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Mulder was used to playing a case on a hunch, but this time there had been something more. He had seen the signs on Phil Adderly immediately -- a twitch, a flinch, a furtive sideways glance. All the smarting, gnawing reminders of faithlessness, of infidelity. He would have seen them from space.
The thing is, he wasn't sure he would have recognized them two weeks ago.
Mulder got back to his apartment late Friday night and collapsed on his couch to stare at the ceiling and not call Scully. He reached for the phone a few times, but every time he thought about hearing her voice on the other end of the line he was stopped by a twinge of fear deep in his chest. It was the same fear that made him hesitate outside their office in the morning, afraid of who besides Scully he might find inside. It was the same fear that made him imagine he could smell cigarette smoke under her perfume when he leaned in close to rest a hand on her back.
Ever since she'd come back from her jaunt with the Cancer Man he'd been trying to ignore the paranoia that churned in his stomach, rising up at the slightest provocation to choke him like bile. He knew that it wasn't fair, that Scully had done everything with good reasons, compassionate reasons, and that she had gone to great risk to send Mulder dangerous secrets right under their enemy's nose. (Mulder wasn't in the least surprised that he had never received the tapes. He was intimately acquainted with the thousand ways that his powerful enemies had of keeping such sensitive information from reaching him.)
Scully had weighed the options presented to her and made the only choice she could have made; the one that would bring the greatest good to mankind. The one that required her to risk her own life, but kept her partner out of danger. Wouldn't he have done the same?
Mulder knew, logically, that her decision had been the right one, but logic alone wasn't enough. It never had been, for him. That was how he had ended up here, in this life, on this quest for truth that had already demanded such impossible sacrifices of him and Scully and everyone around them. He knew that the sacrifices Scully had made in taking the Cancer Man's offer were laughable compared to some of the threats they'd faced.
But logic was cold and remote, and he couldn't hold on to it for long. What lodged between his ribs like shrapnel, what itched under his skin and poisoned his thoughts, was that she had lied to him so easily.
He knew that Scully knew it, too. Their silences had been heavy and oppressive these past two weeks, their conversations disjointed and unresolved. The Cancer Man, and Mulder's fear, had bruised the instinctive trust that had withstood scorn and sickness and Death itself. Every time he got close to Scully he felt the pain of that bruise and shied away, spooked by the paranoid instincts of a lifetime.
Those instincts had saved him in the past, but he felt like this time they just might kill him. Feeling himself wince away from Scully was a little like living in hell.
And he might have let it go on for weeks, or months -- but then he had seen his own starved, yearning restlessness in Phil Adderly's hands, and his own poisonous fear reflected in the eyes of the creature that Ellen Adderly had become.
He couldn't do that to Scully. He couldn't live with that side of himself.
There had to be an end.
Saturday dawned bright and cold, with all the promise of spring but none of the comfort. Even the soft cream and beige of the hall outside Scully's apartment couldn't do much to soften that wintry light, and Mulder had to squint to keep from being dazzled as he shifted the heavy grocery bags in his arms and rapped on his partner's door. The fear was gnawing at him again, and he fidgeted uncomfortably, trying to ignore the Cancer Man's ghost that breathed foul smoke down his neck.
He couldn't hear Scully moving around. She might still be sleeping, it wasn't even ten o'clock yet. Scully tended to be an early riser, by habit if not preference, but she had just gotten off an exhausting case, was it so surprising that she'd sleep in? He should have waited, come over later, but he hadn't been able to sit in his apartment any longer. Another hour staring at his four walls and his fish trapped in their four walls and he might have gone insane.
Although staring at Scully's closed door wasn't much of an improvement so far. He knocked again and cleared his throat, calling out to her without caring that he might wake the neighbors. "Hey, Scully, it's me. I know it's not late spring yet, but, uh --" He paused as the chain rattled and the door swung open. "Wow, you look awful."
