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Things hurt a lot when you haven't used them for a little while. That's what the doctors say, and Mulder can't help but wonder if it's the same for feelings. When he looks at anyone, all he can feel is a persistent sense of numbness. A feeling that he is the ghost they didn't want to see, or maybe that they're expecting a little bit too much of him.
Because he did die, or he might as well have. You don't bury living people. Scully's eyes lock to him every time she's in the room and instead of the welcome, warm feeling he gets from knowing she's there, someone who knows him so well, the only person who breaks "trust no one" for him, all he gets is blank. And the occasional envy of the months gone by, when he was…well, abducted, then dead.
He's trying to get better at that. At saying it to himself, because he was dead, and time went on without him. Will it be like that when he dies for real? He can't quite imagine that. Strange, how all he can think of after coming back is what it was like to be dead.
Scully's at his side when he wakes up again, at two in the morning when a nurse drops by to add a little something into his IV. Scully watches her like a hawk—she's a doctor. She knows what they're doing to him, even if he doesn't quite get it.
When the nurse leaves, Mulder sits up as best he can, ignoring the pained little voice in the back of his head that wants him to go back to sleep for another dozen hours.
"They didn't want to bring in a cot?" he asks quietly. The other patients should be allowed to sleep. Besides, it hurts his voice to talk in much more than a whisper.
She matches his tone even though she's capable of being louder, "I didn't ask."
"You'd think they'd want to be a little more careful with someone in such a delicate condition," Mulder says.
It's been more or less an elephant in the room, though he would never say that particular phrase out loud unless he wanted to see the flash of annoyance in Scully's eyes. He knows it well and he misses it. He misses seeing her look at him with anything other than pity and incredible longing and joy and pretty much everything but annoyance.
He's the golden boy, for now. Life's prodigal son.
"Hardly delicate," Scully notes, but even as she says it she's adjusting her position, shifting to what looks like a less comfortable pose, actually, but what does he know?
She wants to talk about it. He knows that. He's just not sure if he can. Visible evidence of the months gone by, evidence that he existed and should have been somewhere and he wasn't. Is that guilt, the emotion settling deep in his stomach, the feeling encouraging him to play everything off like it's a joke?
Here's a good one: what do you call a man who rises from the dead?
His name.
Mulder shrugs, or tries to. His shoulders are just another part of him that's refusing to cooperate right about now. He can't blame them.
"You can sleep like that?" he says, instead. Because he can feel his eyelids getting heavier, the fog of fatigue rolling into his brain. Shouldn't he have enough energy stored up to keep him up for a couple more months? Maybe then he can make it up somehow. Be on duty for midnight feeds. If she'd still want him around.
The other elephant in the room, although Mulder isn't convinced that this one is one they both can see.
"It's hard to sleep in my own bed," Scully admits, this time rubbing her back. She stands up and walks a little circle in front of her chair. "And believe me, I've got the pillows."
He does believe her. It's hard not to imagine Scully solving any problem she comes across, or at least attempting to. Is that what he is to her, right now, a problem to solve?
He knows the accepted response is something like "it'll be harder to sleep when the baby's here" but he really can't even imagine that at this point. Just Scully, always Scully, the same way he is just Mulder, only Mulder.
"You should get some rest," she says, "When they discharge you there's going to be a lot of paperwork to fill out."
"You think the line at city hall is going to be long?" Mulder says, "'Hi, just here to fill out my "alive again" paperwork. Don't mind me.'?"
Her mouth turns up a little at the edges despite how she's forcing it down. "Something like that."
He tries to grin, or even wear an expression that might hint towards a grin, but the scars on his face don't appreciate it and he finds himself deadpan instead, and drifting off besides.
"You should…sleep, too…" Mulder says, finding the idea of having no particular worries about disappointing her very appealing.
She says something, but he's out already. No way to hear it.
