Bob Vance’s employees were disappearing.

One by one, they stopped coming into work…they stopped answering phone calls…they were nowhere to be found. They were eerily MIA in that way that made people not want to even mention it, because sometimes small towns shouldn’t be the center of attention and sometimes a single missing person was too much to handle and sometimes things were just…creepy. Sometimes seven missing people who all worked for the same mid-sized refrigeration company was just creepy. There really wasn’t any other word for it.

Jim and Pam certainly agreed that it was creepy.

Phyllis was inconsolable.

Even Stanley was a little bit spooked.

Michael was borderline hysterical and called meetings in the conference room at least once every two hours just to double check that everyone was present and accounted for. By the time the fourth refrigeration employee had gone missing Michael even started caring if Toby was around, because the truth was that any sort of crime or mystery made him nervous. Understandably and justifiably nervous.

Jim leaned against Pam’s desk and chewed thoughtfully on a jelly bean.

“What did your brother-in-law say?” he asked in a low voice, making sure nobody could hear them discussing the latest headline that had seeped its way onto the rolling news stories of CNN and MSNBC. Seven missing in Scranton, PA. Local authorities baffled. Pam shrugged her shoulders and lazily moved a jack onto a queen in her game of solitaire.

“They still have no idea,” she told him gravely. He nodded and swallowed. Pam’s brother-in-law was a Scranton policeman and usually at least once a day Jim felt the need to ask if he had heard anything…if they had found anyone…what the theories were.

“You know Creed’s suggestion actually sounds kind of plausible now that Jordan and Kim are gone, too,” he mumbled, not even trying to mask his own vague sense of worry and nervousness. These were people who worked literally right down the hall from him. People who he’d ridden the elevator with. People who sometimes came to office parties and who had families and kids and… he didn’t even like to think about it for very long.

“You think there's a cult? Really?…In Scranton?” Pam whispered, now blatantly ignoring her computer altogether. Jim lifted a shoulder and tipped his mouth to the side.

“Do you have a better explanation?” he asked. Her eyes glazed over in thought for a moment and a bittersweet kind of look crossed her face.

“Group trip to Disney World?” she suggested helplessly. He grinned at her without much humor or merriment.

“Yeah, that would be…let’s just go with that idea,” he agreed. She nodded at him and sighed like she did sometimes when he looked at her a certain way. He noted that with vague interest and popped another jelly bean into his mouth.

****

“You know, there are a lot of possible explanations for this.”

“Could you be any less original? I’m going to start making a list of synonyms for the word explanation so that you can change it up every once in a while.”

She sighed. “You know…there are a lot of viable elucidations for this,” she corrected blandly, her voice flat and her expression bleak. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and kept walking.

“I realize that,” he admitted.

“It isn’t necessarily paranormal,” she continued. He reached out and opened the door to Scranton Business Park, extending a hand and pressing it against her lower back as they entered the building.

“Yeah I realize that, too.”

Her eyebrow lifted as she turned to look at him over her shoulder, flashing her badge at the security guard as he did the same.

“Are you going to make me come right out and ask you why we’re here?” she wondered, stopping at the elevator and crossing her arms indignantly. “Talk about unoriginal,” she muttered. He pressed the up button and stared at her, his face an expressionless mask mostly meant to mirror hers. After a lengthy pause he finally opened his mouth to reply.

“Elucidations, Scully? What did you get on the SAT’s, like a 1600?” The elevator dinged its arrival and she grinned at the back wall as she entered it’s beige confines. The way her mouth curled up was not lost on him and he lifted his eyebrows at her just as her lips set themselves back into a stern looking line, her arms still crossed.

“1540,” she corrected flatly, and he chuckled because sometimes she astonished him. And that was a really hard thing to do.

“We’re here,” he interjected, returning to the question she had posed originally, “because seven people are missing and nobody knows why. No phone calls. No paper trails. No bodies. Just gone…vanished into thin air…local authorities are confused and have conflicting reports…sound like anything you‘ve heard before, Scully?” he asked cheekily, enjoying the blush of irritation that colored her cheeks. She shifted.

“This is not alien abduction, Mulder. It’s just not.”

“How do you know that for sure?” he asked, his impatience playing like a broken record that Scully seemed unable to silence or stifle.

“Because,” she began calmly, “statistically I have to be right sometimes. I know that‘s hard for you to accept,” she mumbled, her voice a bit self-deprecating and unenthused. He chuckled.

“I accept that you‘re right sometimes, Scully,” he promised her earnestly, and she simply raised an eyebrow as the elevator opened again and they stepped out and headed toward Vance Refrigeration. “You just aren’t right this time,” he added, and she rolled her eyes. He grinned to himself because he always loved getting that look of amused annoyance from her, and sometimes Scully in a small town was so much more entertaining than Scully in the city…and he had a feeling Scranton would bring out the small-town best in her.

****

Jim had left his lunch in his car.

It was the kind of thing that happened sometimes because some mornings he was distracted when he pulled into his parking spot, his mind on Pam and drifting across the way that they had fallen so seamlessly back into the routine that they’d had before casinos and Stamford and Karen and Roy.

Karen had gotten the job at corporate easily and without much effort at all, and when she had asked Jim if he would move with her, he’d said yes in his head. He had meant to say yes out loud. But something happened and he just couldn’t get that single syllable out of his mouth…he couldn’t get himself to say it and make her smile the way he knew she would if he agreed to the relocation. Instead he just stared at her silently, and she nodded after something like thirty seconds, tears in her eyes, taking his quiet, non-response for the break up that he guessed it was. She had moved by herself. She was his boss. Saying it was awkward was kind of an understatement.

And that was not the only thing that was awkward in his life at the moment. There was also the fact that he and Pam were just friends…for no real reason other than his own strange feeling of immobility. He guessed it was probably fear. Or pride. But something in him could not push them past where they’d been when she was with Roy or when he was with Karen. He was leaning on her desk again, and eating her jelly beans and making her smile and recruiting her to pull pranks on either Dwight or Andy on a regular basis, but there was still this static, “just friends” feeling. He was acting like she was unavailable. And he didn’t really like to analyze why.

Sometimes she would stare at him and sigh and he would hate himself a little because really they should just be together and both be happy. But maybe he was still punishing her. Or maybe he was punishing himself. He rolled his eyes and straightened his collar as he pushed his way out the door of the office and punched at the elevator button. Whatever, he thought, everything was weird. Literally everything.

The elevator landed on the main floor and he waved at the security guard, his keys dangling from his other hand and his long legs carrying him swiftly in the direction of his car. Once he got out into the parking lot, though, he stopped short, his eyes wide and his head swiveling to look around for something to explain this. For a second he thought maybe he’d stepped onto the set of Threat Level Midnight…he thought maybe he was seeing things. But then he blinked and he realized that there really were actually two people leaning against his car dressed in long black trench coats and sunglasses. And they were arguing. And he was really, really confused.

“My point, Mulder, is that you can’t just come out and ask things like that in this kind of a town. It’s small and people talk and panic and…didn’t you take sociology courses at Oxford?” the woman asked impatiently, her small frame and her fiery red hair not detracting from the seriousness of her countenance. ‘Mulder’ shifted on his feet and planted his hands on his hips.

“The guy seemed level headed,” he told her, and even Jim knew that with things the way they were in Scranton at the moment calling anybody level headed was probably a false assumption. The woman crossed her arms and tipped her head at her counterpart.

“Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration seemed level headed to you?” she mocked, and Jim grinned to himself because something about her saying that was really, really amusing. Mulder stared down at his shoes, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

“Scully let me just ask you this…” he paused mostly for what Jim assumed was meant to be dramatic effect, “how did you get a 1540 on the SAT’s? Even I only scored thirty points higher than that.”

Jim wondered why they hadn’t noticed him yet since he was kind of tall and hard to miss most of the time. He decided it was probably because they seemed enthralled with each other. He also briefly wondered who the hell got over a 1500 on the SAT‘s. ‘Scully’ stared at Mulder’s profile icily and heaved what seemed like a very practiced sigh.

“I’m going to shoot you,” she announced. Jim thought Mulder’s surprised laughter was as much of a break in the discussion as there was going to be, so he stepped up to them and cleared his throat.

“Uh hi sorry but um…this is my…” he drifted into silence when they both turned and looked at him through their very dark lenses as if they had choreographed it. He swallowed. “This is my car,” he explained meekly, his eyes still wide and round like quarters. They didn’t respond for what felt like a half hour and Jim started to feel sweat on the back of his neck. Why did he suddenly feel like some kind of criminal? Eventually Mulder took a deep breath and straightened up and away from the trunk of Jim’s car.

“Do you work in this building?” he asked flatly. Jim turned around and looked behind him as if he’d never seen Scranton Business Park before…as if he hadn’t just come down the elevator and out the door on auto pilot because he’d spent like eight years doing it every day.

“Uh yes, yeah. I do work…I work for Dunder Mifflin?” he mumbled inarticulately. Mulder licked his lips and nodded, refusing to speak for some kind of weird reason that was not clear to Jim at all. Finally the woman, Scully, stood up and away from the trunk too, taking a step toward Jim and raising her eyebrows above the line of her sunglasses.

“We’re sorry, sir,” Scully offered harshly. Sir? Jim thought. If he’d had his wits about him he would’ve raised his eyebrows right back at her. Instead he just stood there dumbly as she gripped Mulder’s sleeve with white knuckles and dragged him away from Jim’s car and toward a burgundy sedan that Jim had never seen before. He heard her mutter “Mulder, will you stop deliberately giving these people heart attacks?” and something released in his chest. Maybe he wasn’t about to get gunned down…maybe he had just accidentally stumbled upon something that was none of his business. Mulder shrugged at her and turned his stare back on Jim, who promptly unlocked his car and retrieved his tuna sandwich with sweaty palms. He made quick work of relocking his Saab and heading back inside, staring nervously at the elevator and hoping it would arrive sooner rather than later.

The door of the building swung open and Jim turned his head and exhaled long and slow when Mulder strolled in after him. What was with this guy, dressed in a really expensive suit but walking around like he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Jim assured himself that the emotion he was feeling was not jealousy. It was something else like…uh…well just something other than that. Mulder offered him a nod. He nodded back.

“Sorry about that,” Mulder muttered, “We weren’t really paying attention to, uh…”

“Oh no that’s um…that’s fine,” Jim interrupted. They lapsed into an awkward silence and Jim watched the numbers above the elevator light up. 3...2...

“Fox Mulder, FBI,” Mulder introduced, holding up his badge as if Jim would know what it meant and whether or not it was genuine. “Would you mind helping me out with a few questions?” he asked and Jim recognized his practiced language for what it was as the door of the elevator slid open. He looked inside longingly before turning toward the agent at his side.

“Yeah definitely,” he agreed easily. “FBI, huh? You must be here about the Vance Refrigeration case,” he supposed. Mulder nodded.

“Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?" he asked, his brow furrowing in interest, "Any strange people or activity?  Strange lights, or maybe...”  Jim leaned forward a bit.

"Excuse me?" he asked, wondering if he'd heard this guy wrong.

"Any kind of suspicious activity at all?" Mulder reiterated, and Jim decided he must've misheard.  Right?  He must've.  Mulder's hair was dark and newly cut, styled into that short but purposely messy kind of look that was really popular at the moment. Jim felt a little self-conscious and ran a hand through his long shaggy mop.

“They keep asking us that and I keep trying to think, but I just…I haven’t seen anything. I’m really sorry, I wish I could help more.” Mulder pushed his hands into his pockets and pulled one back out holding a business card.

“You might know something and you just don’t realize it,” he told Jim casually, and Jim nodded, accepting the card and shoving it into his coat pocket.

“Thanks,” he replied, reaching out to push the elevator button again. The door slid open automatically and Jim stepped inside. As Mulder turned to walk away Jim called out to him. “Hey was that your partner outside?” Years of watching cop shows on television had taught him a little something about how things worked. He stuck his hand out to keep the door from closing. Mulder nodded again.

“Yeah,” he affirmed and Jim nodded back at him. They just stood there for a second, Mulder almost certainly wondering why Jim had asked, and Jim just generally feeling stupid. “I got an eleven fifty on my SAT’s,” he finally offered. Mulder laughed quietly and pointed out through the glass doors at Jim’s bumper, the left corner of which read Philidelphia in a bold red and blue.

“That’s why you’re a Phillies fan,” he joked flatly. Jim huffed a half chuckle and let the door slide closed, shaking his head in disbelief.

What the hell was going on, he wondered, and when exactly had his life turned into a bad episode of Law and Order?

Dwight:

Michael:

***

“Isn’t it against some kind of health code?”

Jim followed Pam’s gaze and eyed Angela standing in the break room, her arms huddled close to her chest and almost completely shielding his view of a mid-sized, long-haired cat…which she seemed to be talking to and stroking lovingly. He rolled his eyes. This had been going on for about a week. Apparently the cat was sick or was getting sick or was recovering from some kind of sickness…Jim didn’t really care. The point was that Angela had this cat, and the cat had a leash that she dragged it around on, and so far nobody had complained and Toby had just looked at her, his shoulders slumping and his face drooping into a tired kind of frown. Jim thought he probably planned on using the ‘ignore it until it goes away’ tactic. Being HR in this office was difficult enough as it was.

“Actually,” Jim replied, leaning one elbow on Pam’s desk and pushing his other hand into his pocket, “it’s against my moral code, so I think I should file a formal complaint,” he confessed. Pam grinned up at him.

“Bringing a cat into work is against your moral code?” she repeated incredulously. He tipped his head to the side as if considering it and they both turned their stares back to Angela who was now shepherding the cat back to her desk by tugging on the leash delicately. The cat meowed and slinked along behind her.

“S&M is against my moral code,” he corrected, and she laughed at him with wide, surprised eyes, her mind probably already churning with the possible complaints they could file with Toby. He laughed with her and turned completely to face her, dipping his head low and trying to shield his amusement from Angela, who already claimed her cat felt the office was mocking it. He didn’t need another speech about the gentle, old souls of felines and how mistreating them would send him straight to hell. “I’m telling you that is not normal,” he promised Pam, but the rest of his joke was cut short when the door to the office swung open and the entrance way was filled with billowing trench coats, over-priced shoes, and charcoal gray business attire. Pam stared at Mulder and Scully as they pulled out their badges and then turned her wide eyes to Jim, who was watching her with smug satisfaction.

“I thought you were joking…” she whispered. He raised his eyebrows at her in victory. The entire office had gone eerily still, and the chances of one hearing a pin drop were much higher than usual, even Dwight going silent and slowly setting his phone back on its cradle, hanging up on a client mid sales call.

“I’m Special Agent Dana Scully with the FBI,” Scully began quietly, her cold blue gaze sweeping over Pam efficiently, “and this is my partner, Special Agent Mulder. We were wondering if it would be possible to talk to some of the employees here about the recent disappearances at Vance Refrigeration?” Her stare never wavered, and Jim thought Pam seemed just as nervous as he’d been downstairs, her face going pale and her knee starting to bob beneath her desk.

Mulder was surveying the entire room, taking in the lay out and the people like pieces of a puzzle. When his gaze met Jim’s he raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement. Jim decided these people were weird.

“Is there someone who’s in charge that we could talk to?” Scully wondered unenthusiastically. Pam looked to Jim in a bit of a panic and he knew exactly what she was thinking. Could they really send these two to Michael’s office to wait for him? He was in the bathroom at the moment and something just seemed wrong about letting the FBI know how completely ridiculous and inefficient their office really was. Pam swallowed.

“Uh…” she mumbled, but was saved from continuing by the approach of a very enthusiastic Dwight Shrute. He stuck his hand out toward Mulder with a stern arm.

“Dwight K. Shrute,” he announced. Mulder simply stared at him, keeping his hands in his pockets until Dwight dropped his arm in confused defeat. “I am a retired Sheriff’s Deputy and I know this office like the back of my hand, so if you are looking for the person who could most likely assist you…”

“You’re not a retired Sheriff’s Deputy,” Jim couldn’t help but interject, even with the stares of the federal government burning holes into his skull. Dwight huffed and spoke to him in blatant irritation.

“Yes. I am,” he corrected. Jim clicked his tongue and tilted his head to the side.

“No,” he responded, “You’re not. You are a volunteer rodeo clown who was fired.”

“Oh wait Jim I think you misspoke,” Pam stepped in as if they had rehearsed the conversation and Jim stifled a smile.

“I did?” he wondered, feigning confusion, and ignoring the way that the FBI was huffing out irritated and impatient sighs beside him.

“Yes, he is a volunteer sheriff’s deputy who was fired,” she told him, nodding to Dwight as if she had done him a great service. Jim hummed.

“What did I say?” he asked.

“Rodeo clown.”

“Really?” he jerked his head back in surprise and gazed down at her with a twinkle of merriment in his eye.

“Common mistake,” she told him conspiratorially. Dwight finally erupted, unable to accept the attack on his character any longer.

“Damn-it, Jim!” he exclaimed, and Scully took a step back from them, her hand lifting to scratch at her forehead in frustration. Mulder licked his lips to try to keep from smiling at the exchange and at Scully‘s reaction to it. “Do not undermine me in front of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” he pleaded on a whisper. Jim opened his mouth to reply but was cut off by Mulder, who had received the glare of death from Scully and was moved suddenly to step in.

“Ok, who…is actually in charge, here?” he asked, tired and practiced impatience laced through his words.

“Actually?” Pam repeated, probably only to buy herself some time.

“Yes,” Mulder and Scully replied in unison. Pam glanced at Jim and sighed.

“You probably don’t want to know.”

***

***

This was the type of case that Scully labeled “Mulder’s idea of a good time.”

A semi-mysterious, borderline ridiculous, Podunk-confusion-laden mess of a case file that forced them to drive longer than she was comfortable with to a town that had less Starbucks than she usually preferred and whose patrons stared at them like they were the aliens. Yep. Definitely Mulder’s sick, twisted, masochistic idea of a good time.

If there was one thing that Scully hated more than her partner’s uncanny ability to put their lives in danger, it was small town ignorance, hysteria, and small-mindedness. And Mulder knew it. Six years of him accepting these cases despite her complaints was sort of leading her to believe that he enjoyed her irritation and impatience with the slack-jawed farmers and the overtly flirtatious farmer‘s daughters more than he let on.

Inductive reasoning, thy name is Scully.

She found herself standing stock still, her arms crossed in a purposeful show of unimpressed skepticism, her icy eyes watching with only a hint of surprise as someone named Michael Scott began a deluge of impersonations, the first being a very original take on President Richard Nixon. She felt Mulder shift uncomfortably beside her as Mr. Scott finished assuring them that he was not a crook and moved on to something that she guessed was supposed to be Will Smith’s theme song from Men In Black. He closed his routine by tossing her a crooked-mouthed order for a martini: “shaken, not stirred.” Her head turned toward Mulder subtly and she sighed, sure that if she took the effort to actually completely face him he would have a smile of ironic amusement plastered on his face.

“You’re good,” Mulder croaked to Michael, and that was all she needed to whip her head around completely. He was staring at her with twinkling eyes, full of mischief. She glared a warning in his direction, fighting the smile that was tugging at her lips.

Insufferable. That’s what he was.

“Thank you,” Michael offered, giving a little bow of appreciation, “I am a student of comedy, so…” There was a pause as he grinned at them, and Scully wasn’t sure what he was hoping they would do…applaud? Compliment him further? God, she hated small towns. Finally, after the awkward silence had stretched beyond what Scully even thought was possible, he extended an arm to the chairs behind them and took a seat at his desk. “Sit, sit, this isn’t the inquisition,” he promised in a voice that was some kind of accent mixing British with German, and Scully turned to Mulder again, this time with a look of flat desperation. He chuckled quietly as they sat down across the expanse of desk from a very jittery and excited Michael Scott. “Now,” Michael muttered, finally settling into his chair and clasping his hands on top of his desk, “How can I be of service to you?”

“We were just hoping to have an opportunity to speak with each of your employees,” Mulder explained. “It wouldn’t take long, just a few minutes with each of them, a couple questions…”

“So…” Michael interrupted, “this is the inquisition,” he assessed carefully, suddenly seeming a bit wary and threatened by the prospect of the FBI questioning or accusing any of his employees. Mulder frowned.

“No, just a simple, standard interview process.”

Michael slumped in relief and huffed out a loud breath as Mulder readjusted his tie. Scully felt a twinge of satisfaction at the fact that Mulder was undoubtedly feeling the discomfort that was dripping down the walls of the room.

“Ok, so you don‘t suspect any of us…” he inhaled noisily, “like…Toby or anybody?” Michael clarified nervously, and Scully wondered who Toby was and took a mental note of the name and the fact that it had been mentioned without provocation. Not that what this guy said held much weight in her mind.

“You aren‘t currently suspects, as far as we know,” Mulder assured him, licking his lips in puzzlement.

Michael nodded and shifted, turning his stare to Scully, who crossed her legs and met his gaze with an expressionless face.

“Does she…speak?” the regional manager asked Mulder in a whisper.

