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“...I’ve had an idea.”Mulder says, quietly, muffled in the mountain of pillows in the middle of the night.“Better not be a crazy one.”Scully replies, pulling the edge of the duvet back towards her from his side of the bed. “If you bring up Bigfoot to me at 2 in the morning, I’m definitely making you sleep on the couch.”“What if we both slept on the couch?”“Is that your idea?”He can tell by the sound of her voice that she’s groggily raising an eyebrow at him. He doesn’t even need to see it. He chuckles quietly.“Yeah right. As if I would be that crazy.”“Go on, then.”“I was thinking about using nicknames.”It’s a tentative thought, but she immediately questions it.“For who?”“For you.”
“Me?”
Scully scrunches up her nose as Mulder shrugs softly, rustling in the sheets.“...We’ve been on surname terms for the last 25 years, Scully, and… I don’t know if I want that anymore. Ever since we got back together, it sort of feels like it should be a fresh start. So maybe we should find some nicknames. …Is it okay if I try some out?”Scully smiles sleepily into her pillow before shifting closer to him.“...Knock yourself out.”---He greets her in the kitchen the next morning, arms around her waist at the counter, pulling her into him.“Hey, honey.”“...Standard.”Scully lets the one word slip out matter-of-factly as Mulder breaks into a gentle laugh, kissing her on the shoulder.“Hello to you too?”She just rolls her eyes. “You’ve used ‘honey’ a couple of times before. I don’t mind it. But it’s not exactly groundbreaking.”“Everybody’s a critic.”“More to the point-” Scully laughs gently, as he tries to lift her off her feet and decides against it after the look she gives him - “Do you know the difference between nicknames and pet names, Mulder?”He shrugs, with a lopsided grin, loping around her to grab his coffee mug.“Thereabouts.”“If you wanted to find a nickname, you’d have to find a variation of my actual name, not-”“I know, I know.” Brushing her off, brandishing a teaspoon at her. “But the last time I called you Danes,, you nearly shot me.”“Force of habit, sorry.”Grabbing the toast out of the toaster without even looking at him, Scully’s got a slight smile on her lips that tells him she’s trying not to laugh.Mulder blows the air out of his nose.“So you did like it?”“...It… just caught me off guard. You hardly ever use my first name as it is.”“Well, I want to change that.”She shoots him another look over her shoulder.“Why break the habit of a lifetime?”“I just feel like-”“You don’t use your first name.” Arching an eyebrow, holding the butter knife in one hand. “If I started to use mine… it wouldn’t feel equal.”“You know that’s a stupid argument, right?”Scully still shrugs. “Even so. You don’t go by yours. That’s why it’s Agent Mulder regardless of who you’re talking to. That’s why it’s Bob in coffee shops to hide the fact that-”Mulder raises a soft eyebrow at her.“Do you know why I do that?”Reaching out, Scully runs a hand softly down his chest, fingernailstracing over the creases of his bed t-shirt.“...Because you don’t like ‘Fox’.”“Did I ever tell you why?”“Not explicitly.” She gets the feeling she’s treading into dangerous territory, but goes there anyway. Sitting down at the breakfast table, she sighs slightly, locking eyes with him. “I thought it may have been because ‘Fox’ was the last thing Samantha ever said to you. You said you remembered her calling out your name over and over again before she was taken.”“...Yes, she did.” Stirring his coffee, Mulder follows suit and sits down opposite her.“...So is that why-?”He shrugs.“It was a bit of that. But it was also my mom, blaming me for all the shit that ever happened to us afterwards. It was always: Fox this, Fox that; you saw how she used to talk to me, even when years had gone by, no matter how many times I told her to quit calling me by my first name.”“Y’know, I never told you, but I was seriously thinking about lodging a round in her shoulder if she kept it up.” Scully says darkly, after taking a bite of toast.“You’re very trigger happy, you know that?”Mulder asks with a degree of admiration that he thinks is best not overheard. Scully just shrugs again, pulling her dressing gown around her.“Well. What else do they teach you at the Academy? Shoot first, ask questions later.”“Pretty sure they teach the opposite of that.” Mulder countermands with a bemused raised eyebrow, inadvertently flexing this left shoulder with its faded pistol scar from all those years ago. “The ‘B’ in FBI does not stand for ‘Bullets’, Dr Scully.”And Scully snorts into her plate, hanging her head in laughter.“Funny. I think we used to know a few Agents who might have disagreed with that.”Shaking his head in a sort of besotted dismay, Mulder reaches out across the table and takes her left hand in his right one, feeling recently-moisturised skin and scattered freckles.“My question still stands.”“Question?”She’s almost in one mind to abandon her toast altogether and start peeling an orange from the fruit bowl just to find a way to keep her hands busy. Mulder just looks at her.“Sweetheart?”Scully flicks her eyes up again.“Don’t even think about it.”“Baby-?”“You’re lucky I haven’t got my gun on me.”“Then tell me what nickname you’d like!” Mulder leans back in his chair, almost defeated.“Oh, I don’t know!” It’s as sincere as Scully can be. “All these ones sound way too young for us. We’re not in our 20s anymore, you know. If you go around calling me Baby at a crime scene, I will have to kill you on the spot, possibly with the original murder weapon before I bag it as evidence.”There’s laughter in the unremarkable house before they leave for work that morning.