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She is already half-asleep when she hears the knock on the door of her motel room. With a sigh, she rolls over and buries her head in the pillow, keeping her eyes firmly shut. It’s not exactly a surprise – she has long since become used to his habit of calling her or showing up at her door at all hours. But their case here is over, it's done. And all she wants to do is sleep and hope that tomorrow, the weather will have cleared up enough for them to get on a plane home.
The knock comes again, more insistent than before.
“Hey, Scully,” she hears him calling, voice muffled through the barrier of the door and the sound of the storm outside. “It’s really coming down out here. Let me in?”
With a groan, she turns on the bedside lamp and drags herself out of bed.
When she opens the door, he is standing there holding a newspaper over his head, which is doing absolutely nothing to protect him from the rain. He wipes at his face with a wet sleeve, blinking water from his eyes. "Hi," he says. Her partner, the world’s most charming insomniac.
She takes a step back to let him in, following him with her eyes as he walks past her, dripping water all over the cheap, faded-beige motel carpet. “What on earth are you doing here?” she asks. The door resists for a second against a sudden gust of wind, and she has to lean her shoulder against it until it closes shut.
He drops the newspaper onto the phone table in the far corner. “I couldn’t sleep. And the TV in my room isn’t working.”
“You’re soaked.”
He brushes wet hair off his forehead and she can see him shivering. “That’s probably due to the heavy rain outside.”
“I would never have guessed.”
“Can I borrow a towel?”
“Hold on.” She walks over into the tiny bathroom. “I don’t have a clean one, I’m afraid.” She hands him hers from earlier and he takes it. It’s still damp, but he doesn’t seem to mind, just starts toweling his hair with it.
“Thanks.”
She stands and watches him for a moment. “Not to repeat myself, but what are you doing here, Mulder?”
“I told you, I couldn’t sleep. So I thought I’d come and check on you.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, I could sleep. I was sleeping. Almost.”
“I’m sorry.” He says, not sounding very sorry at all before he checks his watch and winces. “Oh. I didn't realize how late it was.”
“It’s fine,” she promises, grabbing him by the arm to stop him as he starts lowering himself into the chair. “What are you doing?”
He stands back up, looking first at the chair, then at her. “Trying to sit down?”
“You’re dripping wet.”
“I didn’t exactly bring a change of clothes with me.”
“Then tell me what you came over for, go back to your own room, take a hot shower, and put on something dry.”
He carelessly throws the towel over the back of the chair. “I told you, I just came over to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.” She gives him a long look. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine."
She realizes she’s still holding onto his wrist and reluctantly lets go. “Are you sure?”
“If you really want to sleep, I’ll go,” he says, but she knows she doesn’t have the heart to kick him out. He wouldn’t send her away if she showed up at his door in the middle of the night, needing another living, breathing person nearby to hold off the silence of her own company.
“It’s alright. But if you’re staying, you will have to get out of those clothes.”
“Are you trying to get me naked?”
“You wish.”
He grins. “I don’t really think anything of yours will fit me.”
She waves at the bathroom door. “There’s a robe in there. I'm drowning in it, so it should fit you just fine. If it doesn’t bother you that I’ve had it on earlier.”
“Thank you,” he says, and disappears into the bathroom, closing the door behind himself.
She goes to sit on the bed, trying not to think too hard about the fact that he’s a few feet away putting on a robe that touched her bare skin just half an hour ago and that he seems to have absolutely no problem with that. It’s all just part of this crazy life, she thinks. Boundaries have lost almost all meaning for them a long time ago.
When he comes back out, his hair is sticking up at all sorts of angles and he’s wrapped in that ugly off-white motel-provided robe that falls just below his knees. His feet are bare and he looks more adorable than should be legal, and she feels such a fondness for him it sends a warm, familiar shiver up her spine. She expects him to go for the chair again, but is not all too surprised when he joins her on the bed instead. The best she manages is to frown at him half-heartedly and ask “What do you think you’re doing?”