“Sometimes…You have to put a quarter in. Listen is there a room or an area where we could just set up shop for about an hour?” Mulder forced out, and it took almost all of her willpower to keep from reacting to the joke he had made. Michael Scott’s gaze remained fixed on her intimidating and immovably bland expression, and his mouth twisted into a sort of grimace that part of her couldn‘t help but enjoy. She blinked.

“Conference room,” Michael mumbled distractedly, clearing his throat and shifting in his chair. Scully sighed again through tense lips and Mulder nodded his thanks before turning to her with an enthusiastic grin and asking if she was ready to ‘get this show on the road.’ She turned and stared at him with a look of unmasked and unmistakable contempt.

This was definitely Mulder’s idea of a good time…and it was definitely not Scully’s.

***

The thing with Jim was that Pam wasn’t sure how to talk to him anymore.

Like she didn’t know what would be appropriate…what wouldn’t be met with a blank stare, or with a grimace of disbelief, or with a cold grin of disappointment. She wasn’t sure how she could tell him things, real things, if every time conversation got a little bit serious he literally bailed, coming up with some reason to leave the room or to make a phone call, coming up with some excuse that never really rang true, and avoiding eye contact because she guessed it was probably too painful for him…too much…or maybe not enough.

Pam’s problem had always been that she didn’t know how to speak her mind without hurting someone.

She had spoken up on beach day and had ended up hurting herself. Because look where it had gotten her.

But still every day she came into work wondering if this would be it…if finally they would broach the topic of what had happened before Stamford and how she had left her engagement ring on a freshly dusted kitchen table with a note that said something like “I think we both need to grow up,” and how her mother had asked her if it was all because of Jim and she had said yes without hesitation. Every day she came into work wondering if she’d get to say it out loud to him again the way she had in May, only better, and if maybe he would look at her in a different way…maybe he would respond with something more like “I’m sorry” and less like “I wanted to be not here.”

I wanted to be not here like I wanted to be not Jim like I wanted to fall out of love with you…

Sometimes acting like nothing was wrong, like he hadn’t shattered her as if she was made of porcelain and then looked at the glue in his hand like he had no idea what to do with it, sometimes that was too hard for her. Sometimes it was impossible.

Sometimes the jokes weren’t funny and his smile caused more pain than anything else.

Sometimes she hated her life.

She hated the way that he followed her to her car, but didn’t follow her any further than that. She hated the way that at night she would lie awake and stare at the ceiling, listening nervously for suspicious sounds or the murmur of voices, thinking uncontrollably about Jordan and Henry and Caroline and the rest of the seven who had somehow dropped off the face of the earth, and wondering if it was wrong that sometimes she counted Jim as the eighth.

Sometimes she thought Jim had been the first to disappear.

And then she felt terrible, because it felt like she was jinxing him.

It felt like she was jinxing herself and asking for trouble. And really all she wanted was for trouble to go away, to leave Scranton exactly the way the city had been before trouble had arrived on a fuel spilling train and had cast its lit match down on the tracks in its wake.

Pam’s problem had always been that she had impossible dreams, so she’d resigned herself to living in nightmares.

And the thing with Jim was that Pam wasn’t sure how to talk to him anymore.

***

The thing with Mulder was that Scully found herself staring at his ass way more than was healthy.

Like she would be in the middle of something, performing an autopsy or filling out expense reports or questioning a suspect, and she would find that her eyes were just stuck there and she hadn’t even realized it had happened. The only thing that kept her from being absolutely appalled with herself was the argument that he did have a very attractive back side, and it was probably impossible for her to go every single day without noticing it at all. She’d been effectively achieving the impossible for five years, and it seemed year six was her breaking point.

Scully’s problem was that she had built her reputation on being all about the job…being preoccupied with facts and proof and statistics.

Really she was as normal as any other woman on the face of the planet, and she hadn’t had sex in over two years and it was getting ridiculous. And Mulder’s ass looked really good in a suit.

But she bit her tongue, ignored the flush in her cheeks, and went back to work every time her gaze lingered there because they were partners and this job was her life and Mulder depended on her professionalism. He depended on her sometimes cool blank stare, on her sometimes warm, understanding smile, on her sometimes grimace of concern and empathetic understanding. He needed things from her and she was sure that none of those things included a raised eyebrow of sexual intrigue. Or a rub down. Or… that just wasn’t what he expected of her, and she was nothing if not the kind of person who met expectations. Even impossible and painful expectations.

Expectations that called for her to be without gender and without emotion and without sex in general.

Sometimes acting like she wasn’t attracted to him was completely draining. Sometimes she would excuse herself from an investigation and sit in the ladies room with her head in her hands, instructing herself to get it together and remember all the reasons why kissing him was a bad idea. Sometimes she thought she was probably in love with him, but that idea usually stopped her short and left her breathless.

Sometimes the innuendo wasn’t funny because it was a little bit too true and she could never admit that to him.

Sometimes she hated her life.

Sometimes she hated the way that, when they were on the road, he would sit on her bed and eat Chinese food and watch baseball until midnight, and then he would toss an inappropriate comment at her and shuffle through the connecting door to sleep with a thin wall separating her hands from his face and her lips from his mouth and her body from… Sometimes she hated the way that she would lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling, wondering if he could ever see her as an actual woman after all of the hours she spent silently begging him to treat her like a man.

Sometimes she hated the fact that she had done this to herself.

She had nobody else to blame.

And the only person who understood her at all anymore most likely saw her as a replacement for the sister who had been ripped away from him when she was eight years old, and probably wanted nothing to do with her wandering eyes and her lust-filled mind.

Scully’s problem was that she’d always had impossible dreams, and so had resigned herself to living in nightmares.

And the thing with Mulder was that Scully found herself staring at his ass way more than was healthy.

“Something’s not right about this, Scully,” he muttered, tossing a tennis ball into the air above his head and then catching it just so that he could toss it again. She followed the action with her eyes and tried not to be annoyed with the fact that he was lounging on her motel bed in order to play catch with himself. The thought made her lift an eyebrow.

“You mean besides the fact that seven people are missing and nobody has seen or heard a thing?” she wondered dryly. He chose not to respond and continued to toss the ball into the air. She chewed on her lower lip through the silence and bounced a few times on the desk chair that she was sitting in. She wondered if the motel had purchased the chairs from the same store or manufacturer as Dunder Mifflin and Vance Refrigeration. It was unmistakably identical to the chairs that Jim Halpert and Creed Bratton and Christina Macavoy had been bouncing in all day long, and Scully found herself pondering the people that they had interviewed and the way that they had all been a certain special kind of bizarre that she wasn’t sure she could fully capture in her report. Mulder caught the ball and propped himself up on his elbows to look at her in confusion.

“There’s something Bob Vance…”

“Vance Refrigeration,” she filled in sardonically. He grinned in acknowledgement.

“…isn’t telling us,” he finished. “Somebody’s lying about something. Seven people can’t disappear without somebody witnessing something or overhearing something or…I don’t know. Something about this case…” Scully rolled her eyes. “What?” Mulder wondered defensively.

“You say that about every single case we investigate,” she told him, pushing the chair back and forth with the heel of her shoe and crossing her arms loosely across her middle. His face twisted into a look of disbelief and he huffed out a lungful of air.

“I do not,” he proclaimed dryly. She shrugged her indifference and he went back to tossing the tennis ball. Her eyes followed it, drifting up, and then down…up and down…hypnotized by the rhythm of his catch and release.

“That guy Jim Halpert is good looking,” she mumbled distractedly, and her eyes tracked the neon green of the ball as it came down fast and hit Mulder square in the face, his hands jerking in surprise at the boldness of her statement.

“Excuse me?” he asked, a tint of laughter in his voice, and it made her angry that he would find her impulse and opinion on this matter to be humorous in any way. She felt a pinch of defensiveness and looked him in the eye.

“I said Jim Halpert is good looking,” she repeated. His mouth dropped open as if he was about to mutter the word ‘what’, and she raised her eyebrows to silence him. “Is there something wrong with that?” she wondered.

“He’s a little bit young for you, don’t you think?” Mulder assessed, and she knew that he knew exactly what he was doing…playing on her insecurities and twisting things so that she would drop the subject.

“Not really,” she decided, spinning the chair in a slow circle and taking in the tan colored wall paper and the way that the top left corner of the room had deep brown water stains stretched out like a spider web on the ceiling. When she refocused on Mulder he was staring at her in utter disbelief. “What?” she wondered, ceasing her chair’s rotation.

“I thought you were quiet during that interview,” he replied, “I just didn’t realize that it was because you were undressing our witness in your head,” he finished, his voice full of hard edges and insult. “All this time I thought I was the unprofessional one in this partnership.” Scully let out a single chuckle and shook her head at him.

“I wasn’t undressing him, it’s just a simple observation,” she explained, her voice flat and lacking in any kind of emotion. Mulder pursed his lips and nodded at her, his eyes dripping with suspicion.

“Ok,” he conceded, sighing and reluctantly starting to toss the ball into the air again. Scully watched him through squinted eyes and licked her lips.

“He’s taller than you,” she announced, and tried not to smile when the ball hit Mulder in the face for the second time.

***

“Oh my god, Pam, I can’t even believe how good looking that policeman is, he’s just like so delicious looking like I just want to spread him on a cracker and eat him as a snack before I go out for dinner with Ryan. I mean don’t you think he was so handsome and he was so nice when he was asking questions and he like totally believed me when I said I felt like there were bad vibes and stuff in the parking lot and nobody has believed me about that and I just want to marry him and have all of his little policeman babies. Oh my god, that’s so embarrassing, I can’t believe I just said that Pam, oh my god.”

Pam offered a meek and insincere smile and shrugged, and Jim felt his jaw muscle tense in irritation. He wasn’t sure why, since he was definitely not jealous of this Fox Mulder and the way that Pam’s gaze had swept over him appreciatively when he’d first entered the office…definitely not jealous. That was not what this was about.

“Yeah I guess he’s kind of cute,” she mumbled, shrugging into her jacket, and Jim thought it seemed like she was trying to stall so that she didn’t have to ride down in the elevator with Kelly, who was presently gasping in horror at Pam’s unacceptable understatement.

“Kind of cute?! Pam are you crazy? He totally has that like dark and brooding thing going on, plus he’s got a badge and fancy shoes,” Kelly assured her. Fancy shoes? Jim wondered in confusion.

“Well maybe you should break up with Ryan and hit on the FBI agent,” Pam suggested dryly, and Jim grinned, knowing that Pam’s deliberate comment would end the conversation, which would please him to no end. Kelly took a predictable step back and frowned.

“Pam, hang on a second. I can’t believe you would even suggest something like that. I know you cheated on Roy with Jim, but I am not that kind of girl,” she finished harshly, pushing past an overtly embarrassed Jim Halpert and exiting the Office with a flourish and leaving Jim and Pam alone to lock up the office. Pam rolled her eyes and sighed as Jim studiously avoided her gaze, trying to make sure he side-stepped whatever comment she might be concocting or conversation she might be hoping they would have. The tension of the moment was thick and he pursed his lips in discomfort.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Yikes,” he finally muttered, and Pam laughed uncomfortably. She bent down and picked up her purse and her Barnes and Noble bag, which he knew from experience was full of her new pencils, a sketchpad, some book about women in New York City who, according to an unenthusiastic description from Pam, met every Thursday to drink martini’s and talk about sex, and remnants of her very meager lunch. She offered a half smile to Jim as she made her way toward the elevator, and he found himself silently grateful that she was letting Kelly‘s comment slide without remark.

“So, any exciting plans for the night?” she wondered. He shrugged and hit the down button with his thumb.

“Not really. The Phillies are playing the Mets, so that should be exciting…” he told her.

“Exciting?” she repeated incredulously, and he smiled, wondering why everybody was picking on his team today.

“Probably not,” he corrected, laughter tinting his words, and his eyes were still fixed on her face when the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, his thoughts full of the idea that they should probably talk about whatever this was…and he should probably comment on the tears he swore were in her eyes that he hadn’t noticed until this particular moment... He took a step forward, but stopped short when he realized that there was someone inside the elevator.

“Creed?” Pam greeted in confusion. Creed’s eyes shifted from Jim to Pam and ended up looking someplace else entirely as he shifted awkwardly on his feet.

“Hey there, Sam, I forgot my uh…I left my briefcase behind,” Creed explained half-heartedly, pushing past the two and unlocking the door to Dunder Mifflin with a key that he probably was not supposed to have. Jim looked down at Pam with a furrowed brow, and Pam looked up at him, equally puzzled. The silence lingered for a moment before she opened her mouth and spoke.

“Let’s get out of here,” she murmured, and he nodded enthusiastically, rushing into the elevator and hitting the number 1 emphatically. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the idea that it was kind of suspicious that Creed had left the office promptly at 5, only to return again at 6 when the office had cleared of employees, claiming he‘d left behind a briefcase that Jim was sure he‘d seen him carrying on his way out an hour earlier.

Pam crossed her arms, and Jim was glad that he was with her.

The elevator landed soundly on the main floor and the two exited in silence, both seriously wondering whether they should be concerned, their inner-confusion only highlighted by the fact that they were both also contemplating why they couldn’t just fix what was between them. Pam nodded to the security guard as they pushed out the front doors, and Jim nodded in surprise at Trout, one of Bob Vance’s sales reps who was leaning against the building finishing a cigarette.

“Trout” was the five foot eight, curly haired, fifty something’s nickname, lovingly bestowed because he spent almost every Sunday fishing in the middle of Lake Scranton, despite assurances and proof that there wasn‘t much to be caught. Trout had been on Jim’s weekend basketball team at the YMCA for the past three years, and the two had a decent, friendly rapport.

“How’s it goin, man?” Jim asked, his voice a little less than casual. Trout nodded back and flicked his cigarette onto the pavement and put it out with the heel of his shoe.

“Good, we missed you on Saturday,” he told Jim, kicking the dead butt aside and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Jim turned to walk backwards so that he could keep the conversation going while still making his way toward Pam’s car.

“Did we win?” Jim wondered. Trout chuckled and shook his head.

“With you missing in action we didn’t stand a chance,” he confessed heartily. Jim chuckled and offered a wave before turning back toward Pam and opening her car door for her. He shrugged at her and sniffed.

“Well, we made it,” he muttered, a grin tickling his tone along with some kind of vague double meaning that he wasn‘t even sure he understood, and she smiled without much humor.

“Yes, thank you,” she told him meaningfully. He nodded and watched as she lowered herself into the car and buckled herself in. “Night,” she told him, and he told himself her tone wasn’t wistful, he told himself he was imagining things because it was easier that way.

“Night,” he answered, and retreated to the safety of his Saab, pausing to watch her pull out of the parking lot and to watch Trout retreat to his Honda Civic and start the engine. Finally satisfied, he exhaled and drove away from Dunder Mifflin‘s shadowed parking lot.

The ride home felt long and the night felt even longer as he stared sleeplessly at the walls of his bedroom.

He told himself that he was imagining a lot of things, not the least of which was the look in Pam’s eye and the tone of her voice. He told himself that the tightness that clutched at his stomach every time he saw her or even thought of her would eventually go away again like it had when he was in Stamford…he told himself he was imagining the way that every day her melancholy stare followed him from the copy machine to the break room to the vending machines and back again…

He told himself he was imagining that something just didn‘t feel right…

“I’m running late.”

She was left standing at the door, mouth hanging open, eyebrows raised, and arms extended, offering up the breakfast she had come to deliver. He turned and rushed back inside the motel room, leaving her to invite herself in. She closed her mouth and rolled her eyes.

“Mulder?” she asked, turning to close the door behind her. The only response was running water and the sound of gargling. She pursed her lips. When he reemerged from the bathroom she sat down at the edge of his bed and took in his attire. A wrinkled and completely unbuttoned white oxford shirt, and even more wrinkled, but equally unbuttoned gray suit pants. The definition of his abdominal muscles winked at her from between two strips of crinkly white cotton and she cleared her throat demurely, suppressing an almost primal urge to groan instead. Before looking away she tried to get a peek at what exactly he was wearing beneath his slacks, but her investigation was suddenly thwarted when he glanced in her direction.

“Bagels?” he asked hurriedly.

“Yes,” she responded, sounding remarkably disinterested since she had just been ogling him. He grabbed the coffee from her limp grasp and took a sip.

“Thanks a million, Scully. I was planning on starving until we finished talking to the families.” He began to haphazardly toss belongings that had been strewn across the floor of the room back into an open suitcase as she set the bag of food beside her and crossed her arms.

“Nice suit, Mulder,” she commented dryly. Might as well point out what had her so distracted. Of course, he missed the fact that what she had meant to comment on was his state of undress, and he earnestly launched into a speech about his packing habits which she promptly ignored.

“I couldn’t find my garment bag on Wednesday, so I ended up just tossing some stuff in here, figuring I’d iron it all when I got here. Which I did, yesterday. But today…” He grinned at her as he threw in what looked like a black suit coat. “I’m running late.” He took a deep breath and stared for a moment at the suitcase, seemingly deciding if there was anything else he needed to dig out of it, and then, satisfied, turned back to her. He reached down and buttoned his pants, and began to button his shirt from the bottom up, all the while watching her in puzzlement. “You seem quiet. Did you sleep ok, Scully?” She watched, bemused as he missed a button and left a gaping hole of fabric sticking out from his midsection.

“Mulder…” she began. He followed her gaze and reached to correct his mistake with frantic fingers.

“Damn it.”

“Mulder…” she began again. He finished buttoning his shirt and began to smooth out the wrinkles as if he were in junior high.

“I got it,“ he responded. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Mulder it’s 8:30.” He froze.

“What?”

“I don‘t understand why you‘re running around, Mulder. It‘s only 8:30.” She licked her lips to suppress a smile at his dumbfounded expression.

“Are you telling me I’m not running late?” he asked.

“It’s 8:30. Not… ” she turned, looking over her shoulder at the neon red of his bed-side clock radio, “9:30,” she read, unsurprised. She stood and patted him on the shoulder before stooping to retrieve the suit coat from his suitcase. She began to fold it neatly as he huffed and started unbuttoning his shirt again. She tried to keep her face its normal neutral, but still found her eyebrows creeping up toward her hairline as he loosened button after button, finishing with his cuffs before pulling the shirt off completely. She set the jacket down and swallowed, averting her eyes from the expanse of skin he had just revealed and reaching out toward him. “Here, I’ll do it,” she told him, catching the shirt as he tossed it at her and heading toward the ironing board that had already been set up in the corner of the room.

“Why does my clock say that it‘s 9:30?” he wondered, annoyed. She turned the iron on and crossed her arms, leaning against the wall and letting her eyes drink in the way that he was shirtless and frantic, even after she had told him that he wasn’t running late, letting her eyes drink in the way that his skin pulled across his back as he refolded the things he had tossed into his suitcase only moments before.

“Did you set your alarm after you left my room last night?” she wondered lazily, her voice a little bit droopy with the lust that was pumping through her veins. He stood up tall and sighed.

“Yes…” he admitted, turning toward her so that she had to look away and pretend to check if the iron was hot.

“And you didn‘t notice that an hour had magically gone by somewhere between there,” she pointed toward her room next door, “and here?” she asked him, and his only response was to reach up and scratch at the back of his neck in irritation. The movement pulled the muscles of his chest tight and long and she decided that the best way to distract herself was to start stretching his shirt out on the flat surface of the ironing board beneath her palms. While doing that her mantra was something about professionalism and self control and she was being so adamant with herself that she completely missed his approach and was startled by the appearance of his bent, shirtless form reaching down to untangle his tie from the foot of the ironing board.

Something happened, and later she would claim it was a kind of short circuit in her brain…or maybe demon possession…or…she had no idea. But something happened and she ended up reaching out to touch the skin of his back…

Her fingers were shaking when they finally landed on his spine, warm and long and lean and nothing she hadn’t touched before but somehow this was different…the intention behind the gentle brush of her fingertips was rich with possibility and Mulder stopped breathing.

***

His fingers wrapped tightly around the silk of his tie and he paused for as long as he could to try to prolong the feeling of her hand against his back…the way that it felt like she meant something by it and the way that that made his blood boil. Reluctantly, he finally stood, expecting her hand to fall away and her face to seem unaffected and for them to go on as if that sizzle of electricity hadn’t just happened, expecting her to claim she had lost her balance or had been caught off guard by his presence.

But instead her fingers stayed motionless against him until he rose, and then they drifted delicately to the front of his chest and hung there like some kind of other worldly thing.

She was staring at the spot where her skin touched his, and he felt himself start to breathe again. It was hard and fast, air gushing out of him only to be sucked back in a millisecond later. He was towering over her and she was leaning into him and he thought he must be dreaming because there was no way this was happening right now.

“Scully?” he breathed, and she licked her lips.

