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Disclaimers, etc. with first part.

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"The best thing you can do for the time being is stay put," the exterminator told Mulder over the cellphone. "If we were to come in there and get the two of you out...it would do you more harm than good, I'm afraid. Do you have food, blankets...that kind of thing?"

Mulder rolled his eyes. "I'm sure we could call in for a couple of pizzas. Tell me...is this greenish fog coming in from under the door your doing or are the Grateful Dead doing basement shows now?"

"Stick a towel or something under the door tightly. That's all I can tell you to do. Getting you out by taking you through the chemicals...without letting everything air out properly - it could kill you and anyone I sent in there. I know you're safe this way." The exterminator coughed. "If I may ask, why *were* you still down there after we called for the evacuation?"

"It's a long, boring story," Mulder said, suddenly too tired to stand in one place. "I'm sure we can find whatever we need around here and last until then, thank you." He clicked the off button and stared into the darkness. "Scully?"

Her warm hand was on his back. "What did he say?"

He could hardly see in which direction he was talking to. "He said we were stuck here until they air the place out for Monday morning -- sometime in the middle of the night on Sunday probably. How's the rations?"

"I don't know," she answered, bemused. "Got a flashlight around here somewhere?"

Mulder turned to look for the general area of his desk with his arms stuck out like a kid pretending to be Superman, and ended up giving himself a near-hernia on the low, protruding edge. Owwww.

"You okay, Mulder?"

"Found the desk," he grumbled, lowering himself into his chair cautiously. His desk drawers served as a perfect example of how the Chaos Theory worked in day to day life.There was a flashlight, and he discovered just how bright the beam was when he shone it out in front of him and seemingly knocked Scully over.

She was thinking of cussing him royally, but he stopped her with his wan smile. "Found the flashlight."

She walked over to get it, passing through the eerie sallow haze that made her hair into copper fire. "We're going to need enough sustenance to last us until then, and some blankets...water...."

"It's going to be a very Bohemian existence," Mulder replied, only half-rueful. "In other words, I'm going to smell awful Sunday morning."

"You won't smell any worse than the horrid stench creeping through the door," she assured him. "Don't suppose you keep any food in your desk?"

He beckoned her to bring the flashlight. There was a huge bag of sunflower seeds, of course. Food was food, she reminded herself. There was a sleeve of crackers. Mulder had a can of sardines. Scully had a fourth of a cake left that they had been alternately diminishing since last week. She also had her bottled water that she took with her everywhere. It was full. She filled it up before Mulder had turned the corner and collided with her....

"Mulder?" She asked plaintively as a thought occured to her.

"Yeah?"

"How are we going to...go to the bathroom?"

In other circumstances, the aghast look on Mulder's face would've sent her into hysterics. Later, maybe.

"Sounds like a good time to fast," she suggested dryly.

Mulder laughed. "Scully, I could become an anorexic and dehydrate myself and still have to pee every morning."

"Thanks so much for sharing that. Look, do what you have to do. Don't tell me about it."

"If I have to pee in our office, Scully, I'm afraid you're going to have to know about it. I won't have to say a word."

She pursed her mouth disdainfully in the light of the flashlight's beam. "You'll think of something."

"I'm petitioning for a window office just for reasons of personal safety and bladder maintenance."

"Mulder, they can clean those...kinds of things up..." She really had every desire to get off this subject.

"I'm not a tomcat, Scully," he frowned. "I can't just spray the corners and forget about it. I'd come in to this office every morning ---"

She busied herself at the coffeemaker with a great deal of noise.

"---and think to myself 'I've taken a piss here, here, and here.' That's a little more intimate than I ever planned to get with my ---

She thrust an empty 3 lb. Folger's tin, complete with lid, under his nose wordlessly. She had another in her hand. She put hers on one side of the room and said, firmly, "Ladies room." Pointing to the other side of the room she said, "Mens' urinals."

"You're right," he said gloomily. "Fasting is looking better and better."

Scully put all the coffee into a box that they could scoop it out of and started perusing the shelves and closets. Mulder felt ineffectual and got up to stand with her. "Blankets? Is that what we're looking for?"

"I'm looking for something to drown out that damn surveillance radio," she said bitterly, pulling coats out of the closet - coats she'd left there over the years, coats he'd left there over the years. She found a jacket that wouldn't do any good to anyone and was going to attempt tying the thing up, putting it in a box, and pushing it into the closet where she didn't have to be reminded just how cruel she could be. As she stood over it, Mulder was calling her name to her - as she had left the park. She was trying to turn the other sleeve right side out (why did it matter?) when she heard his - he was crying. On the tape.

