Scully answers the door wearing a pair of jeans and a thin bleach-flecked t-shirt, her hair pulled back, one hand still resting on the knob. Her brows pull together as soon as she sees him.

Mulder opens his mouth, that beestung lower lip falling, his keyring in his hand. He takes a breath to speak and before he can get a word out, she turns on her heel and heads back toward the kitchen table, leaving the door open and him standing there. Three steps in and he stops, looking down. Her freezer is defrosting and she's folding clothes. The television is a low murmur in the background; there's a half-full glass of wine beside the sink. She's settled in for the night.

"Come on."

"Come on and what?"

He still looks like he hasn't slept. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and pulls a black bra out of the basket, folds it into a stack.

He's fidgeting and the door is still open. "Come on and have a beer," he sighs, sounding irritated.

"Right now?" Her voice is even and calm.

He shrugs. "Yeah. Right now."

She fishes out some grey boxers, his, and folds them cleanly twice. He has his own stack on her table.

"Where?" she asks, and he shrugs. The usual. He's been in this mood all day. She had been relieved to walk out of their office at five o'clock, relived that she could be alone. She feels heavy with disappointment.

"I'll meet you there," she says, and she hears the faint sound of his keys before he quietly closes her door behind him.

--

The bar is dim and too close to downtown. She shoulders in wearing a leather jacket, her mood gone a few shades darker, but it's nothing compared to his.

He hasn't looked her straight in the eye since it happened and she's beginning to regret having asked him at all.

Scully gestures to the bartender for something nonalcoholic and slides into the other half of the booth. "Do we have a new case?"

His reaction takes far too long. He raises his eyebrows, shrugs, shakes his head. He's made a pile of sunflower seed hulls on the sticky table next to an empty beer bottle. "Nothing new."

She sighs impatiently, brow furrowing, but then the waitress brings her beer and she takes a slug of that instead, swallowing her words. She has to keep him happy. This is how whores feel.

"So I get to sit here and watch you eat sunflower seeds, that was your plan for the evening."

He looks up, then, their gazes meet, and she can see that he's hurting, but she doesn't know why. He looks back down and the corner of his mouth pulls up in a smirk.

"Think we should track down a Cher impersonator so we can dance?"

Scully takes another pull off her beer. "Cher or Elvis," she says, keeping a straight face. "We gonna talk?"

He shakes his head, slowly, twice, fishing an empty seed hull from between his teeth. "The whole point of this is not to talk."

She nods like that means anything. He talks more than any man she's ever met.

"Besides, there's a game on." He shrugs in the direction of the television set over the bar.

That was his justification, at first, for this. Male partners go out drinking all the time. It's expected. Unless they hate each other. They've even run into Skinner during one of these little field trips into normalcy. He had been wearing a turtleneck, and laughing. The sight had been jarring, incomprehensible. Scully had thought about his wife, that night, but the window has passed. She's too far gone to exist anymore.

"So we talk about space probes or Mexican vampire-goats."

He nods, when usually he would have given that gleeful look and started, pausing only for breath and drink. Probably, in the absence of his slide projector, his visual aids would have been a damp napkin and a few carefully arranged sunflower seeds and a line of condensation on the table.

But he doesn't start.

"I'm sorry I asked," she says. Her voice is rough and low, emotionless. "I didn't know it would do this."

"You regret it?" He dips his head, gaze sinking to the flat plane of her belly, hidden under the table.

"I won't regret whatever comes of it. I will regret what it's doing to us."

It's important to be positive, the doctor had said. Optimistic.

"It's not doing anything it hasn't already done," he says, and takes a long swig of his beer.

--

Everyone's already going to assume it. She knew from the beginning, from the first week she was partnered with him, that he had a bit of a reputation and with every passing month that she didn't storm out of the basement office, slamming the door behind her, they all knew why.

Tom Colton was somewhere pushing papers around a corner office while she was out in Africa trying to figure out why her partner could suddenly read minds.

And everyone, everyone in their tight whirling orbit, fell. Everyone. It was only natural that they come to this.

"This is an odd way to tell me that you don't want to work together anymore."

He'd said it shuffling his feet in her doctor's office while the lab tech floated off with his sample and she had been shrugging back into her coat.

"If I wanted to leave..." She shook her head and didn't have to continue. If she'd wanted to leave Nurse Owens wouldn't have been able to call her back and an Africanized honeybee wouldn't have been able to keep her from transferring to Salt Lake City, and Ritter's miraculous shot wouldn't have been quite so miraculous. There are a thousand better excuses than this.

He can't give her a house or a station wagon or a white picket fence, but maybe he can give her this. She didn't have to play on guilt. He already knew how much he'd taken from her, how much he owed her.

"Alexandria," Mulder tells the cab driver after their last round of beers, and sits with his hands clasped and very definitely on his own side of the seat. He doesn't even glance over at her, asking whether it's all right. She settles into the corner, sweeping her hand over her too-clean hair, and tries not to think about the appointment she's already made for the following month and how this great idea she had, because her world has shrunk and become so very circumscribed, the idea to ask Mulder whether he would be the father of her implanted baby, how that idea made them something she didn't even recognize anymore.

His apartment is a wreck but he doesn't blink. Either he's so used to Their monthly sweeps that he doesn't even give a damn anymore, or he left it this way. He sweeps the clothes off the couch and dumps them in a hamper, gesturing for her to sit, before he goes into the kitchen. She finds the remote after two minutes of searching, but doesn't turn the television on.

"How are we changed?"

He walks back in drinking something out of a coffee cup. She can see his overflowing sink behind him.