“Yeah?” she muttered, trance-like and sexy-low. His tie-laden hand drifted up and landed against her hip, wrapping around the bone of her like that could still the frantic beating of his pulse and the way that maybe he was hyperventilating. She’d always healed him before…

“I, uh…” he mumbled inarticulately. His eyes tracked the motion of her throat as she swallowed and raised her eyes to his face, her fingers tangling with the hair on his chest and making his eyes glaze over with the feel of it. He tipped his head down toward her and inhaled the scent he had come to know so well and wondered how they hadn’t been here before this…he thought she must’ve had the self control of a nun if she was really as attracted to him as it seemed in this moment, because he‘d basically been shamelessly throwing himself at her since she‘d first walked through the door of his office, but she had kept herself casually at arm’s length. Until now.

His mouth drifted just over hers and he watched in wonder as her eyes slid closed. Thoughts of rules and regulations and conspiracy and missing people floated from his mind and all he could think about was how many times he’d thought about doing this…

Holy shit.

“Scully…” he muttered, letting the word drift across her mouth on the ocean of his breath. She let her hand slip down and around his side so that she was wrapped around him and could feel the heat of his chest against hers.

“This is probably bad,” she whispered, and he chuckled because she was so earnestly trying to be the voice of reason that she usually was. Her voice, though, was too thick with want to make him believe that she really thought this should come to a screeching halt.

“Not really,” he replied decisively, sure that they would argue about it later. She licked her lips again and he was sure he was about to taste whatever it was she had just tasted, the thought making his stomach tighten in anticipation. Without giving her another chance to protest, he swept down and pressed his mouth against hers hotly…exhaling against her, and it was like the muscles and bones in her neck just evaporated because her head went limp and she hummed deep and low and smooth and it was just like he‘d imagined she‘d sound. He sighed out her name when her tongue reached out to touch him.

And somewhere a phone started to ring.

They leapt apart like they had been burned and he watched, his pulse pounding, as her cheeks reddened almost automatically. Grimacing, he scratched at his forehead as she reached into her back pocket for her cell phone and flipped it open, avoiding his gaze. He couldn’t hear what she was saying into the phone because the blood rushing in his ears and the thoughts running through his head were too loud and overpowering.

He was just getting around to considering how soft her skin was when she flipped her phone shut and turned back to him, meeting his eyes for only a second before her gaze skittered away and landed somewhere just behind him. He chewed on the inside of his cheek and planted his hands on his hips, the air suddenly feeling annoyingly cold against his naked chest.

“Christina Macavoy didn’t come into work this morning,” she informed him frostily and he grimaced his defeat as she bent down to grab her coffee and the bag of bagels and head for the door. It wasn’t until she had firmly planted one foot outside of his room that she turned around and pierced him with her gaze. He saw her stare for what it was…a kind of warning…a kind of plea, begging him never to mention what had just happened again.

He tried his best to put a “not a chance in hell” look on his face, and hoped she could read that just as clearly. She looked away from him and licked her lips nervously.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” she forced, her voice cracked with the fractures of sexual tension.

He flinched when the door slammed shut.

***

Pam didn’t even own the capabilities to hide her double take when he walked through the door without a coat, his messenger bag slung casually across the fabric of his black sweater…a piece of clothing that had the distinct power to rob her of speech and make her break out into a cold sweat.

It was casual Friday and Jim was wearing a black sweater over his white oxford shirt and khakis. There were so many things about that statement that just weren’t right.

He said hey and he flopped into his desk chair tiredly and she was sure that he couldn’t possibly realize the significance of his wardrobe choice. It probably wasn’t even the same black sweater, which she imagined he’d probably burned right before he’d left for Connecticut, but to her it didn’t matter. Jim Halpert in a black sweater was Jim Halpert in a black sweater…and it seemed like that fact ensured that Pam would be unproductive, skittish and moody all day long. By ten o’clock she found herself reliving Casino night in a way that she had just recently gotten over doing, and by eleven she found herself feeling a new kind of anger toward Jim and his months of this special kind of unattached stand-offishness, pretending none of it had ever happened and ignoring her beach day courage in favor of his own cowardice.

The more the hours wore on the more she was sure he’d worn the shirt on purpose.

The words What the hell? kept looping through her mind, and it wasn’t until just before her lunch break, when Dana Scully arrived and Pam found herself glaring back at the agent‘s cool squint, that she realized she needed to pull it together.

“Can I help you, Agent Scully?” she wondered, watching with half-hearted interest as Agent Mulder elbowed his way sluggishly into the office behind his partner, something in his presence a little bit more brooding than it’d been the day before. Scully pressed her lips at Pam and raised a delicately shaped eyebrow.

“How are you, Pam?” she asked quietly, and Pam pulled back a bit in surprise. Maybe the FBI agent was just the kind of person who took a few days to warm up to her surroundings. Pam’s eyes flicked anxiously to Jim’s back without her meaning for it to and Scully’s gaze followed, but instead of looking back at Pam with judgement or a sort of disgustingly female curiosity she looked back at her with something that was almost like commiseration.

“I’m fine,” Pam sighed. Scully nodded.

“Can you just inform Michael that we’ll be using the conference room again for another set of interviews, unless you have something scheduled during the lunch hour?” she requested, her voice low and tired and laced with something Pam almost felt like she recognized.

“Sure,” Pam responded, forcing a tone of contentment that she didn’t really feel. If they were back and Agent Scully was tired then didn’t that mean…

Someone else was missing.

Her brow furrowed in concern as her gaze followed Scully into the conference room and then swung back to meet Mulder’s hollow stare. He lifted his chin toward her in greeting.

“Morning,” he mumbled and she felt her expression twist into a look of empathetic concern. She’d only known these people twenty four hours, but it was enough to know that something between yesterday and today had gone wrong and it was only partly to do with an eighth missing refrigeration employee. Their rapport was different…stilted…careful. Mulder slouched and shuffled his way into the conference room behind Scully and Pam’s eyes flicked back to Jim and his very black, very significant sweater.

***

“Please state your name and your place of employment,” Scully muttered and Mulder chewed on the inside of his cheek in total discomfort. This day was like some kind of circle of hell where a poor, unsuspecting FBI agent was teased with one of his wildest fantasies which was then ripped away from him by forces totally beyond his control…like work, and life, and missing refrigeration salesmen. It was straight out of Dante. Mulder rubbed his face in frustration.

“Dwight K. Shrute,” Dwight stated firmly, leaning down toward Scully’s tape recorder as if the three centimeters between it and his mouth would make a difference. “I am the appointed number three here at Dunder-Mifflin Scranton, and I am also the head of a number of committees, namely the committee to…”

“Just…” Scully interrupted tiredly, and Mulder was grateful because the day before Dwight had continued his list of responsibilities for almost fifteen minutes. “That’s fine, Mr. Shrute,” Scully assured him. He nodded his consent and pursed his lips at the two agents. “Can you please inform us of your whereabouts and activities yesterday beginning at 5 PM?” she asked him, her hands clasped tightly and her leg bobbing subtly under the table. Mulder scratched his eyebrow and shuffled some papers in front of him.

“Certainly,” Dwight began, “Yesterday at 5 o’clock I was here at the office. Michael and I were having an important meeting involving the state of his…finances…” Mulder watched as Scully raised an eyebrow, “At approximately 5:13, I exited Michael’s office and entered the lavatory where I proceeded to approach the urinal and unbuckle my…”

“That’s…a general synopsis would be fine. We can do without the play by play,” Mulder jumped in, sure that the details of Dwight Shrute’s urination were not relevant to the case. Dwight bristled a bit before pushing a notebook toward Mulder.

“Since the federal bureau arrived I have been documenting my activities. Perhaps you would find that more useful than a spoken account,” Dwight offered. Mulder glanced at Scully and wondered how these sorts of cases always ended up being weirder than the conspiracy-loaded, alien-heavy mysteries involving file cabinets in the Pentagon and ashtrays full of Morley’s. But Scully’s face was stone-like and he realized that, today, she wouldn’t be commiserating with him…at all. He sighed.

Taking the offered notebook, Mulder nodded feigned gratitude and tried not to be irritated by this guy’s small town ignorance. Maybe he really had been a rodeo clown…

Mulder furrowed his brow and met Dwight’s very attentive stare.

“Could you expound on this theory about Vampiric activity?” Mulder wondered curiously. Scully shifted in her seat and huffed out an angry breath. Her response dripped from her lips with unmasked disdain as she took the notebook from Mulder’s hands and closed it determinedly.

“Please, spare me,” she muttered. Mulder shrugged and watched in practiced resignation as she stood and left the room, heading toward the kitchen on irritated feet. Dwight leaned back in his chair and eyed Mulder suspiciously.

“You know a common sign of vampirism is red hair?” he asked, his voice draped in an all-business tone. Mulder nodded.

“Yeah I know.”

***

“Please state your name and your place of employment.”

“I choose to exercise my fifth amendment rights.”

Scully sighed and ignored the way that Mulder let out a half chuckle beside her.

“Mr. Bratton,” she began tiredly.  She was finding that everything that escaped her mouth today was accidentally coated with a tinge of lazy exhaustion. “We interviewed you yesterday…”

Creed simply smiled a vacant smile and nodded at them.

The silence was heavy in the room and Scully guessed that Mulder was probably squinting in confused curiosity. He was always fascinated with this type of person, something about their pure brand of crazy appealing to his psychologist’s intellect. Scully was just annoyed. At everyone in the room.

Mulder shifted in his seat.

“I figured out why I know you,” he announced finally, referencing the day before when he had sworn the name Creed Bratton was oddly familiar to him. “You were in the Grass Roots,” Mulder pointed out, and Scully found herself rolling her eyes. Why, she wondered, did Mulder always feel the need to play pop culture factoid games on the days when she already wanted to strangle him from pure frustration? Wasting time seemed like his life mission…

Creed simply smiled a vacant smile and shook his head at them.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he stated. Mulder cocked his head and Scully began to tap her pencil on the table top in annoyance.

“Sooner or later,” Mulder offered dryly, “love is gonna getcha…” he muttered, as if reminding this guy of the lyrics to a song from the sixties was going to remove the look of strange blankness from his face. It didn’t work, and Scully wasn’t surprised.

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” she interjected, “Just tell us where you were last night so we can move on to the next interview.” She didn’t mean to sound like a stern school teacher, she told herself, sometimes it just happened. Creed sighed.

“I’ll tell you where I wasn’t,” he began cryptically, “I wasn’t here.”

Mulder shifted in his seat.

“Here in this room? Or here in this building?” Mulder asked. Creed smiled.

“Yes,” he told them, agreeing to something that hadn‘t been said…or just agreeing to everything…in general. “Also, you should consider the idea that these people have joined some sort of a cult,” Creed informed them conspiratorially. Mulder leaned forward and raised his eyebrows in interest.

“There’s been cult activity in the area?” he wondered, and Scully slammed her pencil down on the table and reached out to stop her tape recorder. The two men turned and looked at her in concern.

“Please,” she begged, looking to Mulder with narrow eyes and a raised eyebrow, “spare me.”

*** 

What kind of guy, Jim wondered, left his lunch in the car two days in a row? It was bad enough on Thursday -- he’d gotten into his car to go home and the entire interior had had a very special tuna fish aroma, but today he was admittedly annoyed with himself.

It didn’t help that Pam had been snapping at him since he’d walked in that morning, glaring at his back whenever it was turned toward her and answering his jokes and quips with blank stares and, at one point, even an eye roll. It had taken him something like an hour and twelve minutes to figure out what exactly it was that had her so testy.

An hour and twelve minutes after his arrival at the office, he’d been in the men’s room washing his hands and had looked up at himself in the mirror and realized…

Casino night.

Right.

He should’ve burned it instead.

No wonder Pam was acting like she wanted to decapitate him with the edge of her plastic yogurt spoon.

After the realization of his unfortunate clothing choice he’d been tip-toeing around her, trying hard to avoid prolonged conversation and any sort of lengthy eye contact. At 12:37 he’d watched her step out of the office with Angela’s cat in her arms and her cell phone in hand -

And he’d thought Now would be an excellent time to eat lunch.

But unfortunately he’d left his lunch in the car.

Again.

He shook his head at himself and clutched at his brown paper bag, wondering if he was the only person above the age of ten who actually packed a sack lunch. He meandered through the parking lot, shouldered his way back into the building, and headed toward the stairs, deciding he could use any kind of half-assed exercise he could muster. But as he pushed through the door clearly marked STAIRS, he paused…because he’d recognize her voice anywhere.

“Yeah sunglasses and trench coats and everything,” she was whispering, probably trying not to be overheard by the omnipresent ears of the federal governement, and he stopped dead in his tracks because he was a little caught off guard by her presence. It sounded like she was sitting on the steps about two levels up, but he couldn‘t see her at all. “Mom, can you please drop that?” she pleaded quietly, and he felt his mouth tip into a half grin at the idea that Pam was spending her lunch hour on the phone with her mother. “Because it’s too hard. We don’t really talk anymore and even if we did what would I do just walk up to him and ask him to take off his shirt?”

He frowned. Why did this feel like something he should not be listening to…

“Not…like that, I just meant…” she heaved a sigh and he turned to look at the door he‘d just come through, wondering whether he should go back and take the elevator, but deciding that would make too much noise…or it made more sense for him to just wait a second because eventually she would hang up and he could…ok so he wanted to eavesdrop…whatever. “I’m glad this is funny for someone,” Pam muttered unhappily. Jim pursed his lips in curiosity. “God this day just keeps getting worse and worse. And like what is he…” she sighed again, “Who does he think he is? Coming into work dressed in that sweater like I wouldn’t remember it or like that didn’t mean anything… Seriously, mom, every time I see him I just want to cry or like…puke. All over his shoes. Maybe then I’d magically have his attention… What?” another sigh, and her voice began to climb in volume with her clear frustration, “I just meant that it’s like I don’t even exist to him anymore and he acts like last year never even happened… Yes, mom, Casino Night. If he remembered Casino Night he wouldn’t wear that damn sweater!” There was a pause and when she started talking again her voice had returned to the quiet hush of earlier, “I tried to tell him on beach day but it was like…Karen was sitting right there and I didn’t want it to seem like I don’t…I mean I wanted to respect his feelings, you know what I mean? But I still went through this whole embarrassing display of proclaiming that I missed him and it was just so…And now it’s like that never happened, either.”

Jim’s face twisted in disbelief because in his mind beach day had changed everything for them. They were able to joke again, they were able to exist peacefully in the same room again, and he gave her all of the credit. She went on.

“No, you’re right, actually. It’s not like it never happened, it’s like just… Maybe he‘s listening to me but he‘s…like he‘s not really hearing me. Does that make sense?” she paused and he held his breath, absurdly concerned that she would hear him exhaling at the bottom of the stairs and point out how wrong he was to be listening to this particular exchange. Yeah, he thought to himself, this was so very…totally…wrong. “Uh huh,” she murmured, and he smiled. He leaned back against the wall behind him and crossed his arms, cocking his head to the side. “Right. Yeah, like he takes everything I say literally, and…ugh why do I keep using the word friends around him? It‘s like some kind of nervous tick or something…” she muttered helplessly, “I’m such an idiot.”

His mind was churning and he was almost afraid to let the puzzle pieces fall into place. What the hell was she saying exactly? His fist tightened against the brown paper bag in his hand and it rustled noisily just as she cleared her throat. He rolled his eyes at himself.

“Ok, mom, how many times are we going to have this conversation? I can’t just walk up to him and say that,” she stated emphatically and he chewed nervously on his lower lip. He was a jerk, he thought to himself, and wrong on so many levels. “I know that’s what he did, but he is…stronger than me.”

Stronger than her?

“Yes he’s stronger than me and he can talk to people and just walk up to them and say things, even really hard embarrassing emotional things. I can’t do that. That’s why he’s a salesperson and I am not,” she proclaimed. He heard Angela’s cat meow unhappily. Pam sighed. “This cat is such a little…” she drifted off and he smiled to himself again, feeling some of the tension that had been brewing inside of him settle. There was a long pause and he waited through it, hearing the cat meow again. Finally Pam spoke. “Stop saying that.” Pause. “Yeah I know.” Pause. “I know that.” Pause. “Thank you, mom.” Long, labored pause. “Ok, seriously, you really want me to just walk up to him and say ‘Hey Jim? Hi, uh listen so I’m in love with you, but I didn’t want to say anything because it seems like you’ve totally just moved on and I definitely don’t want to get in your way. So don’t feel weird or anything, I just wanted to give you a heads up. Oh and don’t ever wear that sweater again because it gives me a heart attack.”

He stood up from the wall and was standing there staring at the empty steps in front of him in absolute shock, feeling the ice around his heart melt a little and sort of puddle somewhere near his shoes. What the hell…

“I’m not going to say that to him, mom, it‘s just…I can‘t…Whoa, hey!” He froze in an absurd fear that she had found him out. “Stop!” Jim looked up and felt his pulse get fast and frantic, his panic only magnified by her sudden exclamation. She squeeled in a very Pam kind of way and he thought he heard her standing up, moving around…he thought he heard the cat meow. His mouth dropped open and his eyes took in every possible hiding place (there weren’t any) and it took him practically a half hour to figure out he should just go out the door he’d come through, by which time he could see the cat heading down the steps in his direction. Pam was fast on it’s heels and muttering expletives, her phone still pressed to her ear, and the last thing he thought before his brain just totally froze was that he had no escape…this was it, he was done.

Pam stopped dead on the landing and stared down at him in pale-faced horror.

“Oh God,” she whispered. He moved his mouth a few times but nothing came out…not that that surprised him, he didn’t really know what to say, and she shook her head as if she were stuck in slow motion. “Mom, I have to go…” she muttered, and closed her phone with an audible snap without waiting for a reply.

“Pam…” he forced out, but she held up a hand, and he noticed a sheen of tears appear in her eyes.

“Just…um…I have to get that cat. Where did she…did you see where she….uh…”

“Oh, right, um…no I think she went um…” and he pointed down the final flight descending into the basement of the building. She nodded mutely and jogged down toward him, bypassing him skillfully without making eye contact at all. He wondered if she’d learned that from him. “Pam,” he tried again. She didn’t stop or pause or even slow down, simply holding up a hand and shaking her head.

“Angela’s going to kill me,” she called out, and he thought he heard tears in her voice. His head dropped low as she disappeared down the stairs and that was the only movement he seemed capable of at the moment because his entire being was too busy replaying the things he’d just heard…

He shook his head.

Unbelievable.

It wasn’t like he was born into this.

Jesus, it wasn’t like his DNA spelled out criminal or something.

No.

No, no, this was a choice. Because success had to be created…you had to make it for yourself. And he had always believed that completely. He‘d always picked his battles and then fought them with fervor. Just like any other man he would do whatever he could to make his point…to pitch his own qualities and abilities to whoever would listen.

He was just like any other man.

It was just that he had made this choice, and once he’d made it he sort of had to stand by it…he had to take hold of it and run without looking back because things in life would just go on without you…things would take control of you, if you let them. But he wouldn’t let them. He would own this decision, he would own his success…he would take back control.

And, he reasoned, his intention wasn’t to harm anybody…it wasn’t like he was some crazed lunatic. His intention was simply to make a gesture…to prove a point and grab hold of the reins so that things could go back to normal. He really didn’t understand why the women kept crying and the men threw angry fists at him…he really didn’t understand why they were pleading for their lives as if he were a gun wielding maniac. In fact it was a little bit insulting.

Come on! Jesus, he was cultured! He’d been educated! These people were acting like he’d been raised by cavemen or possessed by the devil.

And when they acted like that, like when they begged to be returned to their families or when they looked up at him with tear-stained faces and spat profanity at him, he would just calmly explain it to them again.

It wasn’t like he was born into this.

He was just like any other man. It was just that he’d made this choice…he wanted to make this point…

And they were going to help him out, that was all. They were going to give him a hand.

And they were going to do it nice and quiet…and they were going to smile.

They were going to do it with a smile.

This room beneath the parking lot…this sort of hidden bomb shelter…it was the perfect space for them. It had a little bathroom and some respectable lighting. It had a floor and a ceiling…walls…whatever. They would survive, for Christ’s sake.

The only thing was that it was cold, so he kept having to bring them blankets. It wasn’t like he was trying to harm anybody…so he kept bringing them blankets. And food, of course. And water.

But this time when he tried to open the door to hand them these things…these gifts…privileges, really, one of the men came bounding at him…rudely. Fists swinging. And so he’d had to pull out the knife he sometimes brought. The one he hadn’t ever really meant to use.

And Jesus, they were standing there in a kind of a stare down, him with his knife and the guy with these clenched angry fists, when this cat came running down the dirt tunnel that led to the shelter. This white cat. Like a sign or something. Like a promise. It made him smile because it seemed like somewhere a greater power was reassuring him, telling him that things would turn out right, that this was what men did. To prove a point.

And then…

Then it was like…he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing because right then the receptionist came following after the cat. She just walked right up to him and her eyes took in the scene and he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

Because she knew him. She’d smiled at him…laughed at his jokes…given him compliments in the past. She was kind and she knew him. She would be able to see the amount of success he really deserved. God, she was perfect. And, like affirmation, the words ‘Oh my God’ fell from her lips…prayer like, and he knew it was fate.

Jesus, it was like fate.

Success. He smiled and gestured with the hand gripping the knife, pointing into the room where the eight others sat with tear stained faces, and he just politely asked her if she would join them. He just wondered if she might join them.

