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It’s a quiet day at the office. Their latest potential case just fell through as authorities managed to find their missing person - and it turns out he’d just gone on a bender. No lights in the sky. Upon learning of this, Scully declares today is finally the day they finish sorting the receipts for this quarter’s budget meeting, which Mulder meets with about as much enthusiasm as she had expected, but no matter.
Since joining the X-Files, Scully has slowly come to the realization that Mulder just doesn’t bother to allocate any time to his administrative responsibilities as head of the department. It’s not that he doesn’t care, as she mentally tries to justify it, but chasing cases and being on the field is just too much a priority for him. It seems to her that he can’t justify to himself the idea of staying put on his desk pushing paper while there are so many unsolved cases out there waiting for him. She understands, but she also understands that if things continued like this, the department would end up shut down on bureaucracy grounds alone, nevermind their outrageous expenses and science fiction-like reports. Thus, she has taken it upon herself to wrangle Mulder into the admin position for a day or two each month, just to make sure they stay afloat.
He grumbles, but she knows by now that he also appreciates it - that she even gives enough of a shit about the X-Files to care if it gets shut down. So he may complain, but together they sit down and finish the damn paperwork.
The morning passes by serenely, both of them in the zone, their only words to ask for a piece of paper to be passed or to offer to go get more coffee. For lunch, they go out to the deli two blocks from the Hoover building and get sandwiches bigger than their own heads. The sun is out after two weeks of overcast weather, and Scully thinks to herself that she’s glad for such a calm, pleasant day.
On the way back, Mulder even jokingly holds out his arm for her as they walk side by side, and she keeps the joke going, taking it for a good half of the block, laughing with him in their silliness until she spots a group of agents at a stop sign and lets go. They may have their little jokes, but it won’t do for strangers to see it, lest it be perceived differently. Of course, the silly jokes are sometimes (most of the time) underpinned by a layer of real flirting that she tries to put out of her head for the most part. What’s a little flirting between partners and, dare she say, friends? It’s not like either of them are being serious.
It’s only when they’re a few feet from the office door that she feels a shift, as if knowing she is about to have her world rattled. She slows down her pace and, beside her, so does Mulder, seemingly having sensed the same thing. They enter their office carefully, finding a man in there - his back turned to them, his attention turned to the board behind the desk.
“Excuse me?” Scully asks, and immediately loses the rest of her words when the man turns around.
She knows that face. She’d know it anywhere, even if weathered and half-covered by stubble. The strong plane of his nose, the pouty bottom lip, the mossy green eyes. Holy shit, did Mulder have a much older brother that somehow never came up in conversation?
But no. This man looks too old to be his brother - but she knows for certain that’s not his father, because she’s seen pictures of his parents. Besides, he doesn’t look just related to Mulder - he looks like Mulder, just a couple of decades off.
And he’s staring at both of them, his wide eyes flickering rapidly between Scully and Mulder, as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” her Mulder barks at the man.
“Oh, boy,” he mutters.
His hand moves to his back and both Scully and Mulder immediately react, raising their guns to him on instinct.
They shout in unison, “Drop it!”, and the man freezes, putting up his hands slowly.
“I’m just going for my wallet.”
“Yeah, right,” Mulder scoffs, looking at Scully from the corner of his eye and nodding at their John Doe. She moves quickly behind him, finding that he is in fact not armed, and fishes his wallet out of his back pocket.
“Hey, careful there,” the man jokes, to her astonishment. Why would anyone joke in this situation?
Nothing prepares her for the moment she opens the wallet to find an FBI credential not unlike hers, though with several little details changed. The most shocking thing, though, which almost makes her drop the wallet, is the name FOX W. MULDER right next to the man’s picture, and her partner’s signature at the bottom.
“What the hell is this,” she breathes out. “Where did you get this?” Scully demands of the man, who still has his hands up.
“What, Scully? What is it?” Mulder asks, his grip on the gun steady and his eyes alert for any sudden moves the man might make against his partner.
She joins him once again and, in disbelief, holds up the offending object so he can see what they’re working with.
“Is this a joke? Who sent you here?” he shouts.
The man calmly shrugs his shoulders at them. “That’s what I’d like to know, too. And the way back home,” he says. “My family will be worried.”
Scully glances down. On his left hand, sure enough, sits a gold wedding band. Simple, understated, a bit dulled by time. There are markings she can’t make out, the details too tiny.