“My feet are cold,” he says in lieu of an explanation, lifting the covers to slide in under them, leaning back against the headboard. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I was warm and comfortable before someone made me get up to answer the door,” she says as she shuffles underneath the covers next to him, and wonders just how naked he is underneath that robe. She pushes the thought away quickly, a well-practiced move, and focuses on the matter at hand. “Any reason you couldn’t sleep?”
He shrugs. “I was thinking.”
“Amazing. I’ll mark the day in the calendar.”
“Haha, very funny.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“All kinds of things.”
“Oh, I see. Don’t feel like you have to overshare.”
He lets out a small laugh. “Okay. I was thinking about…you know. Human connections. What they are and how we define them. And why we need to put them into neat little categories that we specifically make up for them.”
She hums acknowledgement. “The big philosophical questions of life?”
He bites his lip, looking thoughtful for a moment before he continues. “Don’t you ever just wonder what makes relationships – any kinds of relationships – what they are? Friendships, friendly relationships, mortal enemies, love, all of that. How do they work? How do they come to be? Is there a number of defining factors for each? Do you need to be able to apply a certain number to one to be able to say: this person is my friend, this person is an acquaintance and nothing more, this person is my partner?”
She shakes her head. “I have honestly never thought about it.”
“Not ever?”
“No.”
“But it's actually really fascinating,” he says slowly. “I mean, just take us as an example. Based on our interactions, what are we? If you wanted to put a name to it?”
“We are friends,” she says. “Aren’t we?”
He pulls the covers up higher and stretches out his legs, making himself comfortable. “Yes, we are. But why? What do we have between us that makes us friends? We’re also the kind of coworkers who get along really well, which is a whole different thing. Two people who spend a lot of time together and like each other. Is that already friendship? Where’s the line? What differentiates one from the other?”
“I mean, they’re not mutually exclusive,” she points out.
“Exactly.” He wraps his arms around himself, obviously still cold. “So, if people can be more than one thing to each other, is it possible they can become so many things to each other that they aren’t even aware of something else that they also are to each other? Like missing a piece of a puzzle? Maybe there are things you just never think about. For whatever reason. But if you’d look at all the facts, maybe you’d be surprised.”
She resists she urge to pull him against her to share her own body heat with him. “Surprised by what?”
“What you’ve been missing.”
“Would it matter?”
He looks at her. “I don’t know. Don’t you think that sometimes putting a new label on something gives you access to thoughts you hadn’t been paying any attention to before? You said we’re friends, and I completely agree. But what is it that makes us both so sure about that? Just for the sake of argument, have you ever wondered why we’re always each other’s first phone call?”
“Because we don’t really have any other friends anymore?”
“Don't we?" he asks. "I mean, if you can't think of anyone else, I'll lend you Frohike. He'd be thrilled.”
"Thank you so much."
"I get to keep Byers and Langly, though."
She raises an eyebrow at him. "Why do you get two and I only get one?"
He shrugs. "I'm...taller?"
"You need more friends because there's physically more of you?"
"Okay, because I have known them for longer, then," he says. "Seriously, though. I could call them just as well as I can call you."
“Then why don’t you?” she asks.
“That’s my question. What makes me think of you first?”
She does wonder sometimes. And what it always comes down to is this: their lives are too crazy for anyone else to understand; too often they are the only ones who truly get each other. Somehow she doesn’t think that’s what he means. “Mulder, I haven’t slept and I -”
“No, hear me out,” he interrupts, and she thinks she might as well, because he isn’t going to stop talking either way. “Actually, do you have a pen and paper?”
“What?”
“Hold on.” He scrambles off the bed and pulls open the drawer of the phone table in the corner. “Yes, okay.” He returns with a notepad and a pen, crawling back into bed next to her.
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s see,” he says, ignoring her question, looking down at the paper thoughtfully for a moment. “Alright, I think friendship is too complex a field to begin with, so let’s go with -” He scrawls 'romantic relationship' on top of the page, then looks at her. “One that should be easy. Everyone thinks they know what this one is. But do they? What do you think makes a relationship romantic?”
