All of This (a round) Us
Notes: This is a missing scene from The Pine Bluff Variant, but mostly it's a little story about nothing. Also, apologies for the pretentiousness of the title (...get it?).
Partial impact theory states that when two stars tumbling through the nothingness of space collide head-on, a little piece of each breaks off and combines to create a third star, right in between them. The third star, though small and temporary, is brighter and burns hotter than either of the colliding stars on their own. This is The Romance of the Heavens, and it is, more or less, how Scully finds herself sitting on Mulder's coffee table at one o'clock in the morning.
"That needs to be set."
It's the second time she's said it ten minutes, ever since the ice in his cold compress started leaking through the towel.
The silence between them now is dark and full, solicitous, almost rich in the same way as the aftertaste of campfire smoke. The air in here is cool on Scully's skin and Mulder's hands are large and dry; she forgets how large they are, sometimes, when she's constantly sidestepping just out of their reach at the small of her back, and she's surprised when it takes both of her hands to envelope one of his in order to pull it into her lap. "Ready?"
He's not; he licks sweat from his upper lip and bounces his leg three times, four times, just enough to fill the sizeable pause. His knee is touching the coffee table and Scully can feel the aftershocks of his movement traveling upward from her thighs and concentrating around her hips. With his hand in hers, they're a closed circuit, she thinks. "How about a shot of liquid courage first?" Mulder suggests. "Isn't that how they do it in the movies?"
"What movies?" Scully asks automatically, contemplating his nail bed and not particularly invested in his response. She's fascinated with the bruising on his pinky and itching to get started. "Putting it off isn't going to make it hurt any less."
"But getting drunk off my ass might." Mulder removes his hand from hers and cradles it by the wrist against his chest. With a sigh, he rolls his head against the back of the couch and regards her quietly down the length of his nose. It might have been a challenge but for the tired tilt of his head. "Come on, sawbones. There's whiskey in the bottom drawer of the desk."
Scully leans forward from the coffee table, closing the gap between them, insulating the conversation. It's dark in his apartment; it feels appropriate to be close and hushed like this, sharing oxygen and pillow-talking. She is amused, though, by this secret, and she re-closes the circuit by moving her toes so they just barely pinch his instep. "Whiskey, Mulder?"
He shrugs. "It was a birthday gift from my mom a couple years ago."
"I didn't think you were much of a drinker."
"I'm not." To his credit, his look is only a little bit like velvet brushed against the grain. That's the thing about Fox Mulder, though: he saves self-pity for special occasions, doesn't waste it on old hurts. "Knew it'd come in handy someday."
Scully leans back on her palms, opening up the conversation again; without thinking, she taps out a rhythm on the coffee table with her fingernails: bonedigger, bonedigger. She's supposed to be a doctor; she's supposed to give him some acetaminophen, tell him it's something stronger, and wait fifteen to twenty minutes for it to kick in. "Whiskey." She repeats. Why the hell not.
"Mhmm."
"And then I'll set your finger."
"Jesus, Scully, buy me a drink first and we'll see where it goes." He grins, rubbing his wrist. Scully raises an eyebrow and tries to decide whether that hits a little too close to home, but doesn't reach a definitive conclusion. They stare at each other.
"Don't get up." She finally mutters under her breath. On her way to the desk, she kicks his foot a little by accident, maybe.
He likes to piss her off sometimes. It was, at first, a way to test her boundaries and her loyalty, to see how many times he could push her away until she stopped coming back; five years in, she still hasn't left and somehow it's become affectionate teasing. Still unbelievably annoying, though, especially the times when he's miserable and trying to get under her skin for the simple godforsaken reason that she's the only one who always sticks around.
"Ice," he requests extra pleasantly. Scully gives him a long-suffering look and makes her way through to the kitchen by streetlight and memory.
Mulder doesn't have tumblers, or even a complete dinnerware set, really, so she just grabs two glasses from the drying rack by the sink: a coffee mug with NY KNICKS on it for her, and a fat blue plastic cup for Mulder. She recalls the mug sitting on the desk in the living room at one point, a Number 2 pencil with a chewed-off eraser stuck in it and half full (she is neither an optimist nor a pessimist but a realist) of spit-softened sunflower seed husks. And then there was the summer he had ants. She rinses it out again discretely.
Inside the freezer is a mountain of frost that Scully has to chisel through to get to an ice cube tray. The ice inside looks cloudy and a little brackish, and is, disturbingly, very nearly the color of the whiskey itself.
"Are these ice cubes from your tap?"
"Yeah, why?"
Scully tilts the tray and something like an oil sheen is caught by the light of the freezer. "How long have they been in here?" Her lip curls around the question. She has heard about the infamous year-old orange juice, the one she had rightfully insisted was expired and Mulder, very generously, had declared "aged". After he'd said that, she'd taken the opportunity to show off all her knowledge about the more gruesome symptoms of salmonella infections and- just for the hell of it- botulism. It had been a long car ride.
"I don't know, why?"
"The LSD..." She trails off. Scully's residual paranoia at finding out Mulder's water had been drugged three years ago extended deep into her personal life, for a time. It took months before she could brush her teeth with anything but bottled water. She ran background checks on all her landlord's maintenance men (George checked out but Carl had served time for fraud).
"That's sugar cubes, Scully." She can hear his smile, that obnoxious one with the raised eyebrows he saves for when he's being deliberately obtuse. "I bet you're fun at parties."
