It was nice when every so often in their work they had some good news come their way. Scully smiled as she hung up from the office phone and glanced over to Mulder's inquiring gaze.
"That was Maggie Lupone, she says Richie is home from the hospital. Joe Cutrona's liver, whatever else he may have done to it, is working well in the boy and he's expected to make a full recovery."
"Well that's something," Mulder nodded happily as he returned to the UFO magazine he was not so seriously glancing through. "Glad to see that despite the life that Joe Cutrona led something good came out of it."
"I am to." It wasn't often that anyone's work in law enforcement had a good ending. They were lucky if you found any sort of justice at all. More often than not endings wee ambiguous with no one taking a complete win off the field.
"It's…strange, still, how Cutrona met his end." Scully hadn't quite wrapped her head around the police report or the medical examiners findings. "I mean, the chances of something like that happening to a person would be…"
"Not the kind of odds I'd take in Vegas," Mulder set down his magazine, tossing it lightly on his paper-covered desk. "It was luck, Scully, pure and simple."
"You still think Weems was under some sort of charm?"
"What either of us believes is irrelevant, Scully, you saw the evidence for yourself. How many attempts were made on his life? Four! And all four ended with his unlikely escape."
"Which could be explained by Cutrona's ineptitude."
"It could, except that Cutrona did not get to the place he was at in the organized crime food chain by being inept."
"But luck…Mulder, things just don't fall out that way!"
"Chaos theory, Scully." Mulder rocked back in his chair, regarding her as she leaned against his cluttered desk. "Chaos theory, small factors do not make future events predictable. One thing happens to go right and it's the difference between Weems living through an accident and him not."
"But you are postulating that it is predictable, Mulder, that every time an event occurs to Weems the variables will always be favorable, whereas in chaos theory, that cannot be predicted because the slightest change in the variable will change the outcome."
Mulder waved his hand in the face of her scientific reasoning. "Lady Luck was on his side. And I don't care what mathematic variables you throw out there, the odds are in his favor every time. Even mathematics has to admit that it's plausible."
Scully couldn't deny that. "Plausible, but highly unlikely."
"There's always someone out there who has to be the smart ass beating the odds," Mulder shrugged as he idyll reached for his basketball. With precision born of long practice he rolled it on his fingertips and let it fly in a rainbow arc towards his long-suffering trashcan.
It hit the rim, bounced off towards the filing cabinets, and clanged across the floor. The trashcan tipped, spilling wadded papers, pencil shavings, and the dregs of a cup of coffee across the floor. Scully's eyes narrowed as she turned her face towards her partner.
"The odds were not in my favor, clearly." He shrugged getting up to begin cleaning the mess, silently realizing her ire would not dissipate till he did. She simply shook her head as he began the clean up, stepping around him to retrieve his ball from somewhere behind her desk.
"So let's just say you are right, Mulder," she mused as she passed his basketball from hand to hand lazily. "Weems does have a streak of luck a mile wide, for all time! What does he do with it?"
"Well, I think he'd finally got the only thing he really wanted, for Richie to be better." Mulder sopped up the spilled dregs with a few crumpled sheets of paper, tossing the mess in the trashcan. "Remember, his luck comes at a price, for every good thing that happens to him a bad thing happens to someone else. That's a heavy burden for anyone to bear."
"True," Scully admitted thoughtfully, the leather of the ball thumping in her palms. "I couldn't live with the idea of my good fortune coming at the expense of someone else."
"Exactly. I think for Weems he's just happy for Richie. If nothing else lucky ever happens to him he'd be happy for life." He tipped the trashcan back to its original, upright position.
"What about you," Scully wondered aloud, spinning the ball between her hands. "What would Fox Mulder do if he luck was on his side?"
"What would I do?" Mulder smirked at the idea, shrugging as he leaned a hip against his desk. "Who says I need luck?"
Scully silently eyed him, and then let her gaze flicker to the pink scar across his forehead before dropping to his eyes again with a small smirk. "How many times have you been in the hospital again?"
"I wasn't the one who got shot by my pretty boy partner?"
Clearly he would forever bear a grudge against Agent Ritter after the incident in New York. "You know there would be many who would say you are a pretty boy, Mulder."
"Really?" She regretted the instant she said it as a cocky grin lit his face. "And who would those people be?"
Hell! Something shifted between them in that moment. There was a new…something in the air. Scully could feel it as the basketball slid suddenly in hands gone very damp. She clutched her nails around it to keep it from sliding away, shrugging as she scrambled for some response.
"Mulder, it's no secret that half the women in this building think you are attractive."
"And all the women in this building think I'm crazy…well, all save one."
"I wouldn't be so certain of that," she shot back, feeling suddenly very uncomfortable with this situation.
"Still, not sure which half you fall on regarding the attractiveness question."
"Mulder, if you're fishing for compliments, you can stop. I've told you before that you are."
"Oh, that's right!" He feigned a look that said his perfect memory had somehow failed him. "Still, it doesn't hurt to hear it from time to time."
"Like your ego needs the boost," she snorted, trying to pry her nails from the nubby leather.
"A man likes to hear he's appreciated from time to time." From seemingly out of nowhere his hand shot out, quick as lightening, batting the ball from her surprised hands. It bounced off a well-shod toe and into Mulder's fingers as he spun, backed up, and hooked it. The ball floated past Scully's face, stirring her hair as it sailed and landed with a soft whump into the can. The metal rim on the bottom didn't even teeter off the floor.
Scully's mouth went very, very dry.
"I think our luck is changing, Scully!" Mulder's voice sounded very close to her ear. She turned a fraction to glance up at him through a swath of copper hair, tingling at how close he was standing just now.
"Is it?" She managed without a squeak.
"Hope so," he smiled, reaching to brush the lock of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear. "I think Lady Luck owes us a few by now, don't you?"
A few…what? Scully was almost too afraid to ask. And perhaps she should have, because in the space that it took for her to scrabble onto her reeling senses, Mulder had moved away, scooped up the basketball and tossed it lightly on a stack of incongruous files behind his desk.
She cleared her throat, hoping to God her cheeks were not as red as they felt. "So, I take it then this case is closed?"
"Done and done," Mulder agreed as if nothing had just passed between them. "So, burgers or Chinese for lunch?"
Too stunned to care overmuch about food, Scully shook her head in a desperate move to clear it. "Whatever…you choose."
That surprised him. He blinked wide, green eyes at her. "You're letting me choose lunch? Without even an argument regarding fat content?"
"Perhaps you're right, Mulder, Lady Luck owes you, and today is your lucky day."
Mulder wasn't a man to look this good of a gift horse in the mouth. "Come on, Scully, if you're that generous, I'm buying. I'll even buy something green, just for you."
"Sure," she mumbled as she reached for her heavy coat and bag. Why not, she doubted she would eat it anyway. Somehow she had lost her appetite…well, for food anyway.