TITLE: Things That One Tames (1/3)
AUTHOR: Innisfree
E-MAIL: katclar73@yahoo.com
CLASSIFICATION: SRA, MSR, brief S/O
SUMMARY: "You never went anywhere if you stood still. 
You just stayed fixed in one place, grasping 
pointlessly at the possibilities of what could be." 
The overall rating for this story is NC-17, but Part 1 
is really an R for language only. This is a WIP in 
three parts and I anticipate posting Parts 2 and 3 
within the next week.
RATING: NC-17 (language, sexual situations)
SPOILERS: Through Two Fathers/One Son
KEYWORDS: MSR
ARCHIVE: Yes -- just e-mail me.
DISCLAIMERS: They're not mine, I'm not making any 
money, and there is no intent to infringe any lawful 
copyrights or trademarks.
_____________________________________________

"One only understands the things that one tames."
 
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

***

Red meat. A nice, juicy, thick burger cooked just 
somewhere between medium and medium rare. That's what 
he was craving at eight o'clock on a Saturday night, 
after the hunger had finally reached out of his 
stomach and kicked his ass off the couch where'd he'd 
been lazing around watching college basketball games 
he didn't really care about.

These days, it took something as basic as the need for 
sustenance to motivate him toward any action at all on 
the weekend. Motivate him to walk outside his musty 
apartment and forage for something to quiet the 
growling emptiness inside him. He knew he could try 
buying a few staples for his empty cupboards and his 
eerily vacant fridge. He could make a trip to the 
supermarket once in a while, or even the lousy 7-11 a 
few blocks away, but that took so much effort and 
planning. He really didn't want to have to think about 
food until he was ready to chomp right down on it, and 
anything that involved him turning on the oven or 
lighting one of the burners was definitely out. Too 
much work. Who needed it when he could pay someone 
else to do all that crap for him and hand him a meal 
that tasted a thousand times better than anything he 
could ever put together himself?

So he'd grabbed his keys, slid into his car, and 
headed out in search of dinner. Modern man, outfitted 
for his great hunt with a Jeep Cherokee, a tank of 
gas, and an American Express card. Prehistoric man 
would probably find us so disappointing, he nused. At 
least once they moved past the shock of technology and 
all the noise that came along with it.

Even though it was nowhere near where he lived, he'd 
found himself craving a cheeseburger with grilled 
onions and Monterey Jack from Cafe Deluxe in Cleveland 
Park. He and Scully would go there sometimes when they 
had to work late. The comfort food on the menu was 
tasty and it was more than a few steps up from the 
greasy spoon diners where they usually found 
themselves on the road. They liked to treat themselves 
now and again to a decent meal. And he liked any 
excuse to have dinner out on the town with Scully. 
Almost... almost slightly like a date. With a waiter 
and everything. 

He felt a twinge of longing as he thought about those 
dinners at Cafe Deluxe with her, relaxing over beer 
and a nice meal, and listening to the piano playing 
softly from the corner of the room. Dinners they 
hadn't shared in a very long time. He wondered if it 
was really the cheeseburger he'd been craving 
tonight... or if he was craving something else and 
hoping that the burger would remind him of it.

Everything with Scully had been all wrong lately. Off. 
Uncomfortable. Even unpleasant. Ever since that whole 
mess with Cassandra Spender, Ft. Marlene, and Diana 
had ended with the Syndicate being slaughtered at El 
Rico. 

Diana. Mulder sighed. He knew he'd crossed some kind 
of invisible line with Scully when she had explained 
to him that Diana had to be working with CGB Spender 
and he had refused to listen. 

"Mulder, ask yourself why... she would suddenly happen 
into your life when you are closer than ever to the 
truth... You ask me to trust no one and yet you trust 
her on simple faith." 

She'd been pleading with him to hear her. To really 
pay attention to the facts she was giving him. To 
trust what she was telling him.

"Because you've given me no reason here to do 
otherwise," he had responded, annoyed.

"Well, then I can't help you anymore," she'd told him 
just before she walked away, a coldness in her voice 
that chilled him thoroughly.

Yup. That had been a giant misstep in his long tango 
with Scully. He'd taken his size eleven and a half 
shoes and clomped right down on the pointed toes of 
her practical yet elegant pumps. He knew it as he 
watched her moving toward the door, but he didn't feel 
like total shit about it until a few hours later when 
the truth started to become clearer and he realized 
that Scully had probably been right all along. 

"Then I can't help you anymore."

Those words rang in his head for a good week 
afterward, and the sound seemed to pinch a nerve in 
the back of his head whenever he heard them repeating. 
Ouch. Every time.

Since then, there had been no dinners for him and 
Scully at Cafe Deluxe or anywhere else. They were back 
on the X-Files together, finally, but he found 
himself surprisingly unmoved by the victory when it 
was clear that her heart wasn't in it at the moment. 
Not in it for working with him, he corrected himself 
grimly. She didn't tease him anymore when they were in 
the office together, which they rarely were because 
she seemed to find endless reasons to be somewhere 
else. In his worst moments of total paranoia, he 
actually suspected she was volunteering to do 
autopsies for other agents and other departments. 
Seeing other agents' corpses, so to speak. 

He tried doing little things to make her smile. He 
asked for her opinion on possible cases and whether 
they might constitute X-Files. He made lame jokes even 
more frequently and usually at his own expense. In 
fact, he did just about everything except tell her he 
was sorry. That was a word the two of them didn't like 
to use very often, and he was hoping that time and his 
awkward attempts to be endearing would just fix things 
like they usually did. But they didn't this time.

Before El Diana Rico, he would have called her on the 
weekend and come up with some barely believable excuse 
to see her. He'd "accidentally" bring one of her files 
home with him on Friday night and "realize" she'd 
probably need it over the weekend, giving him the 
perfect excuse to drop by her place just to make sure 
that she had it. You want to know if I can stay for 
coffee, Scully? Well, sure, if you really don't mind. 
That sounds good to me. Hey, since we're both here, 
any interest in seeing that new mystery thriller at 
the Cineplex? How about grabbing some Chinese with me 
at that place you like?

He thought he'd done a fairly smooth job of moving 
them into a routine of not-dating dating. And at the 
end of every non-date evening, he'd drop her back at 
her place, give her a quick peck on the cheek, and 
fight the urge to throw himself at her and pin her 
against the nearest wall. Things had been going great. 
Super great. It was a multiple-phase operation that 
he'd laid out in his mind and things had been moving 
along right on pace. He'd been hoping they could work 
up to a real kiss sometime before he turned forty.

And now this. An unanticipated wrench in the works. 
Two steps forward and then ten steps back. He didn't 
like it at all and he didn't know how to fix it.

So he sulked on his couch every Saturday when, only a 
few weeks ago, he would have been hanging out with 
Scully and enjoying something resembling a real life. 

Nice job, Mulder. Fucked it all up again, didn't you?

He pulled up in front of Cafe Deluxe, which had 
thoughtfully arranged for a fifteen minute loading 
zone just behind the valet parking area, unlike most 
restaurants in the city that gave you a choice of 
valet or double-parking and which he boycotted on 
principle. He flicked his flashers on and jumped out 
of the front seat, gracefully stepping out of the path 
of the front door that swung closed behind him. 
Wonderful smells from inside were wafting out into the 
street and he picked up his pace as he sidled through 
the front doors. 

"One for dinner, sir?" The host, whom he imagined 
looked no older than twenty-three in the dark and with 
a full beard, was politely condescending.

"No, I'm just here to pick up take-out." Mulder 
answered with forced casualness, belying his 
irritation with this overdressed teenager who had 
looked at him and immediately deduced that he should 
be fitted for a single place setting.

"Oh, right over to the bar, sir. They'll have it for 
you there."

"Yeah, thanks."

Mulder strolled over to the counter in front of the 
massive mirrored wall of liquor, trying not to seem 
pathetic or resentful of all the couples enjoying 
their evening out among the living. He'd taken to 
ordering an extra entree or appetizer when he called 
for take-out, and made a point of requesting two sets 
of napkins and utensils when he picked it up. He 
assumed that the bartender would pass the word to the 
rest of the restaurant that he was clearly picking up 
food for both himself and some significant other 
waiting for him at home.

He signaled to yet another kid behind the bar who 
didn't look old enough to be drinking alcohol, never 
mind serving it. The kid ambled over, taking his time 
and making sure not to seem as though he cared even a 
little.

"What can I get for you?"

"Actually, take-out. I'm picking up. Mulder."

The kid made no attempt to hide his disappointment 
with the fact that he probably wouldn't be seeing a 
tip from this transaction, but he gamely moved toward 
the register and looked at the tickets hanging from 
three large white bags sitting next to it.

"Mulder... Mulder... let's see. Uh, what did you 
order?"

"Cheeseburger with Jack and grilled onions, fries, the 
mac and cheese entree, and two slices of apple pie." 
Pretending to be half of a hungry couple could get 
expensive, but he usually managed to turn the other 
order into Sunday dinner.

"Okay. It's not ready yet. Probably be a few more 
minutes." The kid went back to the far corner of the 
bar where he was shamelessly flirting with two 
attractive young women.

"Well, I called twenty minutes ago!" He was not a 
patient man.

"Sorry, shouldn't be much longer," the kid yelled over 
his shoulder. The apology lacked any sincerity 
whatsoever.

God, when did his life take this turn? Here he was, by 
himself, barking at some kid who was late getting him 
his dinner while that kid leaned into the personal 
space of two pretty women, probably trying to decide 
if he could get one or both of them to go home with 
him at the end of his shift. Mulder had been that kid 
once. Now he was the cranky old guy waiting for take-
out on a Saturday night and planning a date for later 
with the Playboy Channel. Maybe the Spice Channel if 
he felt like getting really graphic and the burger 
didn't give him heartburn. Where did it all go so, so, 
so wrong?

He grabbed a seat on one of the bar stools, making 
sure to look put-out as he did it, and turned to look 
at all the normal people laughing, and gesturing, and 
sliding forks and spoons into their mouths as waiters 
in white shirts and black ties hovered around them. 

One guy was clearly some kind of investment banker, or 
successful retail broker, with a precisely tailored 
Armani suit and a tie that looked like it would cost 
two weeks of Mulder's salary. He was holding court 
before a painfully thin blond woman who looked 
exceedingly bored, except when she stole a glance at 
her diamond-encrusted platinum watch and then forced 
herself to smile at the guy who bought it for her.

A few tables over from them, a sweet-looking older 
couple were talking softly to one another in between 
bites of pasta and snapper. He looked like he might be 
a professor somewhere, as did she, and it seemed as 
though they might be having a delightful conversation 
about something really interesting that Banker Guy and 
his trophy girlfriend would never, ever discuss.

And there in the corner, in a booth that afforded more 
privacy and probably some shelter from the din of 
voices, a decent-looking guy in an open-collared dress 
shirt sat smiling at a stunning red-headed woman 
who...

"What the fu..." Mulder stopped himself before he 
completely finished the sentence that had 
inadvertently come tumbling out of his mouth.

He blinked his eyes several times as though he'd seen 
a mirage, and then he forced himself to look in the 
corner one more time. 

Scully. Scully was sitting in the corner booth and 
smiling at that not even remotely good-looking guy in 
the stupid open-collared shirt that looked ridiculous 
without a tie. Scully was on a date? Holy fucking God. 
Scully was on a date. Not a non-date with him, but a 
real date with some other man. 

His head felt as though it might actually be boiling. 
Was it possible that everything in your field of 
vision could turn red at moments like this? He decided 
that it was. Slowly, almost too slowly, he slid back 
around on the bar stool and shot daggers toward the 
bartender making progress with the young ladies at the 
other end.

"Hey! You!" He pointed at the kid, using a tone that 
had the desired effect of bringing him quickly back to 
where Mulder was sitting. Or, more accurately, to 
where Mulder was stewing.

"Uh, yes, sir?"

"Give me a double shot of Jameson, straight."

"Okay, sir, but I'm pretty sure your dinner will be 
ready in just a minute."

"I'm not hungry anymore," Mulder told him in a flat 
voice. "Just give me the whiskey. I'll pay for the 
meal but you can give it to someone else."

The kid nodded and solemnly reached behind him for a 
bottle on one of the top shelves. With an expert hand 
that would have surprised Mulder if he hadn't been 
otherwise preoccupied, the kid poured two shots of the 
golden liquid into a glass and set it in front of the 
glowering hunchback in the t-shirt and leather jacket.

"That's sixteen dollars. Hey, are you alright, man?"

Mulder reached into his back pocket to pull out his 
wallet and clawed a twenty out of it and onto the 
counter.

"Keep it. Yeah, I'm fine. Fucking fine."

The kid carefully picked up the bill and backed away.

Fine, Mulder thought. Isn't that the right word? Isn't 
that the word she uses when she's pissed off, or 
upset, or sad, or sick, or dying of cancer? Yeah, 
that's it. Fine. He was just fine.

***

He watched them in the mirror on the wall behind the 
bar, peering through bottles of gin and scotch to get 
a semi-fettered view of the scene playing out behind 
him. Scully was laughing. They'd ordered coffee and 
dessert. That freak in the shirt without a tie 
occasionally reached across the table to touch her. 
Mulder was sorry he'd left his gun back at his 
apartment. He wanted to blow that guy's hand off right 
about now for having the nerve to stroke Scully's 
wrist.

He wished now that he were more of a drinker. He'd 
been nursing his second double whiskey for nearly 
thirty-five minutes, taking bitter sips of it now and 
again while his eyes remained fixed on a vision of 
Scully sitting among the normal people on what 
appeared to be a normal date. 

Do not cause a scene. Do not cause a scene. Do not 
cause a scene.

He repeated it to himself over and over again and 
tried to tamp down on the urge to charge over to that 
corner booth and demand to know what the hell was 
going on there.

Wait. They were getting up. Correction. The man from 
whom mothers should hide their children's faces for 
fear of frightening them was getting up and standing 
next to Scully. He offered her his arm and she 
graciously accepted it, allowing him to help her slide 
out of the booth. Then he was holding her coat for her 
and pulling it over both of her arms in one fluid 
motion, as if they'd been practicing this for years. 

