Disclaimer: 'The X-Files' is the property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen Productions, and 20th Century Fox. If you want to pay for this, pay them, you fool.
Author's Note: This one goes out to all the readers and writers of glbt pulp fiction in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Thank you so much for paving the way.
Warning: As stated in the summary, this story is SLASH (!!!)--that means it contains content of a sexual nature between two members of the same sex, in this case Mulder and Doggett. If you're not into that, don't complain, because I am, and you get no sympathy from me.
Interested
by BJ Garrett
Every few moments he found his eyes drawn to the file-size drawer on the bottom right hand of the desk. He kept asking himself if his fingers itched to open it to empty it, or to rifle through it for some answers, some satisfaction. His mind's refusal to contemplate the question always turned his eyes back to the file he was listlessly reading.
It was eight o'clock. He'd been in the office for well over an hour, and had spent the four hours between the time he got home to when he left his bed in angry frustration tossing and turning over in his mind the feeling of Mulder's hands touching him.
Through clothes, of course, and with no motive other than to get the binoculars from him--he hoped. Or did he?
Shaking his head, he pushed himself away from the desk and walked over to a random filing cabinet, telling himself he was looking for a file similar to the one on his desk. Some ritualistic thing--which reminded him...
"Where the hell is Monica?" he said out loud.
A chuckle echoed down the hallway outside the open door and came closer. He turned to face the doorway and smiled as Reyes posed before entering the office. "Good morning, John," she said cheerfully, tossing her overcoat on her chair.
The wide grin she wore intrigued him. "Where have you been?" he asked in mock anger.
"Well," she began, tucking her hair behind her ears and crossing her arms, "I don't mind telling you that I'm late because I went out last night and got lucky."
Doggett rolled his eyes, asking himself why everybody seemed so obsessed with sex lately. "Congratulations. There I was, freezing my ass off in Maryland, and you're out warming yours with some barfly."
Chuckling that very self-satisfied chuckle again, Reyes shook her head. "Definitely not a barfly, John. Besides, you weren't alone out there. You took Mulder, didn't you?"
He shrugged uncomfortably and went back to looking for that file, praying that she didn't ask how it went. "Yeah."
"Nothing to report?" she asked curiously, picking up the file on his desk.
Looking up at an empty and/or vengeful sky, he replied, "Nope."
As Reyes leaned against the desk and flipped through the file, she hmmed and hawed a little, then pressed on. "You sure? You seemed pretty excited about it."
Slamming the drawer closed, Doggett spun around. "Nothing happened, I was not excited, and can we just forget about it?"
"Okay," she said quietly. "Don't be so defensive."
Restless with denial, he paced the office for a few minutes and then took some evidence baggies into the small lab. Looking at hair and fibre under a microscope calmed him, as did the orderly, sterile environment of the room. A feeling, almost a scent, emanated from the equipment--he recognised it every time he came in and shut the sliding glass door. Scully.
He wondered if he'd ever get over her--not that there was really anything to get over. Just his own delusions, fantasies, desires. She was a one-man woman, no matter how distorted their relationship might seem. He knew that, had known it even before Mulder's miraculous return from the dead, and it still bit him in the ass.
A knock on the door disrupted his thoughts and careful movements of the focus knobs, sending the two samples he was trying to match into blurry chaos. Turning to glare at Reyes for interrupting him, he was greeted by a crooked grin and friendly wave.
Mulder gestured for him to come into the office. He shook his head and bent back over the microscope, fiddling the knobs with trembling fingers. He squeezed his eyes shut as the door slid nearly soundlessly open and shut again.
"Whatcha doin'?" the other man asked, his voice seeming over-loud in the quiet lab.
Doggett muttered something unintelligible and mentally screamed at his hands, telling them to relax and steady out.
"What? Your accent is really becoming a stumbling block to communication."
"I don't have an accent. You have an accent. I'm working here," he said irritatedly without looking up from the slowly focusing samples.
"I can see that. What are you working on?"
"As a civilian, you cannot be privy to that information," was his brusque answer, which reminded him--"How did you get down here?" he asked, turning around on the stool.
