Scully raised her gaze from the cellphone she'd been turning over in her hands for the past two minutes. It had become usus that when she put it into the bag at her feet, Mulder would look up from whatever he was doing and would ask her "You goin' home?"
Today, he was sitting across from her, behind his desk - his desk - so engrossed in a file that he didn't seem to be aware of her still being here, and even less that she was about to leave. While she waited for him to say something, anything, or to even just look up, she watched the vein in his neck pulse. Counted. 76. A rather high heart rate, given he'd been sitting here for at least ten minutes. Apparently, the case file wasn't only captivating, but also exciting. If she vanished right this moment, he wouldn't even notice.
When she'd come down here after returning from a fruitless trip to the bureau's library, he'd been standing in front of an open cabinet on the wall behind his desk. Scully hadn't been able to see what he'd held in his hand - it must have been something small - but the way he'd been looking down at it had made her curious. The buoyant mania she'd come to expect from him in relation to any evidence not yet explainable by science had been absent. Mulder had appeared thoughtful and earnest, but his gaze had been affectionate. Scully had a sudden precognition that whatever he was holding in his hand was personal. She hadn't been prepared for the sinking feeling which caused her to stop in her tracks with her hand still on the door handle.
She'd wanted to vent to him about the old bat at the library, who had refused to rent out the set of medical textbooks Scully had found in the list of archived books to her because "You guys bunker those books down in that basement and never bring them back." Arguing with her that she wasn't "them" hadn't gotten her anything but a disdainful stare from over the rim of the old librarian's glasses and Scully had struggled not to laugh at the woman, whose leathery skin and magnified eyes had reminded her of a very old, very unhappy tortoise.
Then she'd remembered why she'd come here in the first place and had seen the literature research she'd planned on getting done over the weekend go down the drain due to yet another unhelpful government employee. When she'd stepped into the elevator and had seen the button for the basement, trading barbs with Mulder about the people working above ground level had seemed like a good idea to let off steam. Her partner had a long-running feud with Mrs. Hall, who'd banned him from the library for supposedly ripping articles out of newspapers. Back when Scully had confronted him, he'd insisted, with a very straight face, he'd never do anything the like while he'd tried to cover the pile of newspaper clippings scattered across his desk with the pages of the travel expense form he'd been filling out.
She'd counted on his dry humor to lighten her mood, yet after seeing him standing in front of the cabinet as he came to a decision and closed his hand around the item he'd taken from it, she'd felt like an intruder. She'd been about to close the door and leave, but Mulder had turned around and had smiled at her.
"There you are! I thought you'd already left."
He'd seemed happy to see her, even relieved, but also... nervous? As he'd walked over to his desk, he'd buried his hand and whatever he'd concealed in it in the pocket of his pants. Then he'd sat down and had grabbed a case file from the stack to his right, and her chance to find out what it was that seemed to have such a special meaning to him had vanished.
They had been sitting across from each other in silence ever since. Scully had perused the office supplies and knick-knacks on Mulder's desk. A lone white pencil of mysterious origin stuck out from the bunch of ordinary orange pencils Mulder always kept on hand. Next to it, a tear-off calendar showed today's date.
February 21st, 1997.
Two days until her birthday. One day and a bit, since it was almost five in the afternoon. 16:56pm, to be exact. She'd checked the watch on her phone every time the awkwardness of staring at Mulder and his desk had overpowered her.
The title page he'd lifted only enough so he was able read the report beneath had the usual red frame around it. Any comfort she'd come to draw from the familiar appearance of an X-File went up in flames as it turned into her red flag. She was preparing to go home for the weekend, and he didn't notice because of one of those damn files. Her birthday was going to be on Sunday, and he hadn't taken any note of that either.
She didn't know why it made her so angry this time around. He'd never remembered her birthday, not once in four years. Not even her thirtieth. This was her thirty-third, and might also... she cut off her thoughts right there. She couldn't help herself if she wasn't thinking clearly, and only treating her situation the way an investigator would was holding her together.
Of course, this piece of advice had to have come from Mulder. He was chewing on an orange pencil as if his life depended on it, oblivious to her on the other side of his desk. The tenacity she'd admired in him from the moment they'd met was reassuring when it was directed at herself and infuriating when it absorbed so much of his attention that he became blind even to his friends.
