Driving the Wedge

by Emily Short

Mulder looks so tired.  He's sitting down, his hands flat on his knees; his eyes are dull.  I wish I could reach across to him, but I know that we're being watched on the video camera --and there are certain things that Diana Fowley doesn't need toget an eyeful of.

"The video is on," I say softly, "but the audio's off.  Skinner thought that this might not be a conversation that the doctor needed to hear."

Now he looks me in the eye, for the first time since I came in.  Something weird happens then, and I blush for no reason.  I no longer feel alone in my own head.  But I maintain eye contact.  Gradually he grins -- a real, genuine grin -- and his whole posture relaxes.  In fact, despite the hospital gown, he looks better, more sane, more happy than I've seen him in weeks.

"That's because you're here," he replies matter of factly.

It's my turn to tense.  "Shit, Mulder," I say, very softly.

There's a long silence.  I had a whole speech planned for this moment.  It was about how the alien mechanism (whatever it is) had triggered alien DNA in Mulder's brain, waking abilities that are apparently latent in all of us, letting him read minds.  But why say that?  Why open my mouth at all?

Mulder pinches the place between his eyes, then gets up from the plastic chair they gave him for the interview.  "C'mere," he says, nodding with his head towards the corner where the video camera is.  I'm bewildered until I see what he's getting at.  If we both sit directly under the camera, we'll be entirely out of the field of view.

He sits down as gracefully as someone can who is wearing such an essentially immodest garment.  I slide down the wall a little more slowly, not sure that what I want right now is physical proximity to my disturbingly aware partner.

Still, there we are, sitting shoulder to shoulder.  "I hope the floor is clean," I remark.  "I just got this suit back from the cleaners."

There's another long silence.

"Look, Scully, I know this isn't easy for you.  But how bad can it be?  We could practically read each other's minds before this happened."

I bite my lip.  Not all the time, Mulder.  Sometimes you really, really failed in that department.

He just looks at me.  I get the point.  He has stopped responding to my thoughts.  He's waiting for me to SAY something, so that this can be an ordinary conversation and I'll at least have the illusion of some kind of privacy.

"I'll try not to think anything too incriminating," I say, in a subdued voice.  Though of course just by saying it I bring to mind flickers of the things I'd rather he didn't pick up on: jealousy of Diana, for instance.

He reaches down and takes my hand.  "Get better reception that way?" I ask sharply.

"No."  He lets go, closes his eyes; suddenly I realize how exhausted he is and how much of a toll this has taken on him, and I remember to think about something other than how much his transformation has terrified me.

It's probably terrified him, too.

"How do you feel?" I ask.

"Physically?"  He laughs harshly.  "I feel like shit.  They keep punching holes in my arm to give me different drugs; my head still hurts anyway but now I feel kind of dizzy too."

"And -- otherwise?"

"It's disturbing."

"I would think you'd be happy.  No one can pull anything over on you ever again.  No more attempts to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate."

He laughs, a little broken laugh.  "Yeah -- because I'm going to be spending the rest of my life in here."

"You're not as far gone as the time you drilled holes in your head and started having flashbacks.  Or the time you were obsessed with the killer who sculpted gargoyles.  Or…"

"I get the point."  He heaves a huge sigh.  "But I'm not outside now.  I'm in here, and there's only you."

Something about his phrasing of that both touches and wounds me, but I say nothing.

"I was with Diana when it got really bad," he says slowly.  "Before her -- most of what I could pick up was fuzzy, staticky, vague.  People don't think in complete sentences.  Most people's minds are foreign, unfamiliar territory."

"And hers wasn't."

"Hers wasn't," he affirms.  "You can't spend hundreds of hours with someone, investigating subjects that the rest of the world would dismiss, without coming to a certain level of mutual understanding."

My mouth turns down at the corner.  I say nothing.

"So I could read her better," he goes on, almost thoughtfully.  "The whole nasty twisted inner monologue  about how even though she cares about me, she feels no real compunction about betraying us both."

"Ah."

"She called someone, after you called me.  When she got back it was all over her."  This isn't a big surprise to me: I've never trusted her, perhaps because I've never wanted to trust her.  I've always wanted her to be one of the bad guys.  But for Mulder-- yes, I could see how it would be.  I have a few people in my past that I'd like to continue to believe well of, even if I don't love them any more.  I'd like to think that if I ever went back --

Suddenly I remember that he's probably getting all of this.  I concentrate on envisioning the fall of snow outside my apartment in Georgetown, the most meaningless thought I can come up with.

"Is that when you became violent?" I ask.

"She's not dead, is she?" he asks dryly.  "I didn't become as violent as I wanted to.  My bedroom is a little the worse for wear.  I threw a few things and I yelled at her a lot.  It wasn't very coherent.  I would have liked to strangle her.  But I didn't.  Despite my self-restraint, she called the men in white coats.  And here I am."

"Where does this leave us? Can I get you out of here?"

"I don't know."  He sighs.  "I don't think so.  Even if they'd let me out, I'm not sure I could take it out there."

"Headache?"

"More than the headache.  It's like -- living inside the thoughts and experiences of everyone around you.  Having their choices become yours.  When Diana came into the room, part of me became the person who had betrayed her ex-husband…"

I flinch.  That one comes like a slap in the face.  The Gunmen said "chickadee".  They did not say "wife".

"It was a very short marriage a very long time ago," Mulder says, interrupting himself to answer my thought.  "I would have told you about it if it would have helped anything."

If he hadn't known that it would make me behave even more irrationally towards her, he means.

He goes back to his earlier train of thought: "Of everyone I know, you're the only one I could stand to be."

