Patchiness
True to her word, she made it up to Mulder, much to his delight. The lost opportunity from the morning of Skinner’s call was more than made up for, and she had indeed managed to find an old autopsy lab coat from Quantico. In the end, Mulder hadn’t minded his convalescence nearly as much as he had suspected he would.
The nicotine withdrawals, however, were another matter.
“I haven’t smoked since before I was married to Diana,” he groused as he settled on her couch comfortably, glaring at nothing in particular. He had been grumpy throughout the workday, ever since she had made him throw away the pack of cigarettes he had purchased on his way to work that morning.
“Why did you ever get started,” Scully sniffed, wandering to the kitchen where dinner was being prepared.
“To piss my parents off,” he replied lightly. “Though, they were ones to talk, the two of them smoked like chimney stacks when we were kids.”
“Yeah, but that was the thing to do. Both of mine did as well.” Scully had understood her father’s cigar habit in a way, it seemed to go with her image of her father, the sea captain who liked his Irish whiskey, poker games, and occasional football. It was her mother who had always confounded her. Prim and proper Maggie, perfect Irish Catholic mother, educated by nuns, nothing about her said that she would be the one to take up cigarettes. So it was much to Scully’s surprise as a child when she happened upon her mother out in back of the house one night, smoking a cigarette secretly and crying to herself. It had been her mother’s stress relief on those long voyages her father took. Scully had kept her mother’s secret dutifully, even though most of the family knew about it.
“I can’t imagine your mother smoking,” Mulder muttered, as if reading her thoughts.
“Yeah, well she was the reason Missy took up the habit for a while in her teens. Hell, even I used to sneak out a cigarette or two to try when I was young.”
“Dana Scully, you rebel!” Mulder sounded exceedingly pleased by the notion. Scully poked her head out of her kitchen to smirk at him.
“Yeah, I tried it and hated it. But I thought it was so grown up!”
“I did too,” Mulder reminisced pleasantly as Scully returned to the kitchen, pulling out pasta from the cabinet and frozen sauce from the freezer. “I only did it occasionally in high school, being an athlete. It got bad in Oxford. God, everyone in England smokes like a fiend. My university days were spent with a cig in one hand and a pint in the other.”
“And Phoebe in the middle?” She couldn’t help herself.
“Sometimes,” Mulder evaded, not being bated as Scully snickered in impish delight.
“Ah, the college life!”
“Yeah, well Diana made me quit when we moved in together.”
Well, that was one good thing that Mulder’s ex had managed to do. Scully instantly felt guilty for that stray thought. She shouldn’t think ill of the dead, no matter what Diana Fowley did in life.
“And now?” Scully wandered to the doorway again, regarding Mulder as she opened a box of linguini. “You going to take up smoking on the sly just to get your nicotine fix?”
“Nah,” Mulder replied, sitting up to unbutton the long sleeve of his shirt. He rolled it up enough to show a small, flesh-colored, plastic patch on the hairless side of his arm. “Figured I’d not earn your wrath and try this instead.”
“Good,” Scully nodded, though admittedly she wasn’t terribly sure she was any more pleased with the patch than with a cigarette. “Perhaps in a week or two you’ll be over it.”
“Hey, you are the one who shot me full of nicotine.”
“Only to save your life,” she pointed out mildly, giving him a look that said she was having second thoughts.
He grinned by way of response. “You do that a lot, you know.”
“Do what?” She was already becoming distracted again by the thought of dinner as she meandered slowly back to the kitchen.
“Save my life.”
She paused, shrugging as she turned to regard him with a smile. “It’s what we do for each other. I save your life, you save mine. Antarctica, Africa, it all works out in the end.”
“Wish it didn’t have to be that way.” Mulder’s uncharacteristic sigh gave Scully pause as she frowned at him. What had gotten him so melancholy?
“We would have to stop being FBI agents for that to end,” she pointed out good-naturedly, trying to earn a smile out of him. “People shoot at you less when you don’t have a badge.”
“Really, how many times have we been shot in the line of duty?”
“I think more often than the average person gets shot, I’d warrant,” she snickered, returning to the couch to muse down at his pensive face. “I don’t know, you got shot in North Carolina when we first started working together. And that time when I was stung by the bee.”
He grimaced at that memory. “Feels like more than that.” He paused, blinking hard as he thought, a small smile forming at the corners of his mouth. “Didn’t you shoot me once?”
Hell, he had to bring that time up.
“You nearly killed Krycek,” she protested instantly.
“And this would have been a bad thing because…”
Even if privately she did agree with him in principle, she’d never admit it out loud. “Mulder, you’d have had two murders they would have tried to pin you for, and only one of them would you actually have committed, but it wouldn’t have mattered as the only person to give evidence would have been dead.”