And of course she nodded because, really, as a woman who sort of knew him, what choice did she have?

She was the first out of all of them to walk into the shelter willingly...to offer herself up to this cause of his. 

Jesus...it was like...he closed the door and let out a laugh of disbelief.  She'd gone in so quietly and he just knew that she wouldn't swear at him or spit at him when he returned with another blanket or with bread and water.  No, she would smile.  She would believe in him.  Maybe she would thank him.

But, still, he secured the rust covered bolt because he'd learned that the other eight just couldn't be trusted. 

“Jim, you’re on,” Mulder called, his voice laced with a sigh and his body tipped like he hadn’t slept in weeks. Jim raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement and pushed away from his desk, heading into the conference room with a careless kind of gait and glancing over his shoulder at the empty receptionist desk, sure that Pam was avoiding him...

“What’s up?” he wondered tiredly once he had sat himself down across from the two agents.

“Can you state your name and your place of employment, please?” Scully asked him, her legs crossed, and Jim considered how attractive she was for probably the hundredth time since he’d met her…it was the kind of thing no man could deny. She was tightly wound, he realized, but sometimes that was a good thing. He shifted in his seat, concerned.

“Yeah um, Jim Halpert…I uh…” he was interrupted when Mulder leaned forward and hit the ’stop’ button on the tape recorder in the middle of the table and Jim eyed him curiously.

“Look, Christina Macavoy is missing,” Mulder spat impatiently. Scully’s face started to turn an angry shade of red and she chewed on the inside of her cheek and stared at the table as Jim looked from Mulder to Scully and back again.

“Really?” he asked. Mulder nodded.

“We need you to tell us anything you remember happening after 5PM,” he prodded, and Jim sighed, wracking his brain and trying desperately to forget what he'd overheard Pam say to her mother and how that changed things…how that changed everything…

God.

“Uh…” he croaked, swallowing his thoughts and focusing on yesterday. “Yeah…Pam,” he forced out, his voice breaking a little on her name, “uh…she and I stayed late. We were the last to leave around 6... Creed was coming in when we were going out. Said he forgot his briefcase. Then we um, we went downstairs, Pam got in her car and I got in mine and we went home.”

“We should’ve been recording that,” Scully interjected, her voice low and venomous and her stare still fixed harshly on nobody in particular. Mulder rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh and Jim frowned, feeling some kind of energy in the room that seemed like it had nothing to do with what time he’d walked Pam to her car the day before.

“I just assumed you’d interrupt the interview anyway, so what’s the point in wasting tape?” Mulder replied, and Jim’s eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. Any guy could tell you that was probably not the right thing to say. Scully huffed a chuckle and crossed her arms. “Sorry, Jim, go ahead,” he prompted. Jim shook his head.

“Uh that’s all I…”

“I’m just saying that it’s proper procedure to record any interviews,” Scully interrupted again, murmuring as if she were a student sitting in the back row of math class. Mulder froze with his head tipped and his facial expression incredulous.

“So now you’re all about procedure, Scully? That’s quite the change from this morning…” he spat, and Jim’s eyes widened even further than before. This morning? Interesting… Scully bristled and flinched and cleared her throat and every muscle in her body was tightened…coiled…and it only made Jim more wary of the entire situation.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Halpert,” she announced, meeting his alarmed gaze and forcing an insincere smile, “Will you give my partner and I the room for a moment?”

“Yes,” Jim proclaimed too loudly, bolting up out of his chair and heading for the door of the conference room. He had enough drama in his life at the moment…he didn’t need to be in the middle of theirs.

***

“That won’t work down here,” Jordan muttered, and Pam looked up from her cell phone and sighed.

“I know I just…” She shook her head, willing away the tears that were starting to creep up into her eyes and ignoring the way that the rest of the people in the room looked so…worn. So completely defeated and practically hopeless. She was sure they’d tried pretty much everything they could think of to get out of their little prison, and she was sure they’d already cried their tears and muttered their curses enough to last them a lifetime. The only people in the room showing any emotion at all were Christina Macavoy, who was laying with her head in Jordan’s lap and crying silently, her eyes glassy and fixed on a spot of nothing across the room, and Patrick Carson, who was pounding his removed shoe against the pipes next to the toilet in the bathroom... He'd apparently been doing that for almost 24 hours, thinking someone might hear him...save him. Pam licked her lips and looked back down at her phone, flipping idly through her list of contacts because it was just something to do…something to keep her sort of connected to the outside world.  If this was how antsy she was after only an hour of being cooped up in here, she couldn't imagine what it would be like...later...

She flipped past her mother and her sister, wondering if they would find out that she’d gone missing by the end of the day, wondering if they would panic and demand things of the FBI in their long coats and dark glasses the way she’d seen families do on television.

Pam wondered if the nine of them were all going to die before this was over, and if her funeral would be crowded… She wondered at which point during the past hour her thoughts had gotten so unaffectedly dark…

As she rolled through the names in her phone book she found that she kept flipping back to the same entry…the same three letters that seemed to mock her and tease her with the way that they settled the knot in her stomach if only for a moment…

She stared at his number and thought for the thousandth time that there was no way Jim would go home without figuring out that she was missing…

Without somehow feeling that she was gone.

She started when the door to the shelter swung open and their kidnapper entered, offering her a blue and green plaid blanket that she took from him with shaky pale fingers as he gave her a wide kind of smile that made her break out into a cold sweat.  She swallowed.

"Thank you," she whispered on auto pilot, and his smile widened even further.  But it dripped off his face slow like molasses and he cocked his head as the unmistakeable sound of a woman's high-heeled footsteps echoed through the tunnel and into their room.  The nine shifted in surprise and Christina Macavoy let out an audible cry when the man gripped Pam's forearm and hoisted her up against him, her back to his chest.

"Just stay quiet," he whispered into her ear, "Stay very quiet..."

***

“What the hell, Mulder?” Scully spat, moving Mulder to roll his eyes at her in discomfort.

“What?” he asked dumbly and she bristled in her seat until she finally just stood, unable to sit still with the amount of anxious energy in her limbs.  She began to pace the room.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” she accused and he sat back in surprise, his hazel eyes locked on her as she moved back and forth…back and forth…

“Doing what on purpose?” he asked and her hands moved up to her hips.

“Acting unprofessional…acting like…” she stopped pacing and sighed, turning to him and leveling him with an honest gaze. He would expect nothing less. Scully was not the type to run from her mistakes. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she told him flatly, and he raised his eyebrows at her. “I never should’ve…done that.” Her voice was low and he felt a sizzle of electricity meander down his spine at the mention of the morning and what had transpired in his motel room.

“Uh huh,” he offered, aware that it wasn’t an appropriate response, but enjoying the zing of irritation in her eyes too much to let the opportunity pass. She sighed.

“I mean it. I don’t know what I was…thinking…I was just…” her face twisted with embarrassment and she successfully avoided his gaze, searching the corners of the conference room for her missing reason and intellect. He nodded.

“You were just overwhelmed by my rugged good looks,” he finished for her, deliberately flirting in a way that he knew would ruffle her feathers. She pushed out an incredulous breath and met his stare.

“I was not…overwhelmed by your…Mulder, can you please be serious for just one second?” she begged, shifting and crossing her arms. Mulder shrugged at her and scratched at the back of his head idly.

“I’m being serious, Scully. You were overwhelmed by the wonder that is my body and couldn’t help yourself. It’s ok, it happens a lot.” She was chewing on her bottom lip to keep from smiling and Mulder grinned back at her, their eyes locking to share the joke but then lingering longer than was probably necessary. His thoughts were crowded with her sky blue gaze and the way that he swore there was lust lingering somewhere just beneath the surface…he swore there were emotions there that he had never noticed before…he swore that something new was stretching itself out solidly between them and he thought of the way she had touched him earlier, the way that her skin had felt against his, the way that her lips had sighed out his name and danced against the roughness of his jaw…

There was a heavy pause as they stared at each other and a blush crept up Scully's neck.

“Shut up, Mulder,” she finally murmured, and Mulder chuckled.

“I didn’t say anything, Scully,” he offered quietly. She rolled her eyes.

“You were thinking it,” she accused. “And don’t undermine me in front of witnesses,” she added, her voice pinching, grasping at a familiar tinge of professionalism to avoid this new casual fire that he had ignited. Mulder wagged his eyebrows at her and she pursed her lips.

“You mean specifically in front of the ‘good looking’ witness Jim Halpert,” he corrected. She narrowed her eyes in a warning and turned away from him, opening the door with a swift tug. Glancing over her shoulder, she eyed him coquettishly, making his blood boil a little hotter in the confines of his veins.

“I’ll be right back,” she offered.

“Going to give a personal interview?” he wondered, and Scully tipped her head in irritation.

“I left my phone in the car, Mulder, but thank you for being so concerned with my whereabouts,” she offered and he laughed a quiet kind of laugh, watching as she took a step out of the room.

He called out her name just as the door was swinging shut and she turned back, poking her head in with a look of concerned curiosity on her face. He met her questioning gaze with a heavy one of his own and she frowned.

“This isn’t the end of this conversation,” he told her meaningfully, and she visibly blanched, her expression battling between her ever present concern for him and her fear of having to discuss her own vulnerability. Finally she nodded and left the room completely, refusing to turn back and see the way that he was watching her through the glass.

***

Scully decided to take the stairs. She had enough lust running through her body to warrant taking the stairs up and down over and over and over again…to warrant going on a jog around the block in her pumps just to feel herself sweat out the hormones that were so much stronger today than normal…which was saying something. God she couldn’t even scold him properly. She couldn’t even get herself to be angry because as soon as he looked her in the eye she felt this overwhelming tug deep and low and it made her intellectual responses just sort of…whimper and die.

She sighed and took the stairs at a quiet jog, her eyes glazed over and her thoughts racing with self-recrimination and disbelief. How could she have been so stupid that morning? How could she have lost her cool so easily and just… And why the hell had he been prancing around without a shirt on? What did he think she was, just totally blind to his body and her own impulses? She thought probably he had thought that, until she‘d reached out and basically groped him…and then kissed him…ugh, she was an idiot. Which was probably why he had this need all day to push her various buttons…to test her boundaries and see what exactly this new exciting side to Scully meant for him. She shook her head at herself and rounded the corner before stopping short in confusion at the change in lighting.

She turned around and realized that the door to the lobby was behind her and she’d continued down another darker set of stairs, painted a thick sort of green color. She frowned and really looked around, turning in a complete circle with her hands on her hips.

She'd only taken the elevator before this, and she hadn’t even noticed any tell tale 'B' that would indicate…

Suddenly she jolted into action, pushing through the door to the lobby and rounding the corner so that she was face to face with the security guard.

“Excuse me what is this?” she asked harshly. He looked back at her and frowned.

“What?”

“There are more stairs here,” she explained, pointing back toward the door she’d just come through, “Is there a basement in this building?” she demanded.

“Uh, yeah, but uh…nobody goes down there except the maintenance guys and sometimes if the heating system needs…” She kicked into motion again and was around the corner and down the stairs, only hearing an echo of the guard’s: “Hey! Hey, wait a second!”, and only sort of vaguely considering the fact that she should go get Mulder…or at least call him…

Or something.

The lights in the basement flickered as she pulled her gun from its holster and switched off the safety.

She ignored the way that this had a distinct Stephen King feel to it and stepped quietly past the furnace and into some kind of a dug out tunnel, and she paused at the sound of scuffling at the other end.

"Dana Scully, FBI!" she called, "I'm armed!"

She squinted to focus on the hazy light at the end of the path and thought she definitely should've called Mulder.  A man stood there, eyeing her nervously, the single bulb of light glinting off a knife that he had pressed effectively to Pam Beesly's noticeably pale neck and Scully sighed...

This was not good.

"FBI," Scully repeated, "drop your weapon."  The man tightened his hold on Pam and Scully heard a breathy kind of whimper escape her lips as a thin trickle of blood slipped down her throat from where he had superficially nicked her.

"Put down the gun, Dana Scully FBI," the man ordered, and Scully frowned, unsure what the best course of action was and knowing that she was unable to get a safe shot at him with Pam shielding his chest.  "I'll finish this!" he threatened, impatient with the amount of time Scully had spent debating.  Pam forced out the word please and Scully lifted her hand, shifting her aim so that it was pointed toward the cieling.

"Don't do anything we'll all regret," she murmured, and as she bent over to set the gun down at her feet the man lunged forward and grabbed it from her hand, lifting to aim it at her and tossing the receptionist back into what seemed to be a kind of bomb shelter.  Scully raised her hands in surrender.

"Get in," he told her, tipping his head back to indicate the room behind him.  Scully nodded, wondering how she always managed to get herself into these situations.

She was highly educated but, Jesus, sometimes it really didn't seem like it.  The door swung shut behind her and she heard a bolt slide into place before she turned to take in her surroundings with the sinking feeling that there was no easy way out of this.

She licked her lips in discomfort.  She really...really should've called Mulder. 

He pushed and he pulled.  He made sure there were no seams visible in the thick plaster and that the construction and solidity was as immaculate as when he'd first discovered that the wall was false, opening into the tunnel leading to the shelter. 

He secured that wall every time. 

And now he realized he should've been securing it behind him, even when he'd just been going into the tunnel to bring blankets and food.  He realized that leaving the shelter visible while he delivered things had been a foolish thing to do. 

Jesus, it wasn't like he wanted to get caught.  

He knocked against the green paint and threw his weight against it once to make sure the undetectable doorway from the basement to the tunnel was secure and there was no sign of entry.  He took a step back and sighed, brushing his hands on the thighs of his pants. 

Perfect.  It was like there was nothing there.

Nothing.

*** 

Jim had his hand perched against his mouth as if that could hold in his doubts…as if that could somehow magically settle his very palpable unease. His chair was faced completely away from his desk and he was slouched down in it, one arm draped across his middle and his eyebrows drawn in thought. His gaze didn’t waver.

Her desk was empty.

It had been for about two hours now, and for the first forty five minutes of her being gone his coworkers had tossed their curiosity at him, assuming that Jim would know where she was and what she was doing. He’d initially responded to them with things like ‘She’s walking Angela’s cat around the block,’ or ‘She’s talking to her mother on the phone,’ and now he simply didn’t respond at all, his stare unmoving and his eyebrows only flickering with mild acknowledgement. He was sure something wasn’t right.

And for the past hour he’d bounced back and forth between the thought that she actually couldn’t find Angela’s cat anywhere and was avoiding the office in fear of the repercussions, and the thought that she had no desire at all to see his face and was avoiding the office in fear of having to look him in the eye. Of course, being the person that he was, he was most inclined to blame himself for her absence…and he was sure that she would not want to deal with the idea that he had heard her talking to her mom.

But the thing was…the tight coiling in his stomach and the way that he actually thought he might vomit at any second made him think that maybe he was missing something…

And it was about seven and a half minutes ago that he’d finally considered the three words he’d been avoiding at all costs:

Vance Refrigeration Kidnappings.

His knee started bouncing and he shifted and sighed. Her chair mocked him with its emptiness and his nervousness tightened even further. Finally he lunged from his chair and moved like lightening toward the men‘s room.

He was definitely going to puke.

***

“If you could actually just stick to the facts pertaining to the case that would be really…”

“Yeah of course definitely. So anyway after that I just came out and told him that I needed some space even though that wasn’t really what I wanted at all because with guys you sort of just have to say things and make them feel like their territory is threatened so they react like when a dog pees on a fire hydrant…only not really like that but you know what I mean…”

“Helpful, was what I was going to say…” Mulder interjected dryly. He was seriously reconsidering this decision he’d made to continue the interviews while Scully was doing…whatever it was Scully was doing. Which he assumed was mostly just avoiding him at all costs.

Not that he could blame her.

Because if he’d been sexually harassing her before, now it was like…he couldn’t stop himself. He just…he said things without even…

He’d kissed her. She’d gone and put her hand on the slope of his back and now he had this very vivid, very distracting memory just looping through his brain of the way that she’d sounded and the way that she’d felt and the way that she’d pressed herself up against him and it was exactly the way he’d imagined it on multiple, semi-embarrassing occasions. He cleared his throat and readjusted his tie, smiling a false kind of smile in Kelly Kapoor’s direction.

He was thinking that this case was practically a lost cause. Because beyond the fact that he wanted to throw Scully down on the conference room table, beyond the fact that he kept getting distracted by her hands and her face and every single inch of her, he now had this sneaking suspicion that his feelings weren’t as one sided as he’d always thought… and that suspicion put him so on edge that it had actually crossed his mind that he might spontaneously combust. Or something.

The point was that he could see why Scully would be avoiding him.

He interrupted Kelly mid-rant and once again attempted to veer her statement in a more useful direction.

“Did you happen to see anything suspicious or notice anything out of the ordinary?” he wondered, deciding silently that he’d give this interview about two more minutes before he ditched it and went after Scully…

“Um, you mean like someone carrying an axe or something?” she asked him. He met her gaze and felt his curiosity spark.

“Yeah that would… You saw someone carrying an axe?” he repeated. Her brow furrowed.

“No. Did you?…” And, blessedly, at that moment Mulder’s irritation was thwarted by someone bursting through the door.

“Hi, sorry, excuse me.” Mulder looked up, half in relief and half in concern, at the sound of Jim Halpert’s voice. Jim swallowed and scratched at the back of his neck with a shaky hand.

“Jim?” Mulder prodded, feeling an instinctive tickle of worry settle low in his gut.

“Yeah can I um…Pam’s been gone for like two hours?” Jim offered nervously and Mulder leaned forward in his chair, pursing his lips in confusion.

“Gone?” he repeated. Jim glanced back at reception and Mulder, being Mulder, suddenly realized what he was trying to say. Pam was gone…like Vance Refrigeration gone. “That’s not a normal thing for her?  She doesn't take afternoons off or anything?” he asked. Kelly scoffed.

“Please, Pam has like no life. She’s always just there answering the phone,” she informed him in a pinched voice. The two men ignored the way that she was obviously missing the point and Mulder squinted slightly and took in the expression on Jim’s face. There was something weirdly familiar there that he felt like he’d seen in the mirror on more than one occasion. It was a special kind of panic, and even though it seemed like Jim didn’t have any sort of solid evidence leading him to believe that Pam had been kidnapped, he had that expression…that familiar edge that said that he knew because…

He just knew.

And Mulder had been there enough times to know that he shouldn’t question it.

“Where did you last see her?” he demanded, standing and brushing past Kelly and out the conference room door with Jim on his heels. If she’d only been gone two hours that meant they had a real actual chance of finding evidence…of finding her…and there wasn’t time to pause and weigh the options.

He wondered where the hell Scully was.

***

The basement was dark and small, filled almost completely by an ancient looking furnace and pipes. It had four simple walls and a concrete floor.  Jim watched as Mulder turned a full circle around himself and chewed nervously on his cheek. There was nothing here. No Pam…no cat…nothing that might hint to where they could’ve gone. Mulder slowly walked around the perimeter of the room, his hand dragging along the plaster of the walls, his teeth still gnawing on the inside of his cheek. He paused.

“Was there ever something else down here?” he asked, and Jim raised his eyebrows, shifting nervously on his feet.

“I have no idea,” he answered honestly.

“Like a second room or some kind of extension? The size of this basement doesn’t make any kind of structural sense,” he assessed, his eyes sweeping over the ceiling and floor like there was something written on them to be decoded. Jim sighed and crossed his arms.

“Look I’ve never even been down here before, so…” he trailed into silence and wondered how standing in the empty basement and discussing the structure of a building would help them find Pam. The blood pumped heavily through his veins and he pressed his lips together to keep from voicing his thoughts aloud. Mulder tapped thoughtfully against the wall and nodded.

“Ok let’s go, maybe the guard saw something,” he suggested, moving past Jim and up the stairs at an easy jog. Jim took one last look around the room and shook his head.

No Pam. No cat. No second rooms or extensions.

Nothing.

***

Mulder tapped on the Security Guard’s desk and waited impatiently while he finished a phone call that somehow Mulder doubted was in any way business related. Finally the man hung up and met the agent’s level stare.

“Yeah?” the man asked. Mulder held up his badge as a friendly reminder and Jim finally pushed through the door and approached the two. The security guard nodded in acknowledgment.

“Did you see Pam come through here earlier?” Jim interrupted, his voice pinched with an unsettled edge. Mulder shot him a glare, but waited for the answer.

“No sir,” the guard replied casually. Mulder shifted and pushed his badge into his coat pocket.

“Did anything strange or out of the ordinary happen in the past three or four hours? Any unfamiliar people come through or any noises?” he asked for what felt like the thousandth time since he’d arrived in Scranton. The guard’s face twisted into incredulity and he huffed a laugh.

“You mean your girlfriend running around yelling at everybody?” he asked, and Mulder instinctively turned to look at Jim, assuming the guard was talking about Pam but didn’t realize that was her name or… But Jim looked back at him expectantly and Mulder’s head whipped back toward the guard.

“My girlfriend?” he asked. The man nodded. “Scully?” Mulder provided in shock.