A couple of beats pass.  Scully is not looking at me; she is frowning.  She is thinking about whether or not what I just said is a compliment.  I want to tell her that it is: that I would rather be her than be myself.  That I have never appreciated her clean, linear thinking so much as I do now, or her trustworthiness, or her inherent integrity.  Just having her outlook on the world accessible to me like this begins to erase the horrible, nauseating loathing that I've felt during the last few days, towards myself and all the people who are willing to lie to me.

But she's not ready to hear that.  She doesn't want to be reminded that I can hear her think.  It bothers the hell out of her, as I knew that it would: here I am, stampeding across her precious personal boundaries.  This is all backwards.  She should be the one reading minds: I wouldn't mind so much if she could read me.  She more or less already can.  It'd be a struggle trying to keep my thoughts G-rated, but ultimately, I don't mind being vulnerable to Scully.  She's never let me down.  My weakness only shows up her strength.

"Why you?" she asks suddenly -- evidently following a similar line of logic, though I wasn't paying attention.  "Why are you the one and only person to respond to this thing?  Why hasn't it 'activated' me, or any of the other people who have come in contact with it?"

"I don't know.  Maybe I'm unusually sensitive."

She snorts.  Then she sighs.  "Mulder -- this is going to be awkward.  If I can't have privacy in my own skull I'm going to go crazy."

"I wish I could tell you that there was some sort of trick to it, like that I can't read minds through lead."

"Yeah, I can just see coming in here with a lead bonnet.  I'd set a whole new fashion trend."

I smile back, more than the remark demands -- mostly because she has spoken her thought aloud as soon as it came into existence, and it feels natural and right.

Then she gently pulls away from me and stands up.  "I've got to go now, Mulder.  I've got to think -- by myself.  I'm sorry.  But I'll be back when I've figured something out."

I watch her back as she goes towards the door.  No, Scully, I need you.  Please stay.

But she can't hear me.

I stand for a long time, watching her sit on that bench in the middle of the Mall.  I've come to respect her as much as I do her partner, and to feel almost the same mixture of affection and affinity.  We're all in the same game; they're the ones who've managed to keep their hands clean.  And there's a part of me that wishes I could join that shining coalition -- self-righteous, naive, and embittered as they are.

But I can't.  There's no room in that dyad for a third.  Still, sometimes we serve each others' purposes.

Her eyes are wary when she sees me.  "What do you want, Krycek?" she asks.

"I hear Agent Mulder has a problem."

Her mouth tightens.  "Do you have a solution?"

"May I sit down?"  I take the seat next to her without waiting for an answer.  My proximity obviously makes her nervous.  Which amuses me; I like feeling dangerous, even to a trained and armed -- and two-armed -- FBI agent.  Her eyes are drilling into me.  Finally I say, "I don't necessarily have a solution.  But I have access to someone who might be able to counsel your partner.  A little firsthand advice about handling his skills."

"Gibson."

"Yes."

"And what do you want in exchange?"

I want what you have.  To be half of a whole.  To trust and be trusted.  The words sound ludicrous, so I don't say them.  I'm the ruthless asshole in this story, right?  "The men who ordered me to kidnap the boy in the first place are dead.  He eats a lot."

"Right."  Yes, it's a lame excuse and has nothing to do with my real reasons -- which are, among other things, curiosity, and a desire not to see Mulder destroyed.  Beaten to a state of collapse, but no more.

"Move Mulder into your apartment.  I'll bring you the boy."

She takes a deep breath, lets it out again.  "I don't know, Krycek.  I'm not sure he'll appreciate my dealing with the devil.  And," she adds with a flash of humor, "it's not as though I can keep it secret from him, given how things are going."

"When it was your life on the line, he accepted help from anyone who would give it," I remind her -- a little disappointed that she isn't eagerly accepting my generosity.

She looks me in the eye.  "I never thought I'd say this, but thank you."

She gets up and walks away, and I watch her go, bitter.  I've always envied Scully.

Mulder's in the living room, playing chess with Gibson.  There's no sound but the movement of pieces.  They're always totally silent around each other: eerie.  Something is going on between them, whole conversations; something more than conversations, maybe.  Sometimes I stand in the doorway and watch them, secure in the knowledge that they're both much too preoccupied to pay any attention to me.

I'm hiding out in my bedroom, where neither of them either comes.  That doesn't stop me from thinking about our problem, and our situation -- though things could be worse.  After Krycek's little visit to me, both Diana and Skinner became a lot more cooperative.  They got Mulder released and arranged some time off for us both.  Nice to know who is pulling the strings these days.  Though how Krycek got such a hold on Skinner is beyond me.  I also wish I knew why he's helping us now, and why none of our friends remain our friends or our enemies remain enemies.  I guess I should be grateful that I can still trust my own mother.  Mulder doesn't have even that luxury.

But I've lost the luxury of spending time around Mulder, arguing with him, agreeing with him, keeping certain things unspoken from him.  We just don't say certain things.  Once, he did slip and say he loved me -- but he was doped to the gills.  I told myself that was all it was and I nearly forgot about it.  Certainly it never came between us later.  That's the way it works.  As long as neither of us speaks and neither of us goes off with anyone else, the balance is maintained.

How can you keep that up when there's mind-reading in the equation, though?

I'm so busy feeling sorry for myself about this state of affairs that I don't notice that the chess game has ended until there's a knock on my door.  "Scully?"

I sit up.

"Yeah, Mulder?"

He pushes the door open and stands in the doorway, leaning against the jamb.  "I sent Gibson out for some ice cream."

"Do you think that's a good idea?  I mean --"

"He's a big boy," Mulder replies.

"Yes, but there are people who --"

"Krycek brought him to us.  I don't think he's going to steal Gibson away again."

"I could have gone for ice cream," I say.  Trying not to think too loudly about what a relief it would be to get out of the apartment.