“You want to have an ontological discussion about romantic relationships at almost 1 a.m. in a freezing cold motel room after we both haven’t slept for a week?”
“Yes.”
"Any chance I can talk you out of it?"
"How long have we known each other?"
"I withdraw the question." She lets out a long breath. “You're crazy. You are really, actually crazy.”
"You sound surprised." He gives her the best fake innocent look she has ever seen and she knows she has already lost. “Come on, Scully, indulge me.”
“I don’t seem to be doing much else these days,” she says. “But okay. I suppose it starts with love. Two people need to be in love.”
“Yes, but there’s one problem already,” he says. “Isn’t there a difference?”
“A difference between what?”
“Between love and being in love. I really don’t think they’re the same thing at all. Related, but not the same. Loving someone is a steady, everyday kind of thing. Being in love is much more raw and passionate and fragile.”
She has to consider that for a moment before she can answer, but it does make a certain kind of sense. “Maybe. I guess so.”
“Good, okay,” he says, and makes the first two bullet points on the notepad: ‘love’ and ‘being in love.’ "What else? Trust?”
“Ideally,” she agrees. “It wouldn’t be a very stable relationship without it.”
“No, it really wouldn’t be.”
“Dating,” she suggests. “People in a romantic relationship should probably go on dates.”
“Even after they’ve been together for a while?”
“I think so. Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.” He taps the pen against his lips. “What counts as a date?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do they have to leave the house? Does it have to be scheduled? Do there need to be flowers, or do they need to kiss goodnight or anything like that? Is it still a date if any or all of those things are missing?”
She thinks about it. “I don’t know. I suppose it depends.”
“I think so too, but on what? Are we on a date right now?”
“Obviously not.”
“But why not?”
She almost laughs. “Is this a serious question?”
“I never joke about dates, Scully.”
“Fine.” She can’t help but smile at him when he looks at her. “Because you came over unannounced in the middle of a storm when I was trying to sleep and then came up with this weird game. That’s just…”
“What?”
“Us. That’s just us.”
“That’s the point. We’re spending time together,” he says. “It may be unscheduled, but we’re together and we’re having fun and we care about each other, right?”
Sometimes she isn’t prepared for the rush of affection he sparks in her with a few words. “Well, yes,” she says. “We are doing all that and we care about each other. But we’re still not romantically involved.”
“No, hold on, now you’re getting it backwards. You suggested that dating was part of a romantic relationship. Not that romance was a part of dating.”
“Shouldn’t it be though?”
“Then what is romance?”
“It’s -” she starts, then breaks off. “I have no idea. Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to figure out?”
“What we are trying to figure out. And in my opinion, I’d say a date is when you decide that something is a date.”
“So we could be on a stakeout and because the mood is right we could just simply define it as a date?”
“Why not?” His hand with the pen hovers over the paper. “I’m hesitating to put ‘date’ on here if it’s so vague, to be honest.”
“It’s just a random list.”
“How about ‘enjoying each other’s company?’ Shouldn’t that be the essence of a date? Plus spending planned time together?”
“Sounds good. And it has to be mutual, as obvious as that sounds. I think that's important.”
“You’re right. We can't leave that out.”
“Intimacy,” she suggests. “Although I guess that’s another thing we’d have to define first.”
“Yes,” he agrees, but writes it down anyway, pauses, then adds ‘(closeness)’ in brackets. “Okay?” he asks. “Because I think if it’s about romance, we can leave the sexual aspect out of it?”
“I agree,” she says. “You can definitely have one without the other.”
“And also honesty,” he says. “That should be part of any relationship.”
“Yes, definitely. Along with respect.”
“Equality,” he adds, and writes it down too as she nods.
“It also isn’t much of a relationship if you can’t tease each other and laugh together.”
“True.” He puts ‘having fun together’ as the next point. “Commitment?”
“Can’t hurt.”
“Support,” he suggests.