That. Is. My. Job. 

Mulder felt the anger in every bone of his body. 

That is my job and she only even lets me do it a third 
of the time. 

This was not happening. He now knew what it meant to 
seethe. He imagined that he was Bruce Banner and, any 
minute, he was going to explode out of his clothing 
into a green monster that would tear Scully's escort 
from limb to limb. He couldn't be held responsible for 
his actions right now.

In the mirror, he saw them walking toward the door and 
he slunk farther down toward the surface of the bar 
where he wouldn't be so obvious. For half a second, he 
thought he caught Scully looking in his direction with 
a puzzled glance, but before she could do anything 
about it, Captain Horrible was sweeping her away and 
out the front entrance.

Mulder motioned urgently toward the bar kid, who had 
officially grown tired of waiting on the crazy guy 
with the raging eyes. He'd been watching this loony-
tune simmering himself in Jameson since the two girls 
had left him with promises to stop by again after 
midnight. He'd been pretty sure the guy was watching 
the cute red-head in the booth and now, having seen 
her leaving with her date a few seconds earlier, he 
was sure of it. Poor slob.

"Hey, what do I owe you for the food? I've gotta go." 
Mulder sounded like he was late to help put out a 
fire.

"Forget it. It's on the house. Take the money you were 
going to spend on dinner and buy her some flowers or 
something, dude." The kid hoped this was not what life 
at forty was going to look like.

Mulder shot him a look that was at first sheepish, 
then irritated, and finally grateful.

"Thanks. I think maybe I should have done that before 
tonight." He shoved his wallet back into his pocket 
and made a hurried exit.

Maybe so, the kid thought. Because that guy with her 
looked a damn sight more stable than you do right now.

***

He stopped just after the first set of doors and 
cautiously surveyed the front of the restaurant 
through the glass. He was surprised to see Scully 
taking the keys from the attendant and getting into 
the driver's side of her own car. 

This guy was letting her drive? What kind of 
testosterone-challenged wimp takes a woman on a date 
and lets her drive? Unbelievable. He didn't even see 
this loser open the door for her.

Scully's car pulled away from the curb and he strained 
to get a good luck at the front passenger window, but 
in the dark, it was hard to tell whether he was seeing 
the interloper or the headrest. Was she taking him 
home with her? His heart actually hurt.

When he was satisfied that Scully had cleared the 
area, he burst through the main doors and lunged in 
the direction of his Jeep Cherokee.

"GODDAMMIT!!!"

There was no Jeep Cherokee waiting for him with 
flashing lights in the fifteen minute loading zone. 
The same fifteen minute loading zone where he had 
parked it - he checked his watch - well over an hour 
ago. 

"I don't fucking believe this!" He yelled and threw 
his car keys hard against the cold cement.

"Sir, is there something I can help you with?" One of 
the valets was standing in front of him and, from the 
look of him, bracing for a confrontation.

"I don't think so," Mulder said tiredly. "Did someone 
tow a Jeep Cherokee away a little while ago?"

The valet nodded apologetically.

"It's a fifteen minute loading zone only, sir."

"Yes. I know," Mulder answered with a clipped voice. 
"I didn't expect to go in there and find my partner on 
a fucking date with some other man so I stayed and had 
a couple of drinks. Clearly, my car should be taken 
away from me and never allowed to see me again."

"Ummmm... why don't you let me hail a cab for you, 
sir?" The valet shifted nervously from one foot to the 
other, no doubt hoping he wouldn't have to tackle and 
restrain another tow truck victim.

Mulder perked up instantly. 

"Yes, a cab," he muttered. "Get me a cab!" He could 
still get to her place and put a stop to this before 
anything truly terrible happened. Assuming that they 
had gone to her place and not to where the soon-to-be-
dead man lived. God, he'd never find them now if 
they'd gone to his place. Please let him live in some 
far suburb that's not remotely convenient for a 
nightcap or anything else.

"Cab, cab, cab!" he sputtered, waving his hands 
impotently at the valet who was in turn waving his 
hands toward the oncoming traffic.

Calm down, he warned himself. They're going to hail 
you a couple of EMTs with restraints if you keep it 
up.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity but was 
probably less than two minutes, a vision in white and 
green pulled up and he leaped into it, slapping 
another twenty in the hands of a very pleased and 
relieved valet. Money was really no object for him at 
the moment. He'd give away every cent he had if he 
could just reach her.

"Take me to Georgetown," he ordered the driver. "Don't 
spare the gas."

***

Mulder had been standing outside of Scully's building 
for a good ten minutes. Swaying occasionally as the 
last of the liquor wound its way through his 
overactive mind, he was struggling to get a good look 
at the shadows he could see moving behind her window. 
Well, actually, he could only make out one shadow at 
any given time. It had calmed him to realize that 
someone's shadow was home in Scully's apartment, as it 
suggested he did not have to worry that she was in an 
unknown location with the unknown man whom Mulder had 
now convinced himself fit the profile of a serial 
killer. Now he only needed to figure out what to do 
next. If any lights went off, so help him, he was 
going in and kicking the door down.

What to do, what to do. There was no guidebook for 
this kind of situation. He knew instinctively that any 
number of decisions by him at this moment could lead 
somewhere very bad. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-
Adventure book from hell, trying to think of a way he 
could intervene in what was happening that would not 
result in Scully refusing to speak to him ever again. 

And admittedly, there was a tiny voice somewhere deep 
in his consciousness whispering to him that he had no 
right to intervene at all. She did not belong to him. 
Maybe she never had. Who was he, really, to react this 
way to the sight of her having dinner with someone 
else? He was her partner. He had been her best friend, 
although he worried that the events of the past month 
had tagged a question mark even on that moniker. He 
was her... he wanted to be her... he had always hoped 
that someday they could be...

Damn. This wasn't going to be easy if he couldn't even 
let himself think the thought that lay just beyond 
language, buried in his heart. He knew exactly what he 
wanted, but he'd always been afraid to say it, even to 
himself.

He steadied his mind and tried to stop swaying.

He wanted to be her lover. He wanted to belong to her.

He shuddered with surprise as the thought broke free 
inside his head and planted itself firmly in his 
frontal lobe. Hers. Mine.

Yes, he thought, for the first time with perfect 
clarity. He was in love with her. He had been for a 
very long time. And even though he'd never really done 
anything about it before today - unless he counted 
that abortive kiss in the hallway the previous summer 
that he didn't think she actually remembered - he felt 
as though they'd been dancing around the subject for 
years. Dancing around a fire, moving closer and then 
further away and then back again, but never touching 
it. Never coming near enough to feel more than the 
occasional wave of heat or the fast pain of an errant 
spark.

Sometimes he imagined that he was dancing with a wild 
animal, although Scully was in almost every way the 
perfect opposite of something wild and feral. When it 
came to her heart, though, he believed that he was 
dealing with something that needed to be tamed. 
Something that could break away and crush him if he 
didn't handle it properly.

Until very recently, he believed that he had earned 
her complete and unqualified trust in the most 
important sense of the word. But even before the 
meltdown of the Consortium, he knew that it would take 
him a very long time to convince her that she could 
trust him with something as easily broken as love. 

He wasn't even categorically certain that she felt the 
same way about him. But there had been enough hints 
over the years, enough moments when they danced so 
close to the fire he thought it would burn him, that 
he had come to believe he wasn't imagining the feeling 
that seemed to course between them. It was as though 
in the middle of this careful primal dance, the wild 
thing he sought to touch sometimes looked at him 
gently for a moment and pleaded to be tamed. And he 
wanted to. He just wasn't quite sure how to do it.  

So here they were. He was standing outside her 
apartment after a frantic taxi ride like some bizarre 
stalker, and she was standing behind a window bathed 
in warm light with some man who knew exactly how to 
slide her coat onto her shoulders. 

He probably didn't have any right to do anything here. 
That was the hard truth. But he knew he'd hate himself 
for the rest of his life if he didn't do something, 
finally and for a change. 

He reached for his cell phone in his jacket pocket, 
pulling it out and pushing one of the buttons so that 
the green screen lit up dimly. He could call her. Make 
up a reason, something to interrupt whatever was going 
on. Yeah, he could do that. It was only a little after 
ten o'clock.

No, he thought again, as he slid the cell phone deep 
into the pocket where it lived. More game playing. And 
it might not even work, he fretted. She might hang up 
with him and go right back to whatever she was... 
doing. He had to go in there and knock.

He swallowed hard as he came to terms with it. He was 
really going to have to walk into that building and 
rap his knuckles on that door. And he probably needed 
to do it soon. If he arrived while they were in the 
middle of... anything... this whole scene might be 
that much worse. 

But what would he say? Should he lie and pretend he 
happened to be in the neighborhood? That might have 
worked before the chill had set in between them, but 
now it would seem bizarre when he couldn't even seem 
to have a casual conversation with her at the office.

Should he just storm in and tell her he loved her and 
whoever was in there with her could just get the hell 
out right now? Hmmmmm. He liked that idea. But then he 
thought it might seem a little bit wacko coming out of 
nowhere, and he was fairly sure she wouldn't care for 
the part about throwing out a man she had invited into 
her home. It was way too caveman, even for him.

He was terrible at this kind of thing. He was nearly 
fearless when he was getting cozy with liver-eating 
mutants in their slime-covered lairs, or trying to 
outwit creepy forces of evil like Mrs. Paddock with 
her "It's been nice working with you" farewell note, 
but this? This scared the shit out of him. He was 
absolutely terrified to move toward that building, and 
equally afraid to move away from it. So he remained 
standing right where he'd first planted his feet, 
frozen by the panic that rose whenever he drew a 
mental picture of Scully's reaction to anything he 
might say.

This was their whole problem, he realized suddenly. 
Lack of movement. Standing still. You never went 
anywhere if you stood still. You just stayed fixed in 
one place, grasping pointlessly at the possibilities 
of what could be. What could be if you only had the 
courage to move toward it and find out.

He was tired of waiting to find out, he decided. He 
wanted to know, even if it ended up being the last 
thing he knew before his heart broke into a million 
ragged pieces inside him. He was going in. No cover, 
no backup. Just him and this gnawing ache in his chest 
that was eating away at him. This gnawing ache which, 
he thought with some amusement, would have eased at 
least a little bit if he'd washed that whiskey down 
with a burger.

***

Scully was lounging on her couch, all rapt attention 
directed toward the man who was speaking.

"You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to 
stick out your chin and say, okay, life's a fact, 
people do fall in love, people do belong to each 
other, because that's the only chance anybody's got 
for real happiness." 

She sighed and shook her head.

Outside the apartment, Mulder's ear was pressed to the 
door. He was deeply confused by the voice he heard 
coming from the other side.

"You call yourself a free spirit, a 'wild thing,' and 
you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. 
Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it 
yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, 
Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever 
you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end 
up running into yourself."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Mulder whispered under 
his breath. He's already figured this much out about 
her after one date? God, maybe this isn't even the 
first date. And he's calling her baby? She's my wild 
thing in a cage, buddy, not yours! And what the hell 
did Texas have to do with it? He was calling a time-
out on this whole thing right here and now.

Scully was startled by the loud and insistent knock on 
her door. She found it hard to take her eyes off this 
man and his wonderfully graveled voice, but she rose 
and moved toward the door anyway. She had a pretty 
good idea who was knocking if it was going on ten-
thirty at night. More likely than not, it would be her 
thoroughly frustrating partner, the same one she was 
nearly positive she'd seen lurking at the bar at Cafe 
Deluxe earlier in the evening. Well, this should be 
interesting, she thought. 

She swung the door open and suppressed a smug smile at 
the sight of Mulder proving her right.

"Mulder." She said his name like she was stating a 
fact.

"Uh, Scully... hey..." He was anything but subtle as 
he craned his neck up and around to get a look at this 
asshole who might be from Texas and was so brazenly 
moving in on his territory. He couldn't see anyone. 

"Uh, I just needed to come here and..." Craning. 
Craning. The only thing he could see from here was the 
light flickering from the television. It looked like 
that movie with Audrey Hepburn and that guy from the 
A-Team where... Oh. Cages and wild things suddenly 
sounded very familiar. Oh.

"Can I help you, Mulder?" Scully's voice was dripping 
with irritation and at least one octave higher than it 
should have been.

Mulder took in a deep breath and huffed it back out, 
trying to think of something to say.

"Looking for something?" she asked pointedly. "Or 
maybe someone?" 

Her nostrils took a hit from the whiff of air that 
Mulder had expelled a second before.

"Oh, I don't believe... are you drunk again, Mulder?"

"Well, I was until about thirty minutes ago, but..." 
Suddenly, this all seemed very familiar.

"Yeah, well, was that before or after you... wait a 
minute. I'm having the strangest sensation of deja 
vu."

Mulder felt impatient but managed to halt the eye roll 
he had nearly started.

"It isn't deja vu when it's actually happened before. 
We've had this conversation. I wasn't drunk then and 
I'm not drunk now but I need to talk to you."

"Mulder, do you know what time it is? What the hell 
are you doing here?"

"Like I said," Mulder answered calmly, "I need to talk 
to you."

"Uh huh. And does this have anything to do with you 
being at Cafe Deluxe a couple of hours ago?"

She watched his eyes dart back and forth like a 
trapped cat and knew immediately that she'd been right 
once again.

"Maybe," he told her with a note of defiance, 
embarrassed that she'd seen him haunting the bar like 
that. "Look, is there someone else here or what? 
Because if there is, I need to talk to you outside. 
And if there isn't, I'd appreciate it if you'd invite 
me in so I could talk to you like a normal person 
without waking all of your neighbors."

Scully found herself at a brief loss for words, just 
before all of the pieces of the puzzle began clicking 
together in her mind. She'd been out with a close 
friend from medical school who was in town for a 
conference. For some unknown reason, Mulder had been 
at the bar. Now he was here, pounding on her door well 
past visiting hours and trying desperately to get a 
good look inside her apartment. He'd thought she was 
on a date and he'd come here to talk to her about it. 
No, more than that. It looked as though he'd come here 
expecting to find her doing something with her "date" 
that Mulder obviously intended to interrupt. Scully 
didn't like where this was going. At all. 

