“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.”