---When they’re in the office in Washington around lunchtime, Mulder tries again, leaning across a mountain of paperwork to answer the ringing phone that he knows without a doubt is going to be Skinner before he even picks it up.“I know we’re running late, Sir, we’ll be up in a minu-”He can’t even get the full sentence out before his boss sighs at him.They’ve got a meeting on the fourth floor just before they head off to the crime scene: a little town in the middle of nowhere in South Carolina where residents are disappearing from the streets only to turn up again brutally murdered.“Remember to actually bring your head, this time, Agent Mulder.”Mulder briefly wonders whether Skinner’s referring to the same time last week where he’d turned up to the briefing and got the X-File case they’d been working on mixed up with the plot of a UFO episode he’d been watching the night before.“Will do, Sir.” He looks back over his shoulder in Scully’s direction, dragging the phone cord with him. “Pass me the police report, would you, Darlin’?”And Scully’s cheeks flush as red as her hair, hitting him on the shoulder right in the place where her bullet had sunk in nearly a quarter of a century before.“Shut up!”Throwing the file at him, as Mulder breaks out into laughter.Skinner only has four words to comment:“You two are idiots.”Before he hangs up the phone.----Much later that night, in a little rundown motel room in Kingstree, South Carolina, Scully rolls over to face Mulder, dragging the covers with her as she looks at him through the dark.“You were talking about your 'wife' to an EMT at the crime scene today.”“Oh, you overheard that?”Mulder cringes slightly, turning over to face her.“Mmm. Ears like a bat. What happened? Did you marry a girl I don’t know about?”She looks at him coyly through the dim light of the paper-thin curtains as Mulder pulls her closer.“Unfortunately, I think there’s only ever been one girl for me.”Scully scrunches up her nose.“Is she here right now, or are you about to tell me something?”“Ha.” Mulder snuggles closer into her shoulder. “That’s never going to happen.”“You know you can’t go around using ‘wife’ as a pet name,” Scully mutters softly.“Can too.”“Can’t. It’s not even true.”“Ah, who cares about the truth, anyway?” Mulder chuckles gently into the nape of her neck as she rolls her eyes. “Except us of course.”“Skinner’s right. You are an idiot.”“He called us both idiots. You can’t blame it all on me.”“I can’t believe you called me darling while he was on the phone. I swear to God, M-”“Have you not found a nickname you like yet?”Scully immediately shakes her head at Mulder’s question.“I’m still working on it.”“You haven’t pointed your gun at me yet, I know that much.” Toying with her through the darkness.“Don’t let your guard down.” Scully wraps her hands around his arm, nestling her head into his shoulder, smiling blissfully. “You said so yourself. I’m very trigger-happy.”“How about a tried and tested one? You always did like Starbuck.”But Scully shakes her head again at his suggestion. “Doesn’t matter how much I love you. It’s still reserved for my father.” Even though William Scully Sr was scattered at sea 25 years ago.“I figured it might be.” Mulder nods gently. “How about Scout?”“Mm. Best not.”“Sister Spooky?”A grin appears on Scully’s lips.“Not in public.”“Then I’m kind of stuck.”“Tell you what. Why don’t we start with something easy?” She leans up on her elbow, their noses inches apart in the darkness. “Hi, my name is Dana.”And Mulder cracks the biggest grin she’s seen in a while.“Hey, Dana.” Rubbing a soft hand up her side. “My name is Fox.”“Oh, don’t-”“I want you to have it.”“You want me to have it?” She’s momentarily drumbstruck, curled up under the duvet cover in a random motel room in Kingstree, South Carolina.“I want Fox to be yours. I want you to use it. I’ll forget any association I ever had with Samantha, or my mom. Start brand new from the beginning.”“Mulder, I-”“You can have my surname too, if you’d like.”There’s a split second of silence, and then Scully realises what he means.“...So you really could go around calling me your wife at crime scenes?”He glimmers at her. “That’s the general idea.”Scully’s breath catches slightly.“What on Earth would we tell Skinner?”He can’t believe that’s the first thing that comes to her mind. Mulder rolls his eyes fondly.“Oh probably something like: ‘By the way, we’re both going by Agent Mulder now’.”And Scully cackles into her pillow, collapsing back down next to him with a snort of laughter.“Can you imagine? He’d definitely call us idiots then.”“You don’t want to take my name?” Waggling his eyebrows, Mulder’s teasing her, they both know it.“Are you actually asking?” Scully flashes her eyes at him. “That’s quite a question.”He shrugs.“It’s yours if you want it.”“Fine. Fox, I will.”She leans over and kisses him on the edge of his mouth, feeling the curve of his smile as she deepens it.When she breaks away, he whispers:“I’ll buy you the prettiest ring in Kingstree, South Carolina.”And Scully smiles right back.“What more could a woman ask for?”Threading their fingers together under the duvet, he squeezes her hand tightly.“Here’s to us being on first name terms. And sharing surnames.”“Does this mean you’ve abandoned your nickname idea?”Scully raises an eyebrow as Mulder leans over to kiss her again, a smile crinkling her eyes.“Oh, you wish.”