#i really should have been working | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

slippinmickeys · 11 months ago

Text

Totality

Fiona made me write an eclipse fic.

Scully gently shut the door behind her, the crisp blue duffle with leather handles in her grip; the go-bag she always left in her car, just in case. It had been a just-in case, Mulder had to admit. They’d had to fly to Idaho with no time to pack, and had worked a grueling five days straight on a series of local murders with only enough time to catch maybe four hours of sleep a night and pop into a shabby JC Penneys once for more underwear. They were both overworked, overtired, and their suits–of which each of them only had two–were overworn; ripe with the scents of stale sweat and stale coffee and stale eau de morgue.

Scully looked weary as she handed over the bag to where Mulder stood in front of their rental car’s open trunk.

“How far away is the airport again?” she asked, squinting up at him as he deposited her bag next to his and slammed the trunk closed.

“Only about an hour,” he answered, mentally girding himself for what he was about to tell her. “But, I uh,” he went on, “pushed back our flights to this evening.”

Her posture visibly slumped. “You…what?”

Mulder bit his lip, hoping he hadn’t made a horrible miscalculation. He knew she wanted nothing more than to get home, slide into a hot bath and pull the covers over her head for three straight days. She’d certainly earned it.

“Hop in the car,” he said, moving to the driver’s side door. “I have a surprise.”

He was exhausted himself, his nerves shot. He was running on caffeine and cortisol, his skeleton rattling with every step. But this…she would like this. He was sure of it.

“Mulder,” she said wearily, a whine in her voice that he’d rarely had the opportunity to hear. But she said nothing more and reluctantly dropped into the passenger seat, leaning her head against the headrest and rolling it to look at him beseechingly after she’d clicked her seat belt on.

Mulder turned the ignition and the sedan growled to life under them.

“It’s a good surprise,” he assured her.

She only sighed, and they bumped out of the hotel parking lot and onto town’s main drag, the sun shining on the shabby line of depressing suburbia. Ten minutes and five stop lights later, Mulder pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of a dying mall, the tires popping over stray gravel and broken glass. He cranked the wheel and the car swung over the cracked asphalt in front of a defunct Frederick & Nelson, turning in a reflex angle and stopping when the sun shone in full through the windshield. He killed the engine.

Scully opened her mouth to say something, but he reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a couple scraps of cardboard, handing one over before she could voice a complaint.

It took her a moment to register what he was handing her.

“Eclipse glasses?” she said, sitting up a little in her seat.

Mulder had found the black polymer lenses next to the cash register at a local coffee shop that morning, the bespectacled co-ed working it disinterestedly telling him he could have two pairs for a dollar.

The upcoming eclipse had been in the news recently, but he’d mostly ignored it–back east it would only be partial at best, the path of totality only hitting the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. Four murders and a rough case later, he hadn’t given it another thought. Until that morning in the coffee shop.

“We’re in the path of totality here,” he explained. “We’ll only get it for about a minute and ten seconds according to the local newspaper, but I thought you might like to see it.”

A look Mulder couldn’t read crossed over her face and he swallowed.

“The next full eclipse over North America won’t be until 2017,” he went on nervously. “I can probably change the tickets back if you-”

Scully reached out and put a warm hand on his arm, cutting him off.

“I’d love to see it,” she said delicately. “Thank you.”

Despite the dark smudges under her eyes, the soft smile she gave him quieted any lingering apprehension about his decision, and he gave her a smile back.

“I figured we could get on the hood, lean against the windshield,” he said.

“What time does it start?” she asked, popping her wrist out from her sleeve to look at her watch.

“In about five minutes,” he grinned.

Scully fingered the glasses and then opened her car door. Energized, Mulder did the same.

“I ask you to avert your eyes,” he said drolly, putting a hand on the warm hood of the car before awkwardly lumbering his way on top of it, the metal plane thumping loudly under him as it dented to accommodate his weight and then popped back into place.

Scully, opting to watch, looked on primly.

Once he was settled, he held out a hand.

“Milady,” he said, and she settled her warm palm onto his, grabbing on while she put a foot on top of the tire and dexterously swung herself up next to him.