"Mulder, whatever it is you need to talk to me about, 
I think we should discuss it another time. It's late 
and you've been drinking and I'm not comfortable with 
the direction this conversation is taking."

"Scully, listen." 

He placed a tentative hand on the arm she was using 
quite effectively to bar his entrance through the 
door. 

"Please don't make me leave. I need to talk to you. 
It's taken me half an hour to work up the courage to 
come up here and I don't think I'll ever get it up 
again if..." Mulder winced at his word choice and 
hoped against hope that she'd miss the double entendre 
despite her familiarity with his abiding love for 
innuendo. "Please. I really think we need to talk and 
I'd like it to be now."

She looked at him, pleading with her like this, and 
she could almost feel the fear crawling out of her 
body and across her skin. Whatever this discussion was 
going to entail, she didn't feel remotely prepared for 
it. What if she let him in and there was no going 
back? She tensed at the thought. But what if she made 
him leave and there was no returning to this moment? 
What if she shut the door on him and discovered later 
that she'd never find him standing on the other side 
like this again? 

Maybe they could just stand right here forever. Or at 
least for a few more hours while she steadied the 
jarringly fast beating she felt inside her chest. They 
really were standing at a threshold, she realized, and 
she was quite fond of thresholds. Less fond of moving 
through them.

"Please, Scully," he asked her quietly. "Just give me 
a chance here."

She looked at the floor and tried to concentrate on 
her breathing while she considered his request. In. 
Out. In. Out. Carefully. She didn't even realize that 
she was allowing her arm to slide down the doorframe 
and fall to her side until it was there, next to her. 

At least some part of me made a decision, she thought. 

"Alright, Mulder. Come in."

END PART 1 - CONTINUED IN PART 2

_____________________________________________

Scully closed the door behind her, listening for the 
click of the lock like it was the most fascinating 
sound in the world. She watched out of the corner of 
her eye as Mulder paced uncomfortably in the general 
vicinity of the couch.

"Okay, Mulder. Let's have it."

She walked purposefully over to the arm chair and took 
a seat, crossing her legs and arms in a single 
coordinated movement. She had decided against resuming 
her place on the couch where he might very well end up 
sitting next to her. She was fairly certain that Eddie 
Van Blundht was still locked up, or at least taking 
court-ordered muscle relaxants, but she did not know 
what to make of the rattled Mulder who'd just begged 
his way inside. She wanted to err in favor of caution.

Mulder, for his part, was already suffering the 
consequences of his failure to think this all the way 
through before he arrived at her door. 

He felt like he was staring at the blank first page of 
this conversation, with no idea where to begin, and he 
wondered if he should have downed a few more shots of 
Jameson before he'd hopped in his cab. He was so 
relieved to find her alone in here that he'd seriously 
considered turning back around and trying to forget 
that the entire evening had ever happened. The only 
thing that compelled him to stay and put himself 
through this impending awfulness was the possibility 
that The Wrist-Molesting Coat Holder was still lurking 
out there in second date land. 

Well, here goes nothing, he thought. Or here goes 
everything, down the tubes and never to be found 
again. Whatever.

"Okay," he whooshed. "Thanks for letting me come in."

Scully nodded, a bit reluctantly. 

"So. You know, and I know, things have been awkward 
lately." 

He paused, not genuinely expecting an argument but 
hoping in vain that she'd find a way to make this a 
little easier for him. The ensuing silence confirmed 
that he was pretty much on his own for the time being.

"I know the thing with Diana upset you. And I know now 
that I should have trusted you when you told me she 
wasn't working on the same side with us. And I just 
want you to know that I'm sorry for that."

More silence. 

Mulder nervously ran his fingers back through the 
spiky hair jutting up from his head in all kinds of 
weird directions after a long evening of abuse from 
his hands.

"And... and I don't know what else I can say to you on 
that subject. I screwed up and I'm sorry. I can't take 
it back but I really want us to figure out a way to 
move past it. I think what you and I built together 
over the past six years ought to be strong enough to 
survive a few bumps in the road."

Scully snorted, delicately, but still quite audibly.

"A bump in the road, hmmmm? Is that what this was?" 
She tried to push down the bile that seemed to be 
rising up in the back of her throat as the depth of 
her anger finally hit her full force. "I came to you 
with evidence that she was not what she appeared to 
be. That she'd likely been undermining you - and us - 
this whole time. And you didn't want to hear it. You 
pushed me away. How am I supposed to feel?"

Mulder shifted on his feet and, somewhat 
unconsciously, crossed his arms over his chest. He 
felt like a heel about what had happened, but he 
didn't especially enjoy being on the defensive either.

"I'm sure it didn't make you feel very good. I mean, I 
know it didn't. But you have to understand, Scully, I 
would have been just as skeptical if someone came to 
me with evidence that brought *your* motives into 
question."

The change in her face told him instantly that his 
previous thought should have been constructed and 
presented very differently when it left his mouth.

"Do NOT... compare me to that woman as if we're in the 
same category." Her nostrils flared and her chin rose 
a full inch farther toward the ceiling. "I can't 
believe you'd imply that some random person coming to 
you with something questionable about me is the same 
thing as me coming to you with a question about... 
Her." 

"I'm not saying you're the same. That's not what I 
meant," Mulder sputtered miserably. This, in a 
nutshell, was exactly why he had stood outside for far 
too long in thirty degree weather. Paralyzed. 

"I'm saying that I trusted her once and it was hard to 
accept that someone I trusted... someone I lo..." 

He slammed on the brakes before finishing a dangerous 
sentence, deciding that he really needed to work on 
improved coordination between his brain and his mouth.

"Someone you loved." 

Scully threw that gauntlet to the ground, and Mulder 
found himself wishing that he could simply pick up 
those words and carry them off to a duel that would 
settle this. Anything would be preferable to more 
talking.

"She was someone I thought I loved. I guess. Maybe. A 
long time ago and before I..." 

Mulder trailed off, increasingly uneasy about heading 
down this path in spite of all his bluster earlier 
that night. He didn't seem to be saying anything right 
as it was, and that made him all the more reluctant to 
start talking about things that made him feel utterly 
unsure of himself.

"Before you what?" Scully asked quietly, her left hand 
gripping the arm of her chair more tightly.

Before I met you, he thought. He wished there were 
some way to plug her brain into his and let all the 
data in there transfer over effortlessly.

They held a stare between them for a long moment 
before Mulder blinked, letting his end of it fall 
away.

"Before I realized... after she left me... that she 
and I had been all wrong for each other anyway." 

He sounded disappointed with his own words, and he 
was. Why it was so hard to say what he really wanted 
to say? Why did everything that passed between them 
always exist entirely in subtext, where it was wide 
open to misinterpretation and misunderstanding? 

"I see." 

Scully loosened her grip on the chair, relieved and 
surprisingly sad at the same time. She'd expected that 
sentence to end... differently. She brought her hand 
up to rest on the side of her face. 

"Well, it doesn't matter one way or the other. This 
isn't about her. It's about you and me."

"Yes," Mulder replied wistfully. "Yes, it is..." 

He tried gathering his courage one more time for a 
plunge into the unknown. But before he could finish 
his thought and raise the subject that logically 
followed what he'd begun to say, Scully hurried to 
take the reins and steer them firmly back onto more 
neutral ground.

"And what I mean by that is it's about you not giving 
me the benefit of the doubt. Not even the benefit of 
the doubt, Mulder."

He lightly kicked one of the legs on her coffee table 
and raised the volume of his voice for the first time. 

"Alright! I know! How many ways can I tell you I'm 
sorry and I wish I could go back and do it 
differently? Christ! I'm trying here."

"Okay. Okay." The anger dissipated from Scully's voice 
as it took on a more soothing timbre. It was her 
sometimes annoyingly instinctive response to the sound 
of him getting upset. "I just need to make sure you 
understand why what happened is unacceptable to me. 
And I also need to make sure you understand that it 
can't happen again."

"I understand. I do." A note of desperation was 
creeping into Mulder's voice. "I promise you that it 
will never happen again. But *I* need to know that you 
can forgive me. I need to know that things can go back 
to the way they were before."

He walked over to the chair where she had obviously 
isolated herself and sat on the edge of the coffee 
table he'd assaulted with his foot a minute before. 
Now, facing her at eye level, his eyes implored her to 
accept her half of this bargain. He was disappointed 
to see her instead shaking her head, sadly and slowly, 
eyes looking down at her lap.

"It's not that simple, Mulder. Words don't make 
everything right."

Mulder exhaled quickly, a frustrated noise sounding in 
the air as it pushed through his lips.

"Well then, what can I do to make this right? You tell 
me."

Scully shrugged. Not a casual shrug or a dismissive 
shrug, but a shrug that said it simply is what it is, 
and it will be what it will be.

"Do what you said you'd do," she told him. "I just 
need time. That's all." 

She lifted her head to watch the last of the end 
credits for "Breakfast at Tiffany's" rolling across a 
now-muted television. She imagined herself standing in 
the rain with Mulder, just like they had done on their 
very first case together. Only this time they were 
standing on a familiar city block and he was wearing 
that charcoal gray suit she liked so much. She wasn't 
drenched to the bone in a poncho this time, but 
wearing a light summer dress that remained dry beneath 
the umbrella she held over her head as she leaned in 
to kiss him. She wanted to watch that movie. Not the 
one that was playing over her life right now.

"Time." Mulder rolled the word around his head and 
tried to imagine how much time her "time" would 
entail. He thought they'd lost enough time over this 
already. He reached across the deceptively small 
distance between them to cup her knee in his hand. 

And he was immeasurably sad when she flinched at his 
touch and used her own hand to gently push his away.

"Give me time, Mulder," she asked him in a soft voice. 
Her eyes carried the apology he knew she wouldn't 
say.

He leaned back from her, arms falling to his sides. 
Useless. Just like he felt. Mercifully, his cell phone 
began to vibrate in his jacket pocket. It wasn't 
Scully calling obviously and he didn't care much about 
calls from anyone else these days. Still, he pulled it 
out to answer, disinterested but grateful for the 
interruption. 

"Yeah. Mulder."

Scully watched him mumbling into the mouthpiece of his 
phone and pinching the bridge of his nose with his 
free hand. He looked tired and she wanted in the worst 
way to reach back out and trail her fingers lightly 
over the firm line of his jaw. But she couldn't let 
herself do that. Could she? No, she couldn't. He'd 
hurt her, more than she was even willing to let him 
know. One night of apologies prompted by his jealousy 
wasn't the magic wand that waved all that hurt away.

"They're at the restaurant? Okay, I'll head over and 
pick them up. Appreciate the call."

He snapped the clamshell phone closed and shoved it 
back inside his jacket. Reaching behind him 
reflexively to feel for the wallet he now knew he 
wouldn't find in his pocket, he was oddly reassured to 
find confirmation that it was, in fact, not there. It 
was so rare to touch proof of anything in his life, 
even when he was only touching absence as he was at 
that moment.

"That was American Express. I, uh... dropped... my car 
keys on the sidewalk outside Cafe Deluxe and 
apparently I also dropped my wallet inside when I 
thought I was putting it in my back pocket. So, banner 
evening for me all around." 

He rose from the coffee table and wiped slightly 
sweaty palms on his thighs.

"I'd better go pick them up before the place closes."

Scully mentally checked the puzzle pieces she'd 
assembled in her mind and found one missing. "If your 
car keys are there, how did you get here, Mulder?"

"Cab." 

He sounded distant. And now he was getting ready to 
leave. This wasn't what she wanted, was it? What the 
hell did she want? She was only trying to be honest 
and tell him how she really felt about everything, but 
she realized suddenly that she hadn't wanted him to 
accept it so easily. She wanted him to find something 
to say that would fix all of this even though she 
couldn't think of what that could be.

"Well, maybe I should drive you over there then. It'll 
be hard to get another taxi in my neighborhood right 
now." She tried to sound bright and upbeat as she made 
the offer, but the tone fell flat at the end as she 
noticed his eyes refusing to meet hers.

"That's okay, Scully. I don't want to drag you out 
just to fetch my stuff with me." He took a beat. "I 
shouldn't have come over here anyway." 

He lumbered over to the door and took hold of the 
handle, feeling the slow awkwardness of his own 
movements all the way. He had definitely reached that 
stage in an evening of drinking when the liquor seemed 
to have moved into every muscle and bone and the body 
started playing at the wrong RPM.

"Well... I'm glad you did, Mulder." She rose from her 
chair quickly and found herself moving toward him. "I 
appreciate that it wasn't easy to say what you said."

"Right." A half-hearted acknowledgment straight from 
the half of his heart that had slowly gone numb during 
this conversation. "Well, I guess I'll see you on 
Monday. Hopefully."

"Mulder..." Scully rushed to get his name out as she 
walked a few steps closer to where he stood facing the 
door. She pondered the way he seemed to be hesitating 
there like someone had pressed his pause button. "Why 
*did* you come over here tonight? Really?"

Another uncomfortable silence passed in seconds just 
before he finally yanked the door open and walked into 
the hallway. As he did, he turned to face her with 
clear eyes and a heart that weighed heavier inside him 
than it had when he was only thinking about getting 
another man away from her.

"You know why, Scully. I don't want to make an even 
bigger ass out of myself reliving the details."

"Mulder, wait a second," she entreated. "I don't know. 
Not really."

He flashed her a sad smile. He felt strangely free now
that he was standing in the hallway again, on the other 
side of the entry that led into her world.

"I think you really do," he told her patiently. "I 
came to tell you that I don't like you having dinner 
with some other guy. Especially one who can't be 
bothered putting on a tie when he takes you out."