"You've done nothing but fetch for us all week," he replies.  "You're not an airline stewardess.  Besides, I wanted to talk to you."

"Okay," I say cautiously.  He's got all the information I have, already.  How could he not?  What is there left for me to tell him?  I've detailed for him my trip to Africa, everything I saw there, my theories about what happened to him, the cautious arrangements I'd made to have someone translate more of the fragments and unearth the ship.  I've got some top naval archaeologists on it from Texas A&M: they don't know what they're dealing with, but they do know how to record it and preserve it in the process of retrieval.  Science moves slowly, Mulder.  I don't KNOW anything more yet.  I'm sure that whatever we find out will be pretty amazing, but right now, life goes on and we both have to be behaving like sane individuals in order to get to the next step…

He pushes away from the doorjamb and comes into the room.  "I didn't want to ask you about the case," he said.  "I wanted to ask about you.  Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You know," he says conversationally, "I've discovered an interesting fact.  I can't just plumb someone's brain for information.  I can only read what they're thinking right at the moment.  However, when a person lies, she usually at least has the truth in mind."

"Mulder, I explained to you that I'm not comfortable with this.  We discussed this.  You supposedly understood.  Of course I don't like having you able to read my mind."

"But you trust me."  He sits down on the bed beside me.

"Yes," I say.

"Then there's nothing for you to fear.  How  many important things can there be that we don't know about each other?"

I didn't know that you'd married that Fowley woman.  And I don't want you to know how much that bothers me -- though now, of course, it's too late.

"I told you before, Scully," he says in a low voice.  "It doesn't matter.  I would have told you, if it did."

"How can something like that NOT MATTER?"

"Because you're nothing like her.  And I didn't want you to think that I automatically fall in love with my partner.  As though what has happened between you and me were some sort of replaying of a scenario between me and her."  He keeps on meeting my eyes while he says this, though I can tell he doesn't want to.  He gives a low chuckle. "Gibson said I should tell you.  He said that I have to make up for how bare you feel by making myself equally exposed.  Not much fun, though."

The wheels are turning in my mind very swiftly indeed.  He still hasn't said it.  He's implied it, but he hasn't said it.  We're still on stable ground.  I can still ignore --

"I'm in love with you, Scully."

I let go the breath I was holding all at once.  "You weren't supposed to say it, Mulder."

"I know you better than I ever knew her.  Your courage, and your loyalty."

You're testing those things, right now.

"It's not a revelation.  It's just a complication," I say.  "We can't act on this, and you know it."

He looks away and sighs.  "All I know is that you don't want to act on it.  I haven't understood why not for quite some time now.  And don't give me any crap about bureau regulations or playing into the hands of our enemies.  Half the bureau already thinks we sleep together and our enemies are already aware that the quickest way to ruin my life is to harm you.  We both know it.  So this comes back to you.  Why you hold yourself permanently in reserve."

I lie back on the bed and throw an arm over my face.  "I don't know.  I just know that this is how it has got to be."

There's a long silence, during which I listen to him breathe.  I've never felt so far from him.  He's angry at me, or confused by me; even reading my mind, he doesn't understand me.  Figures, doesn't it?  The really important things aren't communicable by telepathy.  So much for resolving the great male/female communication divide.

He lets out an explosive breath.  "Because you're not thinking about why you've decided we should stay in limbo like this!" he says in irritation.  "You're just aware that you feel that way.  Fine -- I'm aware of it too.  That doesn't get me any closer to your reasons."

I spring up in one quick motion and stand there with my back to him, where he's still sitting on the bed.  "So what, Mulder?  What does it matter?"  Is this about you wanting someone to sleep with?

"If that were what it was about I would have tried seducing you.  Not asking you a bunch of questions."

My cheeks burn.  Tried?  He would have succeeded. There's no way my willpower would have held out, if he'd ever even kissed me.  Silently I reorganize the objects on my dresser, straightening my brush and comb, arranging perfume bottles in an orderly line.

"I want to be able to ask what's wrong and get some answer other than that you're fine.  I want you to tell me what you're thinking."

Well, you have that now, don't you?  I can't stop you.

"No, I want you to tell me."  He has gotten up; he puts a hand on my shoulder and gently turns me towards him.  I don't meet his eyes.  I can't.  His presence is suffocating, humiliating.  Through no fault of my own, he holds me in the palm of his hand.

As soon as I think this, he drops his hand and walks out of the room.

A few minutes later, the door opens and closes; Gibson is back.  I can hear the sound of dishes being laid out and ice cream being scooped.  No one comes to ask if I want some.  I go back to lying on the bed, looking at the bars of sunlight that fall across me from the window.

I stand outside Scully's apartment door, holding my breath.  When I came to drop Gibson off, Mulder stayed in a back room the whole time and I dealt only with Scully.  But I need to see how the experiment is going.  Whether Mulder is beginning to be sane again.  Despite the apparently lull in activity on the part of the aliens -- and the deaths of most of my former bosses -- I'm concerned that something more may be yet to come.  In that scenario, Mulder and I would be on the same side. I have no desire to become enslaved to, or devoured by, some slimy entity from another planet.

I've been in thrall to enough slimes on Earth, thank you very much.

When Scully answers the door, there's no sign of anyone else being here, much less living here.  They're being careful.

"It's you," she says flatly.  She looks like she's been crying.

"Is everything all right?"

"Fine."  A lie, obviously.  But probably not one about the state of Mulder's health.

"Can I come in?"

She stands away from the door and lets me in.  From inside the apartment, I can see evidence of Mulder and Gibson: the chessboard on the table, a pair of ice cream bowls unwashed in the sink, a sweatshirt tossed casually on the sofa.  Two sodas, half-drunk, sweating on the coffee table -- without coasters.  Scully hasn't even been in this room most of the time.