Mulder pretended to be taking in every single word of the file in his hands. If anyone had asked him about its content, he'd have been able to rattle off all the normal and paranormal events referenced in it. Not because he'd been reading the report just now, but because he'd been familiar with it for years.
He'd rested his left ankle on his right thigh, because he was pretty sure he sat that way when he was relaxed. Through the thin fabric of his suit pants, the cool piece of metal in his pocket burned like ice. Over the top of the pages he'd lifted just far enough so it appeared like he was reading, he saw Scully come to some sort of decision. Since he'd wasted the couple of minutes she'd spent sitting across from him in silence and turning her phone over in her hand as if she were wringing someone's neck, he'd have to ask her now.
Right this very moment.
Or never.
He'd imagined this scene over and over since he'd first had the idea a week ago. Last night, the rhythmic sound of the bubbles rising in the fish tank behind his head had again provided the metronome for the infinite vortex of his thoughts.
Scully was sick. He refused to accept she might die soon, but what if she did? What if their shared path ended before another one of her birthdays came around? Anything they might be hoping for or dreaming of, gone before they were able to reach out for it. Only what was in their past couldn't be taken from them.
He'd decided to turn some of the tentative dreams he'd had for the far future into memories made now. Choosing a date was easy, as was picking up the phone and making the necessary arrangements.
Getting Scully to come there was the hard part. Oh, he knew he'd get an answer if he asked her outright. But what if he'd been wrong? What if all she wanted was to cling to normalcy, as far as there had ever been any for her since she'd been assigned to the X-Files? Normalcy, for them, was his complete lack of acknowledgement of any of her birthdays. He hadn't done it on purpose, they'd just been so occupied with cases each year. Well, he had been. But Scully had never complained. She had never mentioned his birthday either.
What if all she wanted was to keep it that way, the way things had always been?
This train of thoughts biting its own tail had prevented him from asking her about her plans for Sunday night. Some more observation of her behavior, he'd told himself every day, would make the preferred course of action clear.
Today was Friday, and his last chance.
He peered at Scully over the file. She was seething. He had no idea why, since neither of them had said a word in the past fifteen minutes. Mulder had been peering at his wristwatch out of the corner of his eye, watching the hands draw closer to Scully's usual clock out time with every passing heartbeat.
He was running out of time.
Even if she shot him down - not in the literal sense of the word, he hoped, not again - he'd know. He'd have tried, and he could live with that. Mulder took the pencil out of his mouth and leaned forward on his chair.
Enough was enough. Scully was never quite sure when Mulder was teasing her and when he meant what he said - or didn't say, for that matter - but if he had been trying to wind her up, he'd not only succeeded, but missed the moment where it stopped being funny and made her furious instead.
While staring at him as it would will him to acknowledge her, she grabbed her open handbag from the floor and tossed the cellphone into it. It landed on her keys with a loud clatter as the front legs of Mulder's chair hit the ground. If looks could kill, he'd have toppled over, but he was still frowning at the file in his hands.
Scully was sure he believed there was some kind of monster which was able to do that - kill you with a simple look. At the moment, she was inclined to agree with him.
It was also the only common ground between them right now.
She wanted to be seen as a person. Oh, did Mulder ever want to see, but not mere earthlings like herself. Those were only interesting if they were part of a case. She was at the center of one, and he was on it like a bloodhound. Scully was thankful for that as an agent and as a doctor, however, she was also more than that. Even people like her, who held science over most of their beliefs, had feelings and needed to be noticed, known, and understood.
In short, she was forlorn, and the path ahead of her would only get darker and even more lonely.
She couldn't allow her fears to weaken her spirit, so she held onto her anger with everything she had. Mulder couldn't have missed that she'd packed up her things.
With the bag in a stranglehold in one hand, she stood. Even drawing a breath was hard in the corset of her tense muscles.
The concentrated fury with which Scully had gathered up her things had knocked the courage out of Mulder. He was confused. What was going on with her? He peered up at his partner - and looked into chilling gray-blue eyes which were ready to kill.
Averting his gaze was a reflex he'd never encountered when face to face with monsters of all kinds, but the five feet and three inches of anger in front of his desk had succeeded where each of them had failed. In an attempt to brush over his trepidation, Mulder laid down the pencil and grabbed a sunflower seed from the small pile next to his phone. He bit it open and mumbled around it: "So, you're goin' home?"
"Does it look like I am?"