“True. Still, you didn’t have to shoot me over it.” He blinked wounded eyes as he prodded at the shoulder she hit so long ago gently. Scully ignored his crocodile tears, even if the scar that still resided there made her wince in guilt every time she brushed her lips against it.
“I was so terrified when you went down,” she laughed, memory winning over dinner as she sank into one of the armchairs nearest to Mulder. “You were bleeding everywhere, Krycek had run, and I was trying to carry you to the car while your neighbors were in a panic. I finally got one of them to help me carry you there, promising I was a federal agent and was going to take you to a hospital.”
The madness of the entire scene sounded funny to her now. At the time she had been terrified. Mulder had seemingly lost his mind, his father had just been killed, the DAT tape that had first revealed the true nature of just what his father and Spender had been up to had gone missing, and all she knew was that the only person who could help her translate the information off of it was some Navajo code talker in New Mexico. That all seemed so long ago now, so much had happened since then. And she had nearly lost Mulder several times over in the intervening five years.
“I don’t know, Mulder,” she sighed, finally, a thumb picking at the top of the pasta box. “It’s never easy seeing you go down like that.”
“You think it’s easy for me the other way?” He cocked a dark eyebrow at her dubiously. “I nearly killed Ritter after he shot you.”
The darkness to his scowl reminded her all too well of the near fate suffered by Agent Ritter in New York. Mulder wasn’t the only one who was surprised that Ritter managed to survive the incident, let alone walk away without a broken jaw.
“When they called me, Scully, I swear I nearly puked in the trash right there.” The despair and relief sounded as fresh then as it had over a year ago when it happened.
She smiled softly at him. “I didn’t die then.”
“God knows how,” he muttered, shaking his head in true wonder. “Perhaps I should take this religion thing up, obviously there’s an angel watching over you.”
“Don’t joke like that,” she mildly admonished him, knowing too well his propensity for heretical humor. But he met her frown with a steady certitude.
“I mean it, Scully. The number of times you’ve nearly died since I’ve known you is staggering. Between kidnappings, cancer, whatever that smoking son-of-a-bitch is up to, it’s a miracle you are even breathing.”
She could say the same for Mulder. He had his fair share of gunshots and close calls, not to mention whatever alien virus had ravaged his system and nearly killed him just months ago. Their lives over seven years had been filled with the sort of danger that should make more sane people think about getting into a different profession.
She considered that as she regarded him, sprawled out on her couch, his long legs draped over the edge. “You know,” she began carefully, unsure of how to even broach this idea. “What I said earlier, about leaving the FBI. Have you thought about it?”
Bright green eyes turned up to her, wondering in surprise. “Leaving the X-files?”
“Yeah,” she queried, busying herself with the ragged edges of the pasta box she had partially opened. “I mean, you know the truth about your sister now. You’ve discovered the plot that your father was involved in and you helped to end the conspiracy. You’ve done a lot, Mulder.”
“Do you think I should leave?” His question was part accusation, part honest curiosity. Scully bit back the automatic need to defend herself.
“I’m not saying what I think one way or the other. But I do have to wonder what is next.”
She didn’t just mean with their work. And she knew he understood that.
“There are still things I would like to see through,” he said honestly. “Still questions I want to see answered.”
He’d said that before, after they had discovered Samantha’s fate, after the death of his mother. “What sort of questions?”
“I want to know what it was exactly my father and Spender where up to. If there was a colonization plan like I was told, what happened to it?”
“That was foiled long ago, at El Rico, when Cassandra died.”
“Do you honestly believe it’s as simple as that?” Mulder clearly didn’t. He blinked mildly at her. “And do you think Spender would be up to his same old tricks, luring you out in the middle of nowhere if it were as simple as that?”
She knew he was right. That didn’t stop Scully from wishing it were as simple as that, of wishing they could just stop now, to walk away from this, to figure out what this new, tentative relationship between the two of them was.
“Will there ever be an end?” Her question came out sounding far more morose than she intended. Mulder’s sharp eyes cut to hers, softening as they did so.
“I’d like to think that there would be. I have hope at least.” He smiled, reaching a long arm across the way to her. She grabbed his outstretched fingers with her own and squeezed.
“No more dying on me for a while, okay?” She knew it was an impossible request to make of him, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Same to you,” he replied, a slow smile spreading across his face. He tugged gently on her fingers, attempting to pull her towards him, but she slipped her hand out of his with a cheeky smirk.
“If you want to eat dinner anytime soon, you aren’t getting me over there.”
“Who says I’m hungry for dinner at the moment?”
The wolfish grin only earned a snort out of her. “Food first, other things later.”
“This is like that annoying desert rule, isn’t it?”
Scully only laughed as she wandered back into the kitchen. “Meal first, desert afterwards.” She shot him a suggestive look as she returned to preparing their meal.