The coat was still in her hands. Mulder had froze not an arm's length away. Flashlight tucked under her arm, she sank into the extra chair leadenly, staring at the sound, unable to bear it, but unable to ignore it. Mulder unceremoniously picked it up, and she closed her eyes to the sound of it being smashed and returned to its component parts. When the sounds of metal and plastic cracking and snapping was over, he dropped the something heavy at her feet and said, tonelessly, "Found the hammer."

He went over to the shelves on the farthest side of the wall. Might as well have journeyed to the East Wing, for the distance it suddenly put between them. He'd cried. She had done that, just with a certain arrangement of cruel, unnecessary words that had actually made her feel better when she got home, but...her mother simply hadn't briefed her on crying males. She'd been deprived of vital information. Mulder was the kind of guy Scully's brother Bill would've liked to return to *his* component parts when they were kids...and probably now. Bill hadn't changed.

Mulder was mildly amused over the the spot where he'd destroyed the surveillance box. "The robots are gone," he announced in a bad imitation of Charlton Heston, gesturing dramatically at the smashed gears and springs, "but their waste is still *here*."

Scully very nearly giggled, which, Mulder had to say, was a pretty absurd sight in of itself. Soon they were both standing over the remains of the box laughing insanely, stopping periodically to breathe and crack each other up again. She extended an arm out to him. He took it. He enclosed her in a tight hug, burying his fingers and his mouth in her hair, closing his eyes, trying to absorb the moment fully to last him until the next time - down to the smell of her hair to the corner of her eye to the weight of her hand on his back to the timing of her breath and the sinking feeling that started to make him heady and warm if he stood there too long. He ran his fingers down through her hair, absorbing the tiny pinpricks down to the soft nape of her neck and the soft scrape of the links of her small chain against his wrist. His other hand was open too far down on her side - the captivating curve on a woman when the side of the stomach turned into the thigh. He realized with his concentration on the feel of her, he had lost his guard of what he would and would not show her with his face.

And he was open. Open wide. She could've stepped out too far and fallen into him if she hadn't hesitated just enough to see his face fall back into its familiar confines, only now with a soft, melancholy smile and the mussed look of a man who would forever need sleep that he wouldn't get. He deftly sidestepped his way out of her arms, crushing the little parts under his shoe, and she sidestepped him right back.

After a moment, he yielded to her, standing up very tall in front of her so that she was fairly embroiled in his chest, taking in the mingled scent of sweat and soap and fatigue. None of those cologne pretensions for Mulder. It was the smell of a man, and that was all. His hands, fingers spread out, had seized control of the small of her back. She had her hands, palms flat, against the taut muscles of his stomach, almost as if she were pushing him away in equal parts as she closed in tighter on him. The tips of his fingers had gone exploring and were cupping the side of her breast throuht the silky material. She'd worked her way up under his shirt just enough to feel the naked flesh right above the waistband of his jeans. His breathing was so raggedly desperate in her ear that she didn't realize that her own was much the same, and with an inarticulate whisper of unshaven skin and the soft insistence of his lip against the top of her ear, she was open to the extreme possibility that the two had volumes to learn about the other.

And she pulled herself back to look at him - to give him a hard look. Like the aftermath of those times when he had relied on her to keep him alive - shamefaced, handing her the gun he might've shot and killed her with had she not intervened and broke Robert Modell's concentration, and anytime he accepted her hand, there was a certain powerlessness to his features that never quite went away. It was there now, as he pulled away from her with a knowing smile that said this was only the first step of a long walk. She'd wait. She could. Four years had prepared her for that at least. To give him what she could, for as long as she could - it's all she had to offer. Even after he had moved away, she stayed in the same place, arms ready. It took her a minute to realize that the moment had come and gone.

"Music?" Mulder asked from behind a shelf where his radio sat against manuals and annotated code. She nodded and the silence gave way to the sad strains of a guitar. Late night radio. A husky female voice sang, "Everybody knows the boat is sinking, everybody knows that the captain lied. Everybody's got this broken feeling/ like their mama or their dog just died..." Mulder smiled from behind the shelf. His shoes were off and his bare feet shuffled against the floor. He came bearing a blanket, which he put around her shoulders like a cape. It was old, fuzzy fleece blue, and very warm. She rolled herself up in it, and to the slow, lazy beat of the music, she went to sleep. When she woke up for a few minutes, he was there on the floor beside her, and didn't stir when she touched him. Another time, she saw that he, also, was mildly awake, and thinking.He was sprawled out. His shirt was unbuttoned, and his fly unzipped. She didn't care. He didn't care.