“The redhead you’re always with,” the man informed him and Mulder felt like the air had been sucked from his lungs with a vacuum cleaner.

“Scully was running around and yelling at people?” he repeated to the man, leaning forward in impatience. The guy shrugged and pointed a thumb toward the stairs.

“Asked all sorts of questions about the basement and went tearing down there like a mad woman,” he told them matter-of-factly. Mulder paused, his face expressionless, then he thanked the guard and told Jim to go upstairs and wait in case either of the women returned…

And then he went tearing down into the basement like a mad man.

Mulder propped his elbows on the table and opened the file folder for what felt like the hundredth time, his eyes tiredly scanning the information in front of him, and his mind considering what might be missing. The interview tapes played quietly in the background as he reviewed times and places…names and occupations…measurements and explanations…

None of it told him much of anything.

The only thing he knew for certain was that abducting people by day was not this kidnapper’s M.O. The guy was getting desperate. And desperation almost always meant things were about to get violent.

Mulder guessed the perp was a male between the ages of 35 and 50, and that he worked or lived nearby and probably had a generic, run of the mill desk job as his occupation. He’d be average looking…medium height and build…someone who could easily blend into any number of locations in and around Scranton Business Park. So, basically he could be anyone.

He slammed the folder closed angrily and ran his hands through his hair. The only lead he had so far was the gut feeling that something wasn’t right about the basement. But gut feelings didn’t usually get him results. He needed Scully to bounce ideas off of…he needed Scully to tell him what was crazy and what made sense. His eyes sort of glazed over with exhaustion and he bit down on his cheek harshly to keep it at bay.

He had to focus.

He dialed her number again and waited, tossing his phone aside when the only answer he received was her very official sounding voice telling him to leave a message at the tone.

He had to think of something.

Fast.

***

“Do you know why he's keeping you here?” Scully asked tiredly, shifting on the floor in a hopeless attempt to get more comfortable. The three other people in the room who were awake stared at her in obvious exhaustion.  There wasn't much to do at this point besides sleep.

“Not really. He said something about mattering to people? But that was,” Jordan sighed and looked at his wristwatch, “three days ago, so…” he shrugged, “who knows.” Scully nodded and scanned the room for at least the tenth time, looking for some salvation…some way out. The only vague idea she’d had in the first place was somehow using the pipes in the bathroom to…she wasn’t even sure. Inventive thinking wasn’t her strongest area. She needed Mulder. “Do you think we’ll make it out of here?” Jordan asked quietly, and Scully felt Pam’s eyes staring desperately at her, hot and insistent.

“I…uh…” she shrugged, “I hope so,” she finally responded quietly. Jordan nodded and leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms and closing his eyes, effectively ending their dialogue. Scully sighed.

“So,” Pam muttered quietly after a lengthy pause, her voice hushed so she wouldn’t disturb the others, “What’s going on with you and Agent Mulder?” Scully felt her face get hot and she swallowed visibly. A weighty silence hung in the air as she tried and failed to formulate an appropriate response. The truth was she wasn’t sure.

“What’s going on with you and Jim Halpert?” she countered, turning her head to look Pam in the eye. Pam’s eyebrows shot up and her moth dropped open in surprise. Eventually she recovered and offered a slow nod, as if accepting a challenge.

“Got it, I won’t ask,” she murmured, and Scully felt momentarily satisfied. But the feeling was fleeting.

***

***

“Jim overheard me talking to my mother on the phone,” Pam whispered, clutching her cell phone in her hand and staring down at the word Jim that glared up at her. Scully shifted beside her and cleared her throat uncomfortably, unsure what the appropriate response to this awkward confession might be. “I said some things he probably shouldn’t have heard…” Pam explained. The silence once again lingered as Scully simply stared at her in confusion. Pam shrugged in response. “Nevermind.  Sorry.  I guess I, um...I just thought maybe making conversation would…help the time...pass? Or just…” Scully nodded.

“What did you say that he shouldn‘t have heard?” she wondered, resigning herself to talk with this receptionist in a way that she hadn‘t really talked to another woman since her sister died. Pam sucked in a heavy lungful of air and shook her head at the memory.

“Uh…that I wanted to take off his shirt, puke on his shoes, and confess my undying love to him,” she murmured self-deprecatingly. God, the entire thing was mortifying. Although maybe she wouldn’t have to worry about that now that she was in here and Jim was…not. She looked back down at her phone again and frowned. “I’m in love with him,” she murmured, and Scully hummed a knowing response. “He told me he loved me last year and I couldn’t…I just…it was like I couldn’t love him then, you know what I mean? Not that I didn’t, but I…”

“Yeah, I do know what you mean,” Scully interrupted, her voice sounding almost wistful in a way that made Pam look over at her in interest. She watched her face thoughtfully, watched the way that one of her auburn eyebrows was lifted subtly and her eyes were a warm shade of blue…the way that her lips were pursed in a bittersweet sort of frown.

“What happened with you and Agent Mulder?” she wondered quietly, hoping that she wouldn’t break the spell of honesty that seemed to have draped itself over the two of them. It was funny the way unlikely people could bond in desperate situations. Scully’s head shook softly, her eyes glazed over in thought.

“We…it’s complicated,” she finished tiredly and Pam tipped her head, rolling her eyes a little.

“What isn’t?” she wondered, and Scully smirked dryly in her direction.

“True,” she admitted, “That is true.” Silence reigned again and someone in the far corner of the room sniffed and shifted in their sleep. “I kissed him,” Scully confessed, “this morning…” Pam nodded.

“What are you gonna do about it?” Pam asked, her arms crossed protectively over her chest and her ankles crossed out in front of her. Scully inhaled audibly and almost shook herself out of a daze.

“Nothing,” she stated firmly, “Nothing. We’re partners, and the job is what’s important. Anything else would jeopardize our work…”

The two drifted off in thought, each staring straight ahead and considering their sitaution…considering the irony of ending up here, trapped in a bomb shelter, when the world had been happening to them only hours before. Finally, Pam swallowed.

“You know, Jim kissed me last year, after…” Scully nodded and Pam continued, not feeling the need to finish the sentence, “But I was engaged at the time, to Roy, and it was just…” she paused and thought for a moment, trying to figure out how exactly to say what she meant. She self consciously thought that someone as direct and honest as Agent Scully probably never had the problem of not knowing what to say. Finally she went on, “I thought Roy was my life,” she admitted, “and even considering having something with Jim would be like…” She shook her head, “I couldn’t do it,” she admitted quietly. Scully was motionless beside her and Pam wondered if she was even breathing. She turned to look at the agent's stoic profile and Pam felt her own meaning low in her stomach, the tone of her words reflecting her very clear intention, “I was wrong,” she stated with sure determination. Scully’s head turned on her pale neck and her cold eyes melted into Pam’s honesty. The agent nodded, her striking red bob shifting ever so slightly with the motion.

“Yeah,” she murmured, and Pam knew that she understood.

***

Jim didn’t care how cold it was.

He didn’t care how ridiculous he seemed. He didn’t care how many people walked by him and stared.

He was not moving from Pam’s car…even if it killed him.

He was not moving as long as there was a chance in hell that she might appear…she might show up all breathless and say that she’d ditched work whimsically to go buy art supplies or something and smile when she saw that he’d waited…she might come out the door of Scranton Business Park with her coat wrapped tightly around her, asking him why he’d come down without her, explaining that she’d been in Bob Vance’s office the whole time, avoiding Angela because it was just easier than…just…

She might be here, needing him to walk her to her car like usual.

She might be needing him.

He sniffed in the chilly air and Stanley nodded solemnly to him as he walked by and climbed into his car, turning the engine and driving away without another glance toward Jim at all.

He didn’t care how ridiculous it was. He was not going to budge from this spot.

He thought of the way that Pam’s voice had been so starkly honest on the phone with her mother…the way that they had suddenly and accidentally been teetering on the edge of honesty, suddenly and accidentally swaying there like a single nudge would knock them into a fantastic kind of free fall. He hadn’t even meant to wear this sweater…he hadn’t even thought about…

He hadn’t even realized she was in love with him.

It was fascinating the way a person could convince himself that something wasn’t true…the way someone’s self-esteem could be so low that he would shrug off meaningful glances and heartfelt confessions because it was just too much otherwise…it just made him too vulnerable. It was like, once she suggested that he’d misinterpreted their friendship…once she’d pointed out to him that Roy was who she wanted…he’d believed her like she was telling him the truth. He’d thought, yes…yes that was what he’d done, he‘d misinterpreted things. He’d thought yes…yes of course she wanted Roy, she’d always wanted Roy and had never really said otherwise. He’d been confused, and, god, it wouldn’t have been the first time.

But somewhere low and real he knew that wasn’t true. Somewhere human and honest he knew that they were cheating themselves…that she was lying to him.

And today he’d heard it with his own ears. Pam was in love with him.

He hadn’t even realized.

He leaned back against Pam’s driver side door and stared down at his shoes, his shoulders hunched like he’d seen a ghost, and his eyes watering with the cold.

It had to be the cold making his eyes water.

Had to be.

He sniffed and reminded himself that he didn’t care how cold it was.

He was not going to budge from this spot.

Because maybe Pam would show up...because maybe she was fine...or maybe she was needing him.

He licked his lips and he sniffed…

And he waited.

“I know what you’re doing.”

The voice startled him and he turned, dropping his arms to his side. Mulder stood there, dark and shadowed, staring at Jim with a knowing gleam in his eye, his hands shoved into his trench coat pockets and his face looking as worn as Jim felt…his hair askew, his tie crooked… Jim tilted his head at him, as if to say he didn’t understand. Mulder’s expression said he wasn’t buying it.

“Don’t do this, Jim,” he continued adamantly, “Just go home,” this was spoken with a certain kind of desperation that caught Jim off guard, and something about Mulder’s advice sounded like the things Jim had once wished he could say to his younger self…things Jim might say to his little brother… Mulder’s advice rang like the advice of someone who’d lived this all before. “Standing out here won’t help anybody, and we aren’t going to find them tonight,” he finished quietly, down-trodden as if the entire situation was his fault. Jim chewed for a moment on his lower lip and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets, accidentally mirroring Mulder’s pose, his eyes fixed on the ground.

“I just,” he had to stop to clear his throat, “I just thought she might show up,” he admitted, feeling ridiculous and wishing none of this had ever happened, part of him cursing Angela and her stupid diseased cat. Mulder nodded and pursed his lips.

“She won’t,” he told him firmly, and Jim found himself unable to move, finally sinking into a blank kind of nothingness. Up until this moment he’d been wracking his brain for something he might have missed, obsessing over the words he’d heard her speak before she’d gone missing, considering staking out the basement like he was some kind of old-time detective. But now, all of that seemed pointless. Everything seemed pointless. He sighed. “Go home and get some sleep. Let me do my job,” Mulder instructed. Jim nodded, reaching up to rub at his eyes and moving toward his car in resignation. He would go home, even though he knew he wasn’t going to get any sleep. Mulder followed suit, opening the door of the Taurus and rolling his eyes when he looked down and saw Scully’s cell phone sitting on the passenger seat. And just as Jim was folding himself into his SAAB, Mulder called out to him. “Hey Jim, call me if you think of anything else,” he requested, “I’ll be up all night,” the promise fell from his lips like a practiced prayer as he sat down with heavy limbs, slamming the door of the Taurus and turning the engine.

Jim huffed a humorless laugh.

“Yeah, me too,” he mumbled to nobody in particular.

***

The night was long and black, the hours ticking by slowly as Scully sat motionless and trance-like, her eyes fixed on the wall across from her and her hands resting lifelessly in her lap. She didn’t sleep because her mind was too awake, making rest as evasive as a cockroach in a storage closet. So instead, Scully found herself pondering Pam and the things she had confessed…pondering Mulder and the way that he was rooted so firmly inside of her…the way that they were so alike, and the way that they were so very different.

She was sure he was lying awake right now, staring at the motel ceiling the way she stared at the shelter wall, his stomach empty, his eyes glazed over, trying to find some piece of the puzzle that he’d missed, trying to figure out a way to save her because he would know instinctively that there was no real way for her to save herself.

She thought he had timelessness inside of him…she thought he had an unintentional intensity that gripped an iron fist low and tight in her stomach. She thought he was Heathcliffe and Don Quixote, all stormy eyes and illusions of windmills, all foundation-less arrogance and unreasonable romance. She thought he was impossible and imperative both at once, making her unsure whether she should roll her eyes or wrap her arms around him. She sighed.

She usually tried to avoid these romantic, Mulder-heavy thoughts, because he was just so suited to romance…he was just so made to be seen romantically that it seemed like a dangerous path to tread. However, she had nothing but time at the moment and Pam Beesly had planted a significant seed of doubt in her mind.

What if she was foolish to ignore the truth of her emotions in favor of their work? What if she was making an epic mistake by reminding herself of the files every time he made her breath freeze in her lungs? What if, when it came to putting professionalism first, she was just…

Wrong?

And so now she considered her feelings.

Now she thought of the way that he was long and lean and draped perfectly in navy blue Armani. She thought of the way that his stare was sometimes heavy on her skin during late nights and long cases, his self-control slipping and drifting away to let her feel the truth of his emotion. She thought of his hands and how much she loved the way they always seemed to linger at the small of her back…how much she wanted to tell him that his hand owned that certain piece of skin and bone…

She blinked a slow blink and licked her lips.

For a woman who was so full of pride and who so blatantly controlled all of her own thoughts and actions, she was shocked by how much of herself she would hand over to him if he asked. She was shocked by how much of her belonged to him already.

She considered the way that he had kissed her that morning…the way that he had been full of desperation and the way that he had breathed her name into her mouth, he had given it to her like it was a testament or a declaration.

She thought resignedly that she would never be satisfied by another man. She thought decidedly that she could heal something inside of him with just the touch of her hand. She thought impatiently that if she could just get out of this bomb shelter she would explain to him the way that the files would still be there if they gave into this thing that was between them…

And as the sun rose over the city of Scranton, she thought helplessly that she was definitely in love with Fox Mulder.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

***

He paced the cage of his motel room like he could solve this case by treading the stained brown carpet and chewing on the inside of his cheek. He’d abandoned his tie hours ago, but still wore his steel gray dress pants and his oxford shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He knew the facts of the case, at this point, like the back of his hand, and he was certain someone was lying…someone was leaving something out, and that one thing would be all he needed to find the kidnapper and put him in jail. He knew Scully had been in the basement and he knew that the basement didn’t make any kind of structural sense, but he was pretty sure Scully would say you couldn’t just have an excavation team dig up a building’s foundation in the middle of the night, and he was pretty sure she’d be right, so there wasn’t much he could do about that at the moment.

So he just had to wait. And unfortunately waiting was not one of Mulder’s many skills.

About every two hours his pacing would stop cold and he would think What if something went wrong and she’s injured or…

But he would shake himself and he would tell himself that that was a completely unfounded fear and she wasn’t dead because he would be able to feel that and if he just kept thinking he could figure out where she was and this could all be over.

He rolled his eyes at himself. He’d only accepted this case because she hated small towns, and he thought the irritated crease she got in her brow and the aggravated pinch she got in her voice in places like Scranton, Pennsylvania was amusing. He thought he’d watch her huff and puff for a few days and then they would solve the case easily and go back to chasing conspiracies in D.C. He hadn’t predicted this…and now the sun was coming up and in the light of day he felt like even more of an asshole than he had during the night.

He couldn’t even start to think about the fact that he’d kissed her. God, sometimes he was just sure the universe was pointing a finger at him and laughing like…

His mind went still as his phone started to blink and chirp and jump around on his bedside table. He stared at it warily and inhaled a deep breath, glancing at the clock to see that it was quarter to four and there was no sane reason anybody would be calling him at this hour…

He picked the phone up and flipped it open.

“Yeah?” he answered, impatient to find out what the reason was for this call and who was on the other end.

“Agent Mulder?” the voice asked breathlessly, and he nodded.

“Yeah who’s this?” he asked, his mind humming with the kind of outrageous possibilities that only floated through a person’s head at 3:45 in the morning.

“Hi, um, this is Jim Halpert?” Mulder sagged a bit in disappointment and sighed. Why he thought the kidnapper would be calling his cell phone in the middle of the night he didn‘t know, although he guessed it probably wouldn’t have been the first time. He licked his lips and focused.

“Jim, what’s up?” he asked, perching on the edge of the bed and stifling a yawn. Jim cleared his throat on the other end.

“Uh I just, I thought of something,” he muttered, his voice gravelly and tired. Mulder sat up a little bit straighter.

“What?” he asked, unsure whether he was asking Jim to repeat himself or asking Jim to elaborate.

“I thought of something I forgot to tell you.”

*** Saturday Morning, 7 AM ***

“Morning.” The greeting was ice and granite, and Bob Vance looked up in startled curiosity.

“Good morning,” he returned, the dark circles under his eyes showing his deep-seeded unrest. Mulder scratched his eyebrow and approached the older man with a kind of anxious step that was evidence of the fact that he’d been impatiently waiting for a reasonable hour to ask certain questions, and hopefully get certain answers. The parking lot was empty except for their two cars, and their breath puffed out into the atmosphere in visible little clouds. Bob Vance frowned.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Mulder murmured, his voice sounding a little bit less than sincere, “I need to speak with Michael Hanover,” he proclaimed, “And his contact information was left out of the file you gave us.” Bob shook his head in confusion.

“Who?” he wondered, and Mulder sighed out his impatience.

“Michael Hanover. One of your sales reps. Jim Halpert called me last night and informed me that he spoke to Mr. Hanover in the parking lot right around the time Christina Macavoy went missing and I haven’t interviewed him yet,” he explained. “He might know something.” The confusion still didn’t drift from Bob’s face and Mulder felt the coil of anxiousness in his stomach tighten and start to crack. He knew something was off about this…he’d been thinking about it since 4 AM and was almost certain this was the key to finding Scully and Pam and the eight other people who had gone missing.

“Michael Hanover? Michael… oh!” Bob finally exclaimed, and the air fled from Mulder’s lungs in another sigh. “You mean Trout,” he assumed. Mulder’s stare was unwavering and impatient, unwilling to offer smiles or comfort in the early morning sun. Bob nodded with a furrowed brow. “Well his information wasn’t in the file because I fired him,” he stated matter of factly and Mulder felt himself lean forward in disbelief.

“You fired him?” he repeated dumbly. Bob nodded.

“Yeah, about a month ago,” he confirmed, his voice solid and sure. Mulder nodded.

“I’m gonna need any information about him that you‘ve got,” he spat, and Bob nodded again, his eyes wide as Mulder turned away, his trench coat floating out into the chilly morning air and his arms pushing anxiously through the doors of Scranton Business Park. He punched at the up button on the elevator and stood there impatiently, tapping his foot as Bob Vance finally caught up to him, and as Dwight Schrute pulled his Pontiac Trans Am carefully into the parking lot.

***

It was Saturday, but Dwight had reasoned that he had things to do around the office. He figured he could do something for Michael or maybe clean the kitchen or…

 Really he thought maybe the Federal Bureau could use his help.

He climbed out of his car and looked around the parking lot as if it were the Delaware River Bank and he was George Washington himself, strategizing an attack plan and wondering at the fate of his country. Looking around with a tilted head and squinted eyes, his hands settled squarely on his hips, he gave a solid and firm nod to nobody in particular before heading inside…

And into battle.

“Ok the Scranton P.D. says Trout’s not at home, so they’re staking out his house. I can’t…I have to just find these missing people, so I’m going to let them handle that. Bob, listen to me. There’s something weird about the basement in this building. Do you know anything about…”

“What is this, what’s going on?” Dwight interrupted, bursting through the doors of Vance Refrigeration and barreling toward the two men standing at reception, causing Mulder to take a step back and clench his jaw in visible frustration. He sighed and glanced at Bob Vance.

“Nothing’s going on, Dwight, I’m just asking Mr. Vance a few follow up questions,” he explained.

“What are you doing here on a Saturday?” Bob wondered aloud. Dwight let out an incredulous chuckle and shook his head as if Bob Vance was a complete idiot.

“I’m here to help the Federal Bureau of Investigations in their hunt for your missing employees,” he told him matter-of-factly. “I am Agent Mulder’s backup.” Mulder eyed him curiously, but was too tired to argue and decided the best course of action was just to act like Dwight wasn’t even there. He turned back to Bob Vance and offered up a flat kind of expression.

“What do you know about the basement?” he asked.

“The basement?” Dwight repeated, stepping forward so that his shoulder bumped against Mulder’s, causing Mulder to shift away in impatience, quickly losing his cool and struggling to suppress the urge to strangle Dwight on the spot.

“You have to give me some space. Right now,” he ordered harshly. Dwight frowned and licked his lips, his head starting to shake in a negation of the command.

“But you’re asking about the basement and I…”

“Dwight,” Mulder interrupted, “Please give me space.” Dwight pressed his lips together in thought and perched his hands on his hips.

“I’ll go get you a cup of coffee,” he decided and Mulder raised his eyebrows in response, watching as Dwight made his way back to the Vance Refrigeration kitchen and began to brew a pot of coffee. He sighed in relief and turned back to Bob.