Mulder shrugged, crinkling his leather jacket. "Me and Skinner, we're like this," he said, holding up two crossed fingers.
Feeling somehow wounded, Doggett nodded. "I'm sure you are."
Reyes opened the sliding door, looking away from Mulder quickly. "I've been called up to Skinner's office. I'll be back in a minute, okay?"
"Yeah, go ahead."
As she closed the door, Mulder said suggestively, "Good morning, Agent Reyes."
Smiling quickly, she said, "Good morning, Mr. Mulder," without meeting his eyes.
Watching her go, Mulder nodded in her direction. "What's her problem?"
Doggett shrugged and returned to the microscope once more.
He heard Mulder sigh and his shoulders tensed. The office door closed behind Reyes and he blinked to dispel his rapidly growing sense of tunnel vision.
"We need to talk."
Speaking to the microscope, Doggett replied, "No, we don't. I'm not gay."
Mulder was silent for a moment. He began to relax, hoping the subject was closed. "Don't ask, don't tell, Doggett. I didn't ask, did I?"
The tension returned, and he felt the beginnings of a headache creeping up his neck and behind his ears. "No."
"Actually, I came to ask for the key to clean out my drawer. I figured you'd appreciate the extra storage space."
He could have died. His insides shrivelled up into a knotty ball of rejection, and his heart squished into his throat, strangling him as he said, "Yeah, go ahead," and handed Mulder his keys. He wasn't sure whom, but one of them was very careful not to let their fingers touch.
Without a word Mulder left the lab and slid the door closed behind him, cutting off all conversation. Unaccountably angry, Doggett thought, 'Fine, then. Be that way.'
By the time Mulder returned to the lab to let him know he was finished, his fingers ached from focusing and re-focusing the fibres on the plate. When the door slid open, he exhaled deeply and let go of the knobs. Turning, he looked at the box Mulder held to his chest, taped shut with packing tape. Doggett's keys dangled from an outstretched finger.
As he took them, Mulder said, "You wouldn't care what I thought if you weren't interested."
Clenching his keys in a fist, Doggett watched Mulder leave with a stony glare.
A few minutes later, the fibres weren't matching any more than they had been half an hour before, so he turned off the microscope and sealed the baggies, returning them to the crate of evidence beside his desk. Sitting in his chair, he noticed the paperback placed front and centre on his blotter.
'G-Men on the Road,' the title read, the cover a masterpiece in pulp fiction artistry. Dark-suited men in fedoras with Cary Grant chins and Rock Hudson shoulders squared off against each other before the classic backdrop of a city in night's silhouette.
"By Archie Miller," he muttered to himself, picking the book up and opening it to a random page. He'd enjoyed cheap detective thrillers when he was a kid, buying them at the used book stores for ten cents each....
"My God, Randy," Gil said as he shed his holster. "This case is wearing me out like a big-league bat."
Randy removed his jacket and flung it across the shadowy hotel room. "You've got that right, sir. Mob cases are always the hardest, ain't they?"
Slipping his belt from its loops, Gil advanced. "Not nearly the hardest, Randy. Come see for yourself."
Intrigued by the steady bulge in his superior's--
"Holy shit," Doggett exclaimed, slapping the book back on his desk. "Damn Mulder."
He pushed away from the desk and put his chin in his hand, trying to think of a way to let the former agent know he wasn't impressed by this latest stunt, but, intrigued the way Randy had been by Gil's 'steady bulge,' his eyes were drawn to the back cover. One of the men from the front was pushing a younger, thinner man against a wall and kissing him passionately.
"Goddamn him to hell," he whispered as he picked the book up and turned to the first page.
Of course it started normally enough; a rookie agent and a hard-boiled veteran on the road in Illinois chasing after a legendary mobster. But about ten pages in the touching began. And then the innuendos from Gil and blushes from Randy. Then the scene on the back of the book. After being shot at by minions of the mobster (whose name was Carnal Carlos Giovanisi), Gil and Randy were consumed by concerned and illicit passion for each other.
"Gimme a break."