She fell asleep smiling again each time.

She spent all night drifting in and out like that. It was like being a little girl and knowing in the back of her mind that she was in a strange place with entirely new noises. But this time, Mulder was the new place. The new sound in her ears.

When she woke up a third time, the flashlight battery had gone out, leaving the room dark again. She reached out beside her. Mulder wasn't there.

"Mulder?"

At least a dozen different things to worry about sprung to her mind. What if he'd gone downstairs through all the chemicals? What if - ? What if he'd - ?

He was right in the room. She heard his breathing.

"Mulder?"

"Right here."

"Right where?"

He laughed. It was the sexiest sound she'd ever heard before, but she just when she'd figured out where it came from, she heard him somewhere else.

"Scully?"

"Yes?"

"Don't you think it's strange, by now I mean, to call you 'Scully'? I mean, I've been Mulder since I first started college...but you were Dana up until the day you walked into this office. It's starting to feel strange to call you that."

"You only call me Dana when you feel bad for me....where *are* you?"

"Where are *you*? I don't have the light. You don't have the light."

She laughed under her breath. "This is...scary."

"And you *like* it."

She didn't deny it. "Where are you?"

"You won't know until I'm ready for you to know it." His voice had taken on a sensual growl - a confident swagger. And just when she thought he was behind her - she knew his scent was so close! - she hugged empty air, and he laughed from some place near the left. She turned.

She smiled. "Where did you learn this game, Mulder?"

"I learned it from the past four years."

"From me?"

"From *us*. This is all we've been doing, Scully. This has been the crux and curse of our personal lives. We've been groping around in the dark, backing away from the shadow of the other, backing away from the hurt feelings of the other. Stuck in a vacuum where if one pulled close, the other one inevitably ran away. You see that now, don't you?" He was moving in circles. She couldn't keep up with him. "Here we are, trapped in our office, surrounded by hazardous materials - and we're freer now than we've ever been before with each other. Aren't we? Or am I just a delirious insomniac talking out of my ass?"

"No, you're right...where are you, Mulder. I want to see you."

"'Character is what you are in the dark,'" he whispered. "Do you think I have good character?"

"Yes," she answered mischieviously. "I'd like it a lot better if I could *feel* your character."

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes," she said, happy *and* scared now, moving towards the sound of him. Hands hungry for the feel of his skin. She'd gotten merely a taste before. He was torturing her this way...

"What else do you want?"

"Right now, I want what's at the top of the list, and that's *you*.

"That's not what I mean." Soft fingertips brushed her cheek, and he was gone again. "What I mean is that I've never really been able to figure you out." His fingers traced the buttons of her blouse all the way down without undoing one, and then he'd freed the bottom. "You aren't an easily read girl. Who speaks Scully?" She laughed low up into where his face was, fingers bracing his arms as he worked his way down the buttons.

"Right." She said. "Like you are so easy to figure out..."

"I am," he said. "Not to say that I'm normal, but I'm definitely easy to figure out. You've done it...I just wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that we are trapped together. How much of it will you want to remember later?"

"All of this, Mulder."

"Then tell me what you want."

"*You*....NOW." Was this her? With the voice so insistent?She smiled, excited by the game now. She stood, surveying the darkness. She turned, thinking he was behind her, and he was, but to her back now. He pulled the blouse away from her arms, and worked on her bra strap.

"Front facing bra hooks," he said through a mouthful of her soft neck. "Man *has* advanced."

She reached behind her to bring his body closer to hers. Naked skin as far as her fingers explored. Perfect, naked skin. Her skirt was on the floor. She was vulnerable - out of her armor, and stripped of all reserve in that very moment. She was open, easy to hurt. His hands knew hurting was easy enough. And the only pain he was causing her now was the pain of depriving her of instant gratification. She tried to turn, to take him inside of her. He was ready. And she was more ready.

He laughed softly in her ear. "You're going to work for this. Four years of back foreplay. The anticipation of it...builds, makes it stronger - the little death as - well, someone called it. Sex isn't a mind exercise endorsed by Mensa."

She giggled again, and took the exquisite pain as only he could offer it. Because she trusted him implicitly with this core of her - this part that was willing to be submissive, willing to be dominant, willing to bend and to bend him. Like the beliefs they each held sacred, and like the paradoxes they each held in puzzlement, these things too could be interchangeable and dizzying. And she sat back for the ride, and she drove. Because she trusted him.

Some things *never* change.

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Well?

*lyrics to "Everybody Knows" (Leonard Cohen) used without permission. No copyright infringement intended. The version referred to in this story was performed by Concrete Blonde.

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One / Two

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