But there was another feeling, too, in that moment, one he remembers well: a pulse of intrigue, of fascination, which used to catch him off guard. He never knew how to cope with the reminder that Scully the woman—a shadowy mystery, perpetually out of his reach—existed in cohabitation with Scully his partner, the woman he saw every day.

This was the person who threw wadded up bits of paper at his face when he fell asleep with his mouth open; who wore men's deodorant on the road just so, in a pinch, they could share. Back then, Scully using any word—even unknowingly—to acknowledge her own sexuality felt like sudden, blazing exposure to the Lost Ark. It was a miracle his face hadn't melted clean off.

But it was a line they'd taken so much care not to blur, even then.

Now, he listens as it all begins to deteriorate over a puerile joke.

"Listen, Scully, listen to the sounds. Mike," his past self says, stretching the syllable, "Hawk."

"I am listening! You sound ridiculous! What am I supposed to be hearing?"

"You're supposed to be hearing 'Mike Hawk'!" He chuckles quietly to himself. "I can't believe this. The smartest woman I've ever met doesn't know about Mike Hawk."

"Well, I wouldn't say that," she casually replies. "I did see you in a bathrobe once."

The words are so perfectly clear, and suddenly all the noise—the shoe-shuffling, the rush of water as she washes her hands, even the background hum of the refrigeration units—seems to stop.

An interminable second passes in which he wonders if the recording got cut off. But, no.

That's just how long it took him to put the pieces together.

He closes his eyes, picturing it: the pert angle of her stubborn chin, the smirking tilt to her lips. Sparkling amusement, tinged with an adorable hint of triumph.

His grin grows. Scully really does like her own jokes.

"Scully!" his recorded voice bursts out, suffused with delight and bafflement. There's a thread of horror there, too. And desire, but that's more or less a given.

Her voice is thrillingly deadpan as she pronounces, "Gotcha."

"I don't believe it!"

"Mulder, has anyone ever told you that you're endearingly naïve?"

"You little—you just wanted to hear me say 'my cock' over and over, didn't you?"

She clears her throat, a demure little ahem.

"That would be very unprofessional of me."

In sync, both his past and present self laugh, one compressed and crunched by time, the other ever-so-slightly roughened by the same.

"That's not a denial."

"No," she replies. "It's not."

God, he can barely believe this conversation was recorded for posterity. This, of all moments. The moment when he realized maybe Scully enjoyed their flirting. That maybe, when he pushed, she could be counted on to push back.

Even now, belly down on the couch in the privacy of his own home, his stomach clenches at the memory.

She's always been the better actor, between the two of them. He's convinced she could get away with anything, and she more or less has. But the warm undercurrent of invitation on that recording is unmistakable.

"Scully." Closer to the recorder now, he goes low and flirtatious, even as he cautiously asks, "Are you coming on to me?"

He doesn't hear her answer this time around; instead, his ears catch on the rattle of keys, the click of the lock in the front door. When he glances up from the little black box, there she is in the open doorway, auburn hair catching the light.

She's holding the brown bag of takeout in one arm and her purse and keys in the other, and before he can think, he's pressing the pause button on the recorder, shoving it under a pillow, and going straight to her.

"Mulder, what are—?"

Wrestling the bag out of her hands, he stoops his shoulders and catches her lips in a long, hard kiss.

She doesn't expect the force of it, but she's got the legs of something seaborn, unbending against his tide. She accepts the assault with parted lips, mouth already curving like she's laughing at one of her own jokes.

"You must be really craving that Pad Thai," she whispers.

"Nope." He isn't even embarrassed by his own breathlessness, how hurriedly he dives back in to breathe her air. "Just you." He feels the muscles move as her eyebrow jumps toward her hairline, same as ever, and it's like all the blood drains from his brain.

It's hard to help her shed her coat with one hand holding noodles and the other in her hair and the bulk of her back pressed to the door—but he likes to think he makes it work.

"Hey," she murmurs, freeing herself enough to drop a kiss on his chin, "this have something to do with what you just crammed between our couch cushions? You weren't digging through my old cassettes again, were you?"

His eyes light up at the reminder of that particular discovery. "I didn't even know they made erotic audiobooks, seriously. A whole avenue, Scully, a whole dimension of pornography I was completely ignorant of until you opened my eyes! But," he stops, shaking off his momentary distraction, "no, that's not it."

He pauses for another kiss, lingering again because he can.

"It was an old audio log, an autopsy you did on one of our cases."

"An X-File?"

He and the takeout make it to the couch, Scully only a beat behind, pausing to kick off her little heeled boots. She's been breaking them in, claiming she'll need them if they're going to be chasing lights together again.

"No, it was a case we took on as a favor to someone. I can't remember now… What was his name?" He snaps his fingers. "Ben… something. Ben Dover? Or was it Mike Hunt?"

And Scully—well, she just wouldn't be Scully if she wasn't immediately hip to his bullshit, attuned to it like a sniffer dog to a suspicious scent. Her gaze narrows, and he grins at the way her eyelids flutter in an attempt not to immediately and violently roll her eyes. She's had a lot of practice, but he truly is a hazard to her ocular health.

Her smile, though. She can't help herself. It spills out at the edges, softening the corners of her mouth, even as it carves her laugh lines deeper.

She smiles more now than she ever did back then, and he treasures each one. The twist of her lips always feels like he's pilfering extra helpings from some great cosmic store of joy. It's an untold pleasure to watch the wrinkles form, knowing how hard-earned her smiles used to be.

Now, she's happy. She gives them out for free.

"I remember that case," she sighs, flopping down beside him on the couch, kicking her socked feet up on the coffee table. "God, we were young."

"I was 'endearingly naïve,' if I'm to take your word for it."

"Did I say that?" Her lips quirk in wry amusement. "Doesn't sound like me. I must have been in love."

"Yeah," he agrees, stealing another kiss. "Must have been." She softens against him.

He's about to steal something else—second base, if he's lucky—when there's a muffled sound from under the pillow. The distinct sound of his own voice saying, "Mike Hawk" over and over again. Their disturbance of the couch cushions must have started the tape over.

Scully's snorted giggle parts their lips. Her eyes dance like sapphires under the sun. "Did we ever figure out the victim's name?"

"You don't remember?" He sits back, shaking his head. "Wow, Scully, you really love 'em and leave 'em. I thought you had a thing for the guy."

"The dead guy?"

"Yeah, who else? Don't try to deny it, it's all on the tape."

She just shrugs. "Well, if I did—which I can neither confirm nor deny—it's only because I had a lot of tension back then… for some reason."

The grin he's wearing is probably so goofy, and hell if he cares.

Someone once called him one sorry sonuvabitch, but all Fox Mulder knows is that he's lucky. So ridiculously, obscenely, deliriously lucky, sitting next to the girl of his dreams, his once and future partner—twenty years later, on a couch they bought together, in a house they call home.

Twenty years, and she still flirts back.

"The guy's name was Eric," he finally says, because he can't not. Especially when it's the truth. "Eric Shunn."

Scully's laugh is so loud and uninhibited it rings through the house. And he has the distinct pleasure of letting it go on a while before silencing it with his lips.

#*putting my clown makeup on and honking my nose* XFILES IS A SERIOUS SHOW #txf fanfic #msr fanfic #mulder x scully #msr #abbey writes #my fic #txf #idk how to tag and also i fear being perceived. particularly since this is my first published attempt at msr. so if anyone sees this. hi

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