"Nice to see you too, Mulder," Scully grumbled, the sarcasm mostly eclipsed by the painful rasp in her voice. She was pale and disheveled, dressed in a fluffy white bathrobe that he guessed had been hastily thrown on over her pajamas. As he watched she leaned tiredly against the doorframe, doing her very best to glare up at him. It was really a terrifying glare, made only slightly less intimidating by her puffy, watery eyes and a nose almost the same shade of fiery red as her hair.
"Oh, Scully," he sighed before he could stop himself. The absolute misery in her face made him ache with tenderness and pity, and he nearly dropped the bags he was holding to wrap his arms around her then and there. He might have done it, if it hadn't been for that cold, bitter fear of betrayal that stung at the back of his neck like a venomous insect pumping poison down his spine.
He tried to keep that bitterness out of his smile and his voice as she stood aside to let him in. "I really didn't think it was possible for you to look bad, Scully, but the last thing I saw looking that green around the gills actually, you know, had gills."
"Hilarious," she said with no trace of humor. She shut the door behind him and sank into a chair, muffling a harsh, hacking cough into her sleeve. "I must have picked up some kind of virus from my lush accommodations on that stakeout. I assume that's why you're here, to explain to me why it was an X-file after all?"
Mulder pulled out a carton of eggs out of one of the grocery bags and waggled it at her. "Actually, I thought I might make you breakfast."
"Really?"
She sounded more surprised and suspicious about the idea of breakfast than she did about half their cases these days. Mulder shrugged. "Yeah, you know. I thought it might be… nice."
She stared at him for a minute, as though deciding whether she cared enough to further investigate this anomaly. Then her nose wrinkled and she sneezed twice, pulling a crumpled tissue out of the pocket of her robe and blowing her sore nose with a wince. She sniffled and slumped over the table, resting her head on her arms and closing her eyes. "Sure. Whatever."
Mulder turned his back to hide his smile and started to unload the bags of food he'd bought. He'd been unsure of what Scully had in her kitchen, and it was only when he saw the impressive smorgasbord cluttering up her counter that he began to think he might have gone a little overboard trying to cover all his bases. "What d'you want? I've got, uh, eggs, bacon, I can make a mean French toast…"
"Just tea, I think," Scully said weakly.
He glanced over his shoulder to see she had gone even paler at the sight of food. That worried him a little, and probably always would. Her appetite had been the first thing to go and the last to come back during her cancer treatments.
"Aw, come on, Scully. With your medical background, you’ve never heard of 'feed a cold --'"
"'Starve a fever'," she finished. "Yes, I have heard that, even if it's not what I'd call standard medical practice. Believe me, starvation's the better option right now."
"You've got a fever?" Without thinking Mulder tossed the loaf of bread he was holding onto the counter and leaned over the table to rest a hand on her cheek. He saw her shoulders tense in surprise, then relax as his little finger gently traced the line of her jaw. "Geez, Scully, you're burning up."
"I'm fine," she sighed.
The way Mulder felt about that answer must have shown on his face. For the first time in weeks, Scully reached for his hand, covering it with hers where it still rested on her cheek. She gave his fingers a reassuring squeeze. "My temperature's a hundred point three, I took it twenty minutes ago."
Mulder let his hand fall but didn't move away. "That doesn't sound fine to me."
"It's not exactly hyperpyrexia, Mulder," she said with a wry smile he hadn't seen in far too long.
"Hey, you're the doctor." He turned back to the cabinets, pulling down a pair of mugs and setting the kettle on to boil. "I'm just surprised, that's all. You always say med school gave you an immune system of steel."
"It did, but --" she shuddered. "Mulder, I touched surfaces in that room that have not seen disinfectant since the first bacteria coalesced out of the primordial ooze."
He couldn't keep from grinning at her tone of unutterable disgust. "'Primordial ooze'? That's good, Scully."
"Oh believe me, I've got more."
"I bet you do."
She smiled faintly, and suddenly he couldn't stand the distance between them for another second. He leaned across the table again and kissed her cheek, feeling her sharp, surprised breath tickle his ear. "Go on and lie down," he suggested. "I'll bring your tea and you can tell me all the terrible metaphors you made up in the long watches of the night."