"Where are our heroes?" I ask laconically.

She jerks her head down the hallway.  "I've got a guest bedroom.  They're in there."  She turns away from me.  "Guys!  Come out and see Uncle Krycek."

Her eyes dart to mine and then away again.  She moves into the kitchen.  "Can I get you anything to drink?"

I stand right there, savoring the totally surreal quality of this moment.  Uncle Krycek?

It's not me she's pissed at.  It's them.  She's been forced out of paradise.  Thanks to my action, no less.  Here is the sweet beginning of revenge, if I wanted it -- which, curiously, I don't.

I follow her to the refrigerator.  "I'll have a Coke," I say.  Then I add in a low voice, "It's not easy being around Gibson, but I've learned a few tricks.  If you want to know."

"What, mind-shielding tricks?" she hisses back.

"Diversionary tactics.  I've been trying to find something that would shut off his power, or at least block it.  All I've been able to do is learn a little self-control."  In a delicate single-handed maneuver, I pop the tab on my Coke, surveying her thoughtfully.  Self-control would appeal to Scully; she probably likes the idea much more than being handed a protective helmet or a telepathy-dispersing ray gun.  I contemplate the possibility of gaining her trust more fully, taking advantage of the trouble in paradise to drive a wedge right through the Dynamic Duo and make her my partner.  God, Mulder would hate that.  He and Gibson may have some weird private mental tea-party going on right now, but if he saw his little Scully heading down the path to the dark side -- consorting with ME -- there'd be hell to pay.

Scully's glance over my shoulder tells me that they've come into the room.  I turn around, unable to wipe the smirk off my face entirely.

Mulder and Gibson exchange knowing glances.  I feel Scully go still next to me.  This really is pretty insufferable to live with.

"Hi," says Mulder.  "To what do we owe the honor?"

"I just wanted to see how you were doing.  Better than before, I see.  Not cowering in the corner right now, yelling obscenities."

"I would, but Scully's neighbors keep calling to complain about the noise."

"Ah."  I hold his eye for a long moment.  Then he and Gibson exchange glances again.

"Didn't your parents ever tell you it was rude to whisper in front of guests?" I remark.

"I haven't seen my parents in quite some time," Gibson says blandly.  Reminding me whose fault that is.  Something about the crack reminds me of Mulder.  Do they feed each other lines now?

I wonder if Mulder's been keeping his thoughts clean.  Having a kid in the house, and all that.  I grin wickedly and turn to Scully.

"These guys are making me nervous. It's good to see Mulder's back to his old health, but I don't think I can take too much more of this.  I've got some other things to tell you, though.  Is there somewhere we could go?"

Mulder frowns at me.  Down, boy.  I'm not going to hurt her.  He turns as though to say something to Scully -- and that seems to decide her.  "Yes, I'll come.  There's an Italian restaurant down the street."

I don't know when I last had a nice meal with a man.  Which is not what this is -- this is a deal-making session with the devil -- but Krycek is so bland and normal at the moment that it's hard to remember that.  Prince of darkness!  I remind myself.  He killed Mulder's father; he killed your sister.  The devil's greatest trick is looking like a nice guy.

I brace myself for the reply to that not-very-polite reflection -- when I remember that he couldn't hear it.

He sees the puzzled expression on my face and laughs.  "You're going to have to say it aloud if you want me to know something," he remarks, setting his menu to one side.

"No, that's quite all right."  I sip the water in my glass.  My breathing feels tight and constricted.  Too much stress.

"Would it be rude of me to suggest that you need a drink?" he asks.

"Is that one of your tricks?"

"What?" It takes him a moment to track what I mean.  "No.  As far as I can tell, alcohol doesn't mask anything from Gibson that it doesn't mask from me."

I have a hard time believing that he's actually been living with Gibson and taking care of him, himself.  And I say so.

"No," he says.  "I have a woman that I pay to look after him on a regular basis.  But I have to go there to talk to him, and test him, and sometimes I've had nowhere else to stay the night and have had to sleep over at the apartment that they use."

The waitress comes by, and we order, pasta and a bottle of red wine.  I always seem to end up splitting bottles of wine with the wrong people.  The conversation veers off into safe subjects -- or rather, Krycek steers it there, and I don't protest.  It's rather startling how charming he can be; it also surprises me to find that he reads books and watches movies like anyone else.

"Why does that surprise you, Agent Scully?" he asks, when I express startlement that he's read _Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil._  "I spend a lot of time on planes, you know."

"It just doesn't seem like your sort of thing, is all."  He looks up at me warily; he's been gracefully twirling pasta on his fork.  It strikes me that he must have spent a lot of time learning how to eat nicely with only one hand.  He manages to do it without really reminding the person sitting across from him what an awkward situation he's in.

"What exactly do you think 'my thing' would be?"

He's got me there -- I have no idea.  "Something cloak-and-dagger, I guess," I reply uncomfortably.  "You know -- Tom Clancy novels, or John Grisham, or something."

"With a lot of people killing each other in bizarre ways for secret reasons, right?"  Shamed, I nod and take a gulp of my wine.  "I wasn't decanted out of a holding tank to do the conspiracy's dirty work.  I did have a prior existence."

He sounds bitter, and I'm not sure what's going on here.

"I wound up where I am through desperation -- and trying to save the world from invasion.  In fact, there isn't very much difference between how I started out and how Agent Mulder did."

"Yes, well, Agent Mulder hasn't ended up in the same position.  He hasn't ruthlessly murdered people who stood in his way."

He looks me in the eye.  "Only because you've been there to stop him."