It's hard to express what particular thoughts cross his mind when he's looking at his old apartment—his own apartment, it's not like he's got a new one somewhere else—except to say that it, like everything else in his life, has changed more than he thought it would have.
It might be in his head. It must be in his head, because a couple of months can't make that much difference for everything, can they? But they have. And his apartment is rearranged in an unfamiliar way with just a touch of the familiar. Because he knows Scully and he knows the way she would organize things if she was given the chance, which, in the case of his death, she was.
Which is why he knows exactly where his extra pillows will be when it's, by the clock, time for him to sleep. But he can't sleep. It feels ridiculous to even suggest it. If he was an insomniac before, months of deep, dreamless, deathlike sleep have only worsened that particular condition. He tosses, turns, turns, tosses. None of it works. Even the TV set seems hollow and empty.
His eyes land on the phone on the coffee table. Has Scully paid the bill for it, taking her calls from his apartment? He picks it up and hears exactly what he thought he would hear.
"Wasting your money…" Mulder murmurs, but he hits one on the speed dial anyways. He's heard about "getting sleep in before the baby comes" but if Scully is anything like him (is Scully anything like him? does he want her to be?), then she's awake. It can't be that late, anyways.
"Hello?" Scully sounds bleary, but not too hoarse. She hasn't just woken up, though it's entirely possible he's managed to hit the sweet spot where she was just about to fall asleep. He feels almost guilty for that.
"Scully, it's me," he says.
"Mulder? What is it?"
He can hear the shifting of her sheets, another indication that she was in bed. A piece of him considers hanging up, telling her that he's doing something goofy, just wanted to test out the phone to see if it works. And it does, wonder of wonders, but he's still talking to her. Still wants to be talking to her.
"Are you having trouble sleeping, too?" Mulder says, his voice dry.
"That's why you're calling?"
He can sense the mixed sense of relief and exasperation, practically picturing her face on the phone. The way the corners of her lips tighten and she tilts her head ever so much so that she is looking up at him. Beautiful, if there was a word, but that's not what he should be saying. Not his place, not now, maybe not ever.
What are we doing here? The question isn't quite on the tip of his tongue but it's flashing through his newly safe and somewhat sane brain. Because he wants to know, needs to know, how much he can push her—no, that's not quite right. Scully is the only person he can trust, or at least, she has been. No matter what he's put her through (and it's been a lot). But he doesn't want to push her. Pull her, maybe, bring her closer to him, make sure that they're both safe, them and the baby.
Shit. Is it really a good idea to be keeping a pregnant woman up past her bedtime?
"Mulder?" Scully says, "Hello?"
"Sorry," Mulder says, "Train of thought got tied up in the station. I think there was a stick-up of some kind."
"How about you let Sheriff Sleep take the reins there?" Scully says, blindly feeding into his ridiculous little metaphor. Metaphor? Analogy? He should know this, but maybe he is too tired.
"Yeah, maybe that's a good idea."
"Good night, Mulder," Scully says, not unkindly.
"Good night, Scully," he echoes.
And promptly gets the requisite zero hours of sleep. Yeah, this is going swimmingly.
Scully comes over early the next morning to bring him breakfast. He's pretty sure it's some kind of proof-of-life check, a reason for her to be around him even when it's not required. And he likes that, even as he's trying desperately not to fall asleep on a bagel. He's done more on less sleep, but that wasn't when he was straight out of the hospital, out of his own coffin.
He's glad he didn't ask to be cremated. Glad that someone had the old-fashioned sentimentality to bury him by the rest of what could be called his family. He wants to engage with her, spend some quality time with the woman who probably missed him the most while he was (dead) gone, but listening to her talk about her plans for the day just makes him feel more like he's stuck in molasses.
There's too much going on with the X-Files for even him to think about. No, that's a lie, he is still thinking about it. Thinking about Scully and that off-brand replacement they've got filling his shoes. As soon as they take him off of sick leave, he's going back in. That might help him catch up with everything, might help him reconnect to the world instead of living in it as a ghost.
