Bad Idea

A/N: I know I'm covering ground that must have been covered a million times before. But I always liked these two, so I'm going to keep on doing it for a little while.

This tiny bit refers to events in my previous story, 'The Greatest of These'. I guess I'm slowly joining dots between 4-D and Audrey Pauley.

Thanks if you feel like reading. Extra thanks if you ever leave a review.

Monica could feel him watching her from over his desk. He'd been doing this all day. A couple of times she'd looked up from the report she was busy working on to find her partner studiously staring at something in the middle distance just a few inches west of her face, as if he'd had to shift his focus suddenly and had belatedly discovered he had nowhere else to put it.

She frowned at her screen. She had the sense that he wanted to ask her something, but wasn't quite sure how to do it. It wasn't like him. John Doggett was straight as a die, always forthright and completely without guile. She'd known this long before she'd agreed to the unorthodox transfer that had delivered her to this dim Washington basement. To a large extent it was why she'd agreed to it in the first place. Doggett was not a game player. That suited her just fine. She'd had enough of those to last her a lifetime.

Straight and steady, that's what she liked about him. It's what she relied upon when everything else in this life was increasingly prone to shifting under her feet, and not always metaphorically. She'd once told him, in a version of this life he never experienced and that now seemed increasingly dreamlike even in her own mind, that she would do anything for him. It was a statement that had turned out to be truer than even she'd known at that moment, and she had come to think that the same was the case for him with her. She had no doubt he'd take a bullet for her if (god forbid) it came to it, or that he'd turn off her life support if she begged him to. They had each other's back.

Yet for the past few weeks, something between them had been… off. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Monica thought for a moment, and pinpointed it as a form of awareness on his part that she had hitherto not noticed. It wasn't anything overt. He'd let his Southern-boy manners kick in a couple of times, that was all. He'd held open doors for her that she was perfectly capable of opening herself. He'd picked up her jacket at the end of the day and offered it up for her to slip her arms into. Small things. Inconsequential things, surely, and yet… they weren't. In partnerships as close as those formed by the pairings of law enforcement agents, any change was both noticeable and note-worthy. She remembered one of her lecturers at Quantico outlining the relationship that all FBI field agents would have to create with their assigned partners. "You will spend more time with this person than with any other in your life. That includes spouses, children, parents or siblings. All manner of tensions will arise. Be aware of them. Address them. Do not let them fester. Communication is the key."

Monica was pretty sure she knew what had caused this reaction in John Doggett. She was equally sure that it was her fault, and completely certain that there was no chance at all of her ever being willing to communicate with him about it. It had started on the morning she'd woken up beside him in a motel bed after two weeks of imagining that he could be gone from her life forever. Half asleep, disarmed by how close he was, relieved at the recognition she could see in his eyes and floored by the sensation of his innocent fingers against her cheek, she'd let it slip. Up until that point Reyes was pretty sure she'd kept a hold on it. But there, in that second, when she could smell his honest skin mingled with the analgesic she'd put there with her own fingers and feel the sleep-heavy warmth of him close enough to touch, she'd let it out. She knew he'd been aware of the direction her glance had taken as she'd looked at his mouth, just for a fraction of a second thinking about -

Monica screwed her eyes shut, frowning the thought away. Dammit. For sure John had realised where her mind had been. And now he was treating her with kid gloves, as if he had something to make up for. In her more idle moments she'd sometimes wondered how he saw her and always ending up concluding that if he saw anything at all, it wasn't her but something indelible overlaying her image. It was obvious he trusted her as a partner, despite his frequent perplexity over her less orthodox theories. But how could he ever work past the fact that the first time they had seen each other was as she'd stood over his murdered son's body? When every memory of her in his mind must be irrevocably tied to those hideous days and weeks which had separated him from his son and then eventually from his wife?

Monica sighed and put her hands over her face. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to move to the X Files. It might be her ideal field, but here intrigue and attraction had comingled to become something else, something greater, and now despite her best intentions she'd been caught out. She'd apparently managed to gouge a hole right in the middle of their working relationship that was big enough to be her dignity's grave and would surely become so if he chose to voice whatever gentle rebuttal had been going around his head.

Geez, Monica, you're a swell friend an' all, but…

Maybe she should call Brad tonight. Patch a mistake with another, bigger mistake.

"Got a headache?"

She dropped her hands to find Doggett leaning over her desk.

Monica forced a smile. "No, just… long week. Thank god it's," she looked at her watch, "6.30pm on a Friday night, huh?"

He nodded, his eyes sliding away from hers, the expression on his face part grimace, part pale smile. "Got plans?"

"For tonight? Er –" she thought about her idle contemplation of a second ago and mentally slashed a pen through it. Bad idea. Terrible. "No. Just home, I think. You?"

John straightened up and shook his head. "Nothing."

"Right."

He opened his mouth to say something else and then appeared to think better of it. Monica continued to watch him, slightly confused.

"John?" she prompted. "Was there something…?"

"Want to get a beer?" he asked, as if speaking before he had a chance to persuade himself not to. "With me?"

She blinked at him. "Now?"

He shrugged. "Yeah. Figured maybe we could talk about something other than work for a change."

Monica felt her pulse rate quicken and cursed herself for it. She willed her cheeks not to flame.

Doggett was looking away from her, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "Just occurred to me that we don't do it very often, that's all."

Her mouth was suddenly dry. "Talk? Or drink beer together?"

He looked back at her. "Both, I guess."

"Guess you're right," she agreed, the ground beneath her seeming to tilt, very slightly.

"Why is that, do you suppose?" Doggett asked. He was still looking down at her. Right at her.

The disparity in their heights was suddenly unbearable. Monica stood, too quickly. Her blood seemed to rush down to her toes and back up past her ears again in the time it took her to breathe. "It's just the way it is, right? The job takes so much of our time anyway. No need to put more into it at the expense of people waiting at home."

A strange, fleeting expression passed across his face. "I… don't have anyone waiting at home."

Her heart wouldn't seem to settle. "No. Neither do I. So… beer it is, then. I'll drive."

"You don't have to do that."

Yeah, she really did. It'd stop her drinking too much. If she drank too much she might end up doing something – saying something – stupid. "It's fine. You can drive next time."

He paused for a moment and then smiled, as if she'd said something that had pleased him. She wasn't sure what. Monica flicked off her computer and picked up her keys. By the time she'd turned around he'd taken her jacket down from where she'd hung it that morning.

She knew he was going to hold it up for her before he'd even done it. She suddenly wondered if maybe she hadn't misread the gesture.

Don't think it, she told herself. Don't hope. Bad idea. Terrible. Already had enough of those tonight.

"Thanks," she said, quietly, as she turned her back to him and he lifted it over her shoulders.

"Sure." His fingers lingered on her arm, just for a second. "Ready?"

She tried to forestall the sudden connection her memory had made between his touch on her arm and his touch on her face. She failed.

Bad idea, she told herself, desperately. Terrible.

"Ready," she said. "Let's go."

[END]

or just possibly

[TBC]