From: rosecampion@earthlink.net
Date: 13 Jul 2003 08:06:07 -0700
Subject: [atxc-pi] NEW: No Immunity -NC-17- (0/4)
Source: atxc
 
Title: No Immunity 
Author: Rose Campion 
Feedback Email: rosecampion@earthlink.net 
Author's Website: 
Archive at Gossamer: Yes to Gossamer 
Status: NEW - Standalone 
Size: 144k 
Category: Humor, Story, Relationship 
Pairings: Mulder/Doggett 
Rating: NC-17 
Gossamer Category: Story ~ Romance, Humor ~ Slash 
Summary: Remember how in "Audrey Pauley" Doggett says he's been
thinking about getting a cat? I wondered what would happen if he
actually did get one. Mild DoggettTorture, plus Mulder coming to the
rescue.

No Immunity

Disclaimer: Any characters you recognize belong to someone else. The
cat, on the other hand, is an amalgamation of every bad cat I've
heard about or known.

Pairing: Mulder/Doggett

Rating: NC-17

Thanks: thanks to all the folks on the Fox and Hound list for reading
this and commenting as I wrote it day by day. Special thanks to Jo
and Liz for stories of cats behaving badly. Extra special thanks to Jo
for going above and beyond the call of duty.

Summary:  Remember in "Audrey Pauley" where Doggett admits that he's
been thinking about getting a cat because they're low maintainance?
Those of us who actually have cats laughed out loud.

***

Chicago. Chicago, fucking, Illinois. Organized crime, his new
assignment. That was the judgement passed down from the OPR hearing,
after the big shit storm. Skinner couldn't help him, was just another,
impassive face in the pack of ADs,  but it wasn't that Doggett figured
he could. God knows what happened in that office, and likely as hell
the man was compromised beyond any and all help. Monica, she'd had it
easy, relatively speaking. Back to her old home, New Orleans and her
old assignment. But like a good little fibbie, he'd packed his
things into storage, rented the house in Falls Church and headed out
to Chicago  with about as much as fit into the pickup. 

Fitting into his new assignment was easy. The Bureau was a big place.
Nobody in  Chicago seemed to know of his time in the Basement, of the
time he'd spent trying to replace Fox Mulder. If they knew or asked
anything about him, it was just that he'd been transferred from DC. He
didn't volunteer anything more, and  after a while, people didn't
ask.

Finding a new place was just as easy. He stayed in one of those by the
week hotels out by the airport for a while, then in his free time, he
drove around the city and its close suburbs until he found what he was
looking for. 

He ended up renting the first floor apartment in an old brick duplex,
though here in Chicago, they called them two flats. The owner, an old
woman who'd lived in the building since her parents had built it, was
so glad to get an FBI  agent living in it that she didn't ask many
questions, though that could have partially been her reticent nature.

Either way, as he moved his few possessions into the big apartment,
with sounds  echoing off its white walls, he was set. All he'd have to
do was put up wooden blinds in the windows and get a leather sofa in
here and it'd feel just as much  like home as the last place.

All he really needed was someone to give a good goddamn whether he was
alive or  not. 

***

Saturday afternoon, and for once he wasn't sitting tied to a wiretap
listening to Sammy "the Muscle"  Gianelli discuss whether a certain,
uh, lady at the "Gentleman's Club" was silicone enhanced or not. Or as
"the Muscle" put it so eloquently, "Ain't no broad got titties that
big naturally."

It was four months since he'd been exiled from DC, no sign of
reprieve, and Mulder and Scully had driven off into the desert. That'd
been spring. This was now officially fall, only nobody had thought to
tell the weather that here in Chicago. End of September, you wouldn't
expect eighty five degrees and sunny. He had the back door propped
open to catch what there was of a negligible breeze, the screen door
shut. He was sitting at the kitchen table, gun apart on 
the table, NASCAR playing on the little TV on the counter. He cleaned
the gun, slowly. Once he was done with that chore, his inner nag
wouldn't let him just sit here and watch, but insist that he get out
and do errands. Or just get out.  I'm mouldering here, part of him
thought. Packed up in a box. Waiting. 

He squelched this part of him. Punched it down into the little
compartment it'd  poked its ugly head out of. Then he bent back to the
task at hand, running the cleaning rag through the barrel of the
semi-automatic. 