His hand thuds into the table, startling both himself and Scully.
"What did you do that for?" Scully says after a moment where he provides no explanation.
I wanted to see if my hand would go through the table is not a feasible answer, even if it is the truth.
"Had an idea. Lost it," Mulder says instead. He bangs his hand down on the table a few extra times, a little more gently, "Not coming back."
"O…kay," Scully says, hesitating. Perhaps pondering if he should be left on his own while she works a 9-5 that will soon be behind her, and then they can both be on undetermined administrative leave while the world spins past them.
Mulder's not convinced that the table isn't a ghost, too. Maybe he'll see his dead fish floating through the air today, call down Scully and Dog-boy and they can all have a nice visit to a psychiatrist.
"…so I'll see you after that," Scully finishes saying, which is a bad time for Mulder to admit that he wasn't paying attention, so he doesn't.
"Got it," he says, when he absolutely doesn't. If there's something critical he'll figure it out, otherwise Scully's just worrying for nothing. She does that, he's noticed, and it's never been more clear to him than it is now.
He wishes he could bring himself to care as much. The ghost of the feeling is there, maybe hiding behind the ghost of the table and the ghost of him, because he wants to scream and he wants to hide and he wants to dip into a nice little oblivion for the exact amount of time it would take the universe to die a heat death or whatever and come back around to the moment he left so he can pretend that none of this has ever happened.
But that doesn't happen. Instead, Scully reaches out, squeezes his shoulder in a way that he recalls used to comfort him, and leaves.
Back to the haunted house. Mulder considers slamming cupboards until the neighbors tell him to stop, but he's too good for that. Instead he finds himself staring out the window, watching people go by. He can make up stories for them easily—isn't that what a profiler is supposed to be good at? There's a man walking his boyfriend's dog that he hates, even though he'll never say anything. There's a pair of siblings arguing over why one of them went overboard with a Mother's Day present. There's a lady, late for work.
It's much easier to tell stories about other people than it is to think about what's going on with himself. Maybe even better than TV, which is starting to feel just as blurry as the rest of everything that happened pre-death coma.
It's dark out when Scully finally gets back. He doesn't envy the commute. It comes back to him the second he hears her keys jingling, the driving and waiting for other people who were also driving and waiting.
"Hey, Mulder," Scully says. "How are you doing? I called."
"Must've missed it," Mulder says, and he honestly, genuinely did. Not once did the piercing ring of the phone break his concentration from the window. The message indicator blinks at him accusingly.
"Well, I was just checking in," Scully says. She puts her keys down, takes off her jacket, and bam! She's pregnant again, like a magic trick. Object permanence, eat your heart out.
It occurs to him, when she sits beside him on the couch, that she is acting somewhat maternally. And as much as he knows that she has wanted that for ages, now, and she's finally getting the chance, he's not sure where that leaves him.
Paternal? Maybe he should ask, but he doesn't feel it. Just another thing he can't feel really, and dimly he knows that there is something there that should worry him. That he should cling to any kind of normalcy and demand it, kicking and screaming.
Inside, he nearly freezes up when Scully settles at his side, breathing softly. There are a million and one things to ask her and not a one will come out of his mouth, not even if he deeply, dearly wanted it to.
"Busy day at work?" Mulder says instead, because he wants to hear her speaking. He has missed her voice more than he had realized, when he was here, telling himself silly little stories in the neighborhood.
"There's a lot of paperwork when someone the FBI thought was dead comes back to life," Scully admits, "Skinner's trying to get through most of it. I'm getting through the rest—and the cases."
"The cases?" Mulder presses, because that part he knows. There must be a little subroutine in his brain constantly running, constantly saying, "here is the truth, listen to this: the world is stranger and larger than you know and it might bite you and dozens of other people but the truth is there. You can find it. You can pry its jaws away from some people, at least."