She signs and motions at Mulder to lower his weapon. “He’s not armed,” she says. “Let’s start from the beginning. Your name, please.”
“You already know my name, Scully.” He grins at her, while Mulder scowls.
“That’s Agent Scully to you. Now stop the games, who are you?” he demands.
“Special Agent Fox Mulder, FBI. That’s what it says on the badge, isn’t it? But you don’t believe me. How skeptical!”
“Mulder is standing right here and he’s about to point that gun at you again if you don’t cooperate, sir. Who are you and what are you doing in our office? And how did you get this fake badge?”
He scoffs. “It’s not fake, and I’ve already told you who I am. How I got here, I can’t say. One minute I was opening the door to my office on a fine morning just on the edge of winter, 2016. The next, I’m here, in an office that I haven’t seen in two decades!” His voice rises in pitch at the end of his sentence. For the first time, Scully can see a little desperation in his eyes.
As for herself, she feels her eyebrows flying up, the disbelief that’s probably etched onto her face matched by Mulder’s.
“You- you’re not suggesting, what, that you’re... me, from the future? Time travel, this is your big story?”
“Well there’s plenty of literature to back it up and, and we’ve seen that before! Or, well I guess you haven’t yet. What year is this?” he glances at a discarded newspaper nearby. “Shit, 1993. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Maybe he can tell that he’s losing them, that Scully is considering just calling security to remove this man from the building and going on with her life, so he continues, agitated.
“But hey, you’ve said it yourself that it was possible, Scully! Although common sense may rule out the possibility of time travel, the laws of quantum physics certainly do not,” he quotes.
“That’s my thesis” “That’s her thesis” Scully and Mulder look at each other, growing more confused by the minute.
Scully shakes her head, refusing to let this weak attempt at manipulation convince her. “Okay, you’re not here by accident. You know my name, hell, you read my senior thesis. You went to all this effort to look like Mulder and even made a fake badge to pass yourself off as him. All of this to peddle some nonsense about time travel. To what end? What do you hope to accomplish here?”
Seeing their still incredulous expressions, the man lets out a breath, impatient. “Look, you can swab me or something. Will a DNA test prove to you that I’m not lying?”
Scully considers, then leans into Mulder’s space, whispering to his ears only. “That’s not a bad idea. We can cross check federal databases and see if we can get a match. Besides, once his story is proven false, he’ll have no choice but to tell the truth.”
“I doubt we’re getting anything truthful out of that guy,” Mulder whispers back, “but a test can ensure he cooperates for a few more hours while we figure out what to do with him.”
“If you two are done whispering sweet nothings,” the man says, his tone denoting both irritation and amusement.
This day had been going so well. Scully mourns the simple afternoon she’d been looking forward to, and gets to work.
-x-
The room feels stifling, even though it’s just the two agents and the unknown man. Mulder is irritated, and he won’t stop pacing, which in turn is irritating Scully. He would normally be all over this - parallel dimensions or time travel or whatever nonsense this man is trying to sell them - but apparently the notion of meeting his older ‘self’ does not make him happy in the slightest.
The man is leaning against the desk, arms crossed, watching Mulder pace with disinterest. Scully chooses to remain seated in a rickety chair on the corner of the room, watching them both. The DNA was sent to the lab hours ago, and even though she asked for extreme priority, she doesn’t think they’re getting anything today. Not unless she got a superior involved, and that is the last thing she wants to do.
So, instead, all she can do is observe, and observe she does.
Her initial assessment of the man remains. He looks like Mulder, too much like him to be a relative unless Mulder’s family has really strong genes. When she swabbed his mouth for DNA, she took the opportunity to check if they hadn’t wasted their time on someone with extensive disguising skills - but there was no face mask or elaborate makeup. This is what this man looks like - or, she thinks with a shudder, what he’s made himself look like.
Could someone go to such lengths? Plastic surgery to look like her partner, all in the name of pulling a fast one on them, for a reason still unknown? Even if they believed his tall tale, what could he possibly gain from convincing them he was a man from the future? Access to their files? There were much easier ways. Access to their homes? Her building’s security consisted of a kind old man sitting at a desk doing crosswords from 9 to 5. Mulder’s didn’t even have any security.
A distraction, then? They have wasted an entire afternoon on this, already. Perhaps someone wanted the X-Files unit otherwise preoccupied while something went down. But, again, there had to be easier ways than this.