“Ok the basement. What do you know?” he asked and felt something inside of him sink heavily when Bob started to shake his head.

“I don’t know anything about the basement, I’ve never even been down there,” he admitted, reaching down to yank on his belt and shifting on his feet in discomfort. Mulder pinched the bridge of his nose and felt himself starting to lose it, and he realized he could really use that cup of coffee Dwight had mentioned. He held a finger up to Bob Vance as if to tell him to hold on a second, and headed back in the direction of the coffee pot because otherwise he wasn’t sure what he would do or say. He pushed the kitchen door open and rolled his eyes when Dwight straightened from the refrigerator and slammed the door shut, as if he’d been caught doing something illegal by snooping through the shelves.

“How’s the coffee coming?” Mulder asked quietly and Dwight glanced over at the percolating pot which hadn’t even started to fill yet. He sighed and looked down at the floor in defeat.

“It isn’t finished yet,” he admitted. Mulder nodded and moved toward a folding chair that sat around the small make-shift kitchen table. He sat down heavily and rested his forehead against his palm in exhaustion. This was an absolute nightmare. “Having trouble solving the case?” Dwight wondered, his voice consolatory and soft. Mulder inhaled audibly.

“If I could just figure out what the deal is with the goddamn basement in this building, it’d be solved,” he mumbled almost to himself, rubbing at his eyes and trying fruitlessly to clear his sleepiness from their hazel depths.

“Hm,” Dwight hummed, crossing his arms and nodding, “You’re talking about the bomb shelter,” he stated simply. Mulder sat up straight and looked at him in disbelief, his hands hanging mid-air and his mouth hanging open in shock.

“The what?” he wondered, unable to believe what he’d just heard.

“The bomb shelter. They built it back in the fifties, I think, but nobody has ever had to use it.”

“I was down there,” Mulder breathed, “There was no bomb shelter.” Dwight nodded again and licked his lips.

“They walled it off,” and before the explanation was even out of his mouth Mulder was up and out of his chair as if his ass had caught on fire. “What are you…” Dwight began, but as Mulder pushed through the kitchen door and took the Vance Refrigeration offices at a full-out run, he could hear Dwight calling out after him, “I’m right behind you!” and he thought maybe he heard Bob Vance hit the ground and grunt in pain, but was too preoccupied to turn around and look.

He took the stairs two at a time and arrived at the basement in something like thirty seconds. Dwight was hot on his heels and Mulder held up a finger to his mouth, signaling that Dwight should stay quiet. Dwight held his hands up and nodded.

“Show me the false wall,” Mulder whispered, “Point to it,” he instructed, and Dwight did, following diligently behind as Mulder made his way over to it and placed his hands on his hips, assessing how exactly to either knock it down or get it open. Dwight tapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward a lever.

“That unlocks the wall and then you have to push it,” Dwight explained almost inaudibly. Mulder sighed a thank you and told him to go upstairs and call the Scranton Police Department and ask them to send some squad cars for backup. Dwight nodded and headed toward the stairs as Mulder held his breath and pulled the lever. A thin crack about two inches wide appeared in the plaster and Mulder thanked whatever deity might exist, knowing instinctively that Scully was somewhere on the other side. That thought made him lose some of his inhibitions and he pushed the wall aside without even noticing the amount of noise it made. He brushed his hands on his pants and looked down the dirt tunnel with shining, victorious eyes, at the door at the other end, which looked like a door to a vault. Impatient, Mulder took the tunnel at a jog, pulling his weapon out of its holster and holding it out in front of him haphazardly, reaching the door and unlocking the bolt with cold and clammy fingers.

The door to the shelter slid open and he pointed his weapon into the dim lighting, announcing that he was FBI and that he was armed. The first thing he heard in response was his name and he almost fainted in relief.

“Mulder how the hell did you find this place?” she asked him, and he re-holstered his gun, his shoulders sagging and a grin splitting his face at the way that her expression was a mixture of seriousness and humor. He chuckled quietly.

“I have no idea,” he admitted, offering a nod to Pam, “But I think we should all get the hell out of here,” he told them, scanning the room and taking a mental count to be sure everyone was present and alive. They were, and it was like some kind of fairy tale that he couldn’t quite believe.

“You didn’t catch Trout yet?” Pam wondered, inferring correctly that if Mulder thought they should hurry to escape he must still be on the loose. Mulder shook his head and waved toward the entrance to the tunnel.

“No, so come on let’s go, everybody stay calm and file out as quickly as possible.” Scully stood and maneuvered her way to stand next to him, offering up a knowing look full of concern and dusting off her pants at the same time. “Are you ok?” Mulder wondered quietly as everyone else in the room started to stand and organize themselves into a single file line. Scully started to nod, but the simple motion was interrupted.

“What the hell is this?”

The voice made them all stop dead in their tracks and Mulder glanced down at Scully in confusion, reaching back to grab his gun at the look of worry on her face.

“Don’t even think about it,” Trout warned, stepping into the low lighting and pointing Scully’s gun directly at Mulder’s face. Mulder’s eyes widened and he slowly raised his hands above his head.

“Ok, everybody just stay calm…” Mulder suggested, feeling the quiet sort of automatic coddling kick into play that he had learned once at Quantico and that he’d used more times than he liked to count. “Why don’t you hand me the gun?” he offered, taking a careful step forward and slightly to the right, slipping into place in front of Scully, subconsciously protecting her with the width of his chest and the unthreatening stretch of his open and empty palm. Trout’s face was red with anger and his wrist shook slightly with the weight of the gun in his hand.

“Shut up,” he warned, and Mulder watched, part of him fascinated at the way that Trout’s eyes filled with tears. He was always full of a certain kind of guilt because of how interested he could still be by the intricacies of the criminal mind…by the way that this man was still so human even with lives hanging in the balance and desperation nestled into his behavior. Mulder wanted to discover what it was that made that desperation reach this point…partly because of his clinical interest…and partly because he sometimes thought he needed to be careful, be aware, he sometimes thought he needed to know that moment or that certain thought that changed everything because desperation was his life, and he was terrified of turning into someone else, someone with this crazed look and this shaking arm and these tears in his eyes. Mulder nodded his agreement to be quiet, and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the hostages who were lined up along the back wall, terrified and quiet.

“You’re in charge here, Michael. You’re the boss, just tell us what you want us to do and we’ll do it,” Mulder instructed, careful to group himself in with the rest of the captives and careful to assure this guy that he was the one holding the cards. Careful not to mention the backup that was probably already outside and the way that in minutes this would probably all be over. “Nobody needs to get hurt,” he promised.

“Just shut up,” he murmured, his voice low and cool and the kind of sound that sent a chill sliding down Mulder’s spine because usually low and cool was much more dangerous than loud and angry. “Jesus,” Trout breathed, readjusting his grip and shuffling his feet a little. Mulder and Scully stared at him warily, Mulder with his hand still out and Scully with her eyes wide and her breathing shallow. Trout flinched at them and Mulder reached his other hand back slowly, carefully, tapping Scully on the thigh and hoping that she knew he meant for her to take his gun out of its holster. “I’m not some kind of crazed lunatic, you know?” he mumbled and Mulder nodded.

“We know that, Michael. We know,” he assured him, his voice matching the lowness of Trout’s and staying equally as cool and unaffected.

“I’m just making a point,” he explained, “I’m just, like…you can’t fire somebody,” he told them adamantly, his voice starting to tighten, to coil up and clench its fists. “You can’t just…you know? Jesus. And I’m not crazy, I gave them all blankets and I…” he sighed and seemed to deflate, his voice dropping down again, his hand still extended and the veins in his wrist outlined weirdly by his skin. Mulder felt Scully’s fingers at his back and he tried not to let his facial expression waver.

“We believe you,” Mulder promised.

“Please,” Trout murmured incredulously, “The FBI doesn’t believe anybody,” he declared and Mulder pursed his lips because he couldn’t exactly deny that, “Look at Lee Harvey Oswald,” Trout offered, and at that Mulder raised his eyebrows. Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fascinating.

Then his own self-control returned, as well as a splash of self-flagellation, now was not the time for useless profiling and psychoanalyzing, even if the mention of the infamous assassin seemed highly significant to what had made this fifty-something refrigerator salesman just totally lose his cool. Mulder nodded his agreement as he felt Scully silently unhook the snap of his holster.

“You’re right, Michael, but we’re here to listen to you, we want to hear what you have to say. Why don’t you let your friends go and my partner and I will stay so that you can explain this to us and we can maybe try to help you,” he offered, truly wanting to keep this situation from turning ugly. Trout licked his lips and readjusted again.

“You don’t believe me, you’re trained to say that. I’m educated, and I’m not stupid, so don’t even try your psychological bullshit with me,” he warned and Mulder felt something inside of him deflate because he would’ve preferred for this to have been over by now… obviously. Trout tightened his grip on the gun. “I’m a nice guy,” he promised, “I’m not a criminal or crazy I’m just a normal guy,” his gaze shifted to the line of hostages and Mulder felt himself react without even thinking about it, standing up straighter, readying himself for what might be coming. Trout’s aim shifted with his gaze and Mulder felt Scully grip his gun with sure, medical fingers. Trout licked his lips. “Ask Pam,” he muttered, and Mulder hazarded a glance over his shoulder at the receptionist and the way the barrel of Trout’s gun was aimed directly at her forehead.

“Pam will tell you I’m normal.”

***

Pam stared down the barrel of the gun and tried to remember what NBC network television had taught her about dealing with crazy men wielding guns and weapons. She tried not to cry and she tried to think of something to say but her mouth was dry and her eyes were full of saltwater and there was something about trying not to blink that made her head hurt with exhaustion. Finally she forced out choked sounding words, and somehow made herself sound calm…sound at ease…sound like Pam.

“We know you’re a nice guy, Trout. We know you aren’t going to hurt us,” she told him softly, and she could feel the eyes of the other eight, trained on her and afraid to look away, she could feel the way that Trout’s expression softened and she could feel his slow-spreading smile in the way her stomach roiled with disgust.

“See?” he whispered, and Pam nodded her head, realizing that the movement was a little bit jerky, a little bit frantic, but unable to help it. “See? Pam knows me,” he told them, his stare shifting icily to Mulder and Scully and his gun wavering, drooping so that it pointed just to the left of her shoulder and
Pam felt something about the way that she was standing deflate.

“Maybe you should give your gun to him, so that he believes you,” she suggested carefully and Trout looked back at her with wide and unsure eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“Just, if you give back that gun than the FBI will have to listen to you and believe that you didn’t mean to hurt anybody. It’s hard to believe you when you’re holding a gun, Trout. I believe you because I know you but they don’t know you,” she mumbled, feeling the way that tears were clogged down in her throat and the way that her voice was floating, unstable, above them…shaky and gravelly. Mulder re-extended his hand and nodded, and Trout’s arm sagged even more, his resolve visibly deflating.

“Maybe,” he muttered, and just as his finger started to lift from the trigger, just as he started to tip the gun sideways and hand it over, just as Agent Scully was pulling her hand away from Agent Mulder’s gun, there was a battle cry from somewhere in the dirt tunnel and a piece of potato came flying through the air, hitting Trout squarely in the back so that he grunted with the force of it…hitting him squarely in the back so that his fists clenched and his finger tightened on the trigger…so that the gun fired and a bullet ripped through the air and directly through Mulder’s shoulder, flying past Pam’s face and lodging itself soundly in the muddy wall beside her head.

…she’d thought of Jim.

Scully watched with confused and annoyed eyes as Dwight barreled into the bomb shelter, carrying a huge sort of contraption and a bag of potatoes. He dropped both, and the vegetables went rolling around on the floor as he dove down and tackled Trout, clasping the Vance employee’s hands behind his back and sitting on top of him to keep him in place. Even though this entire thing was basically Dwight’s fault, and even though Scully loathed practically everything about him, it was actually sort of helpful that he was restraining Trout at the moment, so Scully reached behind her and pulled out her cuffs, tossing them toward him with practiced efficiency.

“Cuff him,” she instructed coldly, ignoring the look of excitement and false importance on Dwight’s face. She then shifted and directed her attention to her partner, who was sitting on his knees with a hand pressed to his left shoulder and his face twisted in pain and irritation. “Let me see,” she murmured, her voice a soft kind of whisper that was almost always reserved for these moments and this man. She got down on her knees beside him and pried his hand away so that she could inspect his wound.

“I’m fine, it’s fine. I think it just grazed me as it went by,” he assured her, his body language just this side of shrugging her off the way that he usually did. She peered at his shoulder and peeled his shirt away gingerly. He hissed, but her fingers were warm and gentle against him and he thought maybe it was more a caress than a checkup.

“You need stitches,” she whispered, and he looked down at where her hand was pressed against him and then back up at her face, but she found herself unable to look him in the eye, unable to meet his meaningful stare and unable to drag her attention from the bullet-wound and the blood on his skin. She was too raw…she’d had too few hours of sleep…

She was too much in love with him to look him in the eye.

He cleared his throat and took a deep breath.

“Hey, Scully?” he mumbled, and she hummed, still unable to really address him in any real kind of way. She pressed her palm against him and tried to silently tell him that she was sorry. “You were right,” he announced, and at that she momentarily forgot her self-consciousness and her eyes widened. She looked up at him in surprise and her mouth dropped open at the look of resignation on his face.

“What?” she breathed, so unused to hearing him mutter anything involving her having been right about anything that she practically couldn‘t breathe, and a grin started to seep into his features. She felt her stomach flutter a little and raised an eyebrow at him because otherwise she‘d have smiled, but she couldn‘t do that because…well because she was Scully.

“It wasn’t aliens,” he whispered fondly, and somehow it sounded more like a confession…more like affection and promise and assurance than humor or defeat or resignation. She finally smiled softly at him and looked back at his shoulder.

“Yeah, well,” she sighed, “don’t be too disappointed.“ She felt more than saw the look of question on his face, asking her to explain and expound on why he shouldn’t feel the sting of disappointment he always did when there was nothing paranormal going on at all. She smiled at his shoulder and raised her eyebrows. “He did mention Lee Harvey Oswald,” she explained dryly, and he laughed. She felt her stomach flip again as he dipped his head low and let his breath fan against her ear.

“Maybe it’s a conspiracy,” he whispered, and she chuckled in response, pulling away from him and telling him clinically that he should apply pressure while she checked on the rest of the hostages and got them all out of there safely. He nodded at her and there was a moment where their eyes locked and something passed between them. There was a moment where she found herself completely unable to keep her expression from giving her away, and Mulder’s eyes widened slightly because there was no mistaking the look of complete infatuation on her face…the look of fondness and affection…the look of something way beyond even lust.

She stood up and walked back to check on Pam, telling herself she’d just deal with this later. There would be plenty of time later.

***

The lights on the ambulance had been turned off because there was no rush, there was no emergency, there were no real victims to tend to and heal. Pam sat on the ledge of the back door, her eyes closed as one of the EMT’s dabbed alcohol and cotton balls against the cut on her neck. It stung, but she didn’t really mind.

Mulder, however, sat to her left, complaining and whining and huffing in that way that only men could, and Scully stood away from him with her arms crossed, watching in amusement as another EMT attempted to dress his flesh wound.

“Ouch, damnit, what are you doing down there? Can’t you just let Scully do this? You’re killing me with that needle,” he announced, and Pam sighed, wondering if he was always like this.

“Sir, your flesh is very raw right now and you insisted that I put these stitches in right here in this parking lot, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m sure your partner can tell you that the pain is your own fault,” the EMT countered, and Pam pried one of her eyes open to look over at Scully who was rolling her eyes in annoyance.

“Jesus, Mulder, you’d think you were the one locked up in that bomb shelter this whole time, with the amount of complaining you’re doing,” she muttered, her voice back to its dry monotone that Pam had gotten so used to over the past few days. The EMT at Pam’s neck finished taping a small bandage against the cut and told her to replace it the next day and then she’d be fine. Pam nodded and thanked him.

“I’m the one who got shot,” Mulder was saying beside her, “I didn’t see you diving in front of any bullets today,” he accused.

“Please, Mulder. Just…be quiet and let the woman do her job,” Scully instructed sounding like either a tired parent or an exhausted fifth grade teacher. She stepped past Mulder and moved to stand in front of Pam with crossed arms and a concerned expression. “How’s your neck?” she wondered and Pam pressed the tips of her fingers against the bandage in curiosity.

“I can’t even feel it,” she told Scully with a shrug, and Scully nodded her approval as if she’d figured that would be the case.

Pam shifted on the ledge of the ambulance and thought about the way that Scranton had become a novel by John Grisham and Mulder and Scully had shown up like Holmes and Watson or Batman and Robin. She thought about the way that despite their trench coats and stoicism, despite their sunglasses and affinity for asking and re-asking the same few questions over and over again, they had become part of Vance Refrigeration and Dunder Mifflin and Scranton in general and she was glad, grateful, well aware of the fact that the city owed them a great debt.

She considered Jim and what she would say to him…what she would tell him when she saw him and how she would handle the fact that he had basically overheard her pouring her heart out on the telephone. She considered apologizing and demanding apologies. She considered stealing his black sweater and burning it just so he would never accidentally (or purposely) wear it to work again and make her remember the way that she’d treated him…the way that she’d needed a second to think and that had sealed her solitary fate…the way he’d looked at her when she’d stopped him from kissing her and the way that he‘d basically walked away from her without looking back.

She considered Sprinkles, but only for a second.

And she also considered how she had a new apartment and she was independent and capable and generally happy, even if she and Jim were still whatever it was that they were. She considered that she was a grown up and she wanted so badly to do grown up things and feel genuinely adult. She tilted her head at Scully.

“Listen, Agent Scully, I um…this might be weird and everything but I was just thinking, you guys are staying at a motel, right?” she wondered and Scully turned back to her from glaring in Mulder’s direction and sighed.

“Yes, the one right off the highway,” she told her shortly, and Pam had to keep herself from grinning at the way that it was so easy for Scully to slip in and out of her professional role. She was suddenly all business when hours ago she’d been so quiet and feminine, so honest and thoughtful.

“I was just thinking that maybe, um, I mean if you want, you and Agent Mulder could come to my apartment for dinner tonight. If you…want…” she offered, her cheeks turning pink with the fact that she was all too aware that she was extending an awkward kind of invitation. Scully visibly softened a bit, turning for a moment into the woman Pam had gotten to know inside the shelter, and she glanced at Mulder quickly then back to Pam with a quiet smile.

“That would be really nice, Pam,” she told her, “Thank you.”

***

It was three o’clock in the afternoon by the time they’d taken everyone’s statements and been cleared by the medics and told they were free to go, and they spent the first fifteen minutes of their twenty minute car ride in a blatantly awkward and forced kind of silence. Scully had the radio tuned to some AM station that was explaining blandly the dangers of mercury poisoning for people who ate excessive amounts of salmon and Mulder was getting to the point where he thought he might literally have preferred to have been knocked unconscious in the bomb shelter. This was ridiculous. He heaved a sigh and Scully glanced at him quickly and then looked quickly away.

“How’s your shoulder?” she asked flatly, her eyes intent on the road and her face stoic and clear of emotion. Mulder pursed his lips and studied her profile.

“Fine,” he answered, his voice just as devoid of feeling as hers. She nodded in response, and he nodded in response to her nod. The electric silence hung in the air and he felt her energy stirring in the drivers seat, pulsing like there were things she needed to let out, or…

Well, he always thought Scully needed to let some things out.

“So,” he began, “are we going to talk about this, or…”

Her brow furrowed and he was not in the least bit surprised at the way that she feigned ignorance, the way that she kept her breathing even and the way that she didn’t look over at him and the way that her fingers were loose and calm on the steering wheel. Scully was almost never overpowered by emotion in a way that would give her a heaving chest or white knuckles.

“About what?” she wondered, asking him to explain himself because she knew that he was no more brave than she was, usually. He wasn’t any more courageous when it came to these things that weren’t paranormal or tragic or life-threatening. He let out a cynical chuckle and raised his eyebrows.

“Pick something,” he muttered and she licked her lips carefully.

“I don’t know what you…” she began and he found himself turning his torso toward her, ignoring the way pain sliced through his arm at the motion and ignoring the way that the seatbelt he was wearing didn’t really allow for it. He turned the radio off with a harsh hand and she went silent, raising an eyebrow in her signature look of skepticism and mild irritation.

“Come on, Scully” he interrupted, as if that could communicate what he was really trying to say…it was the best he could do at the moment. He licked at his bottom lip angrily and forced himself to go on, “I have to be honest with you, this is getting impossible for me…which is saying something because we both know I‘m a masochist, so…” There was a tickle of satisfaction somewhere low in his stomach at the way that finally her cheeks were turning pink with discomfort, finally her eyes seemed glazed over in thought, finally her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and her breath puffed out of her mouth in uncalculated gushes. He was satisfied because sometimes her defense mechanisms were too much for him and sometimes he felt like there were gulfs between them full of words unsaid and sprinkled with stifled emotions. “Can we just… I don’t want to lie to you,” he admitted softly, honestly, “but I have been. I mean, we have been…lying. Let‘s just try to…”

“I can’t,” she forced out and he froze. He eyed her cautiously and tried to keep himself from feeling completely jolted. He looked for a way that he might be misunderstanding her.