My heart almost stops.  I can remember times -- so many times -- when Mulder has come close to losing it, to following some course of action that no one could condone or defend, who wasn't in the same dark corner he was himself.  Including but hardly limited to the time he almost shot Krycek, and I had to take drastic measures to prevent it.  Krycek was there.  He knows about that one.  He probably knows about some of the others, too, times that Mulder's come close to killing the Cigarette Smoking Man or an informant.  Arguably those people were scum who deserved to die.  But the dividing line between those people and Bill Mulder is a very tenuous one.

I push myself back from the table and start fumbling for my purse.  "I can't believe we're even having this conversation," I say.  "I must be mad.  You were sent to kill me!  If you'd found me instead of Melissa that day --"

Krycek grabs my elbow and pushes me roughly back into my seat.  "Things change," he says harshly, holding up his prosthetic hand.  "I'm not a threat to you.  I was never your enemy except circumstantially.  And we're on the same side now.  Use a little enlightened self-interest and try to understand that."

"You're still hiding things and lying to the American people.  You're in the Cancer Man's back pocket and you are also somehow pulling Skinner's leading strings.  How does that put us on the same side?"

"The ultimate danger is not the conspiracy -- which is mostly gone, by the way -- but the aliens.  Their original plans may not have worked out as intended, but they're not done yet."

After a long silence, she relaxes.  I signal the waitress and call for the dessert menu.  Scully looks stressed enough to need a serious chocolate hit.  I watch her debating with herself about the caloric content, but I win my private bet with myself: she goes for the double chocolate mousse cake.

She's not easy to talk around, and I know that any ground I've gained is shaky.  She may suddenly re-remember our mutual past and walk out the door.  But I also know that she's spent the last week trapped with two people who can strip your nerves and your heart raw in a matter of minutes.  Her usual support structure is gone.  She is having doubts about Skinner, and she can't talk to Mulder. She's vulnerable.

We talk about random things again for a while.  Sports.  The weather.  Television.  I've spent a long time learning to put people at ease around me, to zero in on what makes them feel safest.  I would have made a great con man -- I've pulled off a few small-time cons, in fact, when I've been stuck in New York alone without any money.  The old one about not having enough money to get back to New Jersey is tried and true.  You just hang around Grand Central and look for someone naive.  I've gotten forty, fifty, sixty bucks off people that way.  It's all a matter of knowing which buttons to push.  You have to make it seem like you and the other person have a lot in common, so that they put themselves in the hypothetical situation of being stranded in New York, and their pity momentarily overwhelms their common sense.

And that's what I'm doing here.  Look, see, Scully, I'm a normal person who enjoys popular culture just as much as you or your partner.  But I don't jar her with more important comparisons, like the fact that I also once had a sister, and that I also lost her under tragic circumstances.  I don't think she'd appreciate that piece of information.

She finishes the dessert and pushes her plate away.  "Well, time to go back," she says.

"Not necessarily."

She gives me a wary look.  "Look, Alex, it's not like we're friends, here."

"Do you really want to go back to that twosome right now?"

No.  She doesn't.  She really really doesn't.  Just the thought of walking through the door of her apartment, back into Spookyland, is enough to make her tense up a bit, lose the relaxation brought on by the wine and chocolate.

"Let's go to a movie," I say.

She cracks up.  "What is this, a date?"

How long since I've HAD a date?  Wow.  Interesting question.  Sex with Marita on a ship doesn't count.  "No.  I'm just protecting my interests here --"

"-- as usual --"

"-- since I need you to look after Mulder and Gibson.  They're our best hope of outwitting the aliens: with them, we can't be lied to.  But if you suffer a nervous breakdown, then you're no use.  And you look like you need some time off.  I'd have sent Skinner to come take you out of yourself, but I wasn't sure that you'd appreciate that."

"… can't talk to Skinner about this anyway," she says.  "It's no different from talking to you -- because he'd probably be wired for sound -- and with him there's the added problem that I actually care what he thinks of me."

"Ouch," I say, feigning hurt.

"Let's go."

We spend the whole afternoon and evening together.  After the movie, we stop at a bar. We've gotten into an argument about whether one of the action scenes in the movie would really have worked, and it needs to be carried to its logical conclusion.

I'm already the worse for the wine, and I figure that what I really need is to hammer my brain the rest of the way into senseless oblivion so that when I get home there will be a buffer between me and the Omnipresent MulderGibson Entity.

Krycek gets us a dark little booth in the corner, and I sag into my seat and lean my head back.

"So you said something about being able to block out the reading."

"It's mostly a question of catching yourself before your thoughts go too far.  If you distract yourself quickly with something else.  And to the best of my knowledge, they can't read you when you're a couple of rooms away, unless you are thinking directly AT them. That's all there is to it -- but you can pick it up with practice.  It's far from ideal."

"That's not going to do me much good on the long-term living-together kind of basis."

He gives me a silent, thoughtful glance, as though mentally summing up everything he knows about me and Mulder.  Is he one of the people who assumes we sleep together?  It hardly matters: he got an eyeful of Mulder going apeshit when I was abducted, so he knows how much we mean to each other.  I restrain the urge to clarify what I mean.

"Then you're just going to have to live with him reading you -- or put some distance between yourselves."

I bite my lip, feeling tears come into my eyes even though I knew already that that was more or less the inevitable conclusion to this whole fiasco.  Krycek puts his hand on top of mine, on the table, and strangely, it actually does feel comforting.

"Dana.  No one could blame you if you decide that you can't handle being Mulder's partner any more.  It's a lot to ask anyone to live with.  Even he would understand that."

Yes.  Even he would.  He, especially.  Assuming that he was in one of his self-castigating moods where he doesn't know why I stick with him anyway.  Otherwise, he'd hate me for being such a coward.

I finish my drink, and Krycek signals the waitress for another.

"You didn't find it so hard to be around Gibson, when it was just him, did you?"

She lifts the glass again -- she's pretty well lost her inhibitions by now.