“Nimble,” he complimented her, reluctantly letting go of her hand.

She shrugged and leaned back gingerly against the windshield, mindful of the smear of desiccated bugs across the face of it.

“Here, wait,” Mulder said. He sat up quickly and peeled off his suit coat, rolling it into a ball to tuck behind her head, pillow-like.

“Thanks,” she said quietly.

“Don’t mention it.”

Mulder could feel something ineffable pass between them. He coughed once awkwardly, and then pressed his eclipse glasses to his face, the sharp cardboard edge digging into the skin behind his ear.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Like a dork,” Scully said, delicately donning her own, in, Mulder hoped, solidarity.

She looked nothing like a dork, Mulder thought, eyeing the sharp lines of her face. She looked like a space girl, sleek and silver, an otherworldly beauty.

He cleared his throat. “So do you.”

Scully’s face was tilted to the sky and he turned to follow her gaze.

“It’s starting,” she said, her voice a little irreverent.

Mulder looked at the sun, dark through polymer lenses of the protective eyewear. The moon was just beginning to edge itself in front of its celestial sister; incremental, pendulous.

Lacking the pillow he’d given Scully, he raised his arms up and bent his elbows, resting his head back against cupped hands. Beside him, Scully breathed serenely. He caught a whiff of his fusty clothing and hoped his jacket had fared better in the olfactory department than his shirt.

They were silent for long minutes, watching the gradual procession of moon across sun. The day was bright but began to take on a verging luminosity, and Mulder raised his glasses up to take a look at the dark shadow of the car under them, which took on an off-putting sharpness against the dusty asphalt.

“What do you think ancient peoples made of solar eclipses?” came Scully’s voice, a little dreamy. “What must they have thought?”

It was an invitation to oratory. A small gift. Mulder smiled.

“Cultures throughout the world had wildly different theories,” he said, and Scully turned her head towards him, her eyes hidden behind the dark lenses. “Most of them, obviously, wildly incorrect.” Despite the fact that he couldn’t see her eyes, her look was encouraging.

“The sun being devoured was popular,” he went on. “From the Norse mythology of Sköll,” at this she smiled. “To Asian cultures like in Java and Vietnam that variously had creatures or monsters swallowing the sun. It was commonly held in ancient China that a celestial dragon attacked and devoured it. Here in the Northwest, the Pomo people’s name for a solar eclipse is ‘Sun got bit by a bear.’”

The bear, Mulder mused, was widening its jaw. It was getting gradually darker, and he could feel the temperature start to dip. He put his glasses back on and looked back at the sun.

“The Inca and Ancient Greek believed eclipses were a sign of a wrathful and unhappy god.”

Scully hummed. “The word ‘eclipse’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘abandonment.’”

“Right,” Mulder said, “though I think I prefer mythologies of a more solicitous nature.”

Scully raised her glasses to give him a look. “Solicitous?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

Mulder couldn’t help his grin. “In Australian oral traditions, the moon falls in love with the sun and chases her across the sky. If caught, the sun plunges the world into darkness. Medicine men recite magical chants to combat the evil omen. In German mythology, the sun and the moon are married. One rules the day while the other the night. When the moon is lonely, he’s drawn to his bride and they come together to create a solar eclipse.”

She looked at him frankly. “You know a weird amount about eclipses.”

“I like to impress you.”

“Is this why you were so late getting back to the hotel this morning? Research? My coffee was cold.”

“But are you impressed?”

“I wasn’t impressed by the coffee…”

Mulder gave her a long look, the odd light turning her hair a hazy copper wool.

“I like the German one best,” she finally said, plunking her glasses back on and leaning back to gaze at the sky.

“Me too,” Mulder said.

More long minutes of silence between them with the occasional car whooshing past on the roadway. Mall security drove by them slowly and Mulder gave the rent-a-cop a small salute. It was impossible to see Scully with the glasses on, so he kept taking them off.

“You’re going to permanently burn your macula,” Scully said from beside him, not taking her eyes off the welkin of the heavens above them.

He ran his eyes over the brushstroke of freckles on her nose. She was goddess-like; as luminous as a star. If he was the moon, he’d chase her through the sky, too.