“Who needs a bullet or bugs to kill me, I think you are doing just fine on your own,” Mulder’s disgruntled complaint sounded from the living room, frustrated and annoyed. Scully wasn’t the least bit sorry.
The nicotine withdrawals, however, were another matter.
“I haven’t smoked since before I was married to Diana,” he groused as he settled on her couch comfortably, glaring at nothing in particular. He had been grumpy throughout the workday, ever since she had made him throw away the pack of cigarettes he had purchased on his way to work that morning.
“Why did you ever get started,” Scully sniffed, wandering to the kitchen where dinner was being prepared.
“To piss my parents off,” he replied lightly. “Though, they were ones to talk, the two of them smoked like chimney stacks when we were kids.”
“Yeah, but that was the thing to do. Both of mine did as well.” Scully had understood her father’s cigar habit in a way, it seemed to go with her image of her father, the sea captain who liked his Irish whiskey, poker games, and occasional football. It was her mother who had always confounded her. Prim and proper Maggie, perfect Irish Catholic mother, educated by nuns, nothing about her said that she would be the one to take up cigarettes. So it was much to Scully’s surprise as a child when she happened upon her mother out in back of the house one night, smoking a cigarette secretly and crying to herself. It had been her mother’s stress relief on those long voyages her father took. Scully had kept her mother’s secret dutifully, even though most of the family knew about it.
“I can’t imagine your mother smoking,” Mulder muttered, as if reading her thoughts.
“Yeah, well she was the reason Missy took up the habit for a while in her teens. Hell, even I used to sneak out a cigarette or two to try when I was young.”
“Dana Scully, you rebel!” Mulder sounded exceedingly pleased by the notion. Scully poked her head out of her kitchen to smirk at him.
“Yeah, I tried it and hated it. But I thought it was so grown up!”
“I did too,” Mulder reminisced pleasantly as Scully returned to the kitchen, pulling out pasta from the cabinet and frozen sauce from the freezer. “I only did it occasionally in high school, being an athlete. It got bad in Oxford. God, everyone in England smokes like a fiend. My university days were spent with a cig in one hand and a pint in the other.”
“And Phoebe in the middle?” She couldn’t help herself.
“Sometimes,” Mulder evaded, not being bated as Scully snickered in impish delight.
“Ah, the college life!”
“Yeah, well Diana made me quit when we moved in together.”
Well, that was one good thing that Mulder’s ex had managed to do. Scully instantly felt guilty for that stray thought. She shouldn’t think ill of the dead, no matter what Diana Fowley did in life.
“And now?” Scully wandered to the doorway again, regarding Mulder as she opened a box of linguini. “You going to take up smoking on the sly just to get your nicotine fix?”
“Nah,” Mulder replied, sitting up to unbutton the long sleeve of his shirt. He rolled it up enough to show a small, flesh-colored, plastic patch on the hairless side of his arm. “Figured I’d not earn your wrath and try this instead.”
“Good,” Scully nodded, though admittedly she wasn’t terribly sure she was any more pleased with the patch than with a cigarette. “Perhaps in a week or two you’ll be over it.”
“Hey, you are the one who shot me full of nicotine.”
“Only to save your life,” she pointed out mildly, giving him a look that said she was having second thoughts.
He grinned by way of response. “You do that a lot, you know.”
“Do what?” She was already becoming distracted again by the thought of dinner as she meandered slowly back to the kitchen.
“Save my life.”
She paused, shrugging as she turned to regard him with a smile. “It’s what we do for each other. I save your life, you save mine. Antarctica, Africa, it all works out in the end.”
“Wish it didn’t have to be that way.” Mulder’s uncharacteristic sigh gave Scully pause as she frowned at him. What had gotten him so melancholy?
“We would have to stop being FBI agents for that to end,” she pointed out good-naturedly, trying to earn a smile out of him. “People shoot at you less when you don’t have a badge.”
“Really, how many times have we been shot in the line of duty?”
“I think more often than the average person gets shot, I’d warrant,” she snickered, returning to the couch to muse down at his pensive face. “I don’t know, you got shot in North Carolina when we first started working together. And that time when I was stung by the bee.”
He grimaced at that memory. “Feels like more than that.” He paused, blinking hard as he thought, a small smile forming at the corners of his mouth. “Didn’t you shoot me once?”
Hell, he had to bring that time up.
“You nearly killed Krycek,” she protested instantly.
“And this would have been a bad thing because…”
Even if privately she did agree with him in principle, she’d never admit it out loud. “Mulder, you’d have had two murders they would have tried to pin you for, and only one of them would you actually have committed, but it wouldn’t have mattered as the only person to give evidence would have been dead.”
“True. Still, you didn’t have to shoot me over it.” He blinked wounded eyes as he prodded at the shoulder she hit so long ago gently. Scully ignored his crocodile tears, even if the scar that still resided there made her wince in guilt every time she brushed her lips against it.