For a split second as he moved back he saw a strange look flash across her face, one he couldn't identify. Then she raised an eyebrow at him, her features composed again into her normal all-purpose look of fond skepticism. Mulder couldn't help but admire her control; even red-eyed and runny-nosed, she could be more poised than the most powerful men in the world if she wanted to.
(she could even fool that chain-smoking son of a bitch, you never had a chance, his terror hissed, but he was determined not to listen.)
"Oh, please. Like you're any good at metaphors," she muttered. Mulder raised his own eyebrow back at her and made shooing motions with his hands. Scully rolled her eyes, but stood and retreated into the living room without arguing.
When he followed her a few minutes later with the tea, she had curled up into one corner of the couch and dragged a knitted blanket up nearly to the top of her head.
"Scully?" He settled down next to her, setting the steaming mugs on the coffee table and pulling at a fold of the blanket until her face reappeared. "You cold?"
"Freezing," she sighed, begrudgingly. She knew as well as he did that the apartment was warm, the heater turned up. Admitting she was still cold was halfway to admitting weakness, never something Dana Scully enjoyed.
Mulder was long past the point of being able to tell whether her stubbornness was irritating or endearing. All he saw was that here, at last, something was wrong that he could fix.
"Thought so -- I'm getting chills just looking at you. C'mere." He grabbed two fistfuls of blanket and tugged gently until she shuffled closer to him. There was a guardedness in the way she moved, the faintest hesitation as she leaned against his shoulder. Like she was afraid he'd push her away.
It was such a small thing that anyone else might not have noticed it, but it pierced Mulder like a knife, not least because he knew he'd earned it. It was all he could do not to wince. Feeling himself flinch away from Scully had been a taste of hell, but feeling Scully flinch away from him was almost more than he could endure.
Suddenly self-conscious, he wrapped an arm around her gingerly, as though one of them might break at the contact -- which one, he had no idea.
A long, quiet minute passed of neither of them speaking. He had time to wonder if they were going to spend the rest of their lives this way, close together but barely touching, before he felt the tension start to seep from her and she relaxed into the space between them, letting her head fall to rest on his shoulder.
He felt himself grow still at that touch, at the faint warmth and soft weight of Scully's body molded against his. He waited for the clench of cold fear like a vise around his heart, waited for the nagging, nauseating doubts that had been driving him crazy for weeks.
They didn't come.
He let out the breath he hadn't known he'd been holding and buried his nose in Scully's tangled hair. She smelled like floral shampoo, with a faint trace of decay -- the remnant of a thousand autopsies that no soap or perfume would ever be able to entirely mask. It was heavenly, and he could feel it working on him like an antidote, flushing out the Cancer Man's poison. The tension and misery of the past two weeks were washed away by instinct and memory, by Antarctica and Florida and his mother's boarded-up summer house and a hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Logic and reason hadn't been able to settle his hurt at being left behind. He'd needed something that went deeper than logic, and he'd found it.
After two weeks of tormenting himself with the aftermath of the Cancer Man's lies, this was the truth: here, now, with Scully in his arms, he couldn't have been suspicious of her if his life depended on it. And if his life did depend on it, he didn't want his life.
Of course. Of course the cure for his self-destructive paranoia was Scully. It always had been. Wasn't that why the Cancer Man had tried to break their trust in the first place? Wasn't that why he'd tried to prey on her better nature, tempting her with the only thing that could possibly draw her away from her partner? And to think that Mulder had almost let it work…
"Mulder. Mulder, let go." Scully was pulling on his arms. He blinked and came back to himself, only to realize that in the course of his epiphany he had melted bonelessly into the couch, automatically drawing her up closer to his chest and awkwardly twisting one of her arms in the process.
"Sorry," he sighed. She grunted and wriggled free of his grip, turning to settle more comfortably with her back pressed against his shoulder and her head resting under his chin, the blanket draped over them both. When she was still, Mulder let his arms settle around her waist and pressed a feather-light kiss to her hair. "Sorry you got sick," he said into the top of her head.
She shrugged, then croaked, "Mulder, if you didn't know I was sick, why did you show up at my door at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning with enough eggs and bacon to feed half of D.C.?"