"No."  She sighs wearily.  We're sitting more next to each other than opposite; it would look, to the casual observer, like a romantic evening.  I have a brief, very amusing image of Mulder storming in in a fury, demanding that I get away from his partner.  Then she speaks again, and I tuck away that thought for later review.  "But Mulder's different."

Obviously.  "He's an adult, and therefore more likely to understand what he hears," I say, even though I know that that's  not the half of it.  The best interrogations are done by  encouraging the other person to elaborate and clarify, without  ever asking a point-blank question.

"And we have a lot of history together."

I nod.

"You'd think that would make it easier.  I mean, there's no one I trust more than Mulder.  Thank God it's not you, or  something."

Amused, I tap my glass with one finger, and fail to point out that I'm the one she's pouring her heart out to at the moment.

"But still," she goes on.  Less articulate now than usual.  She seems to be screwing herself up to say something.  Finally she just blurts it out, plainly against her better judgement.  "We don't sleep together, you know."

"I hadn't given it much thought," I reply.  Not nearly as much as I've obsessed over their emotional connection, anyway, and how much I want one or the other of them -- it almost doesn't matter which, or in what sense -- for myself.

"Well we don't."

"Okay."  I make it sound as though I have no idea why she's bringing this up, though I think I have some sense of where this is going.

"But I love him, and he loves me."

"Many partners do feel that way about each other."  Ann Landers, move over; the one-armed man is here to do your job.

"I didn't mean it in a Platonic sense," she grinds out.  I laugh inwardly.  It's been so much fun pushing her to this point.  Unfortunately, it only remains funny for about half a second.  Then it becomes bitterly uncomfortable.

"Okay.  I still don't see why this is a problem.  If you both know that, then how is it a problem that Mulder can read your thoughts?"

"Because it just is!"  She sloshes half of her drink on the table, slamming down the glass.  "There are certain things we just don't say to each other.  And that subject is one of the things that is supposed to go undiscussed.  Until this afternoon, when Mulder thought we both needed to air a lot of dirty laundry."

Aha.  The red-rimmed eyes and the Mulder-Gibson conference.

"I can't have a relationship with him," she says.

"It seems to me that you already do."

"Well, it can't go that direction."  She puts her head down on the table, and puts her arms over her neck, like a child doing an earthquake drill.  Thank goodness she's on my armed side.  I put the arm around her shoulders.  We sit like that for a long, long time.

I'm sitting in the darkness, and Gibson has already gone to bed, when she stumbles through the door at 2:37 am.  She seems dispirited; her thoughts are muddy and whirling.  She throws her keys down on the coffee table and kicks off her shoes, apparently not even seeing me.  She pours herself a glass of water, and I hear the rattle of pills.  Pre-emptive anti-hangover aspirin.  Coming back into the living room, she starts to peel off her shirt.

"Where have you been?" I ask, very softly.

She whirls.  Her face -- or what I can see of it -- is all Enigmatic Dr. Scully, and ordinarily I'd be cowed by that.  But I can see the strands beneath it.  She spent the whole evening with Krycek.  And the kicker: she kissed Krycek.  It comes to me in a tumbled haze, as though I had just been kissing Krycek.  Disgustingly, I recollect that it was quite a pleasant experience.

"Fuck it, Scully," I say, getting out of my chair.  "I don't really want to have this conversation after all."

"I was lonely," she says in a very, very blank voice.

"You were LONELY?" I repeat incredulously.  "So you have a romantic evening out and a nice little snog with our most dangerous enemy because you can't bring yourself to touch me??"  Yes, Scully, me.  The one in love with you.  The one you're in love with.  Remember?

She doesn't remember.  Her thoughts on the subject of me are full of confusion.  "Mulder," she says pleadingly.  "You're not helping."

"You're the one who just--"

But she turns her back on me and walks away, and the door to her bedroom closes with a soft snick.  I lie down on her sofa and stare at the ceiling.

It isn't until early the next afternoon that Mulder and Gibson decide to see how Mulder does with going for a short walk in public.  Finally I have the apartment to myself, and I can allow myself to recollect in detail what happened last night, without having all of it immediately downloaded into Mulder's eidetic memory.

Somehow, by the end of that long evening, Krycek had ceased to seem evil.  That comment of his about doing what he had to in order to survive: it struck home.  I've done a lot of things in the last few years that I wouldn't have thought myself capable of.  Breaches of protocol and professional ethics.  Wild expenditures of taxpayer money.  Strange and cavalier treatment of my friends and family members.  It's still a far cry from murder.  But Mulder's come a lot closer to the edge than I have, and I can understand everything he's done.

It was dumb of me to tell Krycek as much as I did.  It's no one's business but mine and Mulder's.  On the other hand, I can't handle Mulder now, and I can't manage this situation on my own.  The Courageous Scully facade is cracking.

As for the kiss we shared, outside the bar, that was something else.  An unexpected pleasure.  Reassurance that I don't have to immolate myself on a man's altar before he'll take notice of me.  When the kiss ended, he hugged me around the shoulders and then called me a cab.  After that scene with Mulder last night, all I wanted to do was go back to Krycek and reinsinuate myself into his lopsided embrace.  To return to a situation that didn't demand, demand, demand, everything I had to give and more.

The phone startles me.  I answer it on the first ring, my heart quickening.

"Scully, it's me."

"Mulder," she says.  She sounds disappointed.  Whom was she expecting?  Krycek doesn't seem like the type who calls the next day.  Not a sensitive man of the nineties.

"We need to talk."

"We've been doing nothing but talk," she replies wearily.

"Wrong.  I've been doing nothing but talk.  You on the other hand have been…"

There is a tense silence over the line.

