Chapter Text
The remote was buried somewhere between the couch cushions, and neither of them was looking for it.
The movie had been background noise for at least twenty minutes. Dana Scully knew this because she'd followed the plot up to the point where the protagonist walked into a building that was clearly going to explode, and since then she'd stopped caring whether it did or not. She had her forensic pathology textbook open in her lap—the chapter on fracture patterns in high-velocity impacts—and she'd been staring at the same page for exactly that long without reading a word.
On the floor, back against the couch a few inches from her knees, Mulder had the Oregon case files spread in a semicircle around him. He'd been taking notes for the first hour. Now his pen sat idle on the page, and he was staring at the ceiling with the look of someone having an argument with himself that he was losing.
Scully knew him well enough to know that if she waited, the argument would eventually spill out.
"The problem," he said without preamble, still staring at the ceiling, "is that all three witnesses described the same light, but from angles that aren't geometrically compatible."
Scully lowered the book to her lap.
"Incompatible how?"
"Incompatible in that if all three were standing where they said they were, and saw what they said they saw," Mulder gestured at the ceiling as though the map were projected there, "the object would've had to be in three different places at once."
"Or one of them was lying."
"Or all three believed they were telling the truth," he said, turning toward her just enough to see her profile, "and their brains processed the same stimulus in completely different ways for reasons that have nothing to do with lying."
"That's the same as saying none of them is reliable."
"That's the same as saying," he held up one finger, the gesture of someone steering a conversation exactly where he wants it, "that the reliability of eyewitness testimony is a convenient fiction."
Scully looked at him. He went back to staring at the ceiling, satisfied.
"Mulder." She set the book on the coffee table. "It's nine o'clock on a Sunday night."
"I know. You want more coffee?"
"If I drink more coffee at nine PM, I won't sleep."
"I won't sleep anyway," he said with the casual certainty of someone stating a weather forecast, "so it's irrelevant."
Scully made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh but came close. She leaned back into the couch and looked at the TV without really seeing it. The protagonist was on a rooftop now. It was raining. Someone had a gun on him.
This was the third time they'd done this in the past month.
Not exactly this, sometimes it was her apartment instead of his, sometimes there was a case that needed working and sometimes the case was just the excuse that got the evening started before the files got pushed aside and the conversation drifted somewhere else entirely. But the shape of it was always the same. Him on the floor or in the armchair, her on the couch. Work woven through conversation woven through the kind of silence that didn't need filling. The habit, built without anyone planning it, of existing in each other's space without needing a reason.
It had started taking this particular form sometime early in the fall, though if someone had asked for a specific date, Scully couldn't have given one. What she could have given were data points: In September, when the doctors used the word remission without any qualifiers, Mulder had been waiting in the hospital corridor, and when she came out he'd looked like someone who'd just gotten something back that he'd been bracing to lose. In October they'd started spending weekends together without ever having a conversation about it. In November, Fridays had begun extending past the office without anyone asking why.
It wasn't new. It was the same distance they'd always kept, just becoming more porous. And Scully, who was precise in her analysis of almost everything, had decided not to be particularly precise in her analysis of this.
Mulder reached for the bag of sunflower seeds next to the files. He shook a few into his palm and held the bag over his shoulder toward her without looking, the automatic gesture of someone who knows the other person will take one. She did, without thinking.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You've spent four years asking me things without permission."
"This one's different." He didn't move from his spot on the floor. His elbows rested on his knees, the seed bag loose in his hands, and something in the stillness of him suggested the question had been waiting a while.
Scully waited.
Mulder turned then. Not all the way, just enough to look up at her, head tilted back at an angle that made his expression harder to read than usual.
"Are you happy?" he asked.
She blinked. Whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't that.
"Where is this coming from?"
"Nowhere specific." His eyes stayed on hers. "Or everywhere. Depends how you look at it."
Scully held his gaze a moment, then looked back at the screen. The protagonist was still on the rooftop in the rain, no resolution in sight.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I didn't ask if you were fine."
"Mulder..."
"I asked if you were happy." He said it without pressure, the same tone he'd use to point out an inconsistency in a witness statement. "They're not the same thing."
She looked at him again. He was still in that same position, waiting with the kind of patience he only showed when something really mattered.
"Sometimes," she said finally.
It was more honest than she'd meant to be. Mulder absorbed it without so much as a blink, like he'd been expecting exactly that.
