Sleeping Together

"How do you feel?"

"Fine," said Mulder, not bothering to try to hide the fact that he was cradling his injured arm, and leaning forward to keep his back from making contact with the car seat. The burns weren't bad enough to require treatment more elaborate than cream and gauze, were as nothing beside some of the injuries he'd sustained over the course of his work, but they were still obviously painful.

Yet he roused himself from his preoccupation with his own pain, enough to glance over at her with concern. "How's your shoulder?" he asked, in return.

"Fine," said Scully, not bothering to try to hide the fact that she was driving with difficulty. She'd wrenched her arm and shoulder and back pulling him away from the flames; again, not a life-threatening injury, but not pleasant, either.

And no rest for the weary, because there was still work to be done, a case to be solved...

Which wasn't going to happen tonight. Mulder, who could usually stay awake for ridiculous lengths of time, looked to be about a half-inch from the borderline of dreamland; and all Scully could think about was the prospect of a lengthy submersion in hot water and the luxury of a full night's sleep.

Her fatigue lightened somewhat as she glanced sideways at him, in the small window of opportunity afforded by the red signal light. Curled up in the corner of the car, tie missing, shirt ruined, jacket wrapped 'round his shoulders, hair tousled, drowsy-eyed and damn near snoring, he was adorable in a cute-fuzzy-baby-animal sort of way -- like a kitten so fatigued from having chased its tail all morning that it had fallen asleep whilst lapping its milk, and therefore had toppled face-first into the dish.

He must've sensed her watching him, for his eyes blinked somewhat open. "What're you looking at?" he said sleepily.

Scully gave it to him straight. "A seven-year-old who just had an exhausting day with his friends at the playground," she responded, with perfect seriousness.

She expected him to laugh, or become annoyed, but instead his face took on a thoughtful look. "Hmm," he mused. "Yeah, I guess life was that simple, once."

And she could have kicked herself, then, as the realization sank in: childhood, sister, Samantha -- word association, reminding her partner of things best left in the depths of unacknowledged background memory.

"Sorry," she mumbled under her breath.

He seemed not to hear her, regarded her instead with interest. "You going to bring me milk and cookies before naptime?"

The query swept away her brief spasm of guilt, brought an unwilling laugh to the surface. "If you're a good boy," she told him.

"Help?" he said, as he stood at the threshold of the doorway between their motel rooms, trying to make it into a joke but instead only sounding forlorn.

So she helped him remove what was left of his clothes and don sleepwear, not allowing herself to react to his evident embarrassment, checked the dressings on his back and arms, and as she was carefully spreading more cream on one of the nastier burns, noticed that he had fallen asleep. In her bed.

She didn't have the heart to try to wake him, and wasn't sure she'd succeed in any case.

Eventually, Scully emerged from the shower feeling almost human, and more exhausted than ever... strained muscles had eased, but so had her tenuous hold on consciousness. She glanced into Mulder's room -- there was stuff all over his bed, and she didn't have the strength to clear it -- and he was still asleep in her bed, and she still didn't have the heart to wake him. He looked so peaceful -- and so weary.

She moved to the other side of the bed, lay down, and was asleep within seconds.

The first time she awoke was to his snoring. It wasn't loud snoring -- in fact, the soft, steady rhythm was rather soothing. But it was occurring in her ear, and she found that disconcerting...

He'd moved, apparently in his sleep, to curl up beside her -- not touching, except for the barest contact of his hand against her shoulder. Kind of sweet, actually, but the air conditioning was faulty and the room too warm, and she hated feeling confined... so she edged away from him to the far side of the bed; and it wasn't five minutes before he rolled over in his sleep to sprawl the same half-inch away from her, crowding her again.

Mulder was still fast asleep; oh, she checked that first -- having determined that if he was in fact awake, she was going to knee him in the family jewels for having preyed on her sympathy. But no, he was out like a light, so deeply asleep that he didn't react even when she peeled his eyelid back... not entirely surprising. Between the insane pressures of their work and the pain of his personal struggles, she was sometimes amazed that he hadn't self- destructed already.

As she did on a fairly regular basis, Scully said a silent little prayer that Samantha Mulder might still be alive, and well, and that her Mulder might find his sister in that condition. That the infinite well of sorrow in his soul might be drained of its agony, soothed into peace. She didn't exactly phrase it that way -- her actual thought processes were more along the lines of 'let him find his sister already before he annoys me into shooting to kill' - - but Scully knew that the One who listened to her prayers would understand what she really meant.

And with his breath warm against her shoulder, she fell asleep again.

The second time she awoke was to his nightmare. It wasn't a loud nightmare, but what she could discern of it was heartbreaking.

In Mulder's dream, someone was dying a horrible death, and he was helpless to stop it; his muscles twitched as he fought faceless demons, as he sobbed out the name of the doomed one who he was so desperately struggling to save.

The worst part was, it was her name.

She tried to wake him, shook him hard, called to him -- when the nightmare finally broke, it was as sudden as the click of a lamp switch and the concurrent flare of incandescent light; he blinked up at her, whispered, "Scully," in a tone of anguished disbelief that broke her heart all over again, and she wrapped her arms around him and held him.

Sobs still shuddered through him, but he fought them now, not allowing the sadness to overcome him, forcing back the emotional reaction -- she held him, and didn't say a word, because one wrong word would shatter him and she couldn't chance a mistake. It took him exactly two minutes and forty-two seconds, according to the clock-radio, to regain his composure; she knew the exact moment when his control slipped back into place, because it was the moment he pulled away from her. "I'm fine," he said, in a flat, toneless voice.