But what if this man is telling the truth? her traitorous mind wonders.
What if this is what Fox Mulder looks like twenty-something years from now? Graying hair at the temples, salt and pepper stubble. Stockier. Though he’s wearing a light jacket over his shirt - looking, frankly, underdressed for an office setting, with dark jeans and casual shoes, which doesn’t help his claim - she can tell that he’s heavier than her Mulder. Heavier, with muscle. His shoulders and chest are broader, and when he stands and turns to grab a handful of sunflower seeds from the open package on the desk, she can see that the jeans fit snugly over his thick, round ass.
God help her if this is what Mulder looks like in the future.
Not that he doesn’t look good today.
Not that it matters in any way whatsoever how attractive her partner is, now or twenty years from now.
The clock hits five thirty, but none of them make any mention of it. At six, Mulder gives up his restless puttering around the office and offers to take the man home with him so she can get some rest.
“You sleep on your couch, Mulder. Where do you intend for him to sleep? Besides, it’ll be safer if there’s the two of us. I have a guest room. We can lock him in there, you take the couch, and I’ll be in my bedroom next door to his. He won’t be able to leave without alerting us.”
Mulder protests while the man stays silent, looking at them with an infuriating, knowing gaze. Finally, he relents, and the three of them drive in Mulder’s car to Scully’s apartment.
While her partner has his overnight bag, Scully finds a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt Ethan had left behind and offers it to the man. They probably won’t fit too well, but it’s all he’ll get. He doesn’t complain, just says thanks in a soft voice that catches her off guard, and walks into his room.
She locks his door from the outside, and taking note of the sight of Mulder settling down on her couch with blankets and the TV remote, she retreats to her own bedroom and tries to fall asleep.
-x-
The next morning, Scully walks out of her bedroom to find Mulder conked out on her couch. The sight of him actually asleep - in deep sleep, seemingly - is so rare she decides to give him a little more time. Besides, he looks sort of adorable under a pink frilly blanket she keeps from her college days because it is so soft and it has seen her through so much.
She gets started on coffee and goes to unlock the door to her guest bedroom - after slipping her piece under her pajama pants’ waistband, because she’s not stupid. To her surprise, the man is already wide awake, sitting on the bed - which he either didn’t sleep in, or made - with his arms crossed and a patient smile on his face.
“Morning, Scully.”
Still unsettled at his easy familiarity with her, she simply nods and offers, “Coffee?”
He joins her on the counter, only pausing for a moment to look at Mulder still soundly asleep. “Ah, the soft pink monstrosity,” he mutters. “I miss that thing.”
Scully passes him a cup of coffee without comment. He will not get under her skin.
“You know, you don’t have to look so suspicious of me, Scully. I’ve never meant you any harm.”
She studies him carefully. “You’ll have to forgive me, but it’s hard to trust someone who shows up in our office with tall tales of time travel, claiming to be my partner from the future.”
“Hm.” He sloshes the coffee around with his spoon, making loud little banging sounds as the metal hits the sides of the cup. It’s such a Mulder thing to do, it sets her on edge even worse. How deeply could the people behind this man have studied her partner’s little quirks and manias? “Aren’t you curious, though?” He asks, raising his eyebrows with a clear challenge on his face.
The clothes he borrowed from Ethan are really tight, she notes absent-mindedly. It reinforces her impression from earlier, that he might be as tall as Mulder but his build is different. The sleeves are bunching up around his thick biceps, the buttons on his henley are fighting for dear life as they strain against the broadness of his chest.
The forearms, now those are as delectable as Mulder’s, even though there isn’t the usual leather-strapped wristwatch to complete the look. Delectable? Jesus Christ.
“About?”
“The future, Scully. I could tell you everything that happens to us for the next twenty-something years. Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Would she like to know, if this man was real and his tales were true? Would she like to sit down with a fifty-something Mulder and find out what becomes of her life?
Does she get a consolidated career as a field agent? Does she leave the Bureau and go back to medicine like her family wished? Does she buy a house, have a kid, get married? Does she finally get a dog like she’s wanted since middle school?
If this man were really Mulder from so far in the future… and he seems to know her so well… do they remain in each other’s lives? Surely she wouldn’t still be on the X-Files, but do they stay in touch? As friends?
Does something ever happen between them?
Does Mulder find his sister? Does he find some peace of mind?