Scully stifled a completely involuntary smile of her own 
at Mulder's old-fashioned notions of how a man should 
dress to take her out to dinner. She remembered that he 
always kept his tie when they went to Cafe Deluxe on 
work nights, although he usually loosened it and opened 
the top button of his shirt. Dwelling a little too long 
on that image of how Mulder often looked at the end of a 
long day, she found herself studying the floor and 
realized that she'd almost followed him past the 
threshold of her apartment. She could probably touch 
him from where she stood if she just reached out.

"Why would you want to tell me that, Mulder?" 

Her voice was soft and nearly lost altogether since 
she was practically speaking into her chest. The 
weakness of the sound only frustrated him more. He 
felt like she was asking him the same question again 
and again and not really listening to the answer he 
was giving her.

"Oh, for chrissakes," he muttered as he let all his 
better instincts toward restraint run away and hide in 
a corner. "Continents move faster than you and I do."

He reached through the doorframe to grasp her neck, 
fixing his thumbs against the edges of her jaw and 
briefly registering the shock that passed over her 
eyes as he did it. This was what he'd hoped to do -
tried to do - in his own hallway last summer and he 
reveled in finally completing the action. He kissed 
her deeply, allowing himself to appreciate the 
pressure that seemed to build as his lips moved 
forcefully against hers. 

Maybe she'd been right, he thought, as he enjoyed the 
feeling of her beginning to respond to him. Maybe 
words never accomplished or fixed anything between 
them. Maybe words were small and inconsequential for 
two people who'd learned over many years to speak to 
one another with small movements and fleeting touches 
and meaningful glances. 

He remembered reading once about a poet who learned to 
speak French fluently for the sole purpose of 
understanding the otherwise impenetrable meaning of 
the word "absence" in that language. Some things 
simply never translated when they lay trapped in 
words.

Feeling the need to meet her eyes again, he 
reluctantly pulled away from this kiss that was 
resonating through various and distant parts of his 
body. He was ridiculously pleased to see her swollen 
lips falling open with belated surprise and to hear 
her struggling to slow her breathing.

"That's the main thing I came here to tell you. I 
realize the timing is all wrong right now. I guess I 
just wanted you to know."

Scully looked dazed. She blinked at him once, and then 
again, before she briefly recovered partial powers of 
speech.

"Wanted me to know that you..." Once again, she 
drifted into a question at the end of what started as 
a statement and then left even the question hanging.

"Yeah. I do." Not missing a beat, he picked up 
the end of her hybrid thought. "In that until-the-end-
of-time kind of way. And I thought... I hoped that 
maybe you do too. So now I'm hoping that when you're 
not angry with me anymore, you'll give that question 
the scrutiny and analysis that you apply to all my 
other intuitive leaps."

He couldn't resist stealing one more kiss before he 
walked away, and so he did. This time he merely 
brushed his lips, slightly chapped from the winter 
cold, across the lush mouth that remained hanging open 
in their wake. He reached his hand up to stroke the 
side of her face with a motion that was gentle and yet 
more possessive than he'd ever attempted before.

"Good night, Scully."

He turned away from her, not quite sure whether to 
feel smug or sorry for himself, and headed toward the 
probably impossible task of finding a ride. Behind 
him, a stunning red-headed woman who'd been laughing 
and chatting over coffee a little more than an hour 
ago stood just inside the light that spilled out of 
her apartment. Speechless.

***

If their lives were a film like he sometimes wished 
they could be, she would have come to him in the next 
scene and told him what he wanted to hear. Or told him 
to crawl under a rock and die. But she would have done 
something one way or the other, because no moviegoer 
would ever have the patience to sit through weeks and 
months of scenes that brought no resolution to 
anything. Hell, he didn't even have the patience to 
watch it and it was his stupid life.

Instead, Scully showed up at their office the 
following Monday and never mentioned a thing. Tuesday 
was the same. And Wednesday. And... so on. 

Admittedly, things improved considerably in every 
other way. She smiled at him occasionally and the 
teasing tone he'd missed so much finally returned to 
her voice. He also stopped worrying that he'd come 
into work one day and find a voicemail from Skinner 
informing him that Agent Scully had transferred to the 
FBI's Pathology Lab and he should consider her to have 
left no forwarding address. And, to be honest, once he 
felt confident again that she wasn't going to leave 
him high and dry in a dark basement office without a 
partner and a friend, he talked himself into the idea 
that anything else would come in its own season.

Of course, he tried to play the whole thing off with a 
forced cool. She wanted time? Alright, he could give 
her time. He'd always been proud of his staying 
power... in life, in work, in bed, and just about 
everywhere else. He could wait this out. He'd just 
keep reassuring himself with the memory of how 
entranced and aroused she'd seemed when he broke away 
from their kiss. 

Yeah, he'd been replaying that memory frequently in 
his head. If it had been a videotape, he would have 
long since worn it out. And like any other 
heterosexual man with a less-than-active social life, 
he always let his mind take that scene toward the 
conclusion he desperately wanted it to have someday. 
Instead of breaking away from her, he imagined that 
he'd pushed her back inside the apartment and kicked 
the door shut behind him. 

From there, he'd played the scene out a hundred 
different ways. Sometimes he'd continue to kiss her 
for what seemed like an hour before he made any 
attempt to remove some of her clothing. Sometimes he'd 
pull her down to the floor by the coffee table and rip 
off that slim black pencil skirt she'd worn to dinner 
that night, the one that hugged all of her curves and 
only covered her shapely legs just past the knee. 
Sometimes he'd drag her into the other room and shove 
her onto the bed so he could immediately cover her 
with his own body. Needless to say, every scenario 
ended with him slamming himself inside and against her 
for a good long while and making her scream his name 
out as he took her over the edge.

The more time that passed, the more his imagination 
started to get a little wilder with the memory of that 
night. He couldn't help it, he told himself, although 
he always ended up feeling like a cad when he was 
done. In his mind, over the course of several months, 
he'd been fucking his partner on that cold February 
evening in just about every position he'd ever known. 
Positions he would never, in a hundred million years, 
even think of asking her to take if they managed to 
reach that point in their relationship before he aged 
beyond being able to pull off those positions himself. 

His dreams and fantasies about her started to mirror 
whatever was going on between them in their everyday 
lives. If she did something to irk him or make him 
feel insecure, he'd stroke off in bed before sleep to 
the mental image of himself fucking her from behind - 
usually against the arm of the chair she'd clung to 
for dear life during their talk that evening - and 
reaching around to make her come just before he let 
himself finish. And on the days when she argued with 
him more than usual or dismissed one of his theories a 
bit too unkindly, he'd inevitably end up running 
through the fantasy where she kneeled in front of him 
in her shower and sucked his cock urgently, like 
she couldn't get enough of it.

And after this had gone on for awhile... after his 
dreams had escalated toward this kind of sex that 
seemed to be filled with anger and resentment... he 
really began feeling like an asshole in earnest. Most 
of the sexual encounters he was imagining in his head 
weren't what he really wanted with her at all. He 
couldn't deny that they all turned him on. Obviously 
they did. But he came to understand that he was acting 
out his enormous frustration with their situation, and 
with her refusal to pick up the ball and run with it 
in any direction at all.

Now, even as he used his own rough hand to simulate 
the sensations of these increasingly anxious and 
disquieting imagined liaisons, he knew that none of 
this was really about fucking her at all. It was about 
love, and wanting, and needing to find a way to 
connect with her. It was his inability to connect with 
her that must have caused all of those feelings to 
contort and twist around in the most primitive part of 
his brain. 

At least his pay-per-view bills had fallen to 
practically nothing. He didn't seem to need the Spice 
Channel anymore when he could construct images of 
himself with Scully that were far more vivid. And the 
release he felt after running through these scenes in 
his mind was, he decided, ultimately good. Good and 
necessary. It allowed him to get up the next morning 
and face her with a smile and a hope in his heart, 
feeling only slightly guilty about all the things he'd 
imagined doing to her, and making her do to him, the 
night before.

On his bad days, he was a little heartsick over the 
absence of any forward progress in their alternately 
tedious and frantic dance around the fire. Yet he also 
knew without a doubt that he'd done the right thing by 
walking away from her that night. You can't tame a 
wild thing by jumping all over it and beating it down 
just at the second when it looks like it might be 
willing to trust you. He was in this for the long haul 
and he was terrified of messing it all up with a wrong 
move or an unwanted touch. He'd told her where she 
stood with him. Now he'd just have to wait for her to 
feel calm and safe enough to consider where he stood 
with her.

Still, Scully had a startling capacity to 
compartmentalize everything in her life for great 
spans of time. If something was too difficult or 
painful for her to handle, he knew she'd settle that 
thing neatly in a box and place it on a shelf in her 
mind where it was always within reach but required no 
active attention from her. He was pretty sure that 
their non-encounter at Cafe Deluxe and the actual 
encounter at her apartment that followed were now 
sitting in just such a box in her head, probably 
marked with a biohazard symbol.

It was discouraging. But he tried to believe that a 
day would come when she'd feel ready to look in that 
box one more time. 

So he tried not to count all the days that had passed 
since he'd kissed her. He focused on the other events 
and changes of their lives. How he'd secretly enjoyed 
playing house with her in that truly disturbing 
housing development out in California. How his 
waterbed had sprung a leak and forced him to visit an 
honest-to-God furniture store, where he'd chosen a 
replacement bed with some goofy thought for what 
Scully might and might not like. How he'd been 
embarrassingly flattered by the possessive posture 
she'd taken with Karin Berquist when they were 
investigating the Wanshang Dhole. 

And just about every Saturday night around eight 
o'clock, he'd head over to Cafe Deluxe to pick up 
takeout. He knew he was going there partly because it 
made him think of her. And partly out of a completely 
ridiculous and nonsensical desire to make sure she 
wasn't sitting in a corner booth with That Guy, even 
though he knew full well that D.C. was a city with 
more than one fine dining establishment, and knew that 
she'd be unlikely to return for another date to what 
he considered the Scene of the Crime. 

Still, he'd made friends with the valet who had 
flagged down a cab for him when his Jeep Cherokee was 
hauled away. He'd park in the loading zone and slip 
Miguel a five to keep an eye out for tow trucks. 
Inside, he'd grab a quick beer at the bar while he 
waited for his food, and that bartender kid, Colin, 
would always ask him how everything was going with the 
"pretty red-haired honey."

"You know how it is... we'll see," Mulder would sigh, 
trying to sound optimistic. 

One Saturday, he'd gotten caught up in some awful 
original movie on the Sci-Fi Channel and was over an 
hour late picking up his dinner at the restaurant. 
When he'd walked in, Colin had greeted him with a cat-
that-ate-the-canary smile.

Mulder had laughed.

"You look pretty happy. Did you meet some twenty-year-
old gymnast or something tonight?"

"Naw," Colin had smirked, pleased to be able to give 
this guy Mulder something to go along with his burger 
and fries. "That lady you like. She was in here 
earlier tonight."

Mulder's heart had dropped a few inches lower in his 
chest.

"Yeah? Who was she with?" he'd asked nervously.

"She wasn't with anyone, dude. She walked in and 
looked around for a minute and then came over here. 
Asked me if I'd seen that guy who comes in here every 
Saturday night to pick up his burger. I told her you 
hadn't been in yet and she walked back out. Looked 
disappointed, dude."

How bizarre, Mulder had thought. Why would she come 
over here looking for him when she could call him on 
his cell if she needed to reach him?

"Is that all she said?" The words had come out in a 
pitch much higher than he'd intended.

Colin had smiled at the sap who didn't seem to realize 
his face lit up when anyone mentioned that cute red-
head, thinking this guy might have even been cool 
once, back in his day.

"I asked her if she wanted me to give you a message."

"And?" Mulder had hoped he wouldn't have to drag the 
kid into a chair in front of a very bright light in a 
very dark room.

"She said no message," Colin had shrugged. "Said she was 
hungry and figured she might catch you."

Mulder had felt a grin gradually breaking out on his 
face. She was hungry and thought she might catch him. 
He probably shouldn't read too much into that, the 
rational side of his brain had reminded him. But the 
less rational side had imagined it could smell 
something good cooking at that moment. Something that 
smelled a lot like progress.

END PART 2 - CONTINUED IN PART 3

_____________________________________________

Right around lunchtime one Thursday afternoon - just 
three days before the world premiere of the Sci-Fi 
Channel's original film "Spider God of the Yeti People," 
starring Joey Lawrence and Andrew Shue - Mulder announced 
that he was heading out to get a hot dog from the corner 
vendor who'd reappeared with the spring weather. 

Scully looked up from the report she was finishing on 
Pinker Rawls and his son, Trevor.

"Mind some company?" she asked him casually. "I could 
go for a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut."

Mulder looked a little surprised and gave her one of 
his inscrutable half-smiles.

"I didn't think I'd ever see you eating a hot dog 
again, Scully. What with this health food kick you've 
been on lately."

"Mulder, just because I happen to like salads for 
lunch doesn't mean I'm on a health food kick. And it 
certainly doesn't mean I don't enjoy a hot dog once in 
a while."

"Face it. You're a leafy green eating machine. If this 
were the Jurassic Period, you'd definitely be an 
Apatosaurus."

"Well, obviously I wouldn't be because I'm about to 
get a hot dog with you."

They continued their argument as they rode up on the 
elevator and walked outside. Mulder speculated as to 
whether the Apatosaurus might have occasionally 
snacked on a lizard or some other tiny dinosaur, 
thereby making his analogy appropriate. Scully 
reminded him that an Apatosaurus would not have had 
the teeth to catch and chew that kind of meal, and 
Mulder argued that they couldn't really know for sure 
that the Apatosaurus didn't pay another dinosaur to 
catch his meal and chew it up for him. Perhaps in 
exchange for some of the best leaves from the very top 
of the tree.

"Scully," he argued, "that kind of logic would be like 
someone digging me up in my apartment a few million 
years from now and concluding I couldn't have eaten 
meat, unless it was raw, because there were no cooking 
implements anywhere around me."