It is easy to listen to that voice. That voice has been his friend for so long. What's that saying? It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you? Well, they got him, and he's alive, or at least he's still standing—not standing, sitting, he's here, here with Scully.
She's starting to talk about a case, but with her so close beside him, warm and full of life, real life, not whatever he's been pretending at for the past few days, he finally feels…safe? Maybe that's the word. Safe is Scully and Scully is safe.
He's drifting off. The consequences of staying awake for far too long are that sleep likes to hit back ten times as hard. His head rests on her shoulder, and he feels the comforting pressure of her head resting against his.
This. This is good. He should tell her, when he wakes up, if he remembers. If it's the only thing he remembers, let it be this. If there is no Dana Scully in the world, in his world, it is no longer good.
He wakes up alone on the couch, legs stretched out across it when they definitely weren't before.
"Scully? Mulder calls out, a reflex for worry. There was something he was supposed to tell her and he can't quite remember what it is, but it's at the back of his mind, floating around there in pieces like he's dropped the ball on something again.
"I'm alright, Mulder," Scully pokes her head out from his room, and he sees, with some pride, that she is wearing his clothes as pajamas. They suit her, or maybe it's whatever possessiveness he feels over her kicking in. She hadn't asked, hadn't needed to. He wonders how many times she's done this while he was gone. "The couch was bothering my back. I couldn't move you. Or wake you up. Have you been sleeping okay?"
This. This is the opportunity. Confession. If he asks her to keep his secrets under a seal would she do it? Would that be patient confidentiality, or whatever it is that Catholics do that lets them feel comfortable confessing to murder?
"Not really," Mulder admits, "Hard to make your mind do anything but wander at night, you know?"
Mulder sits up and tilts his neck to the side, stretching out from sleeping on the couch. It was probably more cramped than he should be dealing with, considering the multitude of injuries he's technically recovering from, but it's the best sleep he's had in a while.
Scully looks more concerned than understanding. She joins him on the couch and looks at him, and there's that look again.
"I…" Mulder says, and the words he wants to form don't quite reach his mouth. What does he want to say? He feels like he used to be better at this, telling her how he feels, how he wants to feel. Things have just become complicated so fast, and there are parts of their life that he's missed out on that seem to weigh on his chest.
But Scully waits for him, sitting there on the couch. She readjusts her posture just a little and Mulder takes a moment to appreciate her, the way she's sitting, feet pointed towards him and arms resting on the couch, the way her head is ever so slightly tilted, her eyes focused on him.
"I don't think I could sleep if you weren't there." Mulder says, and he's grateful that, for once, he hasn't convinced himself to chicken out and say something childish instead.
Scully takes that in for a moment. "I could…sleep over," she offers.
Mulder has no idea why that makes him as happy as it does even though he can hold all the pieces together individually. He likes to sleep. He likes Scully. Getting enough sleep and spending time with Scully is perhaps an award-winning combination.
Maybe he should have them give his brain another once over, just in case. With his luck, there's some new shenanigans going on that mean he's going to be worse than ever. But at least he's alive to deal with them.
"That…sounds good," Mulder says, nodding his head slowly. He stands, looking towards the kitchen. "Do you want something to eat?"
"What do you have?" Scully says, as though she isn't the one who stocked the kitchen for him.
"The chef recommends the Cheerios," Mulder says, "Paired with 2% milk, naturally."
"I'll take the chef's suggestion," Scully says. She has a bit of a time standing up, and he offers her his hand.
"Two bowls of Cheerios, coming right up," Mulder says. There is something in spending time with someone else that makes him feel human again. There is a bit of a routine in it, joking around and keeping things light, perhaps lighter than they should be, but it is amazingly difficult to ruin cereal. Which was why he offered it instead of the eggs he knows are in the fridge.