He dared to glance up at her, the thumb and the index finger of his right hand still stuck between his teeth. Smooth, Mulder, he told himself and scrambled to pick the hull out of his mouth so he could speak.
"Well, yes, Scully, that's what one assumes if someone is packing up their stuff and getting up from their desk," he said and threw the hull on the growing pile next to the his coffee mug.
"This isn't my desk. I don't have a desk, in case you are still not aware of that."
Mulder realized that today, saving himself with a joke was not an option. Scully was in a worse mood than he'd thought. Given her situation, it shouldn't have been surprising, but she'd held up so well ever since she'd recovered from the treatment she'd received in the hospital that they spent most days as if nothing had ever changed. He had been so glad she'd come back to work, and falling into their old routine had been a tad too easy.
They both pretended the thin ice above the dark abyss they were crossing would hold as well as the solid earth which had been pulled out under them only two short weeks ago when they'd learned about Scully's cancer.
Neither of them mentioned the tremors the extending cracks sent through their feet. They'd held onto each other when the ground gave in for the first time, and now that the cold water was lapping at their feet, Mulder did his best to talk over the creaking of the straining ice.
"So, what are you going to do over the weekend?" he asked and arranged the seeds into a neat square between four yellow pencils.
Scully had first hoped, then waited for this question since she'd first stepped into the office this morning. Here it was, and yet it did nothing to quench her burning anger. She wanted to let it go, but she found she couldn't.
Wasn't it unjust of her to snap at Mulder when he said what she'd wanted to hear all day?
With effort, she managed to release some of the tension in her shoulders. She intended to maintain some semblance of civility, but as she spoke, bitter sarcasm arose from the fire that kept her going.
"Oh, you know, the usual... take a bath, read. Enjoy how quiet it is in the apartment."
Be lonely, be scared, and waste a weekend that should create memories worth remembering - if not by her, then by those that shared them with her - , she thought to herself. The unfairness that Mulder could just go on with his life made her furious.
With jerky movements, she picked up her blazer from the back of her chair, folded it in half, and chucked it over her arm.
"See you on Monday," she said as she stalked towards the hallway, her voice heavy with barely concealed irritation.
"Fox," she added under her breath and slammed the door shut behind her.
Mulder sat at his desk, his hand hanging in midair. Openmouthed, he stared at the door. The bang reverberated once and then ebbed off as the files and newspaper clippings stacked in every corner of the office sucked all energy out of the sound. However, it still echoed in Mulder's mind once the room had gone back to the soulless silence it exuded in slow, stifling waves whenever he was alone down here.
He'd blown his chance. Scully wasn't in the mood to be around anyone, but it was clear he was number one on the list of people she didn't want to spend even a minute of her weekend with. They might have managed to have a casual conversation if he hadn't waited a whole week to bring up a topic which didn't have to do with an X-File. Maybe he would have been able to weave the question about her weekend plans into that conversation. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe in a parallel universe, he had succeeded, but in this one, he'd failed.
Mulder picked up one of the pencils and threw it at the door with as much force as he could muster. It clattered against the laminated pressboard, then fell down. He stared at the lonely orange fleck in a sea of gray government-issued carpet as if he expected it to come alive. The silence pressed in on him, and nothing moved. A sudden need to get out of the stuffy basement and to breathe some fresh air overcame him. He put on his coat, stepped over the pencil, and made his way to the elevator.
The words on the page dissolved into a gray blur in front of Scully's eyes. In a small, dark corner of her soul, her conscience had raised its unwelcome head while she'd been on the way to the university's library in the tense and aggressive atmosphere of Friday evening traffic.
Mulder hadn't done anything warranting her behavior towards him.
Exactly. He hadn't done anything. He'd only pretended everything was as it had always been, while they both knew everything had changed. Wasn't that just the point?
Someone had honked behind her, and in her hurry to cross the intersection before the light turned red again, she'd stalled the car. When she'd made it to the other side, but the guy behind her hadn't and it had been her fault, she felt as if she failed everyone she came in touch with. Was this what sickness did to people - did it suck their humanity out of them long before it took their life?
She'd pushed those bleak thoughts aside, which became easier every day, just as they became more and more frequent. They assaulted her out of the blue, like hawks swooping down on their unsuspecting prey. A happy couple passed her on the sidewalk on her way to lunch, and she thought she would never get to experience what they assumed to be nothing but their ordinary life. Someone walked their dog, and instead of giving its owner a smile, she was reminded she would never be a dog owner ever again. When she saw kids on a playground, she wished she could wipe her irrational anger at their mothers away like she blinked the tears out of her eyes. It became too much, and she learned to lie to herself that everything was fine, even if she was only able to convince herself of it for a few minutes before reality intruded.