She rolled her eyes and ordered her hot dog as 
previously advertised, while he, of course, got one 
with everything on it. The guy asked for five dollars 
and Mulder pulled a money clip out of his front pocket, 
making a grand gesture with his hand to indicate 
that he was picking up the tab for both of them. She 
found herself scrutinizing the money clip from which 
he unfolded a crisp five dollar bill.

"Mulder, what happened to your wallet?"

"Hmmmmm?" He was already chewing happily on the messy 
mound of food in his hand.

"Your wallet. You're using a money clip."

"Wafffff, issssss?" 

He waved the wad of bills at her and she nodded as he 
swallowed a large mouthful of food.

"Wallet's still in my back pocket. I stared carrying a 
money clip in my front pocket because the wallet was 
getting too bulky and ruining the line of my suit."

"The line of your suit." She took a small bite of her 
own hot dog, not having tried to hide the skepticism 
in her voice and not quite believing that Mulder even 
knew the meaning of that phrase. "So what, are you 
that flush with cash?"

"No," Mulder laughed. "Lots of ones and fives, I 
guess. I keep a couple twenties and fifties in the 
wallet."

"Huh." Scully shook her head with amused confusion and 
chewed on some sauerkraut. "When did this start? I 
never noticed."

"I don't know..." Mulder shrugged. "A year or so ago 
maybe. Clearly you're not looking at my ass or you 
would have appreciated the reduction in the size of 
its right side."

Apparently realizing what he'd just said, Mulder's 
eyes darted away from her and he took a gigantic 
bite of his food. She knew he was feeling self-
conscious about throwing innuendo her way again 
after... that night. Before, he'd done it all the 
time. Snicker material straight from the junior high 
boys' locker room that rolled right off his tongue. 
But since that night, he hadn't made those kind of 
jokes anymore and she'd been surprised to realize that 
she almost missed them. Almost.

"How can I not look at your ass, Mulder? You're always 
running off in front of me somewhere." She gave him a 
warm smile, trying to let him know he hadn't said 
anything that made her uncomfortable. "I just didn't 
know you were still developing new habits at your 
age."

He slowed his ambling to a stop, chewing thoughtfully 
as he did, and he swiveled to face her.
 
"At my age? Ouch. You know, Scully, people change 
sometimes. Sometimes it's not big stuff, but it would 
be incredibly tedious if we always stayed the same." 

His voice was light but she couldn't help feeling like 
he was trying to say something important to her. It 
was Mulder Code, though, and she didn't always speak 
it fluently. The look in her eyes must have told him 
that she wasn't following him because he just sighed 
and started walking again. 

"Sometimes it's not such a good system though. I 
didn't realize I'd dropped my wallet at, uh... Cafe 
Deluxe that, uh, night a couple months back because I 
always use the money clip for tips and small stuff 
like a short cab ride."

Scully winced at his explicit mention of that evening, 
a completely reflexive reaction that she hadn't seen 
coming and couldn't have pre-empted. Luckily, he 
wasn't looking at her right then and so she didn't 
think he noticed. 

The wince had come because she'd never heard him 
reference that night since it had happened. Not once. 
It was as if she'd been sitting in a pitch black room 
for a few weeks and someone opened the door to let 
blinding sunlight cascade in. Of course she'd wince at 
that. 

In the days that followed that night in February, the 
memory of it had started to feel like some sort of 
tripped-out dream. 

Dinner with a friend she'd known since her early 
twenties had reminded her of how normal her life used 
to be. They'd had a conversation full of normal 
topics: the weather, some article he'd seen in the New 
England Journal of Medicine that he'd thought she'd 
find interesting, friends with whom she hadn't kept 
up, a former professor who'd died suddenly, and 
whether Charleston was hotter and more humid than D.C. 
in the spring. It had been so normal that it actually 
felt strange.

Then she'd gone home and settled in to watch the last 
half of a favorite movie, only to find Mulder banging 
on her door with whiskey on his breath and a shade of 
deep green dancing in his eyes. He was making clumsy 
apologies for the whole Fowley debacle, and she 
thought he might have put his hand on her knee at one 
point, and then he was leaving and she hadn't been 
happy about it and wasn't sure why, and then he'd been 
kissing her of all things, and they'd had an exchange 
so vague that she'd finally decided she completely 
misinterpreted it, and then he was walking away to 
find himself a cab when she'd all but told him he'd 
have an easier time flagging down an alien ship at 
that time on a Saturday night.

And then he never brought any of it up again. He'd 
acted like he hadn't said anything out of the ordinary 
to her or kissed her in a way that she remembered made 
her legs feel unsteady. She'd finally decided not to 
think anymore about a night that bled so far outside 
the lines of her usual life that it didn't seem quite 
real. 

But now, that night was back, alive and breathing in 
Mulder's passing reference. For some reason, she 
didn't really want to let it die away again.

"I guess... we haven't been to Cafe Deluxe as often 
lately, have we?"

She spoke softly and was, therefore, taken aback by 
Mulder's exuberant reply.

"Oh, I go there all the time! Every Saturday night I 
go pick up a burger and fries. I know the valets now, 
and the bartender. They pretty much have my food 
waiting for me now at eight o'clock. I don't even have 
to call ahead anymore!"

He had grinned at her, looking almost proud, and 
Scully felt her chest tighten immediately. Right in 
front of her, he'd lit up like a football stadium at 
night, talking about a place where people knew him by 
name and expected him to come by at a certain time on 
a certain day. It was just about enough to break her 
heart.

He goes there by himself, she thought. He looks 
forward to it every Saturday and then he drives over 
there and picks up his food, exchanges a few words 
with people who don't know a thing about him, and then 
goes home and eats alone. And he apparently enjoys it. 
The thought of it made her incredibly sad.

Why wasn't he out doing something on a weekend? Why 
didn't he have any friends to keep him from needing to 
see familiar employees at a restaurant? Why didn't he 
at least eat his damn burger at the bar like a regular 
person would? 

"Mulder, why do you pick up the same takeout every 
Saturday night? Don't you get tired of the same food 
every week? And don't you get tired of eating at home 
by yourself?"

The grin he'd been wearing faded away but faded too 
gradually, like someone was peeling away a band-aid from 
an open wound instead of ripping it off quickly. He looked 
down at his feet and shoved his hands in his pockets. 

"You make it sound kind of pathetic when you say it 
like that, Scully."

Well, it was a little pathetic, she thought. But she 
hadn't wanted to make him feel that way exactly. She 
just didn't understand. 

She found herself cataloguing traits in him that were 
wasted on an evening by himself in his apartment. He 
was obviously brilliant, and witty when he was in the 
right mood, and generous when it was someone he cared 
about, and kind to people from whom someone else might 
have flinched or turned away. His face had been shaped 
by pain infused with hope. It was very young in some ways 
and old in others. A face that should make people want 
to sit down next to him and tell him their stories. 
And his eyes... eyes that had fire in them and responded 
instantly to someone who was intelligent and challenging. 
Eyes that plainly showed all the curiosity and wonder 
that lay just beyond his sometimes cynical exterior. 

Did he not see that? Did other people not see it? She 
did. Why was he always wandering off alone like a wolf 
that had tossed himself out of his own pack before the 
other wolves even had a thought to drive him away?

"Mulder, it's not pathetic. I just wondered why you'd 
want to do the same thing every Saturday night. Same 
burger, same place, same routine... I mean, there's more 
to life than that, you know?"

"I know there is," he said quietly, talking to the 
ground. There was an edge to his voice. "I'm just 
waiting for it, that's all."

"Waiting for what, Mulder? I don't get it." She was 
trying to make her words sound kind and she rubbed his 
arm gently as she spoke.

He lifted his head and looked at her with an 
expression that she couldn't quite read but that 
seemed far away and full of yearning. Then he took a 
too-deep breath and immediately pushed it back out 
into the world. The act had the effect of making 
breathing look painful, though she knew as his doctor 
that couldn't be the case.

"I'll know what I've been waiting for when it gets 
here."

And he turned and walked away, not back toward the 
building, but away toward the street where'd they just 
been. He didn't look behind him, and somehow she knew 
that she wasn't supposed to follow him as he cleared 
the edge of the sidewalk and weaved through stopped 
traffic to cross.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" She didn't 
even realize that she'd said it out loud.

***

Three days later, at 8:45 on a Saturday night, she was 
sitting alone at her kitchen table in front of a 
nicely arranged presentation of empanadas panama and 
pollo salsa de coco limo. She had pushed the food 
around on her plate for about ten minutes, taken a few 
bored bites and chewed them far too thoroughly, and 
was now starting to flash back to childhood dinners of 
meatloaf that she'd treated the same way. Memories of 
meatloaf were what finally pulled the curtain down on 
the current meal. Maybe she was an Apatosaurus after 
all. She got up and walked away from the table, 
feeling like she should apologize to the perfectly 
good appetizer and entree that she'd snubbed.

She wasn't really hungry, she realized, which was odd 
because she'd been hungry an hour or so ago. She'd 
thought about getting dinner around 7:30 and had begun 
running through the list of options in her head. 

She'd wanted to pick up Thai, then considered Indian, 
then wondered if she might feel like Chinese, and then 
found herself thinking about Mulder. Which, at first, 
had seemed completely out of sync with the rest of her 
thought process. But she'd remembered her conversation 
with him a few days earlier and it had occurred to her 
that he'd probably be heading over to Cafe Deluxe to 
pick up his dinner.

In less than five minutes, Scully had found herself in 
her car, heading toward the restaurant she and Mulder 
used to frequent together, and feeling good about the 
idea of surprising him and maybe convincing him to 
stick around and have his burger with her at a table. 
That would be nice, she had thought. She had started 
looking forward to it more and more as she came closer 
to arriving at her destination. She didn't like this 
business of him coming out of his cave only to find 
food and then hauling it back to his lair alone. 

Driving along, it had occurred to her that his 
Saturdays weren't actually that different from hers, 
although she at least managed to pick up takeout at a 
different place every week. As she kept one foot on 
the gas and the other hovering right over the brake 
pedal, she had wondered why she didn't notice before 
that her weekends had been a little flat lately. After 
Kersh had stuck them in the bullpen doing the FBI's 
scut work, Mulder had started coming over on Saturdays 
with files that ostensibly related to their continuing 
covert work on the X-Files. They'd usually ended up 
getting a bite to eat or, occasionally, going to a 
movie. And now they didn't do that anymore.

And that was the moment when Scully had almost sailed 
right through a four-way stop, only shaken back to 
reality by the loud horn that had risen and faded as 
an angry driver passed close to the front of her car. 
She had pulled over to the curb, where the dawning 
awareness suddenly flooding through every sector of 
her brain wouldn't result in a nasty moving violation.

Mulder used to be with *her* on Saturday nights. She 
was the friend who accompanied him to places where 
there were people and lights and laughter. She was the 
friend that was supposed to care where he was, and 
whether he was on time, and whether he was getting 
what he needed, so he wouldn't have to look for those 
things from strangers waiting on him at a bar. She 
wasn't his only friend, but she was the really 
important one, just as he was the really important one 
for her. And she was the reason they both spent their 
Saturdays by themselves now. 

It had been staring her in the face for at least four 
days and she hadn't seen it. Then again, neither had 
she seen the giant saucer that Mulder swore had broken 
out of the ice and flown into the sunset. At her more 
self-aware moments like this one, she wondered if she 
mainly saw what she wanted to see.

Suddenly mesmerized by the image of her hands on the 
wheel, Scully had finally let them fall to her lap and 
shifted her gaze to the hazard button blinking 
rhythmically on the dashboard. She couldn't recall 
ever in her life feeling like such a complete louse.

She hadn't found him at Cafe Deluxe when she'd arrived 
there. For some reason, on that night, he'd been late 
or hadn't shown up. She'd waited outside for a few 
minutes, a little worried, finally convincing herself 
that he'd probably decided to change his routine after 
she'd dressed him down for it the other day. So she'd 
picked up something at that new Mambo Grill place and 
headed back home, only to discover that she wasn't 
hungry anymore.

Except she was.

Something inside her was hungry for the first time in 
a long time. Something felt empty. Hollowed out and 
yet churning with a substance that seemed to burn right 
below the surface of her skin. Something that 
had roared into her alert mind for a few seconds on 
that night when Mulder kissed her, before she'd 
quickly quelled it and driven it back to its 
unconscious state.

Something that was waking up all over again. And this 
time, she worried, maybe waking for good.

***

Not long before Scully began feeling that nervous 
stirring just behind her eyes, a strange young man - a 
writer - moved in next door to Mulder. He'd moved 
there in order to be closer to Scully, and he'd been 
disappointed at the start to discover that the there'd 
been some sort of falling out between the two FBI 
agents and she wasn't coming around as often anymore.

But just like the ground outside welcoming the spring, 
the writer observed, other things had finally begun to 
thaw as well. He'd seen Agent Scully in the building 
once or twice recently and it had inspired feverish 
all-night sessions working on the novel in which she 
played a central role. After months of observing and 
studying her character, he thought he'd detected a 
change in her. She seemed somehow restless now, where 
before he'd seen her as the picture of calm. It had fed 
his obsession with her and the notion that she could fall 
in love with him if given the chance.

So he began writing a story for her that might fulfill 
his own fondest wishes as an ancillary matter but, he 
assured himself, was driven by his desire as an author 
to see her character become what she was meant to be.

***

The Padgett case was not really what Mulder needed at 
the moment. The idea of a man who was obsessed with 
Scully, writing her into uncomfortably torrid sexual 
encounters in his novel, was not exactly a calming 
breeze through Mulder's agitated state of mind. But 
the idea that she might be responding to this wack 
job? Finding her sitting on Kafka's bed in the next 
apartment, in near darkness and without a single light 
turned on? It was a little much for someone who wasn't 
the poster child for stable behavior when something 
was bothering him.

Now Scully was defending this beatnik reject who was 
oh-too-serious an author to have a couch and a 
television. She was actually trying to convince him 
that Padgett might simply be imagining these bizarre 
murders, even though he was writing about them in 
graphic and accurate detail and well in advance of 
their occurrence.