This time he is able to listen, focus on what Scully's saying instead of what she's not. There is far too much politics involved in running the conspiracy theories department down in the basement, but he knew that already. It's something for him to put some worry into now that he's thinking about coming back to it. If they'll have him. He doubts that, but he's not sure if he gets a pension anymore.
"Then you can come in on that Thursday," Scully says, but she isn't exactly hopeful about it. She's learned just as much as he has what their job is.
"Try and stop me," Mulder says. Then he's back to fishing for Cheerios in their milk pool, hunting down his prey with a sense of justice and hunger.
"But I'll be over after work," Scully says, "I can bring some of my things."
Mulder nods at that. He's about to offer to drive her over to her apartment so she can get changed for work, but there's a small section of her things in his closet.
Maybe she's more used to this than he expected her to be.
True to her word, Scully has arrived with two large bags. One of them she sets down by the door, and the other on the coffee table. When she unzips it, Mulder sees the comfortable set of pajamas he imagines Scully wears, along with the various toiletries that come along with womanhood and a dozen other things that are just…hers. It's hard to imagine she needs another bag when this is the main one.
"What's in the other one, spare bricks?" Mulder jokes.
Scully looks at where she's left it, by the door. "Hospital bag. You know, all the things I'll need…"
She trails off, but he hears it anyways. All the things she'll need when she has the baby. They've been avoiding it, but sometimes it slips in.
He does not, in fact, know all the things and is instead left with a desire to go through the bag and know what the things are so he can be more on top of things, but rifling through her stuff would make him a bad host. She's already doing him a favor by sleeping over.
Scully is just as efficient at unpacking as he remembers her to be, and within fifteen minutes she's got her things set up how she likes them. Her pajamas are tucked up under the side of the bed that she's slept on. He notices, with some satisfaction, that it is the opposite of the side he prefers.
Not that he'll be sleeping on the bed while Scully is over. Boundaries and such. What is proper. What is proper? He doubts there has ever been any man, any person alive who has lived the same scenario that he is currently experiencing. He's probably done more unique things in the past month than anyone has a right to do and all it's getting him is banned from job and feeling like the Ghost of Christmas Present has come to visit.
If he's remembering his Muppet Christmas Carol right, that is.
"I'm just going to grab one more thing from the car," Scully says.
"You want help?" Mulder asks, tilting his head as he watches her go by.
"It's light," Scully says, "I'll just be a minute."
And she's back out the door, which is perfect rifling time. The hospital bag glances at him. No, wait, he's glancing at the hospital bag. It seems to be pulling him closer.
What is Mulder if not curious?
He unzips the bag. Various types of bandages and pads stare back at him, along with a few onesies—the smallest onesies he's ever seen, though there's a larger one in there, too. He tries to remember anyone he knows having a baby, because Scully's packed this thing like she packed her other bag—stuffed all the way. The hospital will be jealous.
He zips it back up and tries not to imagine Scully shopping for those, or Scully opening presents at a baby shower, or Scully's mom showing up uninvited at her apartment "just to drop off a few things," or people at work talking about what they did when they (or their wives, girlfriends, partners) had a baby.
He's missed out on that. Almost entirely missed out on it, coming in at the last second, the buzzer beater of this particular pregnancy.
He pours himself a glass of water, hands shaking. This is not the type of thing that makes people sad, is it? He imagines how he's supposed to be, proud of Scully, excited for the new baby. There's guilt there, for making this about himself. Maybe he'll apologize to Scully, let her go home.
The door swings open and Mulder sets down the glass. When it shuts, it reveals Scully holding the most oddly shaped pillow that he's ever seen. It's easily more than half her size, and she has to poke her head around it to see him.
"What is that?" he asks.
"Pillow. It's supposed to help my back."
"Supposed to?" Mulder says, looking at it, "Does it?"
"Sometimes," Scully says.
Mulder can't imagine that until she sets it down on the bed, pulling it closer to the side she's chosen to sleep on. He pictures Scully sleeping—easy, considering how many times she's fallen asleep in the car—resting against the pillow. It's probably more comfortable than sleeping on her back at this point. Is that something she's supposed to do, or not supposed to do?