The knock at the door startled him, at least until he remembered that
his important role was done. He'd been discarded and left to rot. He
didn't need to  be paranoid, because the powers that be had decided he
wasn't worth the trouble. He looked up, expecting to see his landlady.

No one was standing at the door. 

"What the..." he said, rising to his feet. He walked over to the door,
looked out, every direction. He didn't see anyone walking down the
wooden steps, nor up the steps to his landlady's back door. He didn't
see anyone walking away through the shady yard. Nor was anyone hiding
in a corner of the sagging back porch. He shrugged, wrote it off to
some weird wind burst rattling the door and  sat back down, putting
his gun back together a little more rapidly than before, 
race to linger over or not. 

The knock came again a few minutes later. He looked up. Still no one
at the door. He stood up more rapidly this time, walked over to the
door. He opened it, intending to search the area on foot, but as he
did, the source of the knock insinuated itself into his apartment from
the one direction he hadn't looked- down. 

The suspect- about twelve pounds, fifteen inches high at the
shoulder. Distinguishing features- light and dark orange stripes in
the pattern usually known as tabby and long whiskers. No collar or
other immediately obvious marks of ownership.

A cat. An orange tabby cat, to be exact, had knocked on his door,
walked in as if it owned the place and jumped up into the chair where
he'd been sitting. The  cat began to yowl. It had big paws, big,
pointy ears, and a long, long tail, in  addition to it looking awfully
lean for its height. Its coat was kind of shaggy  and rough looking. 
All clues pointed at it being a stray, probably not fully
grown and seriously in need of a few squares in its belly. On the
other hand, its civility spoke of having a human home. And cats had
been known to lie about  being hungry.

He'd once told Monica that he was thinking about getting a cat. He
never had. She'd told him he was a dog person with such conviction
that for a long time, he almost believed her. And there'd been that
terrible accident where she'd nearly died. The getting a cat plans
just had kind of died at that point. Still, he couldn't deny that he
had a soft spot for creatures of the feline variety. It was almost
second nature for him to go to his fridge and rummage around in it for
something the cat might find suitable. No milk- he took his
coffee black. No tuna- he'd always hated it. The closest he could come
to acceptable was some sliced turkey from the deli. 

"Okay," he told the cat, getting out the turkey and a small plate.
"One meal and then out you go. Back to where you belong."

The cat scarfed down the small pile of turkey like a bum meeting a
bottle of nighttrain after a dry week in the lockup. When it attempted
to settle down to a post meal groom, licking its paws, Doggett swooped
down on it. "Sorry, bub, but I figure you must have a home out there
somewhere, right? And it ain't with  me."

He carried it outside into the yard. His landlady was kneeling on the
ground, fighting her usual, ineffective struggle against the weeds
that thrived where the grass was failing. "Hey, Mrs. Mercer," he said.
When he'd gotten her attention, she looked up, strand of deadly
nightshade in her hand. "This cat just walked right into my place. You
know if maybe it belongs to one of the neighbors?"

She struggled to her feet and walked over to him. The cat, contrary
to expectations, wasn't squirming in his arms. Indeed, it kind of
draped itself over his arms like some kind of mangy fur stole. It was
purring. 

"Oh, dear," she said, looking closely at the cat's head. She scratched
behind one of the cat's ears. The cat didn't quite hiss at her, but it
did start to squirm in Doggett's arms. "That's Cuddles. I recognize
him from this scar here."

She pointed to a scar on the cat's left ear. 

"Cuddles?" Doggett asked. As he looked closer, he could see a few
other scars here and there. "Cuddles" looked like he must have gotten
into more than a few back alley spats. "Cuddles" was probably one of
those nicknames like "Skinny Pete" Leonardo who weighed about four
hundred pounds had. 

"He belonged to the people who rented before you. They must have left
him behind," she said. "Honestly, they weren't very nice people, and I
was relieved  when they moved on."

"Where they'd move to?" Doggett asked, figuring it was across town,
next neighborhood, that sort of thing. He thought about dropping the
cat off at their door with a few choice words about responsibility for
living creatures and all that. 

"Supposedly to San Francisco. They were..." She whispered the next
part, drawing it out to emphasis it, "Ho mo sex uals."

Well, so much for returning the cat to its rightful owners. And so
much for a tolerant landlady. Not that he was much surprised. 

"I'll get the number for animal control, Mr. Doggett," she said,
turning towards the two-flat. 