Scully had taken the steps to the library entrance two at a time just to prove to herself that she was able to do so. The sun had set, and the glowing yellow light spilling through the high glass doors had made her feel more welcome than the purpose of her visit had warranted. The way to the section where the medical textbooks stood had still been familiar, and three aisles down she had found the authors starting with the letter R. The books she'd been looking for had had their place in the uppermost row, and she'd had to drag the stepladder from the beginning of the aisle to the dark corner where it ended to get to them. The first volume of "Nasal Tumors in Animals and Man" had stuck to the neighboring books before it had come free and had sent a flock of dust bunnies down on her that had made her sneeze. Scully had frozen with the back of her hand pressed to her nose until she'd been sure that the sudden pressure hadn't started yet another nosebleed. She'd had to leave her handbag in a locker and hadn't had a tissue on her. If she'd bled on the books, she'd have lost access to this library as well, but her life depended on the literature she found on her condition.
She'd piled the other two volumes of the series, Tumor Pathology and Experimental Carcinogenesis, onto the first one, and had climbed down the ladder step by step in her impractical heels. The student temp who'd had the evening shift at the counter had rented the books out to her with the bored routine of someone who had many more hours in the quiet library ahead of her. Scully had stepped out into the dark, cold February night much earlier than she'd anticipated. On her drive home, the sweet-and-sour scent of decaying paper had permeated the car, mixed with years of dust and the chemical odor of the decade-old plastic dust jackets. As soon as she'd gotten home, she'd changed into a loose, comfortable top and pajama bottoms and had settled on the couch for a first skim. She would have much preferred some lighter reading in her free time, but the enemy who'd had taken up residence within her had no concept of evenings or weekends. It was always, always growing. If she wanted to get ahead of it, she needed to learn everything about her cancer's likely and even unlikely causes in as little time as possible so she could turn that knowledge against it.
She'd only planned on leafing through the three volumes before dinner to get her bearings and to make a list of the topics covered that seemed most relevant to her case, but then she wasn't able to put the third book down. It talked about the known ways to induce nasal tumors, and she couldn't help but wonder if one of the described methods had been used on her. The expression made her cringe, because it exposed with clinical ruthlessness that she'd been the victim of a process she'd never consented to.
To get the thought out of her mind, she went back to the index listing all the experimental methods described in the book, hoping to remember anything that would help her discern which one she'd been subjected to. She read through all the chapter titles, but not a single memory or flashback came to her. Her mind took her down the well-traveled path they followed whenever she was working on an X-File with Mulder and she hadn't been able to come up with a scientific theory that made sense of the evidence at hand: she found herself going through all the out-of-the-ordinary explanations she could think of off the top of her head without Mulder there. To her chagrin, they were plentiful.
Of course, there was always that one explanation that her partner believed to be true - the one she found most unlikely. In the silence of her living room, she admitted to herself that she rejected even thinking about the possibility of an alien abduction. If her illness was the result of an unearthly procedure, there might not be an earthly cure for her condition. Out of mere self-preservation, she couldn't let herself consider that. She was only able to keep the darkness at bay if there was a possibility of recovery, no matter how slim.
Mulder wondered why an action he performed every day felt so different all of a sudden: as if his perception had shifted enough to make everything feel foreign and strange, but not enough that he didn't recognize his surroundings. When he turned the key in his apartment door, the clanging of metal and the snapping of the lock appeared to be louder and more piercing than usual, as if to alert everyone on his floor to his presence. In contrast to the office, where the emptiness had screamed at him after Scully had left, his apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. He shut the door behind himself, leaned against it, and breathed a sigh of relief. The wood at the back of his head and his shoulders was cool and solid. If there were only something or someone to prop up his soul like the door did his body.
He pushed himself upright and took his coat off. What a futile habit to put it on the coat rack every night only to take it down again the next morning. What a futile life, chasing something that was always just out of reach or only seemed clear-cut and obvious to himself and no one else. How self-absorbed of him to pull Scully into all that without ever considering any of the dangers beyond those they'd been taught to watch out for during their FBI training.