"If he imagines it, it's a priori - before the fact. I 
think that's pretty clear from what he wrote about 
you. You know you're in here, don't you?"

God, he almost hoped she hadn't read it. He was 
certain that she'd be mortified by the things this guy 
had her doing. At least Mulder didn't put this stuff 
down on paper when he pictured it.

"I read a chapter. What does he say?"

"Well, let's just say it ends with you doing the naked 
pretzel with 'the stranger' on a bed in an unfurnished 
fourth floor apartment."

What the hell was that look on her face? Was that... 
no, it couldn't be. That looked almost like guilt. Did 
she do something with this guy?! Had she imagined doing 
something with this guy?! He wanted someone to knock 
him out until she came to her senses because he didn't 
think he could take this any longer. It was one thing 
for her to ignore him and live a solitary life, but it 
was a whole other thing for her to play the willing 
center of attention for sociopaths. 

"I'm assuming that's a priori, too?" 

Mulder's voice was like a challenge to a throwdown. He 
was somewhat relieved when she blushed and her eyes 
skittered away from his. 

"I think you know me better than that, Mulder."

Christ, he hoped he did. What was going on with her? 
Two months ago, Scully would have probably kneed 
Padgett in the groin if he'd invited her into the 
little cell he called home and told her he'd been 
stalking her. Instead, she was letting him make her 
coffee and sitting on his bed and sounding annoyed - 
annoyed! - when Mulder kicked in the door to rescue 
her. He couldn't recall her ever sitting on *his* bed 
in *his* apartment, but she was suddenly up for 
sitting on the bed of some guy with a typewriter and a 
freak flag. Maybe the apocalypse could be coming with 
the millennium after all.

"Well, you might want to finish it," he told her.

Yeah, you might want to see what this yahoo with a 
goatee had in mind for you and then see if you're 
still willing to defend him. 

He left her with the manuscript and wondered in 
passing why he was practically daring her to read 
something like that. 

***

She had wrestled with the events of the past several 
days in her head, trying to figure out what why she 
was feeling so strange. She wasn't sure. But she felt 
a little bit like a rattle with too many things 
bouncing around inside.

What was it about lunatics that seemed to draw her 
into their apartments and even into their arms? At 
least Ed Jerse had seemed like a harmless everyman 
when she met him, although in retrospect, his 
apartment should have been a big clue. But Padgett had 
practically announced himself as a card-carrying 
member of the crazy club, and she'd ended up knocking 
on his door and entering his apartment and imagining 
an encounter with him on his bed. She wouldn't have 
given either of them a second glance if she'd simply 
passed them on the street, but the idea that they were 
drawn to *her* seemed to pull Scully toward them like 
a magnet, against all her better judgment and 
instincts.

In the wake of another tense conversation with Mulder 
where he'd implied again that Padgett might be writing 
about her from experience, she'd slowed her thoughts 
down and tried to isolate the one that had kept her 
moving forward into Padgett's apartment. And she'd 
realized that she wanted to know why. Why was he drawn 
to her? Why did he find her alluring? What was it 
about her that would compel him to pen a twelve-page 
passage describing an erotic encounter with her?

"You read what he wrote about you. Are you trying to 
tell me that he got inside your head? That what I read 
is true?" Mulder had sounded almost hostile when he'd 
asked her.

She'd blanched at the accusation: "Mulder, of course 
not."

But what had she meant by "of course not?" 

Of course not, she'd never sleep with a guy who was 
obviously imbalanced and might be a murderer? She'd 
done it once before. 

Of course not, she'd never be as wanton and 
unapologetically sexual as Padgett had written her to 
be? What he'd written hadn't seemed altogether 
unfamiliar and certainly hadn't shocked her. 

Of course not, she'd never look at anyone but Mulder 
because their confusing friendship had all the sexual 
tension she needed? Maybe that one wasn't so far from 
the bulls eye. Why else would she feel the need to 
reassure him immediately and definitively that what 
he'd read was fiction?

And who the hell was Mulder anyway to be throwing 
these veiled accusations her way with that same look 
he'd had the night he'd kissed her? Other men came 
around and he started beating his chest and howling 
like she belonged to him. And then as soon as 
they left, he went back to his desk and buried his 
head in a file, or dragged her out into the field to 
investigate vampires and water monsters. Half the 
time, she felt like a toy truck he left in a corner 
until some other boy wanted to play with it and then, 
suddenly, Mulder wanted to play with that truck more 
than anything else in the world.

She didn't belong to him. She wasn't his. He'd never 
staked a claim when he wasn't jealous or angry or 
desperate, and she didn't know if she wanted him to 
stake a claim at all. She just wanted to stop feeling 
like she was in some permanent state of limbo. And 
maybe, for just a second or two, Padgett had made her 
feel like she wasn't.

***

They'd come to release him from the jail cell he was 
occupying, a cage he wouldn't have minded so much if 
he'd had his typewriter with him. Even without the 
machine, he'd managed to finish a new passage for his 
novel with a pen and some paper he'd requested. But 
now, it was time to go home. Agent Scully's partner 
had failed to tie him directly to the murders and was 
being forced to set him free.

"Mr. Padgett... you can go. We apologize for our 
mistake. You're free to finish your book."

Yes, he thought. I am ready to finish it now. 

"Thank you," he said sincerely, beginning to walk 
away. Then he recalled the importance of truth and 
accuracy in writing and turned back around to face his 
apparent rival and the object of their mutual 
affection. 

"I made a mistake myself."

"What's that, Mr. Padgett?" Agent Scully's partner 
was entertainingly snide.

He took one long last look at the beautiful woman who 
had told him with such defiance in her eyes that 
loneliness was a choice.

"In my book, I'd written that Agent Scully falls in 
love, but that's obviously impossible. Agent Scully is 
already in love."

Having been a city boy for most of his life, and not 
having seen much of the outside world regardless of 
where he lived, Padgett had never really understood 
what people meant when they said someone looked like 
a deer in headlights. Until now. He thought he'd just 
seen two of them.

***

Mulder shut the door firmly as the last of the crime 
scene forensics investigators and homicide detectives 
finally cleared out of his apartment. The brief 
investigation of Padgett's apparent suicide and the 
attack on Scully had been more awkward than a seventh 
grade after-school dance. 

Padgett did indeed appear to have ripped his own heart 
out with his bare hands, and neither Mulder nor anyone 
from D.C. Metro had previously believed that to be 
physically possible. Yet there he was, heart in hand, 
raw skin from his own chest buried under his 
fingernails, and not a sharp cutting tool to be found 
anywhere nearby.

Scully, meanwhile, had been wearing a shirt that was 
soaked through with her own blood but didn't have a 
visible scratch anywhere on her. The forensics people 
hadn't known whether to dust her for prints or ask for 
her autograph. And Scully, being Scully, did not want 
to tell the detectives what she and Mulder both knew 
to be the real story of what had happened to her. So, 
in an homage to crimes everywhere and the criminal 
defendants who commit them, Scully had insisted that 
she didn't know how the blood had ended up on her 
shirt and didn't remember anything except a hooded man 
pushing her to the floor.

As he left, a Detective Francisco had kindly reached 
out to shake Mulder's hand and tell him the police 
would be in touch. 

Yeah, Mulder had thought. He'd sit right by the phone.

"I gotta tell you. This is the strangest 
suicide/attempted homicide I've ever been called to. 
They need a special team for this kind of thing."

Mulder had just nodded.

"Yeah. They should have one of those." 

And now he was steeling himself to go back into the 
living room and face Scully. He would have preferred 
to watch her from here, sitting on his couch in a 
ragged old Georgetown sweatshirt he'd given her, 
leaning forward with elbows on her knees and hands 
pressed to her forehead. He was, he admitted to himself, 
a little unnerved by her when someone else had backed 
her into a figurative corner.

Adding to his fear was the fact that he'd never seen 
her the way she was after he'd found her covered in 
blood, lying still and looking lifeless, only to awake 
suddenly and claw at his back as he held her. She'd 
begun to sob and had hung onto him like he was the 
last lifeline that could pull her from a storm at sea. 

It hadn't been necessary for her to explain what had 
happened. He knew. Scully had never been so abject in 
her terror in all the time they'd been partners, even 
with all of the horrible things they'd seen. 

But then the police had come and she was like a 
completely different person. Calm, collected, and to 
the point. No crying. Everything was flat, from her 
tone to her affect. One of the EMTs had examined her 
and informed Mulder she was acting that way because 
she was in shock. Mulder wasn't sure that shock alone 
explained the transformation, and now he wasn't sure 
what to expect when he went back into that room.

He turned off the overhead light as he passed the wall 
switch, and he thought he could see her back relaxing 
a bit once the glare was gone. The room was now
lit only by the small desk lamp a few feet away from 
her, which cast a golden glow but didn't really provide
true illumination. 

Careful not to make any sudden moves, he sat down across 
from her instead of beside her because he knew how she 
felt about her space at times like this. He was perched 
on the coffee table where they'd been focusing all their 
attention only a few hours ago, watching the live video 
feed of Padgett typing away in the next room. 

"Scully, can I get you anything? Do you want something 
to drink? I could pick up some food if you're hungry." 

He could talk all night just to fill up this deadly 
silence, but he fought the urge to ramble on and 
waited for her to say something. Finally, she lifted 
her head slowly, though her body remained hunched over 
her legs. He saw all kinds of things going on in her 
eyes and it scared him.

"Mulder... what happened to me... is impossible. I 
can't reconcile what I felt with what I know."

Well, she's always looking for scientific proof. It 
doesn't get much more authentic and convincing than 
having it happen to you.

"Maybe nothing is impossible. I think that's what 
Padgett believed. He believed that he could will 
something to exist or happen through his writing, and 
it looks like that's exactly what he did."

"It is impossible." She placed even greater emphasis 
on the word. "Someone had his hand inside my chest 
three hours ago and he was holding my heart and 
pulling on it. The pain was excruciating. I passed out 
from it. And then I woke up and he was gone and you 
were there and there's no wound, no point of entry, 
nothing. It's insane. I think I'm going insane."

"No, Scully." 

He reached his hand out to touch her knee and 
immediately flashed back to her apartment on that 
night in February, when they'd been sitting just like 
this and he'd made the same motion, only to have her 
recoil and push him away. But this time she didn't 
move. She let him place his hand where he wanted it 
and he pressed against her knee gently, trying to 
bring her back to their reality.

"I don't understand what happened tonight any better
than you do. I'm just glad that you're not hurt."

"What makes you think I'm not hurt?" she asked him 
icily, the shift in her mood happening so quickly that 
he wondered if he'd somehow lost a few minutes in 
between his comment and her question. "No wound, no 
pain? Is that it?"

Oh, no. They weren't going to play this game tonight. 
He knew she was baiting him, even if she didn't know 
it herself, because she wanted an excuse to lash out 
at somebody now that the hooded man had vanished. A 
few months ago, he would have allowed her to do it and 
then licked his own wounds later. But he'd grown weary 
of the way the two of them seemed to channel all their
pain into anger and then pressed launch.

"Knock it off, Scully. I'm upset about this too and 
I'm not interested in being a punching bag right now."

Well, she clearly hadn't expected that. Her eyes 
widened visibly, just before she became aware 
of it and then narrowed them back into a glare.

"Fine. I need to get going anyway."

She was up and off the couch in a flash and managed to 
move a whole half-step away from where she was 
standing before he caught her arm in a tight grip. 
Rising to meet her and thereby keep her from throwing 
him off balance and slipping away, he stroked her 
gently with his thumb even as his fist held on more 
securely.

"No. No way," he said softly. "You're staying with me 
tonight. I'll sleep on the couch."

She looked at him. Really looked at him. And those 
things in her eyes that had scared him before started 
sparking and crashing into one another. He saw that 
wild thing looking back at him, feeling the bridle on 
itself and getting ready to kick and bolt. He waited 
for her to fight with him. To look away and order him 
to let go of her. But her eyes weren't looking for an 
escape. They were boring right through him, ice and 
fire together in a look that most people would see and 
immediately identify as rage.

"And what makes you think I'd want you to sleep on the 
couch?" She lowered her voice to a register that 
sounded deadly and precise. 

He instantly understood what was about to happen and 
a chill inched its way up the edge of his spine. This 
was all wrong, he thought. Don't do this. Please don't. 

His thumb stopped its soft motions, but not soon 
enough for him to halt the hand that began moving 
with total abandon over his chest, or the lips that 
pressed against his with far too much force. 

He was confused for a few breaths and, just for a 
split-second, he forgot where he was. This felt so 
much like the dreams he'd had for a long time after 
he'd kissed her. She was hungry for him in those 
dreams, letting herself become something wild and 
letting him do the same. But now it was really her 
hand stroking him insistently through his jeans and 
commanding him to respond. Really her mouth on his 
throat, and really her desperate voice telling him how 
much she wanted him and always had. He'd imagined just 
this kind of touching. Just this kind of urgency. Just 
this kind of fury. 

And he didn't want any part of it this time. Been 
there, dreamt that, felt like a dick about it every 
single time. He knew what would happen if he let her 
do this. He'd never see her again.

"Scully, stop..." 

Now both of her hands were moving together in a frenzy 
to pull on the strap of his belt and the buckle that 
held it in place. 

"Scully! Stop!"

He grabbed her arms with his hands and pushed them 
away carefully, trying not to be rough with her as he 
did it. She did stop as she'd been asked, and stood 
before him with a vacant look in her eye where the 
anger had been before. 

She looked utterly blank, like there was a void where 
she was supposed to be. The sight of her made him want 
to cry.

"Just wait a minute," he whispered with a note of 
desperation, knowing that he was talking more to calm 
himself than to speak to her.

Her eyebrows knitted and he could see that she was 
trying to process what had just happened, not really 
recognizing herself in that act. And her eyes seemed 
eerily quiet, like a dead forest after a fire. 

This was completely fucking terrifying and he did not 
have the first clue what to do or what to say to her, 
so he said the first thing that came to his mind and 
didn't try to think too much about what the next thing 
might be.

"Let's just sit down." 