Having been in dozens of similar situations, Doggett could honestly say he'd never been consumed by any kind of passion afterwards--for anybody. Well, maybe Scully. But since he was a professional and she didn't like him like that, it'd never ended with her shoving him up against a wall and sucking his tongue off.
Though one could wish.
Shaking his head, he condemned himself for a stupid, confused man with an adolescent crush and rampaging hormones.
"How'd those fibres match up?" Reyes asked as she came into the office, holding a take-out cup of coffee from a shop several blocks away.
Doggett narrowed his eyes. "Is the coffee machine up there broken?" he asked conversationally.
Reyes swallowed and put her purse on her countertop. "No."
"Then why did you get coffee from a place a half-mile away?"
"They don't pay you the big money for nothing, do they, John?" she replied with a shaky laugh, dropping the offending cup in the trashcan beside his desk.
"No."
She sat heavily in the chair opposite the desk and clasped her hands between her knees. "I need a cigarette."
"Go outside. I don't smoke anymore."
With a sigh, she nodded. "I know...I wasn't called to Skinner's office."
Dryly, he interjected, "No kidding."
"Remember I told you I got lucky last night?"
"Yeah."
"My date phoned and needed to talk to me, so I went." Before he could interrupt to berate her for going on company time, she held up a hand and continued, "I know it was wrong, and I'll eat lunch down here today. Okay?"
Even though he wanted to make her feel horrible to make himself feel less horrible, he knew she'd pick up on that and just said, "Fine."
Smiling brilliantly with relief, she stood. "Great. How about those fibres?"
"What a couple of FBI nerds we are," he replied, chuckling. "I'd say eighty percent, tops, but of course we'll send them down to forensics just to make sure."
"Of course," she echoed, fishing the baggies out of the crate. As she bent beside the desk, she noticed the book still in his hands. "What are you reading?"
He froze, and she definitely picked up on that. "Nothing," he said a moment later, but still too quickly for it to be true. He stuffed the book in his breast pocket and opened the file she'd left on the corner of his desk.
As she started for the door to take the samples to the big lab, he thought briefly of where he'd left Randy and Gil, straining at each other's zippers, groaning in frustration as he closed the book. He thought of the large, anonymous men's room upstairs, and the very last stall in the row, where no one ever went. On impulse, he stood. "I'll do that. You stay down here and get to work."
Her hand on the doorknob, she turned to him with raised eyebrows. "Whatever you say, chief."
Snagging the baggies, he replied, "Don't start that nickname crap, Monica. I mean it."
Laughing, she hid the knowing look in her eyes as they shared a smile. Then he was gone, and she sat at her counter and put her head in her hands.
After putting the evidence bags safely on a cart to forensics, Doggett casually entered the men's room and strolled down to the last stall, nodding at a couple of acquaintances as he went. Once inside, he pulled out the paperback and opened it to where he'd left off.
The kiss broke off and Randy started apologizing, while Gil voiced his devotion to the younger man profusely. Just before Doggett gagged on the romance, the boys faithfully returned to some rather heavy petting.
A barking dog startled the new lovers and they dashed back to their Mercury and zoomed to the hotel, where Doggett had begun reading in the first place.
*
A few pages later, Doggett stood and leaned his burning forehead against the cool metal door of the stall. Slowly he returned to earth, heard the rushing sound of water in the stainless steel sinks, the throat-clearing of staid FBI employees as they nodded to each other at the urinals, the opening and closing of the heavy bathroom door.
With a damnably shaking hand he stuffed the book back in his breast pocket and left the stall. He washed his hands with ice-cold water and two squirts of soap. He didn't dry his hands, just shook them out over the sink as he stared at himself in the mirror. He didn't look any different. Same indifferent grey eyes, same razor-straight nose, same elfish ears. Catching the last self-description, he half-smiled at himself. His mother had always called them elf ears. The neighbourhood kids hadn't been so irreverent.
That memory brought on another, of when the local high school had hired its first male drama teacher.