“Friendship,” she says, and turns her head to look at him, smiling as he meets her eyes, before becoming distracted by a single water droplet running down the side of his neck. She watches it, mesmerized, before she tears her gaze away and focuses her eyes on the far wall instead.
“Always friendship,” he agrees.
She looks down at the list they’ve compiled and she has a funny feeling in her stomach – good, but funny.
- love
- being in love
- trust
- enjoying each other’s company
- spending planned time together
- mutual feelings
- intimacy (closeness)
- honesty
- equality
- having fun together
- commitment
- friendship
“Hey, Scully?” he says.
“Yes?”
“Do you see anything here?”
“I see a whole lot of your handwriting.”
“I think we may be onto something important with this.”
She doesn’t want to ask. She knows she shouldn’t. The thing is, though, that she really wants to. “Onto what? You know relationships between people are more complex than that. You can’t just put checkmarks on a list and use it to put a label on something, much less expect it to stick.”
“But you can see a tendency. You can get a better idea of what is really going on between two people.”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know.” He taps the pen against the paper rhythmically, staring down at his own writing, and she knows him well enough to know that he has more to say. She's just not sure she wants to hear it. So she beats him to it before he can open his mouth again.
“We’ve been saying all along that the individual points on this list are very vague, right?” she points out. “All of them would need to be defined further to be in any way useful. It’s still all open to interpretation.”
“You’re right,” he says. “But maybe recognizing a pattern is a push towards analyzing your feelings further. Maybe that’s the push you need to do just that. To look at all these points in more detail and find out what they mean.”
“Doesn’t that happen naturally sooner or later?”
He shakes his head. “That’s exactly my point. I don’t think it always does, not necessarily. And then you end up being ninety years old, sitting in your nursing home, staring at the blank walls and wondering what could have been. If you had ever truly allowed yourself to put your feelings together like this. That way lies only regret.”
“So by putting together checklists you can avoid that? Like one of those personality quizzes in magazines? But instead of telling you whether you’re introverted or extroverted or on the right career path, it tells you whether or not you have a romantic partner that you might not even be aware of?”
He gives her a slow smile. “Maybe.”
“Well, it’s an interesting approach if nothing else.”
“It is, right? And it does make me think.”
“About what?”
He keeps his eyes fixed on hers and she can’t look away. “Scully, are we in a romantic relationship?”
“No, that’s…” she doesn’t know how to continue that sentence.
“I mean, if we go by our list…”
“But we’re not in love,” she says weakly. They’re not. They’re not.
“Because that part has to be mutual?” he asks, sounding like he’s simply asking about the weather. She can't look at him, but when she looks at the list instead, her eyes catch on the word ‘trust’ in his firm, familiar handwriting.
“Yeah,” she says. “It has to be mutual.”
“So…what if it is? Then it's a simple syllogism, right? If all of these points were to apply to us... Just for the sake of argument?”
They’re friends, they’re unhealthily codependent, and she’s happy with that. There’s no reason to change a thing. But she’s never been good at listening to reason around him. “How hypothetical are we still being here?”
“I think we’re past that,” he says.
“Then I’d have to say that I don’t know how you feel, so I can’t answer your question.”
He looks at her for a long moment. “I came over here in the middle of a rainstorm, coming up with the stupidest excuse imaginable, inventing a completely pointless game to talk about feelings with you.”
And that is all she needs.
She simply kisses him, because it’s the only way she knows how to answer – and if they’re past hypothetical, it should be all the answer he needs.
It doesn’t mean it's a good idea. Two way too sleep-deprived minds writing a bullet point list on cheap motel stationery in the middle of the night is hardly a reason to redefine a well-working, years-long friendship. But as he slips his arms around her and kisses her back, she really kind of wants to see where this goes. And maybe he's right, she thinks. Maybe it's there whether you stick a label on it or not.
She smiles into the kiss as he pulls her closer and decides that maybe not everything needs a definition. There is no conclusion to be drawn here. There is only them, and that is more than enough.