He let himself collapse and pulled lightly at her 
left arm to persuade her to join him. He was relieved 
when she complied.

"C'mere," he whispered to her.

His head lay against the back of the soft leather 
couch where his Navajo blanket was folded into four 
parts, forming something resembling a pillow. Then 
he tugged at her until she placed her head against 
his chest and let him fold her into strong-looking 
arms that didn't feel strong at all right now.

He held her close like that for quite some time, and 
he thought he felt her beginning to relax again, the 
stiffness and rigidity easing out of her back and 
shoulders. Her breathing grew more steady and he hoped 
she might have even fallen into a calm sleep.

"Agent Scully is already in love."

He thought about what Padgett had said and the way it 
shocked him to hear someone else saying those words. 
He wasn't an idiot. If she was in love with anyone, he 
was pretty sure it had to be him. The process of 
elimination was short and simple for resolving that 
mystery. Like playing Clue with only Colonel Mustard 
and Miss Scarlett. 

But how did Padgett know? Had Padgett seen the same 
things that Mulder thought he'd seen all these years 
and then drawn the same conclusions, feeling 
disappointment where Mulder had found hope? 

And why had it sounded like Padgett was telling Scully 
something that would surprise her?

"Scully..." 

He'd only been thinking of her, feeling sad that he 
couldn't seem to reach her, but the word came out in a 
long breath that pushed against her hair like a 
breeze. She tightened her grip on his chest and he 
realized that she wasn't sleeping.

"I feel like I lost myself somewhere, Mulder." She 
sounded entirely played out.

It was hard to comfort someone else when you felt like 
the world was crashing down around you in giant 
pieces, but he was willing to try.

"What happened must have been terrifying," he told 
her, his voice just a notch above a whisper and yet 
full of feeling.

"No, it's not just that. I felt like this before. Like 
I got lost along the way, and I don't know where or 
when, and I don't know if I can find my way back to 
the person I used to be."

"Why would you want to find someone you used to be? Is 
that who you think you lost?"

"Wha... What?" 

Scully pulled herself up from his chest, looking 
slightly puzzled, and looking the way she did when she 
thought he wasn't paying attention. 

He might not have come up with the murmured words of 
sympathy and understanding she was looking for, but to 
be fair, this talk about someone she used to be was 
making him nervous. He liked the person she was right 
now, in 1999, even if he didn't always like every 
single little thing about her (and how dull and 
ordinary would it be if he did?). Was she pining for 
some version of herself that pre-dated him and all the 
bad things that had happened to her because she'd been 
assigned to the X-Files?

"I'm just trying to understand what you mean. Is there 
something you miss about the person you were five 
years ago? Or ten?"

Scully appeared to be considering his question and did 
not appear to be finding an answer.

"I... I don't know. Maybe that's it. Or maybe I'm not 
sure who I am anymore."
 
He suddenly felt a little calmer. Not being sure who 
she is now was an entirely different thing from 
missing who she used to be. He recognized that this 
was the Scully who compartmentalized everything into 
neat little boxes piling up all around her and then 
wondered why she couldn't see anything. Not 
necessarily a Scully nostalgic for whatever she was 
before she ended up stuck with him.

"Well, I admit I don't know who you were ten years 
ago. But I know who you are now."

She scoffed.

"How can you know that, Mulder? How can you know that 
when I'm telling you that I don't?!" The frustration 
was rising again in her voice.

Mulder lifted his head from the couch, rubbing his 
hands against his eyes and down a face that was rough 
and shadowed with evening stubble. 

"Alright. This is not my strong suit, but I'll give 
this a shot as long as you promise not to run out of 
here or try to maul me."

***

The edges of Scully's mouth quirked back like she was 
getting ready to say something with a bite to it. 

Maul him? As if she wasn't already humiliated enough, 
he says something like that.

But his eyes soothed her, even from a distance, and 
she bit down on the retort she'd been contemplating, 
bowing her head to signal that she agreed to the 
terms.

"I know who you are because you've defined me in the 
time that I've known you. You think it's the other way 
around and that I've ended up defining your life, but 
you're wrong. It goes both ways. If you had to tell 
someone else who I am... I'm betting you could do that 
without even thinking too hard first. Right?"

A kind of awareness was dawning on Scully's face, and 
the left side of her mouth pulled out with the 
slightest of smiles.

"I probably could." She'd give him that much.

"See? There you go. Maybe sometime you can tell me all 
about myself because it's a subject that fascinates 
me, but for now, we'll stick to my profile of you."

He smiled at her hesitantly and she immediately noted 
the contrast between his cocky tone and the sudden 
shyness in his gaze. He always did that, she thought. 
Tried to cover up a moment when he felt weak and 
uncertain with bluster or sarcasm. She did know him 
well.

"I don't know if I want to be profiled right now, 
Mulder."
 
"Just listen. It won't kill you."

He paused, thinking about what he needed to say for a 
second or two longer.

"You have one of the sharpest minds I've ever known. 
Incisive, careful, and quick. You pick up details that 
almost anyone else would miss. And even though you're 
generally rigid about your science and your method, 
you're willing to listen to crazy possibilities most 
of the time, mainly because you enjoy discovering 
things and trying to explain them."

That's partly true, she mused, but she also listened 
to crazy possibilities because they were coming out 
of Mulder's mouth specifically.

"You don't open up easily. You're guarded. It's not 
that you're inherently suspicious because I think you 
believe most people are good on a basic level, whereas 
I'm not so sure. But you're not confident about what 
people will think of you as they get to know you, so 
you let them in slowly and watch for any sign that you 
should shut back down."

So this wasn't just going to be a festival of 
compliments. Well, she expected the truth from him and, 
this time at least, she thought it might also be 
what she needed to hear.

"You want people to see that you're strong. Your body 
language tells them it would be a mistake to mess with 
you. But you don't often want them to see that, inside 
you, there's kindness, and empathy, and loyalty that 
goes far beyond what's average for everyone else."

Scully felt a knot forming at the back of her throat. 
Was that true? And was that how he thought of her?

"You have a strong faith and you'll always love the 
Catholic rituals you were raised with, but you've let 
go of most of the doctrine and proscriptions and found 
a connection with God that's more personal and 
probably stronger in some ways than it was when you 
were younger."

She was stunned to hear him talking about her 
religious beliefs with such sincerity. She'd always 
imagined that it was a part of her he tolerated but 
didn't really respect.

"And, obviously, you're kind to furry animals, prefer 
old movies to newer ones, and seem to have a soft spot 
for seventies album rock even though you listen to way 
too much classical music."

He winked at her and gave her another small smile. She 
found herself smiling back, and they sat like that 
until she saw his face turning more serious again.

"And then there's me."

***

Mulder felt like he was about to jump out of a plane 
at thirty thousand feet without a parachute. He didn't 
think he was going to enjoy the feeling of freefall.

"I, uh... I thought this wasn't going to be about 
you." 

She was trying for a joke but the nervous edge to her 
voice was hard to miss. At least he wasn't the only 
one feeling a little shaky. 

"It isn't," he told her, guileless. "But no picture of 
one of us would really be complete without mentioning 
the other." 

She closed her eyes for a moment and tucked her chin 
in just slightly closer to her neck, but he didn't 
think she was shutting him out. She looked as though 
she wanted to focus on what he was about to say, and 
perhaps needed to clear her vision to do it.

It occurred to him again that this might not be a good 
idea. Maybe he should brush off what he'd started to 
say and make a joke out of it again. This was all 
so... unfamiliar.

Agent Scully is already in love. Some of Padgett's 
last words before he ripped out his own heart to save 
her from himself. Mulder was starting to think that 
Padgett must have known all along how it would have to 
end, and he'd wanted to leave Scully with something 
that might matter.

He took another breath and tried to ignore the way his 
heart was beating more quickly in his chest, and the 
way his mouth was becoming drier as his throat 
constricted. There was never going to be a better 
time, or a more convenient time, or an aligning of the 
stars, or a burning bush. This was it.

"You love me but you tell yourself you shouldn't. I 
make you feel out of whack and off kilter sometimes 
and so, even though you'd do almost anything for me, 
you don't see me as constant or steady. You worry that 
you'll lose your connection to the ground if you hang 
on too tightly to someone like me."

Scully slid just a few centimeters farther away from 
him as he spoke. From the way she was looking at him, 
eyes virtually glued to his, he was almost certain she 
didn't even realize she was doing it.

"You know that I'm in love with you but it disquiets 
you too much to admit it. So no matter what I do or 
say, you take it to mean something that makes you feel 
safe and allows you to keep things the way they are. 
You think I love my partner, the one who's always rational 
and strong. The one who has my back and can take care of 
herself. You think I don't really know the other sides 
of you, or if I do, I dismiss them as a small part of 
the Scully who's been riding in the car with me all 
these years, kicking ass and taking names."

It dawned on Mulder just then that Scully had not moved 
a single muscle in several minutes. Not a finger, not a 
quirk of the chin, nothing. If he hadn't seen her chest 
moving as she breathed in and out, and her eyes blinking 
rapidly, he would have been panicked instead of simply 
overwhelmed with dread.

What the hell... why not go for the big finish? Scully 
already appeared to be on the verge of a coma. Why not 
throw the rest of it over in her lap and see if she 
became more or less catatonic?

"So, yeah. I think I understand what you mean when you 
say you've lost yourself. I think you've crossed so 
many wires of who you want to be with who you're 
afraid you are, and who you think *I* want you to be, 
and who knows what else, that you've overloaded the 
circuits."

He paused for a beat, hoping she might start moving again. 
Apparently not.

"And I feel like a complete idiot saying this out loud 
but I think you need to hear it. I see you. I saw past 
the Agent Scully layer years ago, not that the part of 
you that's her isn't perfectly real, because it is. 
But knowing you the way I do... well, now I'm pretty 
much ruined for anybody else. Thanks a lot."

He tried to smile, but she closed her eyes again 
before she could have really seen him, and he was 
happy that might actually be moving again, but he felt 
the ramble coming on anyway because she hadn't said 
anything in, like, twenty-four hours or something, and 
he didn't deal well with stone cold silence after he'd 
just poured his heart out.

"And I can see that maybe you're not totally ruined 
for anybody else yet, and I can see that you don't 
entirely trust me that way, and I know the Diana thing 
didn't help the situation, but I keep thinking if I 
just wait and you see that I'm capable of sitting 
still and being patient, maybe I won't seem so 
unsteady and potentially destabilizing..."

"Mulder, ssssshhhh."

He'd become so caught up in the sound of his own voice 
blabbering virtual nonsense that he hadn't felt her 
placing her hand where it was now. Right on his knee.

"Sorry," he said, mentally kicking himself. He must 
have sounded like a complete lunatic there at the end 
before she finally shut him up. He'd probably spooked 
her even more now. He imagined a wild horse breaking 
away from him and crashing through the fence to run 
fast and far away across the plains.

***

Mulder had started to sound a little like a lunatic 
before she stopped him. For a second, her mind had 
tried cramming another piece of the puzzle into the 
picture that had been shaping in her head since that 
night in February, but she was relieved to find it 
didn't fit. 

In a true stream of consciousness, she'd wondered if 
perhaps she was drawn to Mulder because she was 
apparently drawn to lunatics. Then she had thought 
maybe she was drawn to lunatics because she was drawn 
to Mulder. She used to think he looked at her sometimes 
the way that Jerse and Padgett had. Possessive, and coveting, 
with dark eyes that went too far back in their heads. They 
were all three drawn to her, and maybe she went to Jerse and 
Padgett to find out why because she couldn't go to Mulder. 

But she'd been wrong, maybe for a very long time. One 
of these things was not at all like the others. Where 
Jerse and Padgett had seen a construct, Mulder actually 
saw her. Where Jerse and Padgett had simply desired, 
he loved. Where Jerse and Padgett had reached out from 
darkness to pull her in with them, he reached out 
toward her to help pull him out. 

Imagine that.

She watched him now, his head hung low and hands 
folded over one another loosely in between his knees. 
He had clearly decided he'd said too much.

But he hadn't said too much, she thought, as she began 
lightly circling his knee with her hand. He'd said it 
all, and it was just enough.

"Mulder." She tried to keep her tears at bay and out 
of her voice as she spoke.

"Yeah?" He looked like she imagined a gladiator would 
have looked when he lay with a knife to his throat and 
saw the thumb pointing down in the distance. Still 
proud perhaps, but ready to die.

"Thank you. For seeing me."

He nodded his head and gifted her with a wobbly smile.

"You've given me a lot to think about."

He nodded again, the smile fading slowly.

"I'm tired, Mulder. Exhausted, really. I think I need 
to sleep for a bit."

"Sure... I..." She saw him swallowing and he cleared 
his throat. "I understand. Why don't you go sleep 
in the other room and I'll wake you when it's 
morning."

She stood, breathing deeply and realizing that the 
tears had somehow receded. Her eyes were clear. She 
held out her hand to him, and the gesture looked much 
more bold than she felt.

"Come lie down with me..." 

She expected Mulder to look at her with surprise, but 
surprisingly, he didn't. He simply met her eyes and never 
let them go, taking the hand she offered him and rising to 
follow her.

END PART 3 - CONTINUED IN PART 4

_____________________________________________

Mulder was dreaming.

Not the dreams he usually dreamed. Not nightmares 
filled with burning cities and huge swarms of bees. 
Not the feverish dreams of wild, angry sex with 
Scully. Not the recurring horror of her lying against 
a wall, an enormous bloody hole in her stomach, while 
Peyton Ritter stands over her yelling that he doesn't 
want this to go in his permanent file.

No, in this dream, Mulder was sitting on the edge of 
the dock near the house on the Vineyard where he'd 
spent summers as a child. He was wearing lightweight 
khakis, the legs rolled up to the middle of his 
calves, his feet dangling over the side. And he was 
watching her, swimming at a leisurely pace near where 
the water became deep.

"Don't go too far!" he yelled, laughing. "Remember 
Jaws!"

She stopped her strokes momentarily, lifting a hand to 
wave at him sitting so far away.