God, yes, she would like to know.
“No,” she answers instead. “I’d prefer to live it.”
“Good answer,” he says, almost flippantly, but then his face falls. In an instant, his expression darkens. There’s a weight to his gaze and a sadness in his eyes she hadn’t seen before now. “Some things, I wish you wouldn’t. Live through, I mean.”
Not sure how to respond to such an ominous statement - probably some variation of ‘is that a threat?’ - Scully is saved from answering by Mulder’s grumbles which indicate he’s awake.
“Word of advice though? Probably shouldn’t waste years of your life on that jerk over there.” He nods at Mulder and winks at her, and she immediately wants to throttle him.
“We having a slumber party?” Mulder’s gravely voice comes as he stumbles into the kitchen space, and she hates how much she likes that sound. Half-asleep, grumpy, vulnerable Mulder is a forbidden treat she needs to remind herself she can’t have.
“Mulder. Sit down and get some coffee, I wanna take a shower. I’ll be quick,” she says, not giving him time to process before she flees from the kitchen and the temptations it holds.
-x-
The phone rings as soon as they’re all dressed and ready for the day - the man wearing the same clothes as yesterday, for lack of choice.
She picks it up with a sharp “Scully”, and already the lab tech is rattling off the results as requested. She asks him to repeat it. She asks if they tested the three separate samples she sent in. She asks if they re-tested and re-checked their results. She thanks him and hangs up.
“Mulder.” She doesn’t have to say anything more. The tone of her voice and the look she gives him is plenty enough for him to understand.
As if stricken, her partner takes a step back, looking at the man - looking at himself - as if seeing him for the first time. “No way. Scully, are they sure?”
“It’s all positive, Mulder. It’s him- I mean, it’s you. I- I don’t know how this can be possible,” she says, her voice growing impossibly small as she looks from her partner to the man he will become so many years from now.
The man - Older Mulder - looks supremely relieved. “So you believe me, then?”
“I don’t!” Mulder exclaims. “You- you can’t be me. You- what the hell am I doing in the FBI twenty years from now?” He doesn’t notice Scully’s sharp intake of breath at these words. “2016. That’s over forty years since- If I’m still... that means I haven’t...” He loses steam gradually, stumbles back a few more steps, dropping down heavily on one of Scully’s dining chairs.
Now things have clicked for her, the reason why he was so skeptical, why he refused to believe this man was himself. Because if Mulder is still in the FBI so long in the future, then that must mean he hasn’t found Samantha. He never found her, so he never stopped looking.
“Hey, look, I know what you’re getting at. It’s complicated. I don’t- I was joking earlier, sort of,” the man looks imploringly at Scully, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be telling you everything that happens in the future. But about Samantha...”
She wants to tell him to stop. She wants to yell at him to shut the fuck up but she’s rooted to her spot and her mouth feels like it was glued shut. Can’t he see the torment on Mulder’s face? The hope and trepidation warring in his eyes?
“It’s not what we hoped. But we found... closure. It was enough, and it was time to move on.”
Mulder’s shoulders slump. The fight of a century seems to go out of him then, his body hollowed out without the purpose that has sustained it for the past twenty years. “So she’s gone,” he says, mostly to himself.
“She’s gone,” the man - she can’t stop calling him that just yet - confirms. “Gone where we can’t follow. Gone where they can’t follow either. They didn’t win. It has to count for something.” He seems sure of these words, but there’s something in his voice that tells her this isn’t the first nor the hundredth time he’s tried to convince himself of this.
“Time to move on, though... move on to what?”
“Priorities changed,” he says, lifting his eyes to look at Scully.
She feels naked under his intense gaze, her heart pounds, her body feels awash with alternating waves of heat and ice as she contemplates the state of things. This is him, this is Mulder, and she is sure to her bones that he knows her. He knows her as she is now, as she will be five years from now, ten, twenty. He knows her better than she knows herself, because he knows a version of her she hasn’t yet dreamed of being.
How much has he seen?
Within hours of meeting Mulder for the first time, she let herself into his motel room in her underwear, bared her skin and showed her vulnerability, trusting the man she’d been sent to debunk. In turn, he bared his soul to her, showed her the trauma that’d become the driving force behind Spooky Mulder, trusting the spy they’d sent to him.