If he'd still been leaning against the door, he'd have banged his head against it in yet another useless attempt to silence the cacophony of thoughts in his head. No matter what he tried to distract himself with - what to have for dinner, tonight's TV program, that he needed to feed the fish - he always ended up blaming himself for Scully's illness. Although he was ready to do whatever it took to help her, guilty or not, he wasn't able to focus on how to do that as long as his conscience was busy trying to assign guilt to someone. Especially since the alternatives to him were either beings from outer space or an evil government conspiracy that no one but he himself believed in.
Mulder stood in the middle of the kitchen, halfway between the pantry and the refrigerator, and couldn't bring himself to open either of them. His stomach had been rumbling on the way home, but now his appetite was gone. As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on the bottle of vodka in the far corner of the counter. Dust had settled on it and muted the gloss of the silver letters on the label to a dirty grey. It had stood there, unnoticed, for weeks, if not months, waiting for its moment.
Maybe the time had come.
There was no one around to talk him out of it. No one he could call who would dissect his motivations. No one who'd fire off an explanation, point by well-researched, fact-supported point, as to why it would be much better, from a scientific perspective, if he didn't try to drown his sorrows in alcohol.
So he had to play that part himself. Drinking on an empty stomach wasn't a good idea. Given how rarely he drank alcohol, it would hit him like a brick.
Maybe it was a good idea.
Maybe he was useless at scientific explanations.
Eight o'clock. There was still more than enough time left to read some chapters of the three books that lay scattered across the coffee table. Dinner could wait a little longer, Scully wasn't hungry. She seldom was. At the end of many of the evenings she'd spent at home since being diagnosed, she'd gone to bed without eating anything. She often lay in bed watching the scrubs in front of the bedroom window sway in the gusts of winter wind until there were only two or three hours left before she had to get up again. That left far too much time to follow her thoughts wherever they took her in the cold light of the street lamp which gave the branches slapping against the glass an eerie silver glow. Their shadows seemed to reach out for her across the empty right half of the bed with long, dark fingers.
The pale moonlight reminded her of another, much brighter, cold and clinical light. She couldn't remember much of her... experience. If she could only forget the parts that came back to haunt her. Yet, the more details she recalled, the better her chances were at saving herself.
Scully pressed a hand to her forehead and exhaled. She was glad she'd gone back to work. It gave her the impression that she was carrying on with her life, that there was going to be more life to live ahead of her. However, keeping up a professional front was draining. By the time she got home after a long day, she was often glad that she could show her fear and growing desperation without raising any questions by colleagues or prompting worried looks from Mulder.
Head in hand, she stared down at the carpet without seeing anything and wiped her mind blank of any thoughts. After a few blissful seconds, the now familiar dread returned, and she collected herself and stood to get a notepad and a pen.
With the dusty bottle in one hand and the TV remote in the other, Mulder plopped down on the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. He switched on the TV, dropped the remote next to him, and screwed the lid off the liquor.
He'd forgotten to bring a glass.
Fumes of alcohol shot up his nose and went straight to his head when he took a generous whiff of the vodka. No way was he going to drink that straight from the bottle.
There was an open jug of orange juice in the fridge, but no clean glass anywhere in the kitchen. Mulder considered pouring the vodka into the jug, but that seemed a bit crass. From the living room, a chipper, high-pitched male voice was advertising some gadget that, according to the commercial, "Programs your cells for health using the latest in computer technology. This is a special offer, only $49.99, only available for a limited amount of time. Call right now and hold the key to your health in your hands by tomorrow!" Mulder believed in many things, but even he didn't think that a random piece of technology could heal all ills and snorted in disgust. If it only were this easy. After rummaging through the cupboards for a while, he found a mug behind some dishes that he never used, since he only recycled the one standing in the dish rack next to the sink. The faded print on the mug said, "We solve your problems!" And, smaller underneath, "SampSolv - Your trusted source for analytical-grade solvents." Baffled, he held it up in front of him. Then, he remembered: almost three years ago, before the X-Files had been shut down for a while, the bag of sunflower seeds he'd been about to take out of his desk drawer had ripped open. The seeds had rained down on his paperwork and from there on his legs and down on the floor, but Scully had grabbed a mug she'd kept at the basement office and had emptied the remaining contents of the broken bag into it. Up in the lab, they sometimes got little gifts from the sales representatives of the companies they ordered their medical and chemical supplies from, and the mug had been one of them. When they'd had to leave the X-Files office, he'd taken it home with him, since it had still held what had been left of his snack.