Scully got up, wrapped a bathrobe around her t-shirt and shorts, and walked the short distance to the vending area - - by the time she'd returned to her room, Mulder had dried his tears and arranged his face into an expression of perfect calm. Though he had made no move whatsoever to vacate her bed.

"They didn't have milk or cookies," she explained, dumping the newfound bounty on the bed. "So I got potato chips. And iced tea."

The smile that spread across his face made her immensely glad that she'd invested the $1.65 in junk food.

He shared the snack with her, insisted that she share it with him, all the while grinning; and afterwards, she didn't even mind the fact that they'd gotten crumbs all over the bed.

And when they settled down to sleep again, she reached out across the arm's-length that separated them, and he took her hand in both of his and held it, and that was how they fell asleep.

The third time she awoke was to the dull ache of her back and shoulder, protesting the earlier maltreatment. It didn't help that Mulder was curled up close to her again, dragging the cheap mattress into an unnatural curve -- though she had to admit that it was kind of a nice feeling, a companionable feeling, despite the damage it was doing to her physically.

She rose from the bed and went to the bathroom, filled the tub with water as hot as she could bear it, added a capful of shampoo as an afterthought and watched the bubbles rise. Slipping out of her clothes, she slid into the tub and sighed happily as her muscles began to respond to the heat.

An interminable time later, as she drifted lazily on the fringes of awareness, a tap on the closed door half-roused her. "Scully? You okay?"

"'M fine," she responded blurrily.

There was a short silence. "Don't fall asleep in there," Mulder warned her.

The fourth time she awoke was vomiting water and struggling desperately for air, wheezing... Mulder's face, looming above her...

"I told you not to fall asleep in there," he said mildly.

He had covered her with a towel, for which she was profoundly grateful; she clutched at it as she sat up in the tub, coughing. Another towel appeared, draped itself around her shoulders, providing additional concealment and psychic armor. "You okay, Scully?" he asked, and the very sound of his voice was steadying; the feel of his hand rubbing her back through terry cloth was even more reassuring.

"Thanks to you," she responded, and allowed herself the luxury of leaning into the arm that curled around her.

Mulder helped her into a bathrobe and back to bed; his bathrobe, she realized later, as he tucked the sheets securely around her. His robe, and somehow warmer for that fact; as comforting as the feel of his arms around her had been.

His fingertips brushed a few tendrils of damp hair from her forehead, and he drew back... "Where are you going?" she blurted out fuzzily, reaching out unsteadily to grasp his hand as it retreated.

He glanced behind himself, at the open door that led to his connecting room. "I figured..."

Her grip tightened around his hand. "No," she said faintly, too sleepy to form coherent speech or thought, driven purely by instinctive emotional response.

And felt the fingertips of his other hand trail through her wet hair. "Okay," he said softly, freed his hand from hers; moments later, she felt the mattress shift beneath her, and the vague subliminal warmth of someone on the other side of the bed...

...and then she was asleep, aware of nothing but the security of his presence.

The fifth time, she awoke in his arms.

Head pillowed on his shoulder, snuggled up alongside him... and it felt so right, so perfect, that she didn't want to move.

She knew that she probably should do something about it, that she was courting danger by being so close, that there were implications... but she was tired, and oh so comfortable.

So she shifted position, just a little, to ease the cramp in her sprained shoulder -- in his sleep, he murmured her name, and she hugged him a little tighter, and let herself drift off again.

The sixth time she awoke, there was coffee.

There was also light, streaming in through a thin crack in the curtains, and the sounds of the shower running. And there was a headache, oh was there ever a headache happening... along with a certain indefinable contentment.

The other side of the bed, Scully discovered, was still warm.

The coffee waited patiently on the bedside table, a tall styrofoam container emitting steam and a very welcome scent. She struggled to sit up, took the coffee between both hands, sipped slowly, feeling the hot brew seep into her soul and coax her to a semblance of consciousness.

She still hurt, and she was still tired, but she felt amazingly good, considering. And Mulder -- emerging in a towel, trailing water droplets on the cheap motel carpeting -- he seemed positively cheerful.

"Good morning," he said pleasantly. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," she replied reflexively, though she wasn't really. "What about you? Let me see your back."

He shrugged, turned around -- some of the skin was blistering; some of the blisters had already broken. "I forgot," he mentioned, "started running the hot water, got in before I even thought about it..."

"That must've hurt," she estimated.

"You cannot begin to know how much it hurt. In fact, my screams are probably what woke you up. Sorry." He sat on the edge of the bed, extended one hand, ran a single fingertip down the side of her face. "By the way... thanks for, um, everything."

Scully smiled. "It's all right." She eyed the towel, wondering how it could possibly stay in place around his hips when only the tiniest margin of fabric held it in place. "Hey, it was almost fun."

"Maybe we should sleep together more often," he teased her, grinning -- but there was an odd little gleam in his eyes, a slight catch in his voice, that made her wonder if he was really joking.

He headed off to his own room to get dressed, and she sat in bed and finished her coffee, thinking -- about Mulder, and corollaries she didn't usually let herself contemplate. He was her partner, her friend, he was off-limits... he was also warm and strong and wonderfully cuddly, more comforting than her childhood teddy-bear. And the caring between them, well, that went without saying...

The other side of the bed was still warm.

"Maybe we should," she whispered -- but only to herself.

Then she got out of bed, and went to get ready for work.

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