While Mulder was quite the fan of surprises, he wasn't particularly in the mood to be surprised today, especially when it involved food. He conveyed this information to Scully as she drove him to an undisclosed lunch location in Fairfax County.
"It's not Indian food is it? Because while I love Indian food, it's not a great midday meal for me. Have you ever felt like your entire stomach was trying to evacuate your body through your—"
"It's not Indian food. It's not even about the food, okay, Mulder?"
"But there will be food, right?"
Scully wondered if Mulder qualified green Jell-o as a food because she sure didn't. In the end, she opted to ignore his question entirely with the hopes that Mulder's very short conversational attention span would be on her side. It was her lucky day.
"Oh, hey, so I meant to ask. How was the big date?" It wasn't just that he 'meant to ask;" Mulder wanted to ask, needed to ask, was dying to ask.
"It was great. Thanks for asking," Scully answered concisely.
Mulder nodded and stared out the window. Great? Great.
Scully found his low-key and less-than-inquisitive reaction puzzling, but she wasn't going to argue. She didn't want to give away too much about Nathan's work just yet, and she certainly wasn't interested in telling Mulder all the details of the kiss they'd shared at the end of the evening. She had no problem recounting them to herself, however.
Mulder glanced over at Scully and instantly took note of the small smile she obviously meant to share only with herself. He wondered if she was thinking of the previous night. Perhaps this guy, this Doctor Nathan Who-ever, had scored a kiss as he walked Scully to her car.
Scully remembered the way Nathan had, as the two of them stood by her open car door, first touched her cheek as if asking for permission to proceed. With no protest made, he'd completed the action smoothly, leaning down chivalrously so that she simply had to stand there and be kissed. When his lips finally left hers, she found herself fulfilled by a level of personal contact she'd been years without.
Mulder hoped it was simply good conversation and better wine that caused her to blush even now as they sat in silence, but he doubted it. Then he thought of something else he wanted to ask and since, as usual, his filter was limited to blocking out only that which would embarrass himself, the words tumbled easily out of his mouth. "Did you sleep with this guy or something?"
Scully was genuinely appalled by the question. "God, Mulder. Really?"
"I just wanted to say that you shouldn't rush into anything, that's all."
"Noted."
"Sorry," Mulder apologized genuinely, the filter stuttering back into operation as he now began to feel embarrassed on his own behalf.
As much as Scully understood Mulder, sometimes she just didn't get him. She couldn't see why he would even be interested in her dating life as a whole, much less her sex life. She certainly wasn't interested in his. Except, she realized, that couldn't be true considering where she was taking him… and for what purpose.
"The answer to the question you better not ever even think about asking me again is no, by the way," she confessed. "I'm just telling you this time so that, in the future, you can rest assured I'm not usually a do-it-on-the-first-date kind of girl."
"Not usually?"
"Not usually."
"One thing?"
"Hmm?" She forced out, truly not wanting to inquire.
"You're not a 'girl' at all, Scully. You're a woman—a beautiful, amazing woman—who deserves to be treated with respect. That's all I was getting at before."
Scully nodded, confused and left not quite knowing what to think about Mulder's compliment. She assumed it was just his way of trying to weasel out of being pegged as a pervert, but he seemed earnest enough. It bordered on bizarre.
"Think you'll go on a second date?"
In Scully's mind, the conversation had now surpassed bizarre and turned into its own little micro x-file. "Isn't there a case or something we could talk about instead?"
"Because if you're going to start seeing someone, I think I have a right to know."
Now he was starting to piss her off. "How do you figure?"
"Look, I know you had your own brothers to protect you, but I never got to have that experience with my sister—butting into her dating life, vetting her boyfriends, punching out anyone who put the moves on her—"
"So, what you're saying, Mulder, just for clarification, is that you're asking me all of these uncomfortably personal questions because you care about me."
"Right."
"Like a brother."
"Right," Mulder replied again, hoping Scully had missed the split-second hesitation of his second affirmation. While he had never thought of a label for his fondness of Scully beyond "partner," the phrase "like a brother"—though he was the one who had implied it—suddenly rubbed him the wrong way. He thought of something slightly less offensive. "Or, you know, like a best friend."
"You think you're my best friend, Mulder?" she asked a bit harshly considering she legitimately wanted to know the answer.
"No, actually, I have no idea how you view me, Scully."
This was interesting because Scully had never actually ascribed any name to Mulder beyond "partner." She didn't know exactly how she viewed him either. She had never even genuinely considered it. She'd made the appropriate denials of "husband," "boyfriend," or "lover" when such accusations arose, but they never lingered in her mind, demanding she come up with some other, special title for Mulder. Granted, there wasn't anyone who knew her better and, likewise, there wasn't anyone she knew better. But who was he? What was he? He was just… Mulder, her partner.
"Partner," Scully told him truthfully. "That's how I view you."
"Professional." Mulder forced out with a light tone and fake smile.
"Well, how do you view me?" she demanded, sure his own classification couldn't be too far from her own.
"Partner," he said, drumming his fingers against the car door, "and best friend. You're definitely my best friend, Scully, even if I'm not yours."
For just a moment, Scully turned her eyes from the road to Mulder.