Armed with the mug and the orange juice, Mulder returned to the living room as a wildlife documentary came on. He poured a generous helping of vodka into the glass and topped it off with the juice. Then he sat back, put his feet back up on the coffee table and took a large swig of the mixture. The cold orange juice froze his brain, but then the alcohol hit and a welcome warmth spread in his mind and slowed his thoughts.
For a moment, anyway. He took another big swallow.
There, that was better.
But not good enough.
Scully heard herself wheeze in the quiet living room. The carpet around her was speckled with tissues from when she'd tried in vain to free up her stuffy nose. She took a deep breath through the mouth and kept reading. So far, she'd skimmed through the chapters providing general information on nasopharyngeal tumors. She was looking for something new to catch her eye, an opening to another avenue of research to pursue, so she kept leafing through the first book. The rustling of the pages made her think of fall, and she wondered if she'd survive long enough to see the leaves turn yellow, red, and brown again. Then she shook her head at herself. She was an FBI agent, she'd been in severe danger before and had still always assumed that she'd live to celebrate another Christmas, another birthday. She forced herself to snap out of her self-pity and the book and the notepad lying on the coffee table came back into focus. So far, she'd only written down the three conventional ways of treatment: chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. The latter was out of the question, since the cure would be as dangerous as the disease. That left the other two. Based on her knowledge from med school, she'd concluded that neither of them were a viable option either for her type of carcinoma, and that's what she'd told Mulder when she'd shared the discovery of her illness with him.
Only with him.
She'd been on autopilot from the moment when she'd first seen the image of her tumor, an innocent white patch in an amalgamation of grey. That the name and birthdate printed at the foot of the radiogram had been hers had given a surreal situation the hard-hitting stamp of reality. In a split second, she'd turned from an examining doctor into the patient being examined. Then, the automatisms from both her medical and her FBI training had taken over, and she'd called the partner she trusted with her life. In the time it had taken him to make his way to the hospital, she'd gone through everything she could recall about the types and treatments of nasal tumors before she'd had to break the bad news to him.
After the numbness of the initial shock of finding her worst fears confirmed had worn off, she'd been able to contain the rising tide of panic by slipping back into her doctor's persona. Scully had wanted to stay strong while she informed Mulder. Having to tell him that he would most likely lose another person from his life had been something she'd rather not have had to do, and breaking down herself while doing so would have turned this journey neither of them wanted to be on into a direction she didn't want to imagine herself going into.
While she'd thought about the best way of presenting him with the grim facts, she'd wondered how she was even able to worry about someone else's feelings when her own world had just been hurled into darkness. The second detail marking the change in how people treated her had been the fact that Mulder had brought her flowers. The first had been the shift in the demeanor of the imaging technician. When Scully had arranged the examination and the technician had assumed it was for one of "Dr. Scully's" patients, she'd sounded upbeat and perky. Later, she'd been taken aback when she'd found out that the appointment had been for Scully herself, but she'd recovered and had put on a professional mask while she readied the equipment. Afterwards, when she'd pinned the prints to the wall in the stark white conference room where Scully had been shivering in her flimsy hospital dress, she'd said, "I'm sorry, Dr. Scully," her face carefully devoid of any signs that there might be joy in her own life. Then she'd closed the door behind herself with great care, as if to shut out the normal life still going on outside the cancer ward.
Scully shook her head in an attempt to return to the present. Ever since she'd diagnosed herself, her thoughts had been going off on odd tangents in the most inappropriate moments, and often, her feelings had followed. She couldn't let herself drift like this if she was going to find a way to treat herself in time. She sat up from her slouch, blew her nose, pulled the coffee table closer, poised the pen over the notepad and found her place in the book where her mind had wandered off.
Partners were supposed to protect each other, to have each other's backs. He'd failed Scully. Not only had he not protected her, he was the one who'd exposed her to what had made her sick. If it hadn't been for him and his crazy quest, she'd never have been assigned to the X-Files to reign him in. He'd pulled her into the center of the conspiracy permeating every corner of his life and had turned hers upside down in the process - had maybe even exposed her to a deadly threat. Their weapons were useless against the kind of danger they were dealing with, and even Scully's faith hadn't been able to follow her to where she'd been taken.