"What's missing?" he asked, voice lower now.
Scully didn't answer right away. There was something about the question, about the way he asked it without looking away, that made it impossible to deflect, even though she would've preferred to.
"I don't know," she said, which was true, if incomplete.
Mulder nodded slowly. He turned back toward the files, cracked a seed between his teeth.
"I do," he said, almost to himself.
She watched him. He didn't elaborate. His eyes were on the open file in front of him, but they weren't moving across the page, which meant he wasn't actually reading.
"Well?" she said.
"Well what?"
"If you know, you should say it."
Mulder turned his head toward her. It was one of those long looks he had sometimes, stripped of the humor he usually used to keep things manageable. Just the look.
"I think," he said, choosing each word with unusual care, "there are things that deserve more room than we give them." A pause. "Things between people. Not the work. Not the mission. The things that come before all that and after all that. The ones that are still there when everything else goes dark."
Scully had the book in her lap and wasn't looking at it.
"What exactly are you talking about?" she asked, though she had the uncomfortable, precise sense that she already knew.
Mulder opened his mouth. Closed it. Cracked another seed.
"The fact," he said, with something that could've been caution or could've been cowardice or both, "that life happens while you're busy doing other things." Another pause. "You know that better than anyone, Scully."
She looked at him. He'd turned back to the files. Or was pretending to.
The words hung in the room with the low murmur of the movie and the distant hum of Sunday-night D.C. Scully thought about the past few months. The hospital. The doctors. The word remission and everything that came after. The feeling—new, disorienting—that something had shifted in her relationship with time. That time wasn't an infinite resource anymore, something to spend without thinking. That it had to be used. That it had to matter, somehow.
She thought about the last time someone had known her in a way that wasn't professional. Asked her questions that had nothing to do with work. Been present the way you are when someone actually matters.
She thought that Mulder had been doing all of that for years, and neither of them had ever called it what it was.
"Sometimes," she said, quieter now, "I wonder what would've been different if I'd made other choices." She didn't specify. She didn't need to. "About certain things."
Mulder stopped pretending to look at the file. He shifted to face her fully, back against the side of the couch now instead of the front, closer to her knees.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked.
"Not the important things." A pause. "But there are things I... postpone. That I keep postponing."
"Like what?"
Scully looked at him. He was watching her with that unfiltered attention he only used when something mattered more than theory.
"I don't know exactly," she said, which was true in the way things you know but haven't named yet are true.
Mulder nodded. He didn't push. He turned back toward the files with the deliberate slowness of someone who's said what he can say for tonight and knows it.
"The witness up north," he said, back in work mode, "described the object as elongated. The other two said spherical."
"Mulder."
"What?"
"Stop."
This time she did laugh. Brief, involuntary, the kind she didn't quite control. He heard it without turning, and something in his profile settled, like that laugh was exactly what he'd been waiting for and it was enough for now.
________________________________________
At ten fifteen, Scully said she needed to go.
Mulder gathered the files from the floor, stacking them according to some system that made sense only to him, while she collected her coat from the back of the chair. He walked her to the door the way he always did: the short hallway, the door, the threshold where there was always a moment of recalibration before they went back to their separate lives.
At the threshold she turned to say something about Monday's report. There was an inconsistency that had been nagging at her, and he was closer than she'd calculated. Not by much. Just enough to mark the difference between their usual distance and something else. She finished the sentence. He answered about the report, eyes on hers, without taking the step back that would've normalized the space between them.
"See you tomorrow," she said.
"See you tomorrow, Scully."
She took the stairs down. November air on the street. She'd parked three minutes from his building, and as she drove she watched D.C. pass by and thought, without meaning to, without being able to stop, about what he'd said. There are things that deserve more room than we give them. And what she'd answered. There are things I keep postponing.
It wasn't a conversation they would've had a year ago. A year ago the parameters were different. A year ago the relevant question hadn't been whether she felt lonely or whether she was postponing things, but whether she'd even be here to feel anything at all.
But she was here now.
And tonight's conversation had edges she couldn't quite ignore.
She parked outside her building, went up, let herself in. She turned on just the desk lamp. Sat on her couch—smaller, neater than his—and stayed there a moment without doing anything.
Two days later, she had dinner with Ellen.
________________________________________
Tuesday. Galileo. Georgetown. 8:15 PM.
