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“It means . . .”
Mulder knows what he thinks it means. He could expound on it until his face turns blue. But one look at his partner’s face and the words die on his lips.
“It means whatever you want it to mean.” It’s not what he wants to say, and it’s not really what she wants to hear, either. A feeble compromise, satisfying no one. Wishing he could offer her something more but unsure what that something more should be, he settles on a soft “Goodnight” and then turns away.
He makes it to the other side of the room before his dissatisfaction overpowers his forward motion. He stops, looks back. She hasn’t moved: still sitting at Willis’s desk, still studying that stopped watch like it holds the answers to all her questions. Mulder feels himself walking back in her direction before he’s made the conscious decision to do so, as though he’s stumbling down a steep downhill slope, gravity tugging at his feet.
He stops in front of her and she looks up at him, eyes glassy, seemingly too wrapped up in her thoughts to question his reappearance. For a moment, Mulder can’t think of anything to say. Usually Scully stalks through the world with a sharp confidence that belies her age and relative inexperience, but sometimes she looks so young that it physically hurts him.
“Hey, uh . . .” He tips his head toward the box on Willis’s desk. “Why don’t you leave that till tomorrow? You look like you could use a drink.”
A hint of a smile warms her expression. “Is that a suggestion or an invitation?”
“It’s both.” He picks up her coat, folded neatly on the corner of the desk, and holds it up for her to step into. “Come on, I’m buying.”
~
He walks them a few extra blocks to a place he goes when he wants to be alone, where he knows they won’t run into anyone from the Bureau. They sit at the bar, side by side in the far corner. Mulder orders a beer, and Scully does too. He didn’t peg her for a beer drinker, and he tells her so. She gives him a look not unlike the one she gave him in the staircase at UMD when she told him she used to date Willis: uncertainty painted over with a veneer of false confidence. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Mulder.”
“So I’m learning.”
They lapse into silence, and Mulder lapses into second-guessing himself. Maybe she doesn’t want to be here; maybe she wants to be alone. She’s not doing or saying anything in particular to make him think that, but he’s not yet confident in his ability to read her. He’s not sure he ever will be. Hell, in the whirlwind that was the manhunt and the kidnapping and the deaths of two men in whatever order they occurred, he’s barely had a chance to process the fact that Scully used to fuck her Academy instructor. This piece of knowledge is like a misplaced puzzle piece; it doesn’t fit the incomplete picture of her that he’s been building in his mind over the past few months. He tries not to profile her, but sometimes he can’t help himself. Scully is the only person who’s ever made Mulder wonder if he isn’t as good a profiler as he thinks he is.
Jack Willis, for fuck’s sake. Just the thought of it makes Mulder feel a queasy mix of agitated and titillated.
“Mulder, you’ve got that look on your face.”
He visibly jumps as Scully’s voice breaks into his thoughts. A little embarrassing, but mostly he feels guilty that he all but forgot she was sitting next to him while he was thinking about her so intently.
It takes a moment for her words to catch up with him. “What look?” he asks.
“That look you get when we’re on a case and you’re about to come out with some intricate, deeply thought-out, and completely absurd theory.” She takes a sip of her beer. “We’re not on a case, though.” She meets his eyes. “You’re not still thinking about Jack, are you?”
Mulder flushes red in the second before he realizes that she must be talking about Willis’s possession and not the fact that she used to fuck him. Even then, he can’t seem to figure out how to answer her question. Luckily, she seems to take his silence as confirmation that she’s guessed correctly.
“Look, Mulder, I know you and I have . . . differing opinions on what happened. To be honest, I’m still not sure what to think.” She shakes her head, massages her temple with her fingers. “I know that Jack somehow knew things about Dupre that he couldn’t have possibly known, even after years working on the case. I heard him say things to Lula that . . . that only Dupre should have known. And I don’t know how to explain that. But . . .” She pauses, picking at the edge of the beer label. “Jack was still there. I know he was. Especially toward the end. The way he talked to me . . .” She bites her lip. “It was him. I just knew it.”
She’s looking down while she speaks, at the bar and the bottle and her hands’ nervous movements, allowing Mulder to watch her openly. She really does have an exquisite profile, and every time she says the name Jack he feels like a dull knife is twisting in his stomach, and maybe that’s why he says what he says next.
“What did you see in him?” It slips out before Mulder can stop himself, and he wishes he were far enough into his beer to blame his poor judgment on the alcohol, because it’s an inappropriate question and he knows it. Especially the way his voice sounded asking it—like a protective older brother, or something else he can’t bring himself to think about. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that Willis is dead.
Her expression briefly freezes in surprise, then thaws slightly, a small smile tugging at her lips. “Is that what you were thinking about?”
Mulder takes a swig of his beer, silently pleading the fifth.
“Mulder . . .” She looks down at her hands, and she’s still smiling a bit, but it’s a nervous smile, or at least Mulder thinks it might be, and so he jumps in before she can say whatever she was going to say next.
“Forget it, Scully. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . .”
Shouldn’t have doesn’t begin to cover it. He shouldn’t even be thinking a question like that. Mulder drums his fingers on the bar. He hasn’t smoked in years but suddenly he’s craving a cigarette. He was never wild about the taste, but he misses having something to do with his hands.
“He was confident, I suppose.” Mulder turns at the sound of Scully’s voice, which he wasn’t expecting to hear any time soon. It takes him another moment to catch up to the fact that she’s answering his question. “He knew who he was.”
She’s staring in the direction of the bottles lined up behind the bar, but her eyes are unfocused, like she’s somewhere else. And then suddenly she’s here again, looking at him with an expression that he can’t quite put his finger on but that prompts a slew of other inappropriate questions to materialize in his mind and bounce around as though trying to get out. Am I confident, Scully? Do I know who I am?
He breaks eye contact first, and it feels like he’s lost a game. While he attempts to recover himself, he lets his brain play free association until it connects something in the far corner of the room with something Scully said the other day.
He nudges her with his shoulder and nods his head toward the corner. “Look, Scully. Pool table.”
She glances over at it, looks back at him, and smiles.
They each order a new beer before they head over. Scully sheds her suit jacket and Mulder tries not to stare at the way her white t-shirt stretches over her hips and back as she reaches out to select a cue. Maybe he’ll kick her ass at pool and then he’ll feel better. If she kicks his ass he might have to take the rest of the week off to recover.