"Oh. Yeah." He'd almost forgotten about breakfast. The thought crossed his mind that he should get up and stow some of the more perishable things in the fridge, but he dismissed it. Just now, he wouldn't have moved for anything on this planet or any other.
Scully muffled another coughing fit in the folds of the blanket, then let her head fall back to rest in the crook of his neck. "'Oh yeah' isn't an answer, Mulder."
"It's -- it wasn't a big deal," he said at last, trying to sound casual and probably failing. "It was just -- something Ellen said to me."
"Who's Ellen?"
"Ellen Adderly, the sheriff's wife. The one who turned out to be behind the murders. And the ravens."
"Uh-huh." Scully made a noise that might have been expressing disbelief, or clearing mucus out of her throat, or both. "And what did she say to you?"
"That, uh, housework, cooking and cleaning and that kind of thing -- it helped her feel like she had things under control." It seemed sort of silly now, that he'd thought such a stuffy borrowed gesture would help him feel closer to Scully, after all they'd been through. He wondered vaguely if she would see it as a sign of how lost he'd been.
Right on cue, she sniffled and rasped, "Wow, Mulder, you must really be feeling like things are out of control if you're taking life advice from a serial killer."
He smiled into the top of her head. "Yeah, you might say that."
"Well, you can always clean out my garbage disposal, if you're really looking to feel in control."
He laughed and buried his nose in her hair again. "It wasn't just that. Ellen, uh… She said that I didn't look like I was used to having someone take care of me."
"Take care of you? How?"
"Ironing my shirts, making my meals, all that stuff, you know. The thing is, she was wrong."
Scully shifted, wanting to turn around and look at him, but he tightened his arms around her waist and kept his face hidden in her hair. "Mulder --" she started, her tone halfway between confused and warning.
"No, I know, nobody does any of that stuff for me but that's not important. You -- you take care of my sorry ass every day, Scully. You mailed me those tapes."
She was quiet for a long minute. He kept his eyes closed and his head down, resisting the urge to look at her face. Finally, in a voice soft and heavy with guilt, she said, "You never got the tapes."
"Doesn't matter. If you say you sent them, I trust you." It was a relief to say it, a greater relief to know that it was true. "You've done more for me than anyone else ever has, and I thought…" he trailed off, losing track of how to tell her what he'd thought, what he'd hoped.
"That's why you wanted to make me breakfast? Because I don't iron your shirts, but I mailed you some tapes?"
"That's only part of it. There's the autopsies, and -- and your sarcasm has proved invaluable in many an investigation." There weren't words to thank her. There never were. The only true things he could have said were pointless, because she already knew.
He'd been expecting some dry and cutting remark, maybe about how she hoped he might someday prove useful in an investigation, but it didn't come. Instead she turned into him, elbowing him in the stomach as she buried her face in his chest, her shoulders shaking. "Are you laughing at me, Scully?" he demanded. The only response was a stifled snort, and he grinned, resting his chin on the top of her head. "What, a guy can't do something nice for his partner without becoming a laughingstock?"
"Not if you're expecting it to turn me into Laura Petrie," she choked out, muffled as much by laughter as congestion.
"I'd never do that to you, Scully." His tone was too serious for the joke, but he didn't care; it was the truth. He wouldn't give up his fierce, bright, incorruptible partner for a thousand perfect white-picket suburban mansions or a continental breakfast every morning for the rest of his life.
"Then again," he said thoughtfully, "Ellen did also say that the right woman would come along and fix me."
"Yeah? Well, tell her I said good luck. She's got her work cut out for her."
Scully was half in his lap now, and showed no inclination to move. Mulder thought about telling her that she was beginning to cut off the circulation to his legs, but settled for kissing her temple and smirking where she couldn't see. "Smartass."
"That's Dr. Smartass to you," she murmured. She shivered, tugging the blanket tighter around her shoulders and pulling the corners up under her chin.
Mulder frowned into the top of her head. "You still cold in there?"
"I'm okay," she said in a small, sleepy voice. Another chill ran through her and she snuggled closer against him, shamelessly greedy for warmth.