For each day she has lived of this partnership, she has felt Mulder burrowing himself more and more under her skin, inside of her ribcage, taking up space in her heart she never knew was vacant. On their second case together, she put her job and her life on the line for him and she has never regretted it, never looked back.
How much further can she have gone? What does this man, this older version of Mulder, know about her heart, her soul, her grit, her fears? Does he know her nightmares? Has he seen scars where today there is perfect, unmarred skin?
She needs to get the hell out of here. She needs space, she needs this man to disappear, she needs for all of this to have been just a weird dream. She knows she’s not getting any of that, so she escapes with an excuse of grabbing a glass of water.
Maybe she ought to get one for Mulder, too. He looks pale and dazed.
A thick forearm materializes by her side while she closes the door to the fridge and she nearly jumps.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, grabbing a glass for himself. “Maybe get one for him too, he’s not doing too hot.”
At her weak nod, he continues. “Look, I’m grateful for the hospitality but I really need to get home. My family will be worried,” he repeats himself, and the words now, in context, make her heart skip a beat.
Family.
Mulder isn’t close to his parents, as far as she knows, and they’re both probably getting on in years. They could very well be alive in his future, but she doubts they’re sitting around worrying about their fifty-something year old son’s whereabouts. A wife, then, as evidenced by the ring on his finger. Children, maybe? A couple of lanky boys with fluffy hair and a penchant for the paranormal? Or a little girl with green eyes and a brilliant mind?
Her mind wanders. She once again almost jumps out of her skin when she feels him grab her shoulder and, in turn, he takes his hand back like he’s been burned.
“I’m sorry! Sorry, I keep forgetting you’re not my Scully. I mean, you look so young- Not, not that she isn’t!,” he rambles, a look of slight panic passing over his face. “The hair is different too, but she is. Young and beautiful, I mean. She-” he stops himself, sighing in defeat. “Look, if by some freak chance you end up meeting her, or if you just wanna write a note to yourself to remember all this, can we please just keep the part where I call her young and beautiful and forget all the rest?”
The look of consternation on his face is enough to startle a tiny snort of amusement from her, which in turns startles him, too. Scully feels her body shaking as she gives in to the tiny giggles forcing themselves out. He gives her a confused smile while she gradually loses herself to full blown, slightly hysterical, laughter.
They do keep in touch, apparently. And he thinks she's beautiful, which is always nice to hear. And age hasn't stopped him from looking adorable in his confusion. Some things never change - thank God.
-x-
Things seem almost normal, sitting at the basement desk, both her and Mulder with legal notepads out and asking the man to start from the beginning. Fox. He’d said they could call him Fox, to make things easier. It doesn’t make anything easy - it feels foreign and wrong.
“I woke up. I, uh, I went for a run, then I came back home and took the dog out for a bit. Jumped in the shower, made breakfast. I was alone - the house is empty, Sc- they went to a soccer tournament just a couple of towns over for the weekend. I’d been a bit sick - just the flu - so I didn’t go. They were supposed to get back around lunchtime,” he plays with the wedding band on his finger as he speaks. Now a little closer, she can see the tiny engravings are supposed to be stars. “So I decided to get a little work done before then. But when I opened the door to my home study and walked in, it was like- like walking through a portal or something, like a movie. Except I couldn’t go back, I just found myself stuck here in this office.”
“So-” Scully starts, but is soon interrupted by Mulder.
“They? Who’s “they”?”
“Um, my wife and my son,” Fox answers, merely confirming what she already knew. Well, sort of. A son, then. A boy with stars in his eyes and long limbs and a passion for team sports and books and sunflower seeds.
Mulder seems shellshocked. She gives him a few seconds to regain his wits, but he keeps looking at Fox like he’s been kneed in the gut, so she takes the lead.
“And was there any kind of significance to the day?”
“Not that I remember, it’s nobody’s birthday, it’s not our anniversary...”
“Maybe some case you worked on in the past?”
He sighs. “I might have eidetic memory but remembering specific dates for each case... that’s a tall order.”
“Start with the ones involving time travel,” Mulder finally speaks up, though she can hear the slightest tremor in his voice. “Or time dilation, time loops, lost time. You seemed to imply yesterday that you’d had cases like this before.”
“Yes!” Fox exclaims excitedly. “There was this one where the guy came back in time to stop himself and his friends from inventing what would become the foundation for time travel in the future.”
Scully furrows her brows. “That sounds... paradoxical. And fictional.”