"Goddamn fairies," his father had spat, and forbidden him from taking any acting classes. He'd been eleven, and nodded soberly, unwilling to invite his father's wrath by resisting. It hadn't mattered though. They'd been in Boston by the time he was old enough to take those classes, and the drama teacher at Derry High was a woman. He'd never been really interested in the stage anyway.
'You wouldn't care what I thought if you weren't interested.'
When he saw Mulder's words echo in his eyes, he turned away angrily and stalked out of the men's room, ignoring the hello's of a couple of colleagues.
The rest of the day was more of the same, self-examination coyly disguised as criminal investigation as he and Reyes danced around their true thoughts and feelings. He figured Monica must be having a rough day if she wasn't pouncing on his every hesitation, every muttered, "Nothing's wrong."
The book weighed significantly in his jacket as he drove home. Sitting outside his perfect, empty house, he stared at the darkened windows and reversed out the driveway, turning south with a whispering hope in his heart.
The door opened to a crooked grin. "Hey."
He wasn't so thrilled with his presence here. He couldn't quite figure out how he'd convinced himself that it was perfectly okay to visit his ex-partner's ex-partner at ten o'clock at night. Clumsily he pulled the book out of his jacket and almost handed it over with the back cover up, but flipped it at the last second and produced the definitely heterosexual cover to Mulder.
"Thanks," he said, taking the book and throwing it into the apartment behind him. "I knew I'd forgotten something." The quirk in his eye told the other man that he'd forgotten nothing, that the entire visit to his old office had been perfectly orchestrated to land Doggett on his doorstep at ten o'clock that night.
"Yeah," he replied knowingly. They looked at each other for a while. He finally tore his eyes away and cleared his throat, looking down at his shoes, then over Mulder's shoulder as he said, "What if I told you I was interested?"
Silently, Mulder stepped back, opening his door completely and gesturing for Doggett to come inside with a sweep of his arm.
The latch clicked as the door was closed behind him, then shaken as something, possibly the body of a Caucasian male in his late thirties to early forties, was pressed against it in what sounded like a fit of illicit passion to the neighbours, who just groaned and turned over. If they were lucky, there wouldn't be any shots fired tonight.
THE END
Author's Note: This one goes out to all the readers and writers of glbt pulp fiction in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Thank you so much for paving the way.
Warning: As stated in the summary, this story is SLASH (!!!)--that means it contains content of a sexual nature between two members of the same sex, in this case Mulder and Doggett. If you're not into that, don't complain, because I am, and you get no sympathy from me.
Interested
by BJ Garrett
Every few moments he found his eyes drawn to the file-size drawer on the bottom right hand of the desk. He kept asking himself if his fingers itched to open it to empty it, or to rifle through it for some answers, some satisfaction. His mind's refusal to contemplate the question always turned his eyes back to the file he was listlessly reading.
It was eight o'clock. He'd been in the office for well over an hour, and had spent the four hours between the time he got home to when he left his bed in angry frustration tossing and turning over in his mind the feeling of Mulder's hands touching him.
Through clothes, of course, and with no motive other than to get the binoculars from him--he hoped. Or did he?
Shaking his head, he pushed himself away from the desk and walked over to a random filing cabinet, telling himself he was looking for a file similar to the one on his desk. Some ritualistic thing--which reminded him...
"Where the hell is Monica?" he said out loud.
A chuckle echoed down the hallway outside the open door and came closer. He turned to face the doorway and smiled as Reyes posed before entering the office. "Good morning, John," she said cheerfully, tossing her overcoat on her chair.
The wide grin she wore intrigued him. "Where have you been?" he asked in mock anger.
"Well," she began, tucking her hair behind her ears and crossing her arms, "I don't mind telling you that I'm late because I went out last night and got lucky."
Doggett rolled his eyes, asking himself why everybody seemed so obsessed with sex lately. "Congratulations. There I was, freezing my ass off in Maryland, and you're out warming yours with some barfly."
Chuckling that very self-satisfied chuckle again, Reyes shook her head. "Definitely not a barfly, John. Besides, you weren't alone out there. You took Mulder, didn't you?"