Mulder worked one arm under the blanket and rested a hand on the small of her back, finding the soft cotton edge of her shirt and slipping his fingers underneath it to trace slow circles on her skin. He imagined it felt hotter than normal, but he couldn't be sure. "You wanna take something for that fever?"
"No," she sighed into his chest. "'S low, Mulder, 's okay. It's the body's defense mechanism, it'll help me get well faster."
That sounded vaguely familiar -- something she'd told him on some case, describing the progression of a virus that had turned out to be purely terrestrial, much to his disappointment. She had said something about how what seemed at first to be a harmful symptom could actually turn out to be a body's way of healing and strengthening itself. The details of the incident escaped him, though, since Scully chose that moment to pull her knees up and tuck her toes under his thighs. He had to bite his tongue to keep from yelping; her feet were like ice.
"Geez, woman! Warn a guy before you go around jabbing icicles into his legs." He tugged the decorative throw off the back of the couch and added it to the blanket she'd already cocooned herself in.
Scully wiggled her toes, smirking in satisfaction as Mulder squirmed. "Yeah? Or what?"
"Or I'll have my revenge when I'm drooling and sneezing all over you."
As if to prove his point, Scully opened her mouth to retort and sneezed instead. Mulder reached out and snagged a box of tissues from the arm of the couch and offered it to her as she sniffled into a corner of the blanket. "You know, if you did catch this, it would serve you right for ditching me," she grumbled.
There was something sore and half-healed under her words, and he knew that if he wanted to he could pick at it like a scab and reopen the wound. It would be so easy to snap back at her for ditching him, and for their mortal enemy, no less. It would be easy to keep that twinge of pain alive, and make sure she felt it, too, for days and weeks and months and years, for all the time they had left together. To let fear lead him down that path into paranoia and faithlessness deep enough to drown them both.
Instead he took a deep breath, inhaling the familiar smell of flowers and formaldehyde, and ran his fingers lightly through her hair to comb down the worst of her bedhead. "Come on, Scully. Don't doctors take an oath to prevent diseases?"
Scully nodded, her eyes closed, her cheek rubbing against the soft fabric over his heart.
"And hoping your partner gets the lurgy doesn't violate that?"
Her scornful, disbelieving laugh ended in a coughing fit. When she could breathe again, she mumbled, "Mulder, I've seen things in the last forty-eight hours that would have made Hippocrates hand in his stethoscope."
Mulder opened his mouth to make a quip about whether they even had stethoscopes in ancient Greece, but before he could organize the words he felt the change in Scully's breathing, the soft impact as her chin dropped to her chest.
"Hey, Scully, that reminds me. Did I ever tell you about that time I went to prom with Bigfoot?" he asked softly. The only answer was a faint whistling snore.
His left arm was beginning to go numb, and she was tangled around and over him in a way that couldn't possibly be comfortable. Trying to jostle her as little as possible, he kicked off his shoes and swung his legs up onto the couch, stretching out so that Scully lay more or less on top of him with her face still pressed into his chest and her legs tangled with his, her freezing feet tucked between his calves.
She grumbled a little at the movement but didn't wake, which was astounding in and of itself -- she must not have gotten any sleep at all after the longed-for liberation from his stakeout. Mulder sighed and rested one hand on the small of her back, the other between her shoulderblades, keeping her in place. This wasn't the first time she'd used him as a mattress, and, God willing, it wouldn't be the last.
"I'm a lucky man, Scully," he told the top of her head. She sighed and nuzzled against his sternum -- probably getting snot all over his shirt, he thought, already resigned to his fate. She'd be guilty and embarrassed about that later, but for now she seemed perfectly content. And, truth be told, so was he.
As he lay there watching the light shift in dappled patterns across Scully's ceiling, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, the phrase Ellen Adderly had used wandered into his mind again. Significant other. Sitting in a murderer's kitchen, surrounded by the arcane artifacts of her Perfect Life and her pointed expectations, it had only put him off-balance, but now the thought of it made him smile.
While it was nothing Ellen Adderly would have ever recognized, he was certain that there was nothing more significant than this.