“What?” he asked as she finally pulled their sedan into the motel parking lot. She threw the car into park and turned the ignition off, her movements a little bit jerky…shaky…forced in the way that her words had been. He inhaled audibly and she turned her gaze on him and he was surprised to find that it was soft…pleading…full of unshed tears that shocked him and he was reminded momentarily of hallways and bees and telling her she‘d saved him…

“Please, Mulder,” she murmured and her voice was eerily free of the tears that were hanging in her eyes. She wasn’t unsure or confused or searching for words the way that he had been…she just spoke to him, calm and quiet and strangely honest. “I can’t do this right now. I’m exhausted and confused and I’ve been locked in a bomb shelter and I don’t want it to be like this…with bullet wounds and muddy clothes and that look on your face…just…” she sighed and looked down at her hands, stark white against the gray of the steering wheel, shaking her head slightly, and he thought maybe he actually did understand what she was trying to say. He thought maybe he agreed. “I don’t want to lie either,” she admitted, “But I need to for a few more hours because I don’t want it to be like this.”

He chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded, feeling the way her tone of voice brought a little bit of a lump to his throat and the way that he wanted to reach over and touch her… but he couldn’t do that yet because she didn‘t want it to be like this. So he just sat there and breathed in the air she was breathing out the way he’d done for years, and he convinced himself that breathing the same air as her was almost touching her, the way he’d convinced himself thousands of times before.

She correctly assumed his silence was concession and shook her shoulders a bit as if regrouping before pushing open the drivers side door and climbing out, leaving Mulder to sit and stare after her again. She rounded the front of the car and tapped on his window, and he pushed his door open a few inches so that he could hear her.

“Get changed,” she told him like the drill sergeant he was sometimes sure she’d been in a past life, “We’re going to Pam’s for dinner.”

He nodded quietly and climbed gingerly from the car, wincing at the pull on his shoulder and wondering if the universe kept a tally of all of the times it had totally screwed Fox William Mulder out of getting what he wanted. He sighed.

Just one more hit in a long line of many, he thought tiredly, but hopefully...soon...that would all change. 

“You saved me. As difficult and as frustrating as it’s been sometimes your goddamn strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over. You’ve kept me honest. You’ve made me a whole person. I owe you everything, Scully, and you owe me nothing. I don’t know if I wanna do this alone… I don’t even know if I can.”

- Fox Mulder

***

Jim's seconds felt like minutes like his minutes felt like hours, and the day had dragged on as if he were sitting in a hospital, waiting for bad news. Every time he blinked he could hear the echoes of Pam's footsteps against the cold cement steps leading down into the basement. Every time he blinked he saw her tear-filled eyes and her retreating form as she rounded that corner, running after Angela‘s cat. Every time he blinked he could feel the way that his heart had been pounding and his mind had been spinning with uncertainty and confusion, and he‘d wondered if maybe he should‘ve followed her, or maybe he should‘ve called after her, told her he‘d been wrong and he was sorry and things could change and... Every time he blinked he thought he should’ve followed her. He tried not to blink.

This was regret.

The possibilities that had given him a chill before, the ones he and Pam had conjured and discussed as he’d leaned against her desk every day since the first refrigeration employee had gone missing, those possibilities suddenly felt like stones in the bottom of his stomach and his fingers were perched against his too dry lips as he stared at the black square of the lifeless TV screen. His sofa went practically unnoticed beneath him and he was sure Mark had poked his head into the living room to check on him a few times, but Jim felt like he was unable to move…unable to pretend things were normal…unable to exist in the world in any sane, real person kind of way. The possibilities felt like stones in the bottom of his stomach, and all he could do was watch the hours tick by… 4 AM creeping toward 5 AM, 7 AM creeping toward 8AM, noon creeping toward 1...

He sighed and blinked, flinching at the onslaught of emotion that the single movement brought with it.

It was 2:56 PM and his elbows were still propped on his knees…his fingers were still frozen against his lips…his brow was still scrunched in distress…

He glanced at his cell phone and wondered why he hadn‘t heard anything, if he should be calling Agent Mulder to see if everything was alright…if he could help somehow. But at 4 AM Mulder had told him to stay put, to let the FBI do their job, to wait for a phone call, and that, Jim reminded himself harshly, was what he was going to do. It was just that sitting there…just sitting there seemed so seriously dangerous and detrimental to his own sanity. It was difficult and it was dangerous and it gave him much too much time to think and to wonder…to imagine what had gone wrong. He imagined things that he was sure would haunt him for years…things with tears and screaming, things with hunger and confusion, things with pools of red, things with skin gone pale, things with muscles lying motionless against cold cement and things with eyes open and staring… He imagined these horrible things like it was beyond his control. It was crazy to him how twenty four hours could change someone, how twenty four hours could turn innocence into cynicism and hope into dread. And sometimes, just sometimes, when he blinked, he saw her lying still and cold instead of running down those stairs with tears in her eyes.

He tried really, really hard not to blink.

Time crawled by, and this was regret.

At 2:57 his phone rang and he practically had a seizure, reaching forward to grab at it with lightening fast fingers and flipping it open so frantically he almost hung it back up. He pressed the phone to his ear and tried to remember what he should do next… Say hello, he reminded himself. Right.

“Hello?” he muttered, his voice cracked with a lack of sleep and the coolness of the phone a welcome relief against his stubbled cheek.

“Oh Jim, I just found out from Bob. Aren’t you just so relieved?” the voice on the other end drawled and his eyes searched frantically for some kind of clue as to what she meant by suggesting that he would be “relieved.”

“Who is this?” he asked, his tone harsher than he’d intended. He needed coffee…or food…or… Pam.

“It’s Phyllis,” she responded in a way that made him think that should’ve been obvious. “Jim, are you ok?” she asked loudly. He pulled the phone away from his ear in irritation and grimaced.

“I‘m fine, what do you mean, am I relieved?” he asked, his voice tight, his breathing shallow, and his mind suddenly free of pools of red and full of splashes of hope.

“Didn’t you hear? Oh dear, nobody called you,” she murmured and he found himself shifting restlessly in his seat, “They found everyone in a bomb shelter below the building. They’re all fine,” she announced, apparently unaware that Jim couldn’t care less about the Vance Refrigeration employees and only had one kidnap victim on his mind. He stood up and felt a little off balance since he’d been sitting for the entire morning and part of the afternoon.

“They found Pam?” he asked, not even thinking about what that might sound like to his coworker, not concerned at all with the way his one-track mind might look from the outside. Phyllis paused.

“Yes, Jim, they found everybody. Nobody was even injured or anything and they were all sent home,” she informed him.

“Thanks Phyllis,” he breathed, hanging up on her before she could continue to fill him in on the details. He shoved his phone into his pocket and grabbed his keys off the coffee table, and was halfway out the door before deciding that maybe he should shower. His shirt hit the hardwood of the hallway before he had even reached the bathroom.

He didn’t want to waste anymore time.

***

“Well it seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere, and the person who was just a friend is suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

- Dana Scully

***

Pam had talked to numerous people on the phone since she’d gotten home: her mother, her father, her sisters, Kelly, Phyllis, Toby… She’d told them all the same thing. Everything is fine. I’m ok. There’s nothing to worry about.

She’d told them all the same thing.

Everything was fine.

She was ok.

There was nothing to worry about.

And really it was true, except…just…she kept seeing these shadows of glinting knives and shaking handguns, hearing these echoes of panic and paranoia…Ask Pam…Pam knows me…

And it was strange, really, because before, she’d been honestly ok. When she’d had the FBI hovering over her and the metallic coldness of an ambulance beneath her she’d been herself, calm, cool. When she’d had the barrel of a gun aimed at her forehead she’d been able to keep herself together and she’d been fine. She’d survived. Now it was just…

She could see the filth of the fifty year old bomb shelter on her clothes and she could smell the sweat of Michael Hanover in the air around her.

Pam needed to clean up.

She stared dazedly at her apartment with her hands on her hips and wondered when the last time was that she dusted…when the last time was that she vacuumed or mopped or scrubbed hard at the bathtub until her forearms hurt with the strain. She felt like the whole place was covered in filth. She needed to clean…to be clean…

…Ask Pam,…Pam knows me…

She picked up a bottle of 409 and a roll of paper towels and started in the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She scrubbed at the counters and the sink, cleaned the shelves of the refrigerator and the inside of the garbage can, emptied the cupboards of anything with an expiration date that seemed to be close-by and then scrubbed beneath all the boxes and spices before replacing about half of them and throwing the rest away. She mopped the floor and she wiped the windows down until she could see a reflection of herself that didn’t look streaked…dirty…unclean.

…Ask Pam…

She moved into the living room with a bottle of Pledge and her vacuum cleaner, attacking the coffee table and book shelves, the carpet, the television, and the sofa cushions. She emptied the room of all of her art supplies and disassembled the display of fruit and flowers she’d been using as a still life, storing everything in a closet by the front door and hoping her paints wouldn’t tip and spill across the blank canvases she had leaning against the coats. She cleaned the keyboard of her computer with a q-tip and she cleaned the blinds with a damp paper towel. She kept moving and she kept scrubbing because she was sure the knot in her stomach was because of the grime…the dirt…the way that everything was so stuffy and stale.

She was sure that was what it was.

Because everything was fine.

She was ok.

There was nothing to worry about.

She sniffed and brushed an errant lock of hair from her forehead, ignoring the way that her knees were sore against the tile of her bathroom floor, ignoring the way that her forearms were cramping with the amount of force she was using on the slick surface of the bathtub, ignoring the way that the sick feeling inside of her was still there and she’d already cleaned the sink and the toilet and it hadn’t seemed to help at all. She pushed harder against the whiteness of the tub and licked her lips, and her arms went suddenly still when there was a knock at her door.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten because somewhere deep down she knew that she probably wasn’t emotionally sound enough to look anybody in the eye at the moment.

It was one thing to tell someone that everything was fine over the phone and make it sound convincing, it was something else entirely to give them visual evidence of that fact.

There was another knock and she sighed.

“It’s open,” she called out, shaking her shoulders out and returning to her cleaning, refusing to stop, because it wasn’t clean enough…

..Ask Pam…

It didn’t feel clean enough.

…Pam knows me…

She barely even heard the footsteps against the hallway floor and she only quirked her eyebrows, unsurprised at the called out Hello? that echoed against the walls of her living room. She recognized Jim’s voice and the sound of his walk instantly, but she kept cleaning and she didn’t respond because she wasn’t sure what to say to him…what she was supposed to say to him.

Somehow Everything’s fine, I’m ok, there’s nothing to worry about, didn’t seem right in this particular situation.

Finally the footsteps stopped right outside the bathroom door and she knew he was looking in at her with that confused expression he sometimes got. She could feel it.

“Pam?” he muttered, and she shoved the same strand of hair aside for the second time and glanced up at him, fast enough to keep from really having to look him in the eye.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, her arms still working at the floor of her tub. He shifted in the doorway and cleared his throat.

“I heard you got rescued,” he told her, and she thought maybe this would be okay if she kept staring down at tile and he kept staring down at the top of her head…maybe this would all go really smoothly if she didn’t have to look him in the eye.

She bit her cheek angrily because about an hour ago she hadn’t been anxious at all…and it was like something had gone horribly wrong once she’d pulled out of that Dunder Mifflin parking lot. It was like all of a sudden things had started to sink in and people had started to call her and she started to wonder what the hell she was going to do now and she just remembered so vividly the feeling of that knife against her neck and the whoosh of that bullet against her skin and she remembered so vividly the look of crazed desperation on the face of someone she thought she knew, and it was like…

Ask Pam.

She needed to clean up.

Pam knows me.

She scrubbed at the bathtub and nodded at nothing.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, chuckling softly because she knew it was what he wanted her to do.

“How are you?” he asked, and she could tell by his tone that he was concerned…confused…careful and full of a special kind of helplessness that someone only felt if they had almost lost someone else. She licked at her bottom lip and pushed the sponge in her hand a little bit harder, ignoring the way that the whiteness of the tub was kind of swimming in front of her and the way that her nose tickled a little bit.

“I’m, um…” she sniffed, “Everything’s, you know,” she attempted. He saved her from having to continue when he took a step into the bathroom and she shifted to stare at his white Sketchers, pointing at them. “Whoa, I just cleaned the floor in here,” she told him, “So…don’t um…you should take your shoes off.” She thought he was probably nodding but didn’t look up to check.

She heard him heave a sigh and watched out of the corner of her eye as he stepped back into the hallway and toed off his shoes. She went back to cleaning up dirt that wasn’t really there.

“Anyway,” he muttered as the silence stretched, “How are you?” he repeated deliberately, enunciating in a way that made her skin kind of crawl.

“Everything’s fine, and I’m ok,” she told him mechanically.

Silence stretched even further, extending its arms and spreading out its fingers.

“Why is this dirt not coming off of here?” she asked, her voice just barely light-hearted and her face down close to the porcelain beneath her. He shifted but was still eerily quiet. She sighed.

“Everything’s fine?” he asked, and she froze at the hard edge of annoyance she heard in his voice.

“Yeah,” she whispered, brushing her cheek against the shoulder of her shirt because she told herself she had an itch. Her shoulder came away damp.

“Really?” he asked, this time the annoyance evident and clear as day. She resumed scrubbing in defiance.

“Yes,” she answered emphatically and she could tell again that he was nodding at her, the bob of his head almost mocking in its swift severity.

“The tub is clean, Pam,” he told her, his voice dropping down low and throaty and his sock-clad feet inching toward her carefully. She blinked. She tried hard to blink and pull herself together, to blink and make the darkness of her thoughts go away, to blink and believe him. “It’s clean,” he said again. Then almost like an abandoned marionette, her arms went still and limp, hanging defeated over the edge of the bathtub as she sat back on her heels and let her head drop down between the arc of her shoulders. Her eyes slid closed because this was still a nightmare, and she thought once the bad guy went to jail the bad dream was supposed to be over…

Ask Pam, she remembered him saying. Pam knows me.

“Everything’s fine,” she gritted out through clenched teeth.

“You won’t even look at me,” he whispered and she blew out a long hiss of air, steadying herself, hardening herself and preparing the look of disinterest that she wanted to toss at him, preparing the speech in her head about how she’d just been through a lot and she didn’t want to discuss their relationship at the moment and she would see him Monday and thanks for the concern. She opened her eyes and blinked away the water that was still pooling there, and then she turned her head and looked him straight in the eye.

She blinked because he looked as bad as she felt, his hair damp across his forehead and his t-shirt hanging limply from his shoulders, the thin glaze of moisture in his eyes mirroring her own. And, god, the expression on his face was just…soft…warm…full of concern and worry and all of these things that were nothing like the indifferent walls of that bomb shelter or the cold tone of Trout’s voice, and she thought of the way that she’d kept wishing she could call Jim when she was trapped there…she thought of the way that her first thought when she was sure she might die was of Jim…she thought of how much fear had been inside of her then and how much fear was inside of her now and how all she wanted to do was purge herself of it…

She wanted to clean it out.

Ask Pam.

She bit down on the corner of her mouth and her brow furrowed because it didn’t matter how many times she told herself she was fine or how much soap she used against the tiles and the counter tops, she still had a bandage taped to her neck and she still remembered yesterday.

Her expression melted as she started to cry, and she covered her face with her free hand because she couldn’t look at him anymore, at the kindness of his face. He whispered her name and it only made her feel worse, cry harder, until finally, blessedly, she felt the warmth of his body sitting beside her on the bathroom floor and she felt the solidity of his arms wrapping themselves around her and her cheek was pressed against the softness of his cotton shirt. She cried quietly just as she always had and something about that was familiar and comforting…something about his arms around her was familiar and comforting and she sniffed, pulling her knees up closer to her chest and trying to be completely wrapped in him. He pressed his cheek to her hair and she smiled a water-logged kind of smile.

“I think I just lost it,” she assessed, her voice cracking a little with the tears still in her throat. He laughed.

“Yeah, well, I don’t blame you,” he whispered, his back leaning against the coolness of the side of the tub and his legs out straight in front of him, crossed at the ankles. They were quiet for some time after that as she let herself feel childish…let herself imagine that he could heal her and make her forget that she’d just had the strangest twenty four hours of her life. He rubbed her back and pushed hair off of her forehead like her mother had when she was young, and she let him do it. He promised her it would be ok and he pressed kisses against her temple like her father had when she was young, and she let him do it.

Finally, she reached up and dried off her cheeks, taking a deep breath but still refusing to move from the comfort of the spot she’d claimed in his embrace.

“So,” she began, her voice back to normal and her eyes on her unpainted fingernails, “How…um,” she cleared her throat, “How much of my conversation did you hear in that stairway?” she asked bluntly and he barked a laugh of surprise before clearing his throat in return and shrugging against her.

“Um…“ he responded uncomfortably, “I don’t really, uh…” he cleared his throat again and she started to nod, her messy bun bumping against his shoulder, “I wasn’t like trying to, you know, listen to what you um…”

“All of it?” she guessed.

“Yeah pretty much,” he admitted, and she sighed.

“Ok, well…” she felt her cheeks starting to flush slightly and was glad he couldn’t really see her, “That’s embarrassing.” He was silent against her and she thought it was probably because he wasn’t sure what he should say, how he should address all of the secrets he’d heard her utter and all of the things he knew about her now that he hadn’t known before. She licked her lips in discomfort. “Just, um…” she told him quietly, “for the record, or whatever?”

“Yeah?” he forced out in response and his voice sounded cloudy…stormy.

“I would never actually puke on your shoes,” she promised and he was quiet for a moment before he started to laugh and she was glad…she was pleased that she had broken the tension and that she had made light of something that wasn’t really light at all, because that was what she and Jim did. That was how they were so good, and that was what she had missed the night before, alone there with nobody to make her smile.

“You say that now,” he responded and she laughed and she thought maybe everything really would be ok.

“Can I say one other thing?” she asked quietly and he seemed to freeze, tensing a little bit but she guessed probably trying to still seem light-hearted… She thought he should’ve known by now that pretending with her was not worth the effort. She could always tell.

“Uh, yeah go for it,” he instructed, and she felt a little bit satisfied at the falsely-casual sound of his voice. She’d guessed right, he was feigning calmness. She licked her lips and shifted in his embrace, letting his nervousness linger a little longer than was really necessary before she actually spoke.

“If you wear that sweater to work again I’ll tell Dwight that you’re fascinated by whittling and you’d really like for him to teach you everything he knows,” she finally warned him flatly.

He pulled back, away from her, gripping her shoulders and positioning her so that he could look her in the eye, his expression twinkling with amusement and his smile spreading out like she could walk upon it. She raised her eyebrows at him playfully and he let out a quiet chuckle.

“Understood,” he agreed, but his gaze lingered and she felt her stomach flip with the way that he was looking at her…taking her in…taking the time to feel her beside him. He hadn’t done that in so long, and she thought maybe she was imagining it, conjuring it up, but she blinked and squinted slightly until she was certain it was real.

His eyes swept over her face and down across her shoulders, that stormy concern lingering in them and the disheveled look of him pulling a warm kind of smile to her face. At her change of expression he refocused and looked back to her eyes, his stare heavy with intention and unspoken confessions and she felt like she was back on the deck of a ship…back in a near-empty parking lot…back on the beach…

“Hi,” she whispered. He blinked slowly, dream-like.

“Hi,” he answered, his voice just as soft, his gaze still insistent, with no sign of the man who had been running from her for so many months. She licked her lips and his eyes strayed down to them, watching intently.

“You were gone for a while,” she told him, and he swallowed, blinking away what she thought might be moisture in his eyes.

“I know,” he agreed.

“Now you’re back,” she told him, soft, easy…pleased. He nodded.

“Yeah,” he told her, his head dipping down a little bit so that she had to actively control the rate of her breath. The heat of his skin fanned out against her cheek and she reached up to push a stray strand of hair away from his eyes. His breath caught in his throat when her fingers brushed against his forehead and she felt her cheeks get warm, so she went on because she wasn‘t sure what else to do.

“I’m, um,” she began, “I’m glad that you…”

And suddenly he had swept down and his mouth was pressed against hers hotly, deliberately, swallowing her words like maybe he was trying to feel her, to make sure she was really sitting there. He inhaled her and swept his tongue across her lips, he breathed her in and exhaled her name into her mouth. Her eyes slid closed and her arms snaked their way around his shoulders, her mouth moving beneath his and an audible whimper escaping her vocal cords as he clenched his fists against the cotton of her t-shirt. He clutched at her and she got the distinct impression that he wanted to make sure she existed…he wanted to make sure she was actually real.

She nipped at his lower lip to assure him that she was as solid as he was. To assure herself.