Ellen Kazinsky had been talking for fifteen minutes about a man in her building who had, according to her, the supernatural ability to show up at the mailboxes at the exact moment she went to get her mail, which was either fate or a level of logistical coordination that bordered on creepy.
"How many times?" Scully asked.
"Seven times in three weeks."
"Ellen. That's once every three days. People check their mail regularly."
"Not that regularly." Ellen gestured with her finger. "And he always has something to say. Not the usual elevator small talk. Real things. Questions. Last Wednesday he asked if I'd ever seen November rain like this."
"And?"
"And it's November in D.C., of course it rains like this! But he asked like it was fascinating." She sipped her wine. "You don't get it because you haven't dated anyone in way too long."
Scully raised her eyebrows over her glass.
"That's quite a segue."
"That's a direct observation, which is different." Ellen looked at her with the frankness of someone who'd been friends with someone for twenty years and had stopped bothering with subtlety. "When was the last time?"
"I'm not answering that."
"Because you don't remember."
"Because it's invasive."
"Dana." Ellen set down her fork. "I've known you since college. I know you don't remember."
Scully drank her wine. Didn't answer. Which was an answer.
"What about Mulder?" Ellen said, with the casual tone of someone who'd been saving that particular question.
"What about him?"
"You've been mentioning him for years. Never in a completely neutral way."
"He's my partner."
"That doesn't answer the question."
"Ellen..."
"Fine, fine." Ellen held up her hands. "Dropping it. But one day you're going to admit I'm right."
The restaurant was crowded, noisy in the warm way good places are on a Friday night. Scully relaxed slightly in her chair. There was something restful about this, about a normal dinner, a conversation that had nothing to do with cases or files or conspiracies, something she'd missed in recent months without quite realizing she'd been missing it.
The maître d' approached with an apologetic expression.
"Miss Scully, I'm sorry for the confusion. The window table you reserved is still occupied. Would you mind waiting at the bar for a few minutes?"
"Of course not."
The bar had several groups waiting. Scully and Ellen found space between a man alone with a martini and an older couple studying the menu with the gravity of people who took these decisions seriously. The man with the martini shifted to make room and nearly spilled his drink on Scully's coat.
"God, I'm sorry." He turned fully. Mid-thirties, dark hair slightly rumpled, wearing the jacket of someone who'd worked all day and ditched the tie somewhere around hour eight. He looked genuinely annoyed with himself. "Did I get you?"
"No." Scully checked her coat. "I'm fine."
"Almost, though." He moved the glass farther back. "I was warned this bar was tight, but I underestimated."
"First time here?"
"Yeah. I have a reservation, but apparently there's some issue with the table." A pause. "Which I'm guessing is the same issue you have."
"The maître d' mentioned something."
"Sounds like someone double-booked the same table, or the system has an overly optimistic view of spatial reality. Either way, here we are." A brief smile.
He was direct without being pushy. There was a way he talked that didn't feel like he was trying to impress or fill silence out of nervousness, and Scully registered it, without quite meaning to, as unusual and not unpleasant.
"Daniel Hartley," he said, offering his hand.
"Dana Scully."
Ellen, who'd been watching the exchange with the kind of discreet attention people have when they've decided not to interfere and ruin something, ordered sparkling water from the bartender and turned slightly toward the older couple and their menu, granting space that no one had asked for but was, objectively, the right move.
Daniel Hartley didn't try to keep the conversation going past what felt natural. He asked if they knew the restaurant. She did, he didn't. Someone had recommended it for a work dinner that got cancelled last minute, and he'd decided to come anyway since he'd already made the reservation. There was something about that detail, about the quiet practicality of well, I was going to anyway, that struck her as more revealing than anything designed to sound interesting.
They talked for fifteen minutes. The bar, the restaurant, D.C. in November. Not work. He mentioned being an architect the way someone might mention the weather, casually, not making it the centerpiece, and she mentioned the FBI. It was a conversation without an agenda, which was, she thought, rarer than it should be.
When the maître d' came back to say their table was ready, Daniel Hartley set down his glass, grabbed his jacket from the stool, and turned toward her.
"Nice sharing the wait," he said. Then, with the slightest pause, like he was deciding as he said it, "Would you mind if I got your number?"
Scully looked at him for a beat.