"Don't go home without me, Mulder!" Her voice was 
clear and loud from a distance as it never would have 
been if this were real.

"I won't," he promised. "I'll wait!"

"Okay. I won't be long." 

She began swimming away from him again, and he could 
barely see her head dipping in and out of the water as 
she took each breath. But he wasn't worried. She was a 
strong swimmer and the currents weren't fast today. He 
just focused on the sound of the water lapping against 
the shore and then pulling back, over and over. He 
felt like this would be peace if he could ever know 
it.

And then, just like that, she was there on the dock 
next to him. Dripping wet and skin slightly reddened 
from the mid-afternoon sun. He felt her hand running 
down along the length of his left arm, and then back 
up again, so lightly it nearly tickled. And then he 
felt her breath against his neck, warm and moist, 
right at the place where the blood coursed up into his 
head. It felt wonderful. It felt like being alive. 

"I love you," she whispered to him, placing soft 
kisses along the underside of his jaw. It tickled 
again but he didn't mind. "I didn't know I was looking 
for you." 

He reached to pull her more tightly against him, and 
he was surprised that her skin was already dry. Soft 
though. So soft. And hot. And very real.

***

His eyes flew open and his entire body tensed the way 
it always did when he woke somewhere strange and 
wasn't certain where he was. 

"Mulder, it's okay. Everything's fine. You're in your 
bedroom."

He heard her voice, calm and comforting, and he felt a 
hand in his hair, smoothing it back and making his 
head tingle. His muscles instinctively relaxed to her 
touch even as his mind hurried to process what was 
happening.

It was true. He was in his own room. It was still 
dark, only thin light filtering through his window 
from the street lamp outside. And Scully was here with 
him, pressed against his side. In his bed. Craziness, 
he thought. Yet he could feel warmth radiating from 
her and, underneath his long t-shirt and jeans, the 
sides of his leg and torso felt sticky from that heat. 
Was he actually awake right now or did he only think 
he was awake?

"Scccullly?" He sounded groggy as he reached without 
seeing to where he knew she would be, relaxing even 
further as she threaded her fingers through his. 

"You okay?" he mumbled.

"Yes. I am. More than okay."

His mind was still waking, working through the steps 
one at a time. Location? Check. Scully's here... 
Scully okay? Check. Next on the list...

"What time is it?" he yawned, letting out a high-
pitched groan as he stretched his back and legs out.

"Very late or very early, depending on how you look at 
it. In some ways, I think it's both."

"Mmmmmmmm. Deep." He yawned again and finally managed 
to turn his head to look at her.

And woke up completely when he did.

He had never seen her looking at him like that before. 
Her mouth hung open slightly and she made no effort to 
close it. Her lids and lashes appeared heavy, falling 
in slow half-blinks over her eyes. She wasn't frowning 
but her brows furrowed, framing her gaze to give it 
greater focus and intensity. Desire was written across 
every curve and shadow on her face. Holy fucking God. 

Perhaps in response to the way his own mouth was now 
hanging open at the sight of her, she lifted one 
eyebrow and smiled.

"Awake now?" 

"Uh... yeah." Not only was he awake, he wasn't sure he 
was ever going to sleep again. He thought he could 
feel every single nerve ending that was anywhere near 
his skin. "How long have you been awake?"

"A while," she admitted.

She must have been staring at him, he realized. He 
felt strange as he imagined her watching him while he 
slept. He wasn't accustomed to being the object of a 
look like the one she had on her face right now.

"The things you said tonight. It's a little 
frightening to think you know me that well." Suddenly 
shy, she looked down at their hands, still laced 
together from a moment before and resting on the place 
where his hip bone jutted away from his stomach.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," he told her, 
conviction strengthening a voice that was rough from 
sleep. "Never from me." 

Moving slowly, he reached out to draw her face toward 
his. Looking for any sign that she might not welcome 
it, he found none, and so he kissed her softly. Small 
touches of his lips to hers.

"You're not going to break my heart, are you, Mulder?" 
Her voice fell to a whisper so quiet that he could 
hardly feel any breath at all accompanying the words 
as his lips continued to hover near her mouth.

He sighed, one quick burst of dull pain surprising him 
as it shot through his chest and then was gone. 

"Not intentionally. And not carelessly."

He didn't need to tell her what he meant by that. She 
would know. He could think of too many ways he could 
break her heart that would be neither his doing nor 
his fault. He could be taken. He could be tortured. He 
could die. And he had no doubt that losing him like 
that, or seeing him after such things had been done to 
him, would kill something inside her.

"But I'm yours," he continued, his heart feeling 
stronger again at the thought. "And even if... 
something happens to one of us, you need to know that, 
wherever I am, I'm always with you."

He saw the tears threatening in her eyes, but before 
they could fall, she kissed him again. It was fervent 
this time, like she couldn't kiss him quite hard 
enough to tell him everything she wanted to say. He 
heard and he felt the sob catching in her throat, and 
he imagined that there were too many words... too many 
things she needed to tell him, and they had 
bottlenecked somewhere near her tongue in a rush to 
break away.

When she finally inched back from him to take in air 
again, her lips lingered, bumping lightly against his 
as she breathed in and out. 

As near as she was in his own field of vision, he 
still had enough distance to see her eyes searching 
his. Asking something and looking for an answer. Did 
he understand? 

He did.

"I always hear you, Scully. Even when you don't 
speak."

She smiled at him, lips trembling just enough that 
he'd notice, and she rested her forehead against his 
brow. He could stay just like this forever, he 
realized, and probably be content with never having 
anything more. He knew for certain now what he'd only 
known before in that way you 'know' and hope no one 
will tell you that you're actually wrong. 

But he'd wanted her for such a long time, always 
thinking this moment would never arrive outside of the 
skewed fantasies that had troubled him before. Now 
that they were finally moving forward instead of 
standing in one place, he didn't want to stop.

"Raise your arms up."

His voice was full of the heat he felt now in every 
part of his body, and his words carried a rougher edge 
than he'd intended. But she simply lowered her eyes 
and did as he asked. With both hands, he lifted the 
baggy sweatshirt she'd borrowed, over her shoulders 
and away to the floor. 

He felt a shiver run through him as he discovered only 
bare skin beneath the old rag he wore when he went 
running in the winter. Of course, he thought. Her bra 
would have been soaked with the same blood that had 
ruined her shirt, and she must have given it to the 
forensics people. Evidence she didn't need to be 
reminded of anyway.

Lying next to him like this, she looked like the sun 
on a hazy summer day, and he tried to drink it all in. 
He'd seen her breasts before, of course, on more than 
one occasion and as recently as their forced shower at 
Ft. Marlene. But now they looked different, hanging 
farther away from her body as she lay on her side. Her 
nipples were taut, another sign of arousal that 
reassured him even as he saw her eyes wandering 
nervously.

She must feel exposed, he realized, bare from the 
waist up while he still had all of his clothes. His 
stomach muscles were still sleepy, but he managed to 
lift himself far enough up from his side to pull off 
his own shirt. Her eyes stopped jittering and instead 
began to roam with interest over his chest and 
abdomen.

He fell back to the bed and scooted down an inch so 
that his head was right next to hers, wanting her to 
see his eyes without any difficulty. Then he took her 
left hand in his and laid it flat against the center 
of his chest, right over his heart, pressing it firmly 
until he knew she could feel the rapid beating of it 
thrumming against her palm. 

He was surprisingly nervous himself. As much as he'd 
thought about this, he felt almost uneasy that it was 
actually happening. It was as though he were doing 
something he shouldn't be, looking at her like he was 
and wanting her the way he did. He had known her for 
so long and so well that they'd become close friends, 
and sex would be an entirely new element to a 
relationship that had well-established patterns and 
rules. It was so much easier to jump into bed with 
someone you didn't know or had only just met. No 
expectations, no baggage, no fear of screwing up 
something that was already good and important. It was 
like they were walking out of a house where they'd 
lived for a very long time, and they could hear the 
lock turning behind them.

"We, um..." She sounded flustered again. "We don't 
have to do anything right now... if you don't want 
to." 

They'd stayed still like this for just long enough to 
make her think he was hesitant. Or worse, 
disappointed.

"No, I want to. I do." His voice was younger suddenly. 
Like it was when he was seventeen, making love to a 
girl for the first time and feeling so nervous that he 
really just wanted it to be over, which, he recalled 
with some embarrassment, it had been, very quickly.

"I just..." He'd only sound clumsy if he tried to 
explain all of these thoughts and worries appearing 
unbidden in his mind. He decided he should try telling 
her the simple truth, as though that were some novel 
concept that the two of them had only recently 
stumbled upon. "I feel a little like I felt when I'd 
never done this before. I mean, it's you. You know?"

She laughed, low and light, and the sound of it 
quieted his nerves. 

"Yes. I know what you mean."

"I think I'm probably over-thinking."

"We tend to do that."

Yes, he thought. Yes, they did. Their brains were 
always working too hard, overanalyzing, speculating, 
struggling to understand, searching. It was the nature 
of their jobs and the nature of their lives.

"Does this feel strange to you?" 

It felt strange to him. Like the old nautical maps 
that marked uncharted territory with the warning "Here 
There Be Monsters." But he reminded himself that, had 
he lived when men sailed out to find the world, he 
would have been first in line to explore all the 
unknown places foretelling of demons and fiends.

"I wouldn't say strange." She sounded thoughtful. 
"Just different. New."

He felt her fingers playing over his face, tracing the 
line of his cheekbone to the curve of his jaw.

"It reminds me of the first time I went into the ocean 
when I was three, maybe four."

The image of Scully swimming in the Vineyard waters 
came back to Mulder from his dream.

"I wasn't scared but I remember feeling tense because 
the waves were pushing at me and they were very loud. 
My father must have felt that because he held me in 
his arms and told me I belonged there. He told me the 
sea was in my blood. And somehow I knew that was true 
even before he said it."

Mulder brought his hand up to where her hand was 
outlining the edges of his face, covering hers with 
his own like a glove. 

"You mean like we've never been here before, but..."

"... it's where we've always belonged," she finished.

Their minds were moving with symmetry again, for the 
first time in months and perhaps even longer. Finally 
on the same page. Finally seeing the same words at the 
same time. He decided his brain was welcome to stay 
and watch, but he was giving it the rest of the night 
off.

Smiling, he pulled her body toward him and captured 
her mouth for another kiss, shuddering as he felt her 
breasts against his bare chest for the first time. He 
let his hand slide down to the back of her thigh and 
pulled the lower part of her body tight against him as 
well. He loved the sound that she made as he did it, 
knowing that she had just then felt his erection 
straining hard where it met her groin.  

Her hands roamed up and down his back freely now, 
sliding over his skin with an elegant friction that 
only made him harder. 

"Take off the rest of your clothes." 

He wasn't normally this instructive in bed, but he 
wasn't really telling her what to do so much as giving 
her a chance to say no. Moving together in this 
unaccustomed way, he wanted her to trust that 
everything would seem familiar again soon enough. And 
if they were going anywhere she didn't want to, he 
trusted her to turn them back.

She untangled herself from his arms, and he turned to 
lay flat on his back as he watched her removing the 
slacks she'd been wearing when Padgett's golem had 
attacked her. She was almost teasingly slow about it, 
and then she was slipping her thumbs just below the 
edge of the remaining waistband that rested low on her 
hips.

"Wait. Don't," he pleaded. "Not yet. Come back."

"Can't stop telling me what to do, even now?" She was 
half-smiling as she said it.

"I'm just giving directions." His voice was sincere 
and steady. "You have the wheel for a change."

The smile on her face broadened and she slipped back 
to where he lay, daring to throw her leg over his and 
snaking her hand over his stomach just above his belt.

He hissed. Jesus. He hoped this wasn't going to kill 
him before it even started to get really good.

"Now." He gritted the word out. "Help me get out of  
my jeans. I don't know if I can move."

Scully raised her eyebrows.

"Well, *that's* disappointing to hear."

"I'll do better once I'm a little less constricted." 

He tried to brace himself, biting down on the edge of 
his lip, but he couldn't really prepare for the sight 
of Scully carefully undoing his belt and then each of 
the buttons at the front of his jeans. He was losing 
his mind in the nicest possible way, trying to squelch 
a primitive urge to rip off all their remaining 
clothing and simply rut hard and fast until he'd 
marked her with his own scent and seed. It was some 
part of his brain that wouldn't have been invited to 
Oxford.

When she'd finished with a hundred thousand different 
riveted fasteners, she reached up to his waist and 
began to pull. He lifted his hips as much as he could 
manage in order to help her, and she yanked the heavy 
denim off his legs, shoving the mass to the floor. 

His boxer briefs were quite the sight at the moment, 
he realized, seeing that she was taken with the view. 
She brought her hand up to grasp the edge of his hip, 
fingers reaching over the side and rubbing sensually 
against the fabric that still covered him until his 
fast breathing persuaded her to move along.

"Are you ready?" she asked him, sounding something 
like Kathleen Turner after several packs of 
cigarettes. He nodded twice.

Careful to lift the elastic at his waist away from 
him, she stretched the garment up and over his cock, 
brushing it once as it bobbed away from the cotton 
that had been holding him uncomfortably for what 
seemed like forever.

He shut his eyes and tried to concentrate on not 
feeling so much. He knew she'd be looking, studying... 
and he decided that seeing her might be too much for 
him at this second. So his eyes were closed when he 
felt her take him in her hand, delicate fingers 
wrapping firmly around the length of him as her thumb 
passed over the wetness at the tip.

"Unnnnnh..." He moaned, not even trying to control the 
sound or the way it came out of him. This was like 
sensory overload already and she'd barely touched him. 
He thought he might go blind, but it wouldn't matter, 
because he felt everything she was doing to him as far 
down as his bones, and he could picture her face 
perfectly in his mind.

"Mulder," she whispered. "Look at me." 

He panted as he struggled to open eyes he'd shut so 
tightly that his head hurt.

She watched him, watching her, as her hand massaged 
the aching muscle.