Because he was…totally…deliciously solid…

He pushed carefully against her until they were stretched out on the purple area rug that adorned her bathroom floor, and she thought for a moment that she hadn’t imagined this scenario when she’d purchased it, but actually the feel of it against her back was almost comfortable. She ran her hands down his back and around to the side of his waist, feeling the way his shirt played against his muscles and the way that his back and shoulders were broad and masculine but still somehow almost feline in their sweep and arc. Her fingers toyed with the seams of his jeans and he swept his tongue across hers in response to the way she was sure he could feel her touch burning against his hips. She hadn’t gotten a chance to feel him this way on Casino Night, and she wasn’t sure how exactly they‘d gotten to this point so fast, but she wanted to feel him…to feel this.

She dipped her tongue into his mouth, so that later she could say she had really and truly kissed him, and he groaned quietly, still clutching at the fabric of her shirt like he could work out his sexual frustration by pulling at cotton and polyester. She shifted so that her thigh was nestled securely in between both of his and she didn’t have time to worry much about the things he’d overheard in the stairway because he was hard against her and she could feel the way that what she did to him was real.

God, if she’d thought she was in love with him before…now, Jesus, now with his palm warm and creeping up against the skin of her stomach, now with his breath fanning hot and steamy against her ear, now with her name pouring out of his mouth like the gruff last words of a dying man… now she was beyond in love…now she was finished. She would never want anybody else because this was the reason she existed…this heat and this tightness in her stomach…this lump in her throat and this sigh in her mouth… the way that he held her like he’d been waiting to do it his entire life. His mouth worked its way around the line of her throat and she was arching against him, trying to get closer and trying to say things without using words when he froze and pulled away from her, his hand reaching up to hover shakily over her throat.

“What?” she whispered, and he visibly swallowed.

“You got hurt,” he told her, his eyes still glazed over with lust even as his brow furrowed with worry. She shook her head and reached up to grip his fingers, smoothing them across the bandage at her neck as if to prove to him that it was ok.

“Not really,” she promised, “It’s just a little cut. Scully said it‘ll be gone by the day after tomorrow.” His gaze met hers and she was again reminded of the intensity nestled into his eyes, the way he looked at her hungrily and desperately and how she‘d been deprived that look for so long…how he‘d been so cold to her before and now finally it was like she recognized him again. He licked his lips.

“I’m really sorry,” he forced out, and she wasn’t sure what exactly he was apologizing for, but whatever it was she didn’t think it mattered anymore. She brushed the hair off of his forehead again because she liked the way it felt, and she shook her head at him carefully, trying to quiet the haunted look in his eye.

“Don’t,” she murmured. He dipped his forehead low so that it rested against hers and he sighed. He paused for a moment, quiet lingering in the air until he inhaled audibly.

“Did you just say ‘Scully?’” he asked, and Pam felt herself frown.

“What?”

“You said… ‘Scully said it’ll be gone by the day after tomorrow,’” he repeated and she frowned a little further.

“Yeah? So?” she wondered. He started to laugh quietly and she jerked her head away from him. “What?” she asked, a smile creeping onto her face even though she wasn’t sure what was funny.

“This is like Starsky and Hutch now or something?” he wondered, “Last names only?” She rolled her eyes and playfully smacked his shoulder, ignoring the way that she sort of was belatedly realizing how odd just calling the FBI agent ‘Scully’ might sound.

“Shut up,” she ordered, but she laughed despite herself. He bent down and pressed a kiss against her smiling lips and the expression on his face after he’d done it made her smile even wider. He looked shocked…bewildered that he was able to just lean down and kiss her because he felt like it…because somehow he thought she was beautiful and he thought she was funny and she thought he was, too. And that was good…they were good, Pam and Jim. She was certain they were good.

Suddenly, though, she gasped and sat up, pushing him off of her and running a hand through her hair in exasperation.

“Oh God,” she exclaimed. He looked at her worriedly and leaned back against the tub.

“What?” he wondered.

“Scully!” she tossed out as explanation, standing and rushing out of the bathroom on her sock-clad feet, sliding a bit into the kitchen and yanking open the fridge in a blind panic.

“What are you…” she heard him ask from the doorway and she turned to face him abruptly.

“'Starsky and Hutch' are coming over in like an hour for a home-cooked meal, and I have, basically…nothing to feed them,” she told him, her brow furrowed and her body still leaning half in the refrigerator like she could magically will it to have food inside. He quirked his eyebrows at her and pointed at the floor beneath them.

“David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson are coming here? Are they even real people?” he asked and she sighed in irritation, letting the fridge door swing closed and pushing past him in feigned annoyance.

“I need to change my clothes,” she announced. “Put on your shoes, we’re going to the store.”

Mulder sometimes wondered if he was damaging his brain with the amount of time he spent on his cell phone. He would have it pressed to his ear and it would get warm and uncomfortable and after about twenty five minutes he would think to himself: This is probably unhealthy.

And yet, here he was, the phone against his ear and his brow furrowed in concentration, focused sort of mock intently on the far-away-seeming voice of his superior who was relaying information on a new case in that special way that always made Mulder feel like a small scolded child. The government’s work is never done, he thought sardonically. Scully tilted her head at him in impatience and shifted against the wall she was leaning on in the hallway of Pam Beesly’s apartment building. She checked her watch in an unsubtle attempt at speeding him along. He held a finger up and mouthed the words “Hold on,” which only made her more irritated.

“They’re expecting your arrival by noon tomorrow.”

Mulder grimaced in Scully‘s general direction and cleared his throat, not bothering to shield his mouth from the reciever.

“Yeah, uh, sir we won’t be able to be there at that um…that soon,” he mumbled, shifting on his feet and pursing his lips in anticipation of the Assistant Director’s anger.

“I was under the impression that the Scranton case was wrapped up, Agent Mulder,” the Assistant Director responded, his voice sharp and irritated. Mulder nodded.

“Almost, sir, almost. We just have some, um, some interviews to finish up and some, uh, technical type of technicalities to kind of…work out…so, it might take us a day or so. Because of the technicalities,” he finished, grimacing again. Kersh sighed.

“Agent Mulder,” he spat.

“Yes, sir?”

“Once you’ve wrapped up these so called ‘technicalities’ I would expect you to be on a plane to North Carolina as soon as humanly possible. No stops. No stalls. No X-Files,” he barked, and Mulder glanced at Scully and rolled his eyes. “Am I understood, Agent?”

“I think you’ve made yourself pretty clear, yeah.” The response was dry and half-hearted, and Mulder almost cracked a smile as Scully’s eyes narrowed at him in warning.

“That’s all,” Kersh informed him before abruptly ending the call. Mulder closed his cell with a sigh, slipping it into his pants pocket and approaching Pam’s door. He was raising his hand to knock when Scully’s voice interrupted him.

“Mulder?” she questioned. He paused and turned to her.

“Yeah?” His face dripped of feigned innocence and he watched, somewhat amused, as her cheeks turned red in annoyance.

“What did Kersh want, Mulder?”

“Oh! Um, he wants us to giddy-yap down to North Carolina to investigate the case of the stolen manure, but I told him we were kind of busy here wrapping up this…actual…case,” he told her, his voice laced with a combination of disdain and amusement. She, however, was mostly just full of disdain…he could tell by the scowl on her face.

“We’ve already wrapped this case up, Mulder, why would you tell him that?” He turned toward her and let his head dip down in an obvious kind of challenge.

“You really want to go investigate stolen manure?” he asked her, and she sighed, shifting on her feet and planting her hands on her hips in defeat.

“No,”

“Ok then,” he responded victoriously, “enjoy your vacation and don’t complain.” He lifted his hand and, decisively, he knocked.

***

Pam’s kitchen was small and warmly lit and Scully stood beside her casually, arms crossed and cool blue eyes fixed on the barbequed chicken Pam was preparing. She thought back to a time when she used to cook things like barbequed chicken, or beef tips and egg noodles, or pork chops and homemade applesauce, back when she was in medical school and had casual friendships and casual dinner parties and a book full of her mother’s old recipes. She wondered if those friends ever thought of her and where she’d ended up. She wondered if she still had that book somewhere…

“Please give me something to do,” she murmured dryly, “Uselessness makes me irritable, and I’m really trying to keep up my professional façade, here.” Scully crossed one ankle over the other and grinned, picking up a wooden spoon and tapping it on the counter lightly. Pam glanced over at her and chuckled, rinsing off her barbeque-covered hands in warm water.

“Don’t keep up your professional façade,” Pam instructed warmly, “I’m dying for some normal company, cause in case you didn’t notice, I don’t really have a lot of girlfriends at work.” Scully chuckled once and raised her eyebrows.

“I wonder why,” she offered, and Pam laughed, handing her a head of lettuce and a cutting board which Scully took gratefully. “Why do you work at Dunder Mifflin? If you don’t mind my asking.” Her fingers worked at the lettuce, choosing to rip it apart instead of using a knife to chop it. Pam sighed.

“It’s hard to explain,” Pam confessed, and Scully‘s brow furrowed in concentration and honest interest, “but I think it’s because I, um…” Pam shook her head down at the chicken in her hands and shrugged, “I guess because it’s home. To me.” Pam looked up and the honesty nestled into her eyes made Scully smile softly at her in understanding. “What about you?” she wondered, “Why are you with the FBI?”

“Oh,” Scully sighed, dropping the ripped lettuce into a bowl, “Why am I with the FBI, uh…I think it’s because there’s something…” she paused and tilted her head at the counter top, considering it, wondering what her honest answer really was. Finally she raised her head and met Pam’s gaze with a resigned one of her own. “I think I stay with the FBI because it’s home,” she confessed, a tiny lilt of a chuckle laced in her words and Pam’s eyes lit up in humor. “To me,” Scully clarified warmly and Pam nodded, sliding the chicken into the oven and setting the timer.

“I know what you mean,” she promised, standing up and leaning against the cupboards beside the oven and crossing her arms in consideration. Scully began to cut a tomato into quarters and lifted a shoulder loosely.

“Plus,” she admitted, “Mulder isn’t exactly hard to look at,” she murmured quietly and grinned when Pam’s mouth dropped open in shocked accusation, laughter pouring from her mouth easily, girlishly, and Scully couldn’t help but laugh too. Her jeans were soft against her hips and the green cardigan she was wearing felt comfortably warm against her shoulders and she was glad she’d thought to pack some tennis shoes, even though they squeaked against the tile floor of Pam’s kitchen. Everything about her felt better than before…easier. She felt relaxed and she wasn’t sure if it was because of the decisions she’d made in the bomb shelter or if it was the company. She thought maybe it was a little bit of both.

“I have been thinking that all week,” Pam admitted through her laughter and it only made Scully laugh harder, tossing the tomatoes into the salad and leaning forward conspiratorially.

“Sometimes he wears these turtlenecks, Pam, and I am telling you,” Pam shook her head, smiling, and Scully wondered if this was how Pam was with her sisters. She thought probably. “I swear he was a useless professor in a past life,” Scully told her in a whisper, and Pam laughed again.

“You should buy him one of those jackets, you know, with the patches on the elbows,” she suggested and Scully couldn’t help the way that she threw her head back and laughed. “And wire framed glasses,” Pam added.

Suddenly Scully’s laughter was stolen from her lungs at the feeling of a very familiar hand against the small of her back, and her breath came out in a gush as she glanced over her shoulder at Mulder’s confused grin. His hand was hot against her and Scully wondered if it would burn a hole right through her sweater with the way that it was searing against her flesh. She looked away from him and met Pam’s surprised stare with a panicked one of her own.

“What’s going on in here?” Mulder wondered, reaching around Scully to grab the bottle opener from the edge of the counter, and she swallowed visibly, feeling the warmth of his body as it brushed up against hers.

There was a twinkle in his eye that told her he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Just a little female-bonding,” Pam answered casually, crossing her arms across her chest and smiling innocently. Mulder hummed and bent down low to Scully’s ear.

“Scully, you’re so short,” he whispered, “Nice sneakers.” His voice vibrated low and delicious against the bones of her ear and she licked her lips, her face draped in a look of warm irritation as he breezed back out of the kitchen, bottle opener in hand. She inhaled audibly and looked at Pam in desperation.

“I’m gonna kill him,” she admitted and Pam laughed, stepping to the fridge and handing Scully a bottle of Italian dressing.

“Or throw him down on the nearest flat surface,” Pam muttered, and Scully rolled her eyes and nodded in concession.

“Yeah, or that. You don’t want me to put this on here yet, do you?” she asked, gesturing with the bottle toward the salad. Pam shook her head.

“No, I guess wait until the chicken is done,” she instructed and Scully pursed her lips in acquiescence.

“Right,” she murmured in response, offering up one last chuckle at herself and setting the dressing down. “Right. So, tell me,” she prompted, “What…is Jim doing here?” Pam looked over at her and tilted her head, her eyebrows raised in discomfort and Scully felt the grin reappear on her face.

“Um,” Pam stuttered, “Let’s go back to talking about Mulder…” she suggested and Scully shook her head and thought that this feeling was definitely the company. Most definitely.

Mulder handed the bottle opener to Jim and glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, feeling a smile tug at his lips at the lingering sound of Scully’s laughter. Maybe, he thought, she’d finally admit that these small town cases weren’t actually so bad.

“Thanks, man,” Jim offered, popping open two Corona’s and handing one to Mulder, who just nodded and sat down in an armchair facing the television as Jim sat down on the sofa. They sat in silence for a while watching ESPN and Mulder found himself still listening to the sound of laughter in the kitchen and thinking of the way Scully was dressed so casually…how she seemed so comfortable and almost…god he hated to think it for fear of jinxing them, but she seemed almost happy. “The Mets look pretty good this year.” Jim interrupted his thoughts and Mulder turned to him and shrugged.

“Yeah I don’t know, I’m a pretty die-hard Yankee fan, so I guess it’s kind of against my religion to compliment the Mets,” he joked and Jim laughed quietly.

“Oh yeah it is, sorry about that,” he offered and Mulder waved a hand in dismissal.

“No, it’s ok, I don’t really follow it like I used to,” he admitted, part of him acknowledging that he wished he could follow baseball like a normal guy. He wished, sometimes, that he could come home from work in time to stretch out on a sofa and watch a 7 o’clock game and just be…normal. He thought this was the first time he’d wanted to be normal like Scully wanted to be normal and he wondered if that was because she was in the other room looking so…just…

He sighed and took a gulp of his beer.

Well, he thought dryly, if Scully didn’t want to talk about their relationship while they were agents and in panic mode and injured, then… Ok so he was technically still injured, but what better time to talk than when she was dressed like a Kennedy on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, and he was sitting on a rose colored sofa drinking Corona and watching the game. How much more normal could you get, he wondered?

“Who’s your favorite Yankee?” Jim asked, his eyes on the television and his voice half-hearted and exhausted sounding. Mulder glanced over his shoulder at the sound of footsteps squeaking against tile and he caught sight of Scully ducking out of the kitchen. She glanced at him and raised her eyebrows as she made her way down the hall to the bathroom and he raised his eyebrows at her back in response.

“Matsui,” he answered distractedly, and Jim nodded, seeming equally distracted, his stare glazed over and the bottle of beer hanging practically unnoticed in front of his mouth. Mulder scratched nervously at his collar and stood up, ignoring the dull ache in his shoulder as he did so. “I’ll be, um…” he gestured toward the hallway, but found he couldn’t really offer any kind of solid destination and just waved in dismissal. “I’ll be right back,” he promised. Jim just nodded and sipped at his beer.

Mulder headed down the hallway, avoiding skillfully the curious eyes of Pam, who was watching him from the kitchen. He set his beer down on a table against the wall and lingered indecisively outside the bathroom door, his lips pursed in thought and his hands perched nervously against his hips. He listened to the sound of the water running and imagined Scully washing her hands in that doctorly-thorough kind of way that she had, and a smile pulled at the side of his mouth. It was still lingering there when the door opened and Scully stopped short in surprise.

“Mulder?” she questioned, glancing down the hall past him in concern, wondering what she’d missed while she was in the bathroom. He squinted at her and nodded and she pursed her lips at him as if to say What?, but she didn’t have a chance to get the words out because his hand was reaching out to grab her forearm and he had her turned around and back in the bathroom with the door closed before she’d even realized what was going on. “Mulder, what are you…” she began.

“Can we talk for just a…” He paused, fiddling with the door handle before realizing that there wasn’t any way to lock it. “There’s no lock on this door,” he mumbled, and Scully sighed.

“Yeah I know, I was trying to, earlier…but, um…”

“Ok well, screw it,” he muttered almost to himself, and once again Scully seemed on the verge of asking him to explain himself, but she didn't get a chance because he reached down and wrapped his arms around her, ignoring again the way that his shoulder stung because of it.  He bent toward her and pressed his mouth against hers because it was all he could think about doing…it was all he’d wanted to do since that morning in his motel room, and all he’d wanted to do since she stepped out of her motel room that night looking so warm and so real. He inhaled the smell of her and swept his tongue against her lips gently and she sighed into him, reaching up and running a hand through his hair.

Turning them around, he backed her up solidly against the door and pushed his fingers against the cashmere fabric at her waist, his hands big and hot against her. God, he thought he would die from wanting her this way.

“Oh my God,” he breathed, unable to keep his thoughts to himself, “You’re killing me,” he told her earnestly, his tongue brushing against the porcelain of her throat. She hummed in response and he couldn’t tell if it was a hum of indulgence or agreement, so he pulled away from her, because no matter how much he wanted to just tear her clothes right off of her, this was Scully and he was never sure what she was thinking. Enigmatic was an understatement. She looked up at him with damp-looking eyes and raised an eyebrow at his full bottom lip. He grinned down at her.

“This isn’t really talking, Mulder,” she informed him, and he nodded at her, humming like she had because mimicking her almost always drove her crazy and he knew it. She popped out a hip beneath his hands and tipped her head to the side and he tried to keep himself from laughing in satisfaction but was unsuccessful. She smacked his forearm as laughter poured out of his mouth and he leaned his forehead against the door above her head, catching his breath, or at least trying to, as she leaned her forehead against his chest. The laughter died down slowly and their breathing was the only thing audible in the room, and he felt like his body was heaving with it, buzzing with the energy of his attraction to her and he bent down again to press a kiss against her ear, her eyes sliding closed in something like defeat as she sighed out his name.

“You know I’m in love with you, right?” he asked quietly and she sucked in a heavy lungful of air, her fingers tightening around his arm.  The quiet was like a blanket around them, and he closed his eyes to really feel the way her fingers were tripping along the skin of his arm...the way that she was tiny in front of him...the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath, until finally, gloriously, she spoke.

“Yeah,” she admitted, sounding like tears might be caught somewhere in her throat, which he related to because he thought maybe he wanted to cry from just the relief of saying he loved her out loud. “Yeah, I know,” she promised, reaching up to smooth her fingers against his cheek affectionately. He chuckled and reached underneath her, scooping her up underneath the seat of her jeans and swinging her around to set her on top of the sink counter. She wasn’t the type of woman to squeal in surprise, so instead she cleared her throat demurely, and the sound of it made him smile at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. He knocked over some bottles of hairspray and a blow dryer as he set her down and she grimaced at the noise it made, shushing him impatiently and glancing at the door behind him.

“I didn’t realize you owned such casual clothes, Scully, where did you have these hiding?” he asked her teasingly, beginning to unbutton her sweater with slow and deliberate fingers. A blush crept up her neck and she narrowed her eyes at him devilishly.

“Well if I had known that this would be your reaction I would have pulled this sweater out of the closet years ago,” she confessed, watching him intently as he pushed the sweater off of her shoulders.

“God help me, but you do look...uh," he cleared his throat and she smiled, "damn good in a cardigan,” he told her, the words sloppy and soft against the skin of her neck and he pulled her forward on the counter, sending more bottles toppling into the cavity of the sink, pressing himself against her hungrily and she chuckled deep and low, and it made him practically start to sweat in anticipation.

“I’m not wearing a cardigan anymore, Mulder,” she corrected him, reaching down to tug at the bottom of his t-shirt, and he met her dark, hooded stare with one of his own, licking at his bottom lip and squinting at her in assessment. He watched her blush creep up from her neck to her cheeks and felt victorious.

“And thank God for that,” he whispered before he braced himself with a hand against the mirror so that he could more completely press his lips against hers and feel the softness of her skin, his free hand lingering like a promise against the small of her back.

***

Pam froze from handing Jim a stack of plates at the sound of clattering bottles in the bathroom, and he looked up at her with wide eyes and a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on his face. She pressed a finger against her lips and shushed him, trying desperately to keep herself from making any noise either and he silently put the plates down on her dining room table.

“Are they,” he began in a whisper, “doing what I think they’re doing?” Pam covered her mouth to hide her laughter and bent forward in childish embarrassment to lean her head against Jim’s shoulder. He rubbed her back and chuckled affectionately, rolling his eyes. “You’re such a dork,” he told her, his voice gentle and calm. She pulled back and looked him in the eye playfully.

“What is it with that bathroom today? It must be doused in pheromones or something.”  She watched as he grinned down at her and felt so comfortable with his arms around her that she thought she'd never want to move from this spot.  She chuckled up at him and handed him the potholder she’d been holding. “Relax, Halpert,” she instructed, “and go get the chicken out of the oven.”