He shrugged uncomfortably and went back to looking for that file, praying that she didn't ask how it went. "Yeah."
"Nothing to report?" she asked curiously, picking up the file on his desk.
Looking up at an empty and/or vengeful sky, he replied, "Nope."
As Reyes leaned against the desk and flipped through the file, she hmmed and hawed a little, then pressed on. "You sure? You seemed pretty excited about it."
Slamming the drawer closed, Doggett spun around. "Nothing happened, I was not excited, and can we just forget about it?"
"Okay," she said quietly. "Don't be so defensive."
Restless with denial, he paced the office for a few minutes and then took some evidence baggies into the small lab. Looking at hair and fibre under a microscope calmed him, as did the orderly, sterile environment of the room. A feeling, almost a scent, emanated from the equipment--he recognised it every time he came in and shut the sliding glass door. Scully.
He wondered if he'd ever get over her--not that there was really anything to get over. Just his own delusions, fantasies, desires. She was a one-man woman, no matter how distorted their relationship might seem. He knew that, had known it even before Mulder's miraculous return from the dead, and it still bit him in the ass.
A knock on the door disrupted his thoughts and careful movements of the focus knobs, sending the two samples he was trying to match into blurry chaos. Turning to glare at Reyes for interrupting him, he was greeted by a crooked grin and friendly wave.
Mulder gestured for him to come into the office. He shook his head and bent back over the microscope, fiddling the knobs with trembling fingers. He squeezed his eyes shut as the door slid nearly soundlessly open and shut again.
"Whatcha doin'?" the other man asked, his voice seeming over-loud in the quiet lab.
Doggett muttered something unintelligible and mentally screamed at his hands, telling them to relax and steady out.
"What? Your accent is really becoming a stumbling block to communication."
"I don't have an accent. You have an accent. I'm working here," he said irritatedly without looking up from the slowly focusing samples.
"I can see that. What are you working on?"
"As a civilian, you cannot be privy to that information," was his brusque answer, which reminded him--"How did you get down here?" he asked, turning around on the stool.
Mulder shrugged, crinkling his leather jacket. "Me and Skinner, we're like this," he said, holding up two crossed fingers.
Feeling somehow wounded, Doggett nodded. "I'm sure you are."
Reyes opened the sliding door, looking away from Mulder quickly. "I've been called up to Skinner's office. I'll be back in a minute, okay?"
"Yeah, go ahead."
As she closed the door, Mulder said suggestively, "Good morning, Agent Reyes."
Smiling quickly, she said, "Good morning, Mr. Mulder," without meeting his eyes.
Watching her go, Mulder nodded in her direction. "What's her problem?"
Doggett shrugged and returned to the microscope once more.
He heard Mulder sigh and his shoulders tensed. The office door closed behind Reyes and he blinked to dispel his rapidly growing sense of tunnel vision.
"We need to talk."
Speaking to the microscope, Doggett replied, "No, we don't. I'm not gay."
Mulder was silent for a moment. He began to relax, hoping the subject was closed. "Don't ask, don't tell, Doggett. I didn't ask, did I?"
The tension returned, and he felt the beginnings of a headache creeping up his neck and behind his ears. "No."
"Actually, I came to ask for the key to clean out my drawer. I figured you'd appreciate the extra storage space."
He could have died. His insides shrivelled up into a knotty ball of rejection, and his heart squished into his throat, strangling him as he said, "Yeah, go ahead," and handed Mulder his keys. He wasn't sure whom, but one of them was very careful not to let their fingers touch.
Without a word Mulder left the lab and slid the door closed behind him, cutting off all conversation. Unaccountably angry, Doggett thought, 'Fine, then. Be that way.'
By the time Mulder returned to the lab to let him know he was finished, his fingers ached from focusing and re-focusing the fibres on the plate. When the door slid open, he exhaled deeply and let go of the knobs. Turning, he looked at the box Mulder held to his chest, taped shut with packing tape. Doggett's keys dangled from an outstretched finger.
As he took them, Mulder said, "You wouldn't care what I thought if you weren't interested."