Mulder swirled the rest of the tepid cocktail around in the mug and then poured it down his throat in one big gulp. The narrator's sonorous voice didn't match his agitation, and he flipped channels. More commercials. Next channel. Men in suits screaming at each other in a political talkshow. He hit the remote so hard it skipped a channel, and the tinny laugh track of a sitcom filled the room. He switched the TV off and grabbed the vodka bottle. This time, he poured double the amount. The orange juice lost most of its color when it combined with the alcohol. Mulder stared at the pale yellow concoction for a second, then shrugged his shoulders and took a gulp. He leaned back and rested his head against the wall. There was nothing to distract him at the ceiling, and he let it loll to the right side. One of the fish in the aquarium was facing him, and Mulder raised his mug to him before he took another sip.
She was parched. Scully swallowed, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. With her mouth closed, she couldn't breathe, so she gulped in air like a fish on land. Her neck hurt, and she raised her head inch by inch against the stiffness of her muscles with her eyes still shut. Something stuck to her cheek, and it peeled off her skin like a plaster. A book snapped shut below her left ear, and she realized she must have fallen asleep over the books and her notes.
She opened her eyes and pushed her glasses up on her nose. The light in the kitchen was still on from when she'd come home, and she realized she hadn't eaten anything. The hands on her wristwatch indicated that she'd slept until almost 11pm. Scully contemplated rummaging through the fridge in search for something that would pass for dinner, but she was still dizzy with sleep. If that meant that she would for once be out like a light the moment her head hit the pillow, she didn't want to waste the opportunity.
Her leg had fallen asleep, and she stretched it out under the table and waited until the pricking of pins and needles abated before she got up. On the way to her bedroom, she yawned. Loudly. Living alone had its perks.
Scully hadn't looked forward to crawling under the covers this much in a long time. She tucked them under her arm, turned onto her side, and asked herself if there were any tissues left in the box on the nightstand in case her nose started bleeding during the night.
She was fast asleep before she could check.
"I screwed up today, Herman. Scratch that. I screwed up all week. I've screwed up my partner's life. Her future. She might not even have a future anymore."
Herman didn't respond.
Mulder wasn't deterred by the lack of communication. "You know, I was going to do something nice for her. But then I screwed up."
He burped. "I've told you that before, haven't I?" Mulder tried to count the bubbles rising in the fish tank. There were so many, and they multiplied before his eyes.
"Where was I? Right. It's her birthday on Sunday, and she's sick, and I really don't want to think about losing her, so I'm drinking. See? Now I've thought about it again."
He guzzled what was left over from his fourth helping and sat up to pour himself a new drink. His brain seemed to be sloshing back and forth in his skull, and his vision swayed in synchrony. He sat on the edge of the sofa until both settled down. Then, he grabbed the glass bottle and poured its contents into the jug of orange juice. Or rather, he tried. Only when the expected splashing sound didn't come did he realize that he'd forgotten to unscrew the cap. He huffed at himself, removed the obstacle to oblivion with unsteady fingers, and stuck the bottleneck into the jug.
Then he shook it to mix it all up. The contents splashed around in the plastic container, and some of the liquid shot up through the opening and doused his legs.
Figuring out the right order in which to react took him longer than usual, and by the time he'd decided to put the jug on the table and to get something to dab at the spreading stain, the cocktail had soaked through his suit pants. He got up, steadying himself with one hand on the armrest.
"Don't look, Herman," he said, turned his back to the aquarium and unfastened his belt. Working the button was difficult. Several times, he thought he'd managed to slide it through the hole, only to find out that his pants wouldn't budge when he tugged on them. When the button came free, they fell down, and Mulder collapsed on the sofa in his boxers.
"Where was I? Screwed up, right. All I had to do is ask her. By the way, her name is Scully, but you know that, don't you? She's been here before." He raised his head far enough so he could take a sip from the jug. No point in bothering with the mug.
He wiped his mouth and continued. "She's the only person I talk to, because I can't trust anyone. No one besides her, that is. But we never really talk, you know? I thought it would be nice if we did. So, we could go out for dinner, right? Birthday dinner. With sparklers and singin' Happy Birthday and all that. Proper birthday so she can forget for a bit. It's all set, we jus' need to show up. I jus' want her to be happy on her special day. Jus' a lil' smile. That would be nice." He stared at the ceiling while the scene played out in his mind. They'd have dinner... they'd had dinner together hundreds of times, but for once, they weren't going to talk about work. He wasn't going to bring up any cases, or the search for his sister. Scully had always imagined a different life for herself, and the realization that she might never get a chance to live her dreams had punched the air out of his lungs like a nightmare that he still hadn't woken up from. He would do anything to give her even a little bit of what she'd forgone in working with him. Normal people with normal lives had birthday dinners, and they gave each other birthday presents.