The automatic response, the one she would've given a year ago without thinking, was some polite version of no. Not because there was anything wrong with the man in front of her—there wasn't—but because she'd kept those doors closed so long the hinges had rusted.
She thought about Sunday. The couch. There are things I keep postponing.
"I don't have anything to write on," she said.
He grabbed a cocktail napkin from the bar, pulled a pen from his jacket pocket, and set both in front of her.
Scully wrote her number along the edge.
"Thanks," he said, folding the napkin carefully.
"Sure."
The maître d' led them to separate tables. Ellen waited exactly thirty seconds before leaning in with a look that needed no words.
"Don't," Scully said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was thinking about it." Ellen picked up her menu. "What was his name?"
"Daniel."
"Architect?"
"That's what he said."
"Good-looking?"
Scully opened her menu.
"Yes," she said, in the same tone she'd use to confirm a lab result.
Ellen smiled into her wine list.
"Good," she said.
________________________________________
Wednesday. 7:52 AM. FBI basement.
Mulder had the Oregon map up on the wall and the energy of someone who'd been awake since five with an idea he couldn't stop chasing. Scully came in, set coffee on his desk without him asking—four years had built certain unspoken protocols—and sat down.
"All three witnesses," he said without turning around, "were lying."
"Good morning, Mulder."
"Not consciously." He turned then, marker in hand, with the look of someone who'd been the only person awake and thinking about this for hours. "That's the thing. Their stories contradict each other, which means at least two of them have to be objectively wrong, but they all passed the polygraph, they all check out as credible, and none of them has a history of making things up."
Scully picked up her coffee. Wrapped both hands around it.
"Which suggests they all believed what they were saying."
"Which suggests," he said, raising the marker, "they saw different things." He moved to the map, tapped three points. "What if the object could project different images to different observers at the same time?"
"That would require holographic projection technology we don't have."
"That we don't have yet."
"Mulder."
"Or that we don't have publicly." He turned toward her. His eyes did that quick sweep they did sometimes, checking something that wasn't the case. "Sleep okay?"
"Fine. You?"
"Well enough." A pause. He leaned back against his desk, arms crossed. "How was last night?"
She glanced up from the file.
"Last night?"
"Dinner with Ellen."
Scully didn't remember telling him about dinner with Ellen. Which meant he knew because he paid attention to things she mentioned in passing without realizing he'd filed them away. That was Mulder. That was also, she thought, part of the problem and part of something else she hadn't named yet.
"It was good," she said.
"Just good?"
"Good. Fun." A pause. "I met someone."
The shift in Mulder's expression was small and exact: something in the way he held his arms, a new kind of stillness.
"Who?" he asked. Tone carefully neutral.
"Someone at the bar while we were waiting for our table." Scully went back to the file with deliberate casualness. "An architect. Recently divorced. He had the same reservation mix-up we did."
"And?"
"And we talked for a bit."
"You give him your number?"
The smallest pause.
"He asked for it," she said.
Mulder uncrossed his arms. Crossed them again. Looked at the map.
"Good," he said.
Same word she'd used. Completely different meaning underneath.
Scully watched him for a moment. He was staring at the Oregon map like he was reading something that wasn't there. She knew that look. It meant he was processing something he wasn't ready to say out loud yet.
"You have the autopsy report from the second case?" he said without turning. "Mine's missing a page."
"Blue folder. Third drawer."
He found it. Went back to the map. She went back to the file.
Sometime mid-afternoon, while she was reviewing a lab report, her phone buzzed. A number she didn't have saved but recognized instantly.
Hi, this is Daniel Hartley. We met yesterday at Galileo. Any interest in coffee this Saturday?
Scully read the text. She looked up at Mulder, who had his back to her, rearranging pushpins on the map according to some color-coded logic only he understood, talking to himself under his breath.
She thought about last Sunday. The couch. There are things that deserve more room than we give them. There are things I keep postponing.
She thought about how Mulder said things like that and then went back to his map.
She typed: Saturday works. Eleven?
She set the phone down. Went back to the lab report.
"Scully?"
She looked up. Mulder was watching her from the map. He had a red pushpin in his hand and something in his expression that wasn't quite the question he was about to ask.
"Does the tox report from the third case have cortisol levels?" he said.
"Appendix B." She gestured at the right folder.
He found it. Turned back to the map.
She turned back to the report.
Nothing had changed in the basement.
Though to be precise, something had just started.