Clenching his keys in a fist, Doggett watched Mulder leave with a stony glare.
A few minutes later, the fibres weren't matching any more than they had been half an hour before, so he turned off the microscope and sealed the baggies, returning them to the crate of evidence beside his desk. Sitting in his chair, he noticed the paperback placed front and centre on his blotter.
'G-Men on the Road,' the title read, the cover a masterpiece in pulp fiction artistry. Dark-suited men in fedoras with Cary Grant chins and Rock Hudson shoulders squared off against each other before the classic backdrop of a city in night's silhouette.
"By Archie Miller," he muttered to himself, picking the book up and opening it to a random page. He'd enjoyed cheap detective thrillers when he was a kid, buying them at the used book stores for ten cents each....
"My God, Randy," Gil said as he shed his holster. "This case is wearing me out like a big-league bat."
Randy removed his jacket and flung it across the shadowy hotel room. "You've got that right, sir. Mob cases are always the hardest, ain't they?"
Slipping his belt from its loops, Gil advanced. "Not nearly the hardest, Randy. Come see for yourself."
Intrigued by the steady bulge in his superior's--
"Holy shit," Doggett exclaimed, slapping the book back on his desk. "Damn Mulder."
He pushed away from the desk and put his chin in his hand, trying to think of a way to let the former agent know he wasn't impressed by this latest stunt, but, intrigued the way Randy had been by Gil's 'steady bulge,' his eyes were drawn to the back cover. One of the men from the front was pushing a younger, thinner man against a wall and kissing him passionately.
"Goddamn him to hell," he whispered as he picked the book up and turned to the first page.
Of course it started normally enough; a rookie agent and a hard-boiled veteran on the road in Illinois chasing after a legendary mobster. But about ten pages in the touching began. And then the innuendos from Gil and blushes from Randy. Then the scene on the back of the book. After being shot at by minions of the mobster (whose name was Carnal Carlos Giovanisi), Gil and Randy were consumed by concerned and illicit passion for each other.
"Gimme a break."
Having been in dozens of similar situations, Doggett could honestly say he'd never been consumed by any kind of passion afterwards--for anybody. Well, maybe Scully. But since he was a professional and she didn't like him like that, it'd never ended with her shoving him up against a wall and sucking his tongue off.
Though one could wish.
Shaking his head, he condemned himself for a stupid, confused man with an adolescent crush and rampaging hormones.
"How'd those fibres match up?" Reyes asked as she came into the office, holding a take-out cup of coffee from a shop several blocks away.
Doggett narrowed his eyes. "Is the coffee machine up there broken?" he asked conversationally.
Reyes swallowed and put her purse on her countertop. "No."
"Then why did you get coffee from a place a half-mile away?"
"They don't pay you the big money for nothing, do they, John?" she replied with a shaky laugh, dropping the offending cup in the trashcan beside his desk.
"No."
She sat heavily in the chair opposite the desk and clasped her hands between her knees. "I need a cigarette."
"Go outside. I don't smoke anymore."
With a sigh, she nodded. "I know...I wasn't called to Skinner's office."
Dryly, he interjected, "No kidding."
"Remember I told you I got lucky last night?"
"Yeah."
"My date phoned and needed to talk to me, so I went." Before he could interrupt to berate her for going on company time, she held up a hand and continued, "I know it was wrong, and I'll eat lunch down here today. Okay?"
Even though he wanted to make her feel horrible to make himself feel less horrible, he knew she'd pick up on that and just said, "Fine."
Smiling brilliantly with relief, she stood. "Great. How about those fibres?"
"What a couple of FBI nerds we are," he replied, chuckling. "I'd say eighty percent, tops, but of course we'll send them down to forensics just to make sure."
"Of course," she echoed, fishing the baggies out of the crate. As she bent beside the desk, she noticed the book still in his hands. "What are you reading?"
He froze, and she definitely picked up on that. "Nothing," he said a moment later, but still too quickly for it to be true. He stuffed the book in his breast pocket and opened the file she'd left on the corner of his desk.