It's another thing he's fallen behind on, but he can fix that, a little. He didn't go grocery shopping—returning from the dead has made him somewhat agoraphobic, for reasons that are beyond him. It's not like his apartment is particularly safe. That particular fact has been disproved time and time again. It's not like the outside is dangerous—though he knows all too well the kinds of dangers that are out there.
But she put food in the fridge and he is actually capable of cooking things other than bowls of cereal, believe it or not.
"Do you want something to drink?" Mulder says, "I have—well, you know what I have."
"Glass of water?" Scully says, and Mulder obliges. She's leaning on the counter, something that's taking a little bit more effort to make comfortable.
"I can cook," Mulder says, "If you want."
Scully looks at him with a little smile and nods, "Sure. Is that pasta sauce still there?"
It's pretty much all still there. Mulder hasn't eaten anything since the Cheerios that morning, and even then he doesn't feel all that hungry. He isn't sure if that's an emotional symptom or a physical one. It doesn't matter either way—it's not going to make him eat lunch.
"Yep," Mulder says. He knows his kitchen and he knows Scully, which means everything is more or less where he expects it to be. Getting into that rhythm feels good, feels purposeful. Scully pulls up a chair so she can tell him about her day and question him about his. He makes up some not-too entertaining stories about going for a walk around the block.
Mulder turns around from straining the pasta, finishing up an anecdote about a tiny little chihuahua that he saw on his alleged walk, and Scully's crying.
She knows.
He shakes the thought off. There's no way she would have reason to doubt his chihuahua story, or that she could have figured out the fact that he hasn't left the house for a little while.
"What's wrong?" Mulder says. The pasta sits in the colander, momentarily forgotten and dripping down into the sink. Drip, drip, drip. Scully's tears don't go as fast, and she's wiping them away before they trail all the way down her cheeks anyways.
"Hormones?" Scully offers up in a shaky voice. Then, with a watery little laugh, she adds, "I missed you. A lot."
"I'm just making pasta, Scully, it's not rocket science. You should thank the good folks at Ragú." Mulder says, the words instantly springing to his lips. But he had missed her, too, hadn't he? And all the things that she did, the way she puttered about, or the things she ate, or the way she spoke. All of it had been missing from his life for months.
But Scully had known about it. Scully had probably watched them bury him, maybe tossed in a handful of dirt herself. Scully had been there for months, feeling all of it.
There's a rhyme there, some kind of poetry. Him, feeling nothing, her, feeling everything. Except he's not exactly feeling nothing, because when she wipes away a few more tears, he finds his way over to her, over to a hug where he can press his cheek to the top of her head and let her lean on him a little.
It's a slightly awkward hug, given that she's still sitting, but she squeezes him and takes a minute to let go.
"I'm sorry," Scully's already saying when they release from the hug. "I didn't know…I guess I just didn't think of how much of that was still on my mind."
She smooths down the front of her shirt, and her hand comes to a rest on her bump. Mulder can imagine watching that become a reflex. He wishes for the millionth time that he had figured out a way to be there for her.
"It's not…it's not the same, but I missed you too," Mulder says, and he turns his back and goes back to making pasta because it's far easier to be emotionally open with someone if they aren't looking at you like you can do no wrong.
Pasta in the pot, sauce on top of pasta. Stir. Eyes down.
"I…I look at you and I can't help thinking of every single little thing that I've missed. All the things that I wasn't able to be a part of," Mulder says. Stir. Keep stirring. Cover the pot, let it sit. Maybe now he can turn back to Scully, look her in her probably still tear-filled eyes.
"I write a journal," Scully whispers, ever so quietly. "It was more for the baby…just day to day stuff, really."
She stands and walks over to the hospital bag. Bending over to pick it up takes her a second, enough that Mulder gets two steps away from offering her his hand, but with the help of the nearby wall she makes it back up.