“You were very skeptical about the whole thing as I recall, even though you said it yourself in your thesis-”
“I know what I wrote, but that’s all theoretical. The limits of human endurance would-”
“-prevent such a trip from ever happening, yes, you said it, Scully. But here I am and thankfully I didn’t get blown into a million particles in the process.”
This might all still be just a weird dream, she thinks, but doesn’t voice it.
“Okay, that’s one case, is there more?” Mulder scribbles down on his legal pad.
“There’s tons dealing with lost time, since it’s a hallmark of abductions, but I don’t think they have anything to do with this. Uh... there was this one time we got into a ship that made us old.”
“A what?”
“Nevermind, I don’t think that’s it, either. Let’s see... Oh, that’s a good one. I, uh, went on a little side adventure in the Bermuda triangle-”
“You what-”
“and I got myself into some kind of time... portal... trap thing, and there was this old timey ship full of Brits and the Nazis were there and you were there, Scully! You were a spy! And once you - the real you - found me and brought me back I said-” he cuts himself off with a loud cough. “Anyways, just had to be there I guess.”
Mulder crosses his arms, evidently not amused by his future self’s stories. “Could it be that the room you walked into functioned as a portal as well?”
“I’ve lived in this house for over a decade and walked into that office a few thousand times, but this is the first time it ever spat me into a different year. Besides, my house is not located in the Bermuda triangle.”
At a loss, the three agents look at each other, beginning to wonder if the resolution to this mystery is even within their reach.
“If you can’t think of anything else, I think we’ll just have to... wait and see,” Mulder says, uncharacteristic defeat in his voice.
“No!” Fox exclaims, rising from his chair. “I can’t just be gone for days and- and who knows how long, what about my family? They’ll come home to an empty house and I’ll have just fallen off the planet?”
“Look, I know this isn’t ideal-”
“You don’t know shit, man! I can’t put her through this again, okay, she already had to bury me once-”
“Now wait a minute-”
“And I promised her we’d stay away from this bullshit and things have been going so well-”
“Fox, listen-”
“Scully will be sick with worry, she doesn’t deserve this!” he exclaims, plunging the room into silence interrupted only by Scully’s gasp and Mulder dropping the pad he’d been writing on.
At once, he realizes what he’s said and curses. “You shouldn’t know that. You shouldn’t- I don’t want anything to change, it can’t, it...”
“Excuse me,” is all Scully can say before practically running out of the office.
She finds herself inside of a cabin in the nearby bathroom, her breaths coming out ragged.
Scully, he said. Scully. He was talking about his family - his wife - and he said Scully. That’s her. His wife. His future- Fox Mulder’s future wife, Dana Scully. Her thoughts are spiraling. She might be going into shock, just a little.
His son. The image she’d had before is now morphing. Red hair and pale skin, with his father’s nose and eyes. Her freckles, his pouty bottom lip. A sailor’s costume for Halloween like his grandpa and his uncle Bill, watching the ball game with his dad. His head in the clouds, looking to the stars like Mulder, but his feet planted firmly on the ground with Scully’s practicality.
The gold wedding band with tiny stars engraved. Is her name engraved on the inside? Does she wear it too, or does she keep it in a chain with her cross, close to her heart?
She wonders what their home looks like. What they talk about after dinner and whether they go to PTA meetings. What was their wedding like? Did her mother approve?
Sex. They’ve had sex at least once, if she carried his child. They probably had sex a million times more than once, if she knows herself, if she’s right about the things she imagines late at night. How is it fair, that his older self can look so much like him yet so unlike him, that she can feel herself wanting him as much as she wants her Mulder? Is it in her blood to want Fox Mulder no matter what? When did she give up on the notion that she doesn’t want him?
Was it only a day before when she was convincing herself nothing would ever happen between her and Mulder? Clearly she was wrong. Clearly, she has no idea what to do with herself, with him, with this entire situation now.
She gives herself another five minutes, then ten. Splashes some cold water on her face - and thank God for waterproof makeup - and steels her spine. She will walk back into that basement office like nothing happened because nothing actually did happen other than the confirmation of her every fear and desire at once.
It’s abundantly clear, when she steps back into the room, that neither Mulder nor Fox have said a word, or even moved, since she left it.
She doesn’t want to talk about it. She will not acknowledge it. She can’t look Mulder in the eye.
She looks at Fox instead, calmly. “We need to get you home.”