"We can't fight gravity on a planet that insists
that love is like falling
and falling is like this." 
- Ani DiFranco, "Falling is Like this"
 

*****

"Agent Scully? What are you doing here?"

Good question, she thought, and looked up to see her once and future 
partner entering the basement office.  Being Saturday, Doggett, like 
the few other agents roaming the halls of the Hoover building, was 
dressed down.  Way down.  His jeans had obviously spent many years 
making the regular acquaintance of a washing machine, leaving them 
appealingly tight in all the right places, but loose enough to make 
undressing him with one's eyes an Olympic sport.

Not that she was interested in competing in said sport, she told 
herself.  Although the discrete gold check in his blue shirt did 
intriguing things to his blue eyes . . .

She pulled her wandering thoughts back to focus on Doggett's 
continuing questions. 

"Don't you have another week of leave?"

"My mother took Will for the day," she said.  "She ordered me out of 
the house and told me to have a day to myself."

Doggett's keen eyes did a circuit of the office.  "I don't think this 
is what she had in mind," he observed dryly.

Scully shrugged and shifted some files on her desk.  Monica Reyes' 
filing system seemed to constitute mostly of piling papers until they 
began to topple and then starting a new pile.  After a few moments of 
silence, she looked up to find Doggett still patiently waiting for a 
response.  His eyes clearly told her he had her number and wasn't 
going to be put off.

"I couldn't think of anywhere else to go, all right," she said 
defensively.  "And I can't just come back here in a week not knowing 
what you and Monica have been doing, can I?"

"No, ma'am," he said so solemnly that she briefly considered hurling a 
file folder at him, but she didn't have the heart to add to the 
mess.  Besides, the aerodynamics of your average file folder didn't make for a 
satisfactory projectile.

"You might want to look in the recent case file," he said and took a 
seat at his own desk.  "That stuff on Monica's desk is . . . to be 
honest, I'm not entirely sure what that stuff is.  I've been putting 
the new stuff in that first cabinet."

Scully restacked the folders in what she hoped was a decent 
approximation of their previous state.  She went to the cabinet 
Doggett had indicated and started pulling open drawers.

"I don't see them," she said and inwardly winced at her snappish 
tone.  She was as conflicted about returning to work as she had been 
about leaving.  Three months ago she'd felt like a deserter leaving 
the X-files in Doggett's hands.  Now, she felt like a bad mother
leaving Will in her mother's hands so often.  She had felt guilty 
about leaving Doggett without a partner or even worse with the 
enthusiastic but underqualified Agent Harrison.  Now, she felt uneasy 
about this proposed triumvirate.

Doggett and Reyes had an easy and long-standing friendship that made 
her feel as much of a third-wheel as Doggett must have felt when he 
was first assigned to the X-files.  It didn't help that while she 
liked Monica very much, she had more territory issues than an alpha 
wolf bitch.  The X-files were hers now.  After a year of working 
together, Doggett was hers.  And she had never been very good at 
sharing.

She slammed the drawer shut in irritation over her thoughts and 
looked up to find Doggett had come over to help her.

"This one," he said pulling out another drawer.  It was empty.  They 
both peered into the empty drawer in consternation.

"Monica must have been rearranging," he said sheepishly and pulled 
open another drawer.  It, too, was empty but for a scrap of paper 
caught at the back of the drawer. 

"Huh, wonder what that is?" He asked half to himself and fished 
around in the back of the cabinet. "Ah, heck.  See if you can reach 
that, will ya?  Your hands are smaller than mine."

Scully's hand joined his in the drawer.  But with both of them 
huddled over the drawer, they were blocking the light with their 
heads.  On her first attempt, she rammed her knuckles into the side of 
the drawer.

"Sorry," he murmured. They were standing so close his words ruffled 
her hair.

She made what was intended to be a 'don't worry about it' noise in 
her throat, but couldn't come up with a more coherent reply.  If she 
leaned forward, she could rest her forehead against the strong line of 
his jaw.  If she moved her right hand a few inches from the front of 
the cabinet she could wrap her hand around his bicep. If she moved 
her right foot a step forward, the inside of her knee would rest 
against the outside of his thigh.  She wanted to do all three.

And there, there was the crux of her territory issues and at least 
half of her conflicting emotions.  She didn't consider John hers 
because of their work.  He was just hers.  There were a thousand 
other problems and conflicts and difficulties in her life.  All of them should 
take precedence over this.  But when she was around him, she couldn't 
think of one.  She thought about the line of his jaw and the span of 
his bicep and the quiet comfort of his presence which she never 
seemed to get enough of.