"I even have a present," he told Herman, who was standing still in the water, moving his fins just enough not to get carried away by the current. Mulder motioned towards the approximate location where his pants lay in a soaked, crumbled grey heap on the floor. "Keychain. Apollo 11. Because she's a s-scientist, and without them, mankind wouldn't ever have flown to the moon." He mimicked a rocket taking off towards space, and the liquid in the jug in his other hand splashed around. He pulled himself up and drank most of the sour, tepid mixture despite it burning his throat. "No asn... astronauts on the moon without scientists. And none in your fish tank either," he continued. "Scully is a damn fine scientist. Shoulda read her thesis. 'S really good. I've got a copy here somewhere." He got up on unsteady feet and staggered towards the desk.
A warm, fluffy cloud. Soft fabric against her skin, the mild air heavy with the scent of flowers. Sun on her face. Scully stretched her arms above her head and wiggled her toes. No alarm. The weekend! She smiled.
Saturday or Sunday?
She'd fallen asleep at the coffee table on Friday evening. And with that, her new, ugly reality caught up with her. The bright, sunny day promised joy which was lost on her.
She could just as well continue where she'd left off yesterday night. Scully heaved herself up and padded down the hallway.
The living room opened up in front of her, and she stopped dead in her tracks.
The coffee table was empty.
The books were gone, and her notepad wasn't there anymore either. Only the pen lay still on the table, but on the other side from where she'd left it.
The blood drained from her face, and then a wave of heat shot back up as the adrenaline hit. She should have been intimidated. They wanted her intimidated.
Whoever "they" were.
She balled her fists. She'd had it with people intruding into her life, into her apartment, into her body, into her health. With great effort, she contained her fury and listened.
Except for the rustling of the trees swaying in the breeze outside the window, the apartment was quiet. Scully traced her steps back to the bedroom. Gun in hand, she checked the closet, the other room, and then the hallway in front of her apartment.
She was alone.
Without any immediate danger, the adrenaline rush abated. Scully took a deep breath when her heart rate slowed, but the downward spiral continued and swept the defenses away that she'd kept in place for two weeks. She started shaking. When she turned to go back into the apartment, she found she couldn't step over the threshold.
She was standing in the hallway in her pajamas with her gun in her hand, staring into the living room through the wide open jaw of the apartment door, shivering and unable to move.
A neighbor opened a door, and the sound set her in motion. She needed to get out of here.
The light came from the wrong direction, and red heat pulsated behind his eyes in time with the pounding in his head. Mulder pried one eye open, and a flash of pain shot through his skull. He winced and burrowed his face... in a stack of paper. Careful, he opened both eyes. The letters at the end of his nose blurred together, so he raised his head a few inches until the word "universe" came into focus. Mulder straightened and read the whole sentence. "Although multidimensionality suggests infinite outcomes in an infinite number of universes, each universe can produce only one outcome."
Scully's thesis.
The words made their way through the haze in his mind and the sense behind them trickled into his consciousness. Only one outcome per universe.
The wrong outcome. Scully leaving in a huff. His bad mood. The drinking. Staggering to his desk.
He groaned. Time to get up and turn around to face whichever destruction he'd caused last night.
The chair stuck to the back of his thighs and fell over with a loud clatter when he stood. Mulder froze, shoulders hunched and eyes closed, until the bouncing and banging behind him abated.
Wait a minute.
Naked skin sticking to the chair.
He wasn't wearing any pants.
Mulder tried to recalled his steps backwards from when he'd walked to the desk. Once he remembered taking them off, he relaxed. He turned around to the heap of fabric on the floor by the sofa.
Then he shot forward, kneeled down next to his pants and searched their pockets.
Nothing. His heart began to race. Surely he'd searched the same pocket twice.
He checked again.
Left pocket.
Nothing there. However, he recalled putting the keychain in his right pocket when Scully had come down to the office, surprising him. He made sure to check that one again too.
The phone rang. Mulder ignored the shrill sound and kept searching.
The keychain wasn't there.