Chapter 5
"What ever happened to gut feel?" Mulder was trying his best to calm down. The situation was getting out of hand.
"Because I am not Diana," she said with her voice noticeably shaking with controlled rage. "I can't just abandon reason because I happened to fuck you." Mulder tried to ignore the cheap shot that was meant to harm. How could she still be thinking of Diana?
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. "Then prove me wrong. Do the autopsy," he said softly and walked away.
Why does he always seem to get into a pickle just when things should be in the bag? Mulder found himself walking towards the Lincoln Memorial with shoulders hunched. He was flying high at one point. The morning after their lovemaking, Mulder showed up at the office rather late with two lattes in his hand. He told Scully he had to "get organized" and she blushed at the memory of waking him up so he could go home, get dressed and drive to work. Apparently, she too had the same thought and looked at the direction of his desk where a thermal mug was waiting. A morning cup of Joe was a little something that acknowledged what happened without being too 'life-alteringly' sentimental. Minutes later, they stood a little closer during their elevator ride to the briefing room and even brushed hands. Then somehow, somewhere, he crashed.
That Friday morning's case was probably the pebble that caused a collapse in his mojo. Skinner had assembled a team of agents, each with their own specialty, to find leads on a jogger who appeared to have vanished into thin air. The case was intense. They hardly got a wink of sleep. Yet even during those five days of clawing at the walls to find anything that might point to a suspect, Mulder and Scully had found time to share the sheets, so the speak. It wasn't competitive like their first time, or tender like their second. Looking back at it now, Mulder feared that perhaps they had just used each other as a stress release. Could those other times really have been an ordinary fuck to her, as she had so eloquently put it? A bump and grind much like a gym work-out? Mulder was pretty sure he was into it. He thought she was too.
It could only be the close call during our stake-out, he mused and tried to recall the events of that night.
On Wednesday, the sixth day, a needed break came. At 5 a.m. the next morning, the agents were staggered around the picnic area of Sligo Creek waiting for the suspect to emerge. Fatigue had started to creep in as he and Scully hunkered down beside a bush. He caught Scully starring at him as he ate his sunflower seeds.
"What?" he had said then, thinking she was going to complain about his littering again. "I'm keeping the shells." But she just smiled.
"That disgusting habit does have some desirable skill outcomes."
It wasn't so much that she said it. It was how she said it and the way she licked her lips lustfully. She knew what she was doing. What else could a man do but try to kiss her?
At that moment of blissful distraction, the suspect emerged within their line of sight. But with their guard down and reflexes slowed, the partners fumbled to catch up and their slack almost cost the life of a fellow agent. Thankfully their indiscretion went unnoticed and the suspect eventually booked.
He hoped she would let that one pass and chalk up the incident to fatigue. But Scully is a consummate professional. On Friday, she reined in her smiles and knowing glances. And for just one day without those, Mulder was at a loss. He needed to draw them out again so he barged in on Scully's first Friday night date with her nine-year old godson. ("Babysitting is for sissies", he told his mom Ellen once.)
"Mulderr," she warned even as she let him in, "didn't I tell you I was going to be with Jason tonight?" She glanced at her bored looking godson with his meatloaf plate and Scully's game board on the coffee table.
"Scrabble, Scully? With a nine-year old boy?" He walked in with his a big paper bag in hand. "Oh, and this is for you." He tossed her a folder and headed towards the TV where he produced a Playstation 2, which widely impressed the kid who knew his videogames. Scully opened the folder and saw it was a report about a mysterious sonic boom over the Tidal Basin at four in the afternoon that day. No one saw where the sound had come from. Naturally, Mulder thought it was a UFO. Scully rolled her eyes and dismissed the file.
That night was actually companionable, even somewhat affectionate. She served him a meal she cooked, sat beside him on the couch and even tried to understand this whole World of Warcraft. He really thought the night was a winner. But alas, Jason's unedited curiosity got the better of them.
"So Mulder," he said (with Scully abruptly shooting back 'that's Mister Mulder to you, kid') "are you Aunt Dana's boyfriend? Mom didn't think she had one."
What was he to say to that? He didn't know where he stood. If the boy had asked two days ago, he would have been a little more confident.
"You should ask her." He looked at her hopefully as she busied herself in the kitchen.
"Aunt Dana?"
"Hmmm? Oh. Ummm. No. We just work together." She gave Jason a tight smile and went back to washing the dishes. Not once did she look Mulder in the eye till the evening ended.
So there it was folks. They just worked together.
In the days that followed, Mulder had tried to spend more time with Scully by appealing to her sense of duty, her boundaries of just working together. On Saturday, he labored on two months worth of expense reports and came by her place to have her double check them. Then he convinced her to give up her Sunday to drive to Lurray Caverns in Virginia to investigate the other sonic boom that was heard the day after the one over DC's Tidal Basin.
He doubled his efforts in avoiding affectionate physical contact with Scully thinking she needed time to prove her professionalism to herself. She seemed a little more stressed and was getting more and more irritable. Why wouldn't she? They spent four nights chasing after nothing. It was frustrating.
He had planned something special for them this weekend, but her animosity towards him today when he asked her to autopsy a woman he suspected of drowning in ectoplasm did not bode well. He promised himself he would lay off if she got any bitchier.
Then his phone rang.
"Mulder, I'm at the morgue. When do you want these results?" She still sounded pissed off, but hey, at least she was now doing the autopsy. That was something.
"As soon as humanly possible?"
"Fine."
His thread of hope for a brief future together hung on that one overused word.
***
A/N: Sorry for the delay, and the not so great chapter. Potty training my boy, among a host of other things, got in the way. This chapter will hopefully be the crappiest. The next one is the last chapter so please hang in there. It will get better. I just needed to set up the events that led to Scully's and Mulder's behavior during 'all things'.