The heat is physical, palpable, and it hits Scully like a wave when she shoulders her car door open. The thin plastic bag of takeout twists hard in her fingers and she draws her purse over her shoulder, the strap catching on her hair.

The heat is palpable, undimmed by so much as a cloud. The grass turned to dead sharp stalks a week ago, crunching under her tired feet, up to the porch, into their farmhouse.

She should've had enough of children and hospitals, hollow comfort and unmitigated pain, lifetimes ago. And maybe this is her penance, too many miles away from Father McCue to do any good. But most of the time, it isn't.

One tired foot propping the screen door open, Scully fumbles for her keys in her purse, then shrugs and tries the doorknob. For someone so paranoid, Mulder can be remarkably trusting. The knob turns in her hand, the metal cool in shadow.

She can't be sad, tired, or upset; it's Friday night, it's summer, she talked to her mother yesterday, and Mulder has that perfect amount of stubble, just right to burn her neck when he sets his mouth against it, rasping like sandpaper against her palms. And maybe, much later, after a glass of sweet red wine or two, maybe there will be more.

Her mother. She's traced the route back there, back to their old life, in the atlas so many times that she can feel the indentation of her fingertip. She wouldn't give it back, most of it she wouldn't undo if she could, and she feels needed at Our Lady of Sorrows, she just tries not to think about it when Mulder sets his chin on the crown of her head and points out that they fell in love just that way, that when she's slamming hospital administrators' doors and advising radical treatments, she's just finding an outlet for the ingenuity and tenacity that drew him to her so long ago.

It's just that sometimes she misses her mother, her last real link back. She wants to knock at the front door again with Mulder shuffling his feet beside her, fists jammed in his pockets, that little half-smile waiting on his face. She doesn't quite understand what happened between her mother and Mulder so long ago, but part of her doesn't want to be the black sheep anymore, she wants to walk in and introduce him as her partner, her husband in everything but name, and she's helping children, she's doing good, indisputable good now.

It's that homesickness that did it. Scully did their weekly grocery shopping, passing the stack of fat watermelons, and they always remind her of sitting on their front stoop in San Diego, Melissa in a gingham halter and white-plastic-framed sunglasses, her big sister, the two of them, chins slick with watermelon juice, spitting out the seeds, the cool metallic taste of water-hose spray still in their mouths.

For a long time Scully couldn't think of Melissa without tears aching in her throat. Now when she sees the curve of empty rind, ivory and pink and deep red where Mulder's spoon stabbed through the grainy fruit, she only smiles.

She thought she'd made peace with it all, but now that they're not fighting anything, all that's left is William and how she dreads the day they find him only for her heart to break when she sees those eyes blank with lack of recognition, when she finds the son that she's spent so many years loving with every fiber of her being has never felt it touch him at all.

But there's time, there's still time, Mulder assures her, and that 2012 thing he told her about, when he's in his office poring through newsgroups and forums and statistics, tracing patterns in sheer chaos, that's what he's doing. One man, standing in front of it all, averting the apocalypse. They will have their son back. It will all fit back together again.

She only admits to herself, when he's asleep and she can't, fingers twitching as she walks through procedures she'll be doing hours later, that maybe it'll be fun, that one last time. To see him exhilarated, needed again, in a way he hasn't been ever since that bullshit trial and their revolving set of alternate lives.

He's on the back porch. There's watermelon juice on his heather gray shirt. Sometimes she swears his gaze is tracing the constellations in broad daylight.

"Chinese," she says, putting an already-sweating beer next to his two hot empties on the weathered table.

"You must be single-handedly keeping them in business." He's smiling.

No one delivers out here. It's another thing she misses about living on the outskirts of Washington. She can't stumble the three blocks home from the neighborhood bar, and when she wants pizza it's either the freezer or a drive into town.

"How was your day?" His attention is on the foil containers of rice, chicken, dumplings, long fingers expertly twisting back the crimped edges. She dumps a handful of soy and duck sauce packets between their plates.

"Andrea was released today."

He gives her a genuine smile. She knows the excuse, that his memory is perfect, that even if he didn't want to he'd probably be able to recite the name of every patient she's told him about, but it's important to him because it's important to her. She digs for the egg rolls, ducking a little to hide her grin.

A year, even two, after she was assigned to the X-Files, she would never have believed this could be her life. Sitting with Mulder on a back porch, behind a house in the middle of nowhere, proud that she watched Andrea walk out of the hospital on a leg she spent six hours of surgery mending. To her, this life wouldn't have been enough.

But then, in that life, before, Mulder wouldn't circle her wrist with his forefinger and thumb as she twisted the corkscrew into the wine bottle, draw it to his mouth and brush his lips over the pulse point in her wrist, either.

Home. Watermelon for dessert and Mulder's leg tossed over hers as they slept, the breeze blowing in through the screens. Another night she won't dream of monsters in the dark, only of what their time together gives her, the knowledge that between the two of them, they can take down anyone, anything.

But that's tomorrow. For tonight, there's only them.