"I wouldn't know." She mumbles into the freezer. The bare lightbulb inside flickers twice. She dumps the dirty ice cubes into the sink and grabs the other tray, the one she emptied and then refilled when she made the cold compress for Mulder's pinky. They're barely frozen, more water than ice, really, but they'll do a passable job. She fills their glasses and returns to her spot on the coffee table.
Scully hands the fat blue plastic cup to Mulder, but neither of them drink just yet. "What would you have told me?"
"Huh?"
"Tomorrow, when I would've seen your finger. What was the story you were going to use?"
He grins a little ashamedly and scratches the back of his head. "I was trying to decide on one right before I walked in and realized you were sitting in the dark in my apartment with a bottle of hard liquor."
She yawns politely behind her hand, hunched comfortably over her drink. "You make it sound so salacious."
"I can make anything sound salacious."
"Do you have any other hidden talents?" She teases.
"You mean like belching the alphabet?" Mulder rests his foot on the edge of the coffee table. He taps her with his toe, once, on the outside of her leg just above the knee. "For future reference, what story would you have bought?"
She thinks for a moment. "That the Spice Channel was free this weekend?"
Mulder shakes his head and takes a sip. "Nah, Scully, that's a myth."
"Statistically speaking, I'm sure there have been people who have hurt themselves while-"
"About the Spice Channel being free." She smiles with her teeth and they lapse into silence.
Scully swirls the whiskey around her mug, wishing passively that it was vodka or a syrupy mixed drink. She'd even take some black coffee, chalky and too weak, the way Mulder always makes it and that she's begrudgingly come to tolerate. Ed Jerse bought her a whiskey, once, in a heavy glass tumbler with perfectly smooth ice, because she wanted for one night to be a woman who drank whiskey. She can't remember the last time she shared a drink with Mulder. It makes her sad. "What should we toast?"
Mulder has already taken a drink, but he lifts his cup in the spirit of it all. "How about the Spice Channel?"
Scully laughs softly and touches her mug to his cup. "To the Spice Channel." He takes another hard sip and groans; Scully watches him over the top of her mug as he dips his swollen pinky in his cup right up to the knuckle, solidly against an ice cube, and leaves it there.
Outside Mulder's window, a dog brays, a man calls drunkenly. It's an in-between time in every way, either too early or too late, the nameless season between spring and summer. There is a coolness, a stillness, to the air that brings out goosebumps on Scully's arms, but it's not unpleasant. She rests her mug on her knee.
"You could've told me, you know."
Mulder sighs, leaning forward to place his cup on the table. "Scully, don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't start." He snaps. Then, quieter, "I couldn't tell you. You know why."
She sets her jaw. "Actually, I don't. I don't know why, after five years of working together, Mulder, I wasn't given any information about this… this whole secret assignment of yours."
"It was too dangerous! The more people who knew, the more danger I was in." His voice is too loud for this hour, this room, this conversation. "Come on, Scully, this isn't news to you."
"Bullshit, Mulder. I'm your partner. I'm your friend. And after five years, I deserve more respect than that." She pauses. "Don't you trust me?" It's a low blow and she knows it, a technical knockout, punch drunk in every sense of the word. He'll get up again because he always does.
Mulder swallows. "Dammit, this has nothing to do with trust."
"Do you?"
"Scully…" His eyes are dark, suddenly. Guilty. The way they looked after the first Samantha clone was thrown off a bridge and drowned in a river. The way they look when they don't talk about her cancer. He rubs his face tiredly. "You know I do."
Now that she has his attention, Scully is quieter, more intense. "Then trust that I'm going to fight for you, Mulder, especially if you try to keep me in the dark. I sat outside your motel room for hours, surveilling. I was run off the road and almost killed when I tailed you, for Christ's sake. You don't think that's just as dangerous?"
He feels a sudden, overwhelming rush of affection for her for being pissed off at him. "We're both familiar with how these kinds of people operate, Scully. I just didn't want you to get hurt."
"And yet you're the one sitting here with a broken finger."
Mulder leans back, appreciating the irony, a sad smile on his face and his good hand covering his heart. "Ouch. Right in the martyr complex."
Scully looks down into her mug, which she is holding in two hands as if she is trying to warm them. The ice has melted and the whiskey looks watery. "By the way, you're a terrible liar."
"I am not."
"Mulder." The look on her face dares him to challenge this assertion. When he lets out a breath of laughter instead, she sets her mug next to his cup on the coffee table. The silence between them now is different; not awkward, exactly, but expectant and very, very still. She feels like maybe she's said some things that she didn't actually say out loud and it makes her a little uncomfortable to think about, so she focuses on what she's good at: black and white, definitive science; the metacarpus bone's connected to the phalanx bone, now hear the word of the Lord.
"That needs to be set." It's the third time she's said it. God help him, she looks way too eager for Mulder's comfort level. Scully wipes her hands on her thighs and reaches for his finger. "Ready?"
Mulder runs a hand over his mouth. He squares his feet, screws his eyes shut, and breathes out once, hard. "Do it."
One sharp tug on his pinky and Mulder's back is arched against the couch, his "Ahh, Scully, fuck!" breathless and muffled through his teeth. He lands half-prone, panting and sweaty.
Scully watches him writhe for a moment, a bit more scientifically detached than the situation calls for. She grasps her mug by the rim with all of her fingertips, throws her head back, then replaces the empty mug on the coffee table precisely in the center of the circle of condensation that has accumulated. It's not bad whiskey.
Scully touches Mulder's knee for leverage as she stands. "Next round's on me."