"Okay, look," I say.  "This is my idea.  I can't read you from here.  What you say is all that I can know.  I thought it might level the playing field a little."

"Where's Gibson?"

Ever practical.  "Watching a movie."

She takes a deep breath and expels it.  "Talk away, then, Mulder."

"I want to apologize for what I said to you last night.  I had no right to do that.  You hadn't told me anything, so I should have acted like I didn't know anything."  Not that that would have been remotely possible for me to carry off.

"I understand what happened," she says.  "But I don't want to talk about it."

"But Scully --"

"Mulder, you seem to want something impossible from me.  No one can lay themselves wholly open to another person.  It's not healthy.  And it doesn't leave anything of the individual behind.  The fact that we're so close already only makes it worse."

"Prompting you to go off and --" I stop, biting my lip.  I will not go into that.

"There's no formal commitment between us.  Therefore it is my own business whom I choose to kiss."

"But we talked about this!"

"You told me you were in love with me, but Mulder, that doesn't automatically make me yours!  And the more you demand of me things I can't give, the less close I feel to you.  You're destroying what remains between us."

I squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself not to cry.  "Scully, I didn't choose to have this happen to me.  I don't want it.  Especially not if it's going to drive a wedge between us. If I could get rid of it, I would."

She's silent for a long time.

"You are working on that, right?  How to stop it?"  Somehow I assumed that that was what the conversation with Krycek was, at least originally, supposed to be about.  This business of Gibson teaching me to handle my powers was only a temporary stopgap.  On a permanent basis, I needed to go back to being my old self.

"No, Mulder, I'm not.  That's why you have Gibson."

"But there has to be some way to do this."

"Krycek thinks that you could be a powerful asset against our enemies, and against the threat of colonization, if you have your powers under control.  He also thinks that you're not the only person to whom something like this will happen.  It may be a natural next step in the train of human evolution, or it may be something that our progenitors timed to happen at a certain point.  It may even be a natural defense mechanism, something that we never needed while we lived alone on this planet, but that is triggered when we start to come in contact with lives from other worlds."

I lean back against the wall of the movie theater.  "You believe all of that?"

"It's a theory.  Completely untested, but a theory."

"And you're willing to sacrifice me -- us -- to your damned theory."  I hang up the cell phone and turn it off.  Wondering how long I can manage to endure the great outdoors before I'm forced to skulk back to Scully's apartment.  Even now, my concentration is wavering and I can hear the chance thoughts of the people passing by.  It's like standing at the center of a whirlwind.

I stare resentfully at the phone in my hand, unbelieving.  Mulder is constantly willing to sacrifice things for his theories -- things much more real and substantial than the off-chance that I might, somehow, be able to figure out how to inhibit the manifestation of his telepathic abilities.  How about the time you let Roche out of jail in order to serve your theories about Samantha?  A little girl almost died as the price of that.  Or what about --

But he's not here to hear me, so there's no use thinking about it.  I set the receiver back in the cradle and it rings again immediately.  I lift it and say without preamble, "I hope you're calling to apologize, because that was a damned stupid thing to say.  When I consider the number of times --"

"Dana."  The bemused voice cuts through my rant.  "You should really get Caller ID."

"Krycek."

"I think under the circumstances you can progress to calling me Alex now," he says.

"I've gotten used to calling the men in my life by their last names."

"Ah."  There's a silence.  "I assume from your unconventional greeting that all is not resolved between you and Mulder."

"Not exactly."

"Are you all right?"

"No."  How come I can say that to Krycek?  Probably because -- as I said to him in another context last night -- I don't care what he thinks of me.  Earning his respect is not the number one priority on my mental agenda.

"Is he all right?"  The question touches me, because it is the right one.

"No, not really.  He was up last night when I got home.  He demanded to know where I'd been."

Krycek spends a moment digesting this.  "I thought something like that might happen.  I'm sorry.  I didn't really think about the implications."

"Neither did I.

"You were a little drunk," he says.  "I'm willing to take the blame on this one."

"I'll chalk it up to your account."  Some part of my brain recognizes how ludicrous that is as soon as I say it.  What would the other items on Krycek's account be?  Trying to kill me.  Assisting in the murder of my sister.  Being a willing accomplice to my abduction.  Murdering Mulder's father…  I can't seem to get my brain around all that.  I must be going insane.

"You want to talk about it?"

"About what?  Me and Mulder, or me and you?"

"Yes.  Either.  Both.  The weather.  Whatever you like.  If you just want not to be in the apartment when he gets back.  We can go somewhere and not talk, too, if you prefer."

For a second I'm not sure if that's intended a proposition.

"See another movie," he elaborates.

"Yes," I say.  "Let's see that movie from last night again."

He doesn't make the obvious objection that it wasn't very deep the first time.  "I'll meet you at the theater," he says.  And he hangs up.

The apartment is dark by the time Mulder brings me back to it.  There is no one inside.  He looks around for a note or something from her, but there isn't anything.  Must be away with Krycek, he's thinking, and the tone of the thought is not pleasant.  I turn away, not eager to experience any more of his ideas on the subject.  The two of them have a relationship that I'm doing my best not to understand.  It's not a kid thing, as Mom used to say.

I turn on the TV and watch reruns of the Simpsons.  In the back room, he dials her cell phone a number of times, but doesn't get through.

The same bar.  The same booth.  The same waitress and drinks.  Scully picks up the conversation where we left it off last night.

"It's ironic."  She swirls the drink in her glass.  "Two people who've been through as much as we have together, you'd think we could manage any kind of relationship we wanted.  But I've gotten to the point where I only know that I love him from my own actions.  I know it when I get jealous, and when I get protective.  But I don't feel it.  It's not a positive thing.  It just drains energy."