“You lose enough photoreceptors you won’t pass your next firearms recertification.”

He was tempted to tell her that in all the years he’d known her, her shine hadn’t damaged anything but his poor, lonely heart, but pulled his glasses back down and looked to the sun. It was nearly covered.

He sighed and felt her hand reach for his. His heart beat hard once against his sternum.

“You can take them off during the totality,” she said, squeezing. “And should. It’s supposed to be incredible.”

“You ever seen it?” He asked her quietly. She was still holding onto his hand.

“I missed the one in ‘79.”

“Me too,” he said.

Around them, the air had taken on a distinct chill and the light shining down had grown metallic. Next to the car, in the long shadows of the trees along the edge of the mall driveway appeared little crescents. The colors on the mall’s signage dimmed and brightened. Mulder sat up and pulled his glasses off and blinked, shaking his head. The world felt odd, he couldn’t properly adjust his vision. It felt decidedly like the moment after someone takes your picture with a bright flash.

Scully still held his hand and squeezed it.

“It’s called the Purkinje effect,” she said calmly, pulling off her own glasses with her other hand, and looking around with a wondrous smile. “As we near totality and the light dims, our eyes transition from photopic vision–which uses the retina’s cone cells to deliver full colors and fine detail–toward scotopic night vision, which relies on rod cells to detect objects in low light. When the light’s intensity dims in an eclipse, colors with longer wavelengths like red will look darker as the cones become less active. But rods are sensitive to shorter blue-green wavelengths, and those colors will appear to shine. It’s not just you. It’s the rod and cone cells in your eyes trying to make sense of the sudden dimness.”

Scully put her glasses back on and looked up at the eclipse. Mulder felt a surge of something so like love that his eyes burned.

Scully pulled in a sudden inhale of breath.

“The totality,” she said, pulling off her glasses and gazing up. “It’s starting.”

Mulder raised his eyes to the heavens. The world was dusk-like, the stars in the top of the dome of the heavens were winking on. In the bushes nearby, crickets began to chirp.

The eclipse itself was like nothing he’d seen before outside of a big budget movie. The moon was utter blackness, but along the upper edge of the eclipsed sun was a hot pink half-ring that erupted into a single bring spot along the edge of the moon’s shadow like the diamond in a giant engagement ring formed by the rest of the sun’s atmosphere.

And then the flaming plasma of corona as the moon reached complete totality. Second contact. It was a living thing. Streams of white light danced around the ring of the black moon. Scully gasped in pleasure and Mulder couldn’t help but exclaim: “Wow!”

He pulled his eyes from the eclipse itself and looked around. Along the entire horizon, all 360 degrees of it, was in full, brilliant sunset. Everything else was the darkness of post golden-hour. He turned toward his partner and locked eyes with her. Her smile was brilliant, and she held his gaze for only a moment before canting her face back to the eclipse itself.

“This is incredible,” she said breathlessly.

He had found, as the years of their partnership wound on, that their job turned them into ecstatics, subject to mystical experiences. This was perhaps the most transcendent of them all. He would remember the moment forever.

“It is,” he agreed.

A sharp flash, and Scully squeezed his hand.

“Third contact,” she said. “Put your glasses back on.”

He did as she asked, and they leaned back and watched in silence as the moon continued its journey, as the sky relit and the nighttime animals calmed, as the world came back to itself.

Eventually, Scully sat up. The light was still odd, seeming to come almost from inside her, and she lowered her glasses and leaned in to him. For a heady, divine moment, Mulder thought she was about to kiss him, but instead she pressed her cool lips to his cheek, her hair falling down to brush along the skin of his jaw.

“Thank you, Mulder,” she said, and then straightened, the cool air rushing to fill the space she’d just been.

“You’re welcome, Scully,” he said, his voice a little rough. He lowered his glasses slowly and watched her slide off the hood of the car, watched her stretch and smile to herself; a Mona Lisa grin gently stretching the planes of a face with the same faultless symmetry of the celestial bodies sliding across the sky.

#the x files #fanfic #my fic #ficlet #prompt #msr #please forgive the scientific/historical/canon inaccuracies #i really should have been working

85 notes · View notes