“I was so terrified when you went down,” she laughed, memory winning over dinner as she sank into one of the armchairs nearest to Mulder. “You were bleeding everywhere, Krycek had run, and I was trying to carry you to the car while your neighbors were in a panic. I finally got one of them to help me carry you there, promising I was a federal agent and was going to take you to a hospital.”
The madness of the entire scene sounded funny to her now. At the time she had been terrified. Mulder had seemingly lost his mind, his father had just been killed, the DAT tape that had first revealed the true nature of just what his father and Spender had been up to had gone missing, and all she knew was that the only person who could help her translate the information off of it was some Navajo code talker in New Mexico. That all seemed so long ago now, so much had happened since then. And she had nearly lost Mulder several times over in the intervening five years.
“I don’t know, Mulder,” she sighed, finally, a thumb picking at the top of the pasta box. “It’s never easy seeing you go down like that.”
“You think it’s easy for me the other way?” He cocked a dark eyebrow at her dubiously. “I nearly killed Ritter after he shot you.”
The darkness to his scowl reminded her all too well of the near fate suffered by Agent Ritter in New York. Mulder wasn’t the only one who was surprised that Ritter managed to survive the incident, let alone walk away without a broken jaw.
“When they called me, Scully, I swear I nearly puked in the trash right there.” The despair and relief sounded as fresh then as it had over a year ago when it happened.
She smiled softly at him. “I didn’t die then.”
“God knows how,” he muttered, shaking his head in true wonder. “Perhaps I should take this religion thing up, obviously there’s an angel watching over you.”
“Don’t joke like that,” she mildly admonished him, knowing too well his propensity for heretical humor. But he met her frown with a steady certitude.
“I mean it, Scully. The number of times you’ve nearly died since I’ve known you is staggering. Between kidnappings, cancer, whatever that smoking son-of-a-bitch is up to, it’s a miracle you are even breathing.”
She could say the same for Mulder. He had his fair share of gunshots and close calls, not to mention whatever alien virus had ravaged his system and nearly killed him just months ago. Their lives over seven years had been filled with the sort of danger that should make more sane people think about getting into a different profession.
She considered that as she regarded him, sprawled out on her couch, his long legs draped over the edge. “You know,” she began carefully, unsure of how to even broach this idea. “What I said earlier, about leaving the FBI. Have you thought about it?”
Bright green eyes turned up to her, wondering in surprise. “Leaving the X-files?”
“Yeah,” she queried, busying herself with the ragged edges of the pasta box she had partially opened. “I mean, you know the truth about your sister now. You’ve discovered the plot that your father was involved in and you helped to end the conspiracy. You’ve done a lot, Mulder.”
“Do you think I should leave?” His question was part accusation, part honest curiosity. Scully bit back the automatic need to defend herself.
“I’m not saying what I think one way or the other. But I do have to wonder what is next.”
She didn’t just mean with their work. And she knew he understood that.
“There are still things I would like to see through,” he said honestly. “Still questions I want to see answered.”
He’d said that before, after they had discovered Samantha’s fate, after the death of his mother. “What sort of questions?”
“I want to know what it was exactly my father and Spender where up to. If there was a colonization plan like I was told, what happened to it?”
“That was foiled long ago, at El Rico, when Cassandra died.”
“Do you honestly believe it’s as simple as that?” Mulder clearly didn’t. He blinked mildly at her. “And do you think Spender would be up to his same old tricks, luring you out in the middle of nowhere if it were as simple as that?”
She knew he was right. That didn’t stop Scully from wishing it were as simple as that, of wishing they could just stop now, to walk away from this, to figure out what this new, tentative relationship between the two of them was.
“Will there ever be an end?” Her question came out sounding far more morose than she intended. Mulder’s sharp eyes cut to hers, softening as they did so.
“I’d like to think that there would be. I have hope at least.” He smiled, reaching a long arm across the way to her. She grabbed his outstretched fingers with her own and squeezed.
“No more dying on me for a while, okay?” She knew it was an impossible request to make of him, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Same to you,” he replied, a slow smile spreading across his face. He tugged gently on her fingers, attempting to pull her towards him, but she slipped her hand out of his with a cheeky smirk.
“If you want to eat dinner anytime soon, you aren’t getting me over there.”
“Who says I’m hungry for dinner at the moment?”
The wolfish grin only earned a snort out of her. “Food first, other things later.”
“This is like that annoying desert rule, isn’t it?”
Scully only laughed as she wandered back into the kitchen. “Meal first, desert afterwards.” She shot him a suggestive look as she returned to preparing their meal.
“Who needs a bullet or bugs to kill me, I think you are doing just fine on your own,” Mulder’s disgruntled complaint sounded from the living room, frustrated and annoyed. Scully wasn’t the least bit sorry.