Probably, I think, that's because you haven't created the kind of relationship that can produce positive energy.  You don't sleep together, so you don't have the physical pleasure and the relief that that brings.  You don't share emotional things, except in crisis when you have no alternative. You have no small pleasures together.  All you have in common is the darkness.

I don't say it.  I watch her face.  She's being wedged away from Mulder harder and faster than I could have believed possible -- and though that's only partly my doing, I'm enjoying it.  She's putting her faith in me.  In me.  That just goes to show how deep the desire to believe can run.

She talks on, and I listen, but the person she's trying to communicate with is herself.  Hashing out dozens of trivial old events, slights, times when he has treated her as less than herself.

While she's talking, I am trying to figure out my own role in this whole drama.  Am I the other man, the one who tears them apart?  Or am I the counsellor who fixes things up?  If the latter, then I should really tell her that the best thing they could possibly do right now is stop talking so much and spend some quality time in bed.  The next part is for Mulder to be a quick study on his Gibson lessons and discover how not to get in her mental space at all times of the day and night.

It's not the kind of advice I feel like giving.

I finally stop my anti-Mulder tirade and look at Krycek's face.  He has a weird, wry expression.  I feel totally drained.  As much as I hate the conclusion, the only thing I can believe is that there's no future between me and Mulder.  Not the kind that Mulder wants.  We can stay partners, maybe, if by some miracle we can get this train back on its old tracks.  But to venture into a personal relationship?  No way in hell.

I push Mulder out of my head and slide closer to Krycek on the bench.  Last night he took me more or less by surprise; tonight is deliberate, and on my own head.  I remember Ed Jerse, but even that cautionary thought does not stop me.

Krycek puts his arm around me and lets me rest my head on his shoulder.

"I should ask you now," he says.  "Are we censoring our activities for the future consumption of Papa Mulder?  Or is he just going to have to deal with what he sees?"

"Let it be his problem if he hasn't learned not to snoop," I respond.  But the remark is muffled, since I direct it mostly into the leather of Krycek's jacket.

He seems to have heard it nonetheless.  Tipping up my chin with one hand, he kisses me long and gently.

"I should warn you," I say a minute later, a little breathlessly.  "I don't want this to be misinterpreted.  I'm not the promiscuous type--"

He lays a hand on my mouth.  "I may not be able to read your mind," he says, "but I understand what's going on here."

That makes one of us.

Krycek isn't willing to take me to whereever it is that he lives -- more, I think, because it's some crappy little dive than because he wants to keep its location a closely guarded secret -- but I couldn't bear to come back to my apartment and face Mulder with all my intensified doubts about the status of our relationship.

So we check into a hotel, looking very much like a pair of guilty adulterers.  We order room service and watch television.  We make out some, but not with the kind of intensity that leads to more.  It is sort of like being a teenager after a prom, not ready yet for any big dangerous steps.  When there ceases to be anything on television but home shopping channels, we turn it off and lie in the dark, talking.

He tells me stories about strange mishaps that have occurred while he was travelling, mostly -- not of the aliens-abducting-the-airplane variety, but the kind that involve accidentally claiming the baggage of a transvestite at the airport and having to spend the rest of the weekend in drag.  He steers away from anything having to do with the consortium and how he got involved.  I would tell him about similar things, except that most of my recent travel anecdotes have Mulder in a starring role, and I feel that I have talked enough about Mulder for one evening.  Most of my stories center around the pre-Mulder era when I was in college and medical school.  It feels really good to talk about that.  No one's cared about that part of my existence for years: I haven't kept up with my friends from that time, so the only person who really remembers me then is my mother.  And she's not the ideal audience for stories about streaking the men's dormitory with a paper sack over my head.

When I get home, it's nearly noon.  We slept late, Krycek and I.  This time Mulder isn't waiting for me.  He's almost ostentatiously in the middle of a game with Gibson and he barely signals that he realizes I've come in.  I feel so much better (hot chocolate, delivered to our room, consumed to the accompaniment of meaningless banter.  What a great breakfast) that I've almost forgotten about the glacial temperature between me and my partner.

It's Gibson who looks up, actually: his eyes doggy and sad, in an expression I have seen many times, but not on him.

I look at my partner, who is still frowning at the board for all he's worth.  Relax.  Mulder, relax.  I feel better now.  I am ready to be an adult again.  I didn't sleep with Krycek.

He advances a pawn, trading looks with Gibson.  Something gets through to him then -- delayed reaction? -- and he looks up.

"What was that, Scully?"

I meet his eyes, startled.

"Gibson's doing an exercise with me here.  On tuning things out.  It's going pretty well.  But he tells me he thinks that there's something you tried to say to me, a moment ago."  I'm trying, Scully, he's saying.  I'm doing my best.

And he is -- but maybe I haven't been.  Maybe I need to worry less, flinch less.  I feel so much more like a human being this morning.  Maybe I should reconsider everything in thelight of that hope.

I smile.  "I'll tell you later.  In words.  Please go back to the game."

From across the street, I watch them come out of her apartment building and head towards the ice cream parlor.  It won't be long now before she and Mulder are back at work: Skinner tells me Mulder has passed the psych screening.  As for the rest of what's going on between them, I can only conclude that they've reached some sort of peace.  Mulder's hand is at the small of her back as they go through the door.

In my hand is an envelope that Skinner gave me.  Scully's writing is on the outside -- requesting Skinner, in neatly impersonal language, please to pass this on to Alex Krycek if at all possible.

I've already read the note three times.  What it says is this:

I crumple the note in my hand and dispose of it in the nearest trashcan.

At the end of the street, the two of them vanish around the corner, projecting an image of solidarity and strength.  I have no idea whether they sleep together now, or whether Scully remained true to her conviction that that would be a fatal mistake.  All I can say is that there is no longer any purchase for the wedge.

Finis

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