As she started for the door to take the samples to the big lab, he thought briefly of where he'd left Randy and Gil, straining at each other's zippers, groaning in frustration as he closed the book. He thought of the large, anonymous men's room upstairs, and the very last stall in the row, where no one ever went. On impulse, he stood. "I'll do that. You stay down here and get to work."
Her hand on the doorknob, she turned to him with raised eyebrows. "Whatever you say, chief."
Snagging the baggies, he replied, "Don't start that nickname crap, Monica. I mean it."
Laughing, she hid the knowing look in her eyes as they shared a smile. Then he was gone, and she sat at her counter and put her head in her hands.
After putting the evidence bags safely on a cart to forensics, Doggett casually entered the men's room and strolled down to the last stall, nodding at a couple of acquaintances as he went. Once inside, he pulled out the paperback and opened it to where he'd left off.
The kiss broke off and Randy started apologizing, while Gil voiced his devotion to the younger man profusely. Just before Doggett gagged on the romance, the boys faithfully returned to some rather heavy petting.
A barking dog startled the new lovers and they dashed back to their Mercury and zoomed to the hotel, where Doggett had begun reading in the first place.
*
A few pages later, Doggett stood and leaned his burning forehead against the cool metal door of the stall. Slowly he returned to earth, heard the rushing sound of water in the stainless steel sinks, the throat-clearing of staid FBI employees as they nodded to each other at the urinals, the opening and closing of the heavy bathroom door.
With a damnably shaking hand he stuffed the book back in his breast pocket and left the stall. He washed his hands with ice-cold water and two squirts of soap. He didn't dry his hands, just shook them out over the sink as he stared at himself in the mirror. He didn't look any different. Same indifferent grey eyes, same razor-straight nose, same elfish ears. Catching the last self-description, he half-smiled at himself. His mother had always called them elf ears. The neighbourhood kids hadn't been so irreverent.
That memory brought on another, of when the local high school had hired its first male drama teacher.
"Goddamn fairies," his father had spat, and forbidden him from taking any acting classes. He'd been eleven, and nodded soberly, unwilling to invite his father's wrath by resisting. It hadn't mattered though. They'd been in Boston by the time he was old enough to take those classes, and the drama teacher at Derry High was a woman. He'd never been really interested in the stage anyway.
'You wouldn't care what I thought if you weren't interested.'
When he saw Mulder's words echo in his eyes, he turned away angrily and stalked out of the men's room, ignoring the hello's of a couple of colleagues.
The rest of the day was more of the same, self-examination coyly disguised as criminal investigation as he and Reyes danced around their true thoughts and feelings. He figured Monica must be having a rough day if she wasn't pouncing on his every hesitation, every muttered, "Nothing's wrong."
The book weighed significantly in his jacket as he drove home. Sitting outside his perfect, empty house, he stared at the darkened windows and reversed out the driveway, turning south with a whispering hope in his heart.
The door opened to a crooked grin. "Hey."
He wasn't so thrilled with his presence here. He couldn't quite figure out how he'd convinced himself that it was perfectly okay to visit his ex-partner's ex-partner at ten o'clock at night. Clumsily he pulled the book out of his jacket and almost handed it over with the back cover up, but flipped it at the last second and produced the definitely heterosexual cover to Mulder.
"Thanks," he said, taking the book and throwing it into the apartment behind him. "I knew I'd forgotten something." The quirk in his eye told the other man that he'd forgotten nothing, that the entire visit to his old office had been perfectly orchestrated to land Doggett on his doorstep at ten o'clock that night.
"Yeah," he replied knowingly. They looked at each other for a while. He finally tore his eyes away and cleared his throat, looking down at his shoes, then over Mulder's shoulder as he said, "What if I told you I was interested?"
Silently, Mulder stepped back, opening his door completely and gesturing for Doggett to come inside with a sweep of his arm.
The latch clicked as the door was closed behind him, then shaken as something, possibly the body of a Caucasian male in his late thirties to early forties, was pressed against it in what sounded like a fit of illicit passion to the neighbours, who just groaned and turned over. If they were lucky, there wouldn't be any shots fired tonight.
THE END