Steadfastly ignoring the rising temperature in the room, she reached 
back into the drawer and ran her hand down his arm, using it as a 
guide to find her way to the back of the cabinet.  It was a gesture 
born of simple practicality and a wish not to bruise her hand any 
further, but this, she thought, this was a bad idea.  The soft 
flannel of his shirt slid across her palm like a caress. And 
underneath, there was the barest impression of long bones and hard 
muscles that felt like a boulder warmed by the sun.

As bad as that was, it only got worse as her hand reached the bare 
skin of his wrist.  This was no gentle heat, but rather a leaping 
fire, a raging inferno.  Her fingertips paused briefly on the back of 
his wrist. The skin was softer than she expected.  She wanted to 
measure the distance between his radius and ulna with a fingertip, 
but she knew the gesture was more of a caress than an investigation. 
She forced her self to move on, only to linger over the small ridges 
and valleys of his carpals.  If she was a practicing doctor, she could 
press harder and count the bones, pretend she had a good reason for 
the gesture.  Instead, she traced over the long hard lines of his 
metacarpals and phalanges.  And now, at last, she was glad she was 
not a clinician.  Those dull Latin words were entirely inadequate for 
explaining the graceful architecture and the sublime power in those  lean 
digits.

When her hands trailed off the ends of his blunt fingertips, she felt 
a loss of warmth, a loss of closeness, a loss that hit her like fist to the 
stomach.  She wanted to retreat, splay her small hand over his, until 
its shape imprinted itself on her palm.

But her fingers brushed against that stupid piece of paper, and she 
plucked it from its hiding place.

"Got it," she whispered.  When she turned her head, he was 
staring at her.  Looking at her with those burning blue eyes that she 
swore could see through walls, that could see into her soul.  Those 
impassive eyes that never told her what made them burn.

Suddenly, the vulnerability of her position hit her, and she jerked her 
hand out of the drawer and whipped her head back.  Right into his. 

The back of her skull connected sharply with his nose and cheekbone.

She turned just in time to watch with horror as the impact snapped 
his head to the side and into the neighboring file cabinet. 

He dropped like a rock.

He ended up in an undignified sprawl at her feat, and the only 
consolation she could find was at least he didn't crack his head on 
the floor.

"Ow?"  It came out like a question, as if he wasn't sure how all this had happened, but he was sure it hurt.

Blood began trickling half-heartedly from his nose and by the time 
she raced to her desk and returned with tissues had turned into a 
steady stream.

In her head she could hear her mother's voice.  "What did you do 
today, honey?"

"Nothing much, groped my partner, broke his nose. Same old. Same old."

She tried to mop up the blood streaming down his face, but he moved 
his head at the same time she reached for him. And she jammed a 
fingernail into his cheekbone.

"Ow," he said again and took the wad of tissues from her.

"Agent . . . Dana, I don't believe I'm saying this to a woman and 
especially not to you.  But could you stop touching me for the next 
little while?"

"It's probably not broken," she offered miserably.

"No," he said and experimentally lifted the bloody mass of tissues 
away from his face.  When the blood flow didn't resume, he pitched 
them toward the trash.

"I'm sorry," she said and crouched down next to him and gingerly took 
his chin in her hand to look at his pupils.  Since they were even and 
responsive to light, she ruled out a concussion, but didn't let go of 
his chin.

"That's all right.  It's been at least 20 years since a girl beat me 
up.  I kinda miss it," he said with a lopsided grin.

The slight movement made his chin shift under her hand, and his faint 
weekend stubble brushed roughly against her fingertips.  Their faces 
were so close she could see the tiny brown speck in his left eye that 
only made the pale blue more intense.  She could see the thin line of 
a scar on his nose and wondered if it was a souvenir from the last 
girl who had beat him up.  And wondered if she should track down this 
girl and kick her ass. 

But mostly, she wondered about the thin arcs of his lips.  She 
wondered what they felt like, what they tasted like, and what he 
would do if she leaned down and found out.

His mouth quirked further into a grin, and she looked up to find his 
eyes daring her.  She leaned in . . .

 . . .And found that his lips were just like the rest of him:  long, lean 
and agile.  Strong enough to move mountains but tempered with exactly 
the right degree of gentleness.

When she finally raised her head, she found him blushing to the tips 
of his adorably peaked ears, but there were lines of tension around 
his eyes.

"What's wrong?" She asked uncertainly.

He smiled, but it was half of a wince.  "My knee . . . it doesn't 
bend that way."

She looked down to find that at some point she had put her hand on 
his kneecap for balance and was pressing it down into the concrete 
floor.

She moved her hand and dropped her head to his shoulder.

"I think," he said and shuddered as she moved her hand up his thigh. 
He caught her wandering hand and laced his fingers with hers.  "That 
we should find someplace . . . ah, else.  Someplace without filing 
cabinets and concrete.  And then you can do that."