The journal is very practical, and also very Scully. The cover is a pale yellow with 'Memories' and there's a little pen loop that's holding a pen of solid quality. She places it on the table and flips past the first few pages to a time about a month after he 'died.'
"'I went to go visit my mom today and she gave me a box of baby clothes,'" Scully reads out loud, "'I've seen them at the store, but I still can't imagine anyone being small enough to fit into them. Or that so much of them are needed.'"
Mulder looks at her and it feels like his heart is beating out of his chest, the affection surges over him so completely. Has he ever felt anything like this in his life?
He pulls her into another hug, which means another watery laugh and Scully simultaneously attempting to hug him back, hold onto the journal, and wipe her tears away. This time he presses a few kisses to the top of her head.
"They're mostly like that," Scully says, "Just boring…I just didn't want to forget anything if the baby asked me later."
"It's wonderful," Mulder says. He can't be part of the little moments in those pages, but he can know about them. He can know that Scully wants him to be there, wants him to be a part of all this, which is pretty fantastic because he wants to be a part of it, too.
"The sauce!" Scully says, because the smell of something burning is becoming evident in the kitchen. In a long stride or two, Mulder is above the pot and back to stirring. It'll be terrible to wash the bottom of the pot off, later, but for the most part the pasta and sauce are salvageable.
"I think that means it's done," Mulder says, turning the oven off. He gives it a taste even though he knows the sauce as well as he knows anything.
Bowls, forks, and refilled glasses of water come out. While they eat, Scully reads him a few pages out of the journal, and recounts a story where someone helped her grab something off of one of the lower shelves at the store.
It's good.
The sleepover part of the night begins when Mulder is done washing dishes, because he is technically the host and also because he saw the many little things that Scully brought with her. She deserves the head start on her nightly routines. He hums to himself as he scrapes away the little bits of burnt sauce still clinging to the bottom of the pot, and stops for a second.
When was the last time he hummed anything? Probably a few months at least. That's gotta be some kind of milestone. Maybe he should get a journal, too, and put his own little victories inside of it.
He flips the pot upside down onto a towel, where it will most likely spend the next few days until he needs it again, because he will almost certainly forget to put it away the first dozen times he walks past it.
Scully is changed into her pajamas and her face looks vaguely shiny, which he will assume is the result of some kind of cream that she's put on her face. She's about to hop into bed when she sees him and does a little wave.
"Thanks for cleaning up," she says.
"No problem," Mulder says, and then adds that to the little victories notes. Yep, definitely time to get a notebook for that.
His routine doesn't take long, but when he leaves the bathroom changed into pajamas, he's ready to hit the couch. The day feels like it took longer than it did.
"Where are you going?" Scully says, putting her book down.
"Couch?" Mulder says, uncertain if he is answering a rhetorical question.
"I'll scoot over, I'm not going to kick you out of your bed," Scully says.
Mulder looks at the space left in the bed, taking into account both Scully and her massive pillow. There's a little piece of him that wants to fight back and be a gentleman, whatever that means, letting her have the whole bed to herself. The couch, while definitely too small, is not an unreasonable place for him to sleep. But even as he's convincing himself that he'd be fine on the couch, he finds himself pulled back to the bed.
He's not sure what it is about Scully's presence that helps him fall asleep, and if he was asked to put a finger on it, he wouldn't be able to. But when she shuts her book, placing it on the side table, and shuts off the lamp, he can already feel himself at peace.
Even if she makes a little bit more noise than he would've expected as she settles in, shuffling her pillow around until she's found the most comfortable position, he's glad she's there. Her arms are around the pillow, but she's reached out her fingertips so they're just barely brushing his arm.
As he drifts off, Mulder hears her breathing slow until it reaches the familiar pace of sleep, with a little bit of a snore thrown in. It's probably one of the best sounds that he's heard in his entire life.