He gave her half a smile—his best pouty and guilt-inducing smile—then broke eye contact. "Partner first, though. Always partner first."
"Are you being serious right now? Because I have some pretty sincere reactions to what you've just said to me, Mulder, but I want to be sure I'm not responding to some sort of sick attempt at humor, some joke whose punch line you're holding back."
Mulder had a way of murdering serious conversation with his weapons of choice: bad jokes and irreverent jest. Many times, Scully appreciated the levity, but just as often, she did not. In this particular case, she quite hoped Mulder would grant her this rare moment of insight into thoughts that, for once, didn't revolve around monsters, aliens or the foulest of play. On the contrary, these had the potential to be intimately personal details that gave away hints at something beyond his boyhood dreams or penchant for porn. These were the moments Scully hoped for with Mulder, the infrequent and fleeting glimpses into what she felt was a bigger mystery to her than anything she'd ever encountered in an X-file.
"I assure you, Scully, there's nothing funny about my feelings of… friendship toward you," Mulder promised, though his feelings were, in an altogether different way, funny and, at this particular juncture, confusingly sober.
Scully drove the car deep into the Fairfax County Medical Facility's underground parking garage without speaking, hoping for a smooth ride to keep this conversation afloat.
Then the front wheels of the car slammed into a speed bump.
"Why are we at a hospital?" Mulder asked as the back wheels unevenly bounced over the momentum-halting hump of concrete. "Are you finally having me committed?"
There it was: his subtle shift away from the topic at hand. Scully felt disappointment as she swung the car into an open space and slipped the gearshift into park. She faced forward with folded arms and glanced sideways at him, her own version of his pout.
"What?" he asked, unable to resist a smile at the contemptuous expression she wore despite the fact that he was the one who had no clue why they were at a hospital when she'd promised him lunch. She'd better not have thought he'd let Jell-o pass as food. That was as unacceptable as… the mix of feelings he was letting creep out of his subconscious emotional lockbox and into his conscious thought stream.
Scully's glare intensified under his silence. From his stupid grin, she figured he had some zinger ready to sling in her direction. She wanted to cut her losses and go inside, her stomach releasing a small handful of butterflies at the thought of seeing Nathan here today. But as Mulder stayed put, staring at her like a smiling (or perhaps smirking) idiot, Scully felt compelled to sit tight and hope for the best.
When Scully added in an arched eyebrow to her already dubious look, Mulder's smile evolved into a full-fledged grin. Man, did he love that face: the skeptic, the scientist, the fact-monger. The woman who never seemed to believe anything he had to say, yet so often put her faith in him completely.
"What?" she finally questioned him back, mimicking his tone a little too well.
"You were the one who had something to say, Scully—something 'sincere,' as I recall."
Scully blinked a few times, as she often did when she wanted to put off words that had not quite solidified in her brain. Whatever she'd wanted to say to Mulder—the vessel for prolonging the potentially revealing exchange—was still messy in her mind, still forming in the proverbially primordial soup that sloshed just behind the well-guarded mental blockade she kept up when she was with her… partner.
"I guess," Scully began as the words came to her, "when I say that I view you as my 'partner,' the word doesn't hold the same sterile connotation that it does for you. To me, being your partner is like being your friend, but with—"
"Benefits?" he asked, his tone dripping with mock lasciviousness.
"Loyalty," she pressed on because she wanted to tell him this, needed to tell him this, was dying to tell him this. "And trust. I'm talking about camaraderie that goes well beyond what even the best of friends feel for each other. And, though neither of has been overly forthcoming with our inner most emotions over the years, I think our feelings of…friendship, as you put it, are equally matched."
Though Sally Field's you-like-me-you-really-like-me speech came instantly to mind, Mulder resisted the urge to offer an imitation, mainly because he was afraid he may not be able to lay on enough sarcasm to mask the earnestness behind the words.
"I suppose what I'm trying to say, Mulder, is that I like you," Scully said, her smile intentionally begrudging, "I also care about you, and I… like… that… you care about me."
Scully knew that no matter what Mulder said—or, perhaps in this case, didn't say—he wouldn't judge her. It just wasn't something he did. Even though, with his background, he probably understood her motivations and reactions better than she did, he never forced her to explain herself nor did he offer his own unsolicited analysis. He would never tell her that the unwavering faith she put in him was probably more like co-dependence. He would hold back pointing out that this pseudo-partnership—and very real friendship—to which she clung was just a surrogate for the real, romantic relationship for which she longed.
But Scully was wrong. Mulder wasn't analyzing her words. He was too busy enjoying them. She'd verbalized what he, just a second before, had hoped she'd meant. But he crashed down quickly from the high as he realized that where his level of intensity was burning hot, hers was only lukewarm. She liked him. He was her friend just as she was his, but, for her, it was nothing more. It was nothing like what he felt for her, a burning fire that would not be so easily extinguished.
A flush spread across Mulder's face as the realization smacked his brain and sucker-punched his gut. Somewhere between D.C. and Fairfax County Medical Facility, Mulder had admitted what his heart had always subtly suggested and his mouth had sometimes admitted only in jest: he was wholly and indisputably in love with Dana Scully.