People might adopt kittens, Doggett thought suddenly. And they might
adopt an adult cat if they were small and pretty. But nobody was going
to adopt a scruffy looking, loud-mouthed teenager of an ugly cat, even
if he draped himself over you like a rug and made sounds like an
outboard motor. No, consigning this cat to animal control was signing
its death warrant.

"That's okay, Mrs. Mercer," he said. "You wouldn't mind if I kept him,
would you? The last people kept him."

"I suppose not, though I'll warn you, the last people lost their
damage deposit  because of him," she said.

Doggett pondered that. His nose was pretty sensitive. He was sure he'd
have noticed it if there'd been a cat peeing all over the place
previously, even if the carpets were replaced. How much damage could
one cat do?

Mrs. Mercer went back to her battle against the weeds and Doggett
carried the cat back into the house. He shut the door behind him, the
storm as well as the screen this time, then went back to putting his
weapon back together. 

"Okay, soon as I'm done with this, I'll go out and buy you some cat
chow," he had told the cat as he set it down on the floor. It wove
around his ankles for a minute, tail high in the air. He got a gander
of its assets, and determined it was a former tom-cat. At least that
was a decision he didn't have to make.  

Not a minute later, as he was still working, the cat jumped from the
floor, right onto the table. Actually right on top of the loose parts
that had yet to be fit back together. "Hey," he said, grabbing the
cat. "If you're staying here, we're going to have to have a few words
about things like that. You ain't  getting up on the table."

He dumped the cat back down on the floor. It was quiet for a few
minutes and he  looked up as he finished with his gun. The cat was,
pleased as you like, sitting on the kitchen counter, cleaning itself.
Right on the spot where Doggett usually cut up vegetables, on the
built in cutting board. 

He scooped the cat off of there, saying, "Shoo!"

He dumped the cat onto the floor, where cats belonged. The just looked
at him with injured dignity, as if he couldn't believe that someone
would deny him the  counters. 

"Okay, you think you can hold it until I get back from the pet store
with litter and a box?" he asked the cat, not expecting an answer. He
got one, albeit non-verbal. The cat turned and walked through the door
connecting the kitchen with the living room, tail held straight and
proud in the air, the very  tip of it swishing slightly as he walked.

There was one more thing they had to square away, besides the whole up
on the counters issue. He might have wanted a cat, but John Doggett
did not have a cat  named "Cuddles." He'd definitely have to rename
the cat. As he walked out the back door, locking it behind him, he
started thinking about possible names. Now, with that orange fur and
the big ears, the cat looked a little like...a fox. Of course. And
those eyes. Big and mostly green with hints of gold and
brown. Who did that remind him of?

Fox. It was perfect. And it wasn't like he was ever going to see
Mulder again.

***

Doggett remembered a pet store just down the street a little and he
headed there on foot. 

It was a small, neighborhood kind of place, in an old brick building.
When he opened the door, a string of jinglebells on the door rang, not
that that was really necessary to alert the staff to his presence. The
instant he set foot in  the place, a big blue and gold macaw started
screaming. The macaw was held by a  chunky woman behind the counter.
She started soothing it, then she said to him,  "I'll be right with
you. Just let me put Mr. Tweety away."

She went to the back room and in a few seconds, she reemerged,
unencumbered by the bird. "Sorry about that. Mr. Tweety doesn't like
men. He's the jealous type."

"Jealous?" Doggett asked, thinking about pet owners who attributed
human emotions to mere animals. 

"He thinks he's my boyfriend," she said. "Now, what can I do for
you?"

"I just acquired a cat. Though I suppose it might be more accurate to
say that a cat decided it was going to move in with me," he said.

"They do that sort of thing. So you need just about everything, right?
Never had a cat before?"

Not for lack of wanting one. There were always cats around the farm
when he was  growing up, but they were more like part of the
livestock. Ma would never hear about having one in the house. Cats
were rodent control. Then there was the Marines and no chance to have
a cat. Then Barb always claiming to be allergic when he brought it up.
And finally the clusterfuck that his life had become, what with one
thing and another. This was his first chance, really.

"Yeah, my first one," he said.  

She directed him to an aisle with plastic litter boxes, big tubs of
litter, cat  toys and other assorted impedimenta and suggested this
product and that, until his arms were full and his wallet was looking
like it might get pretty empty. 

"You got anything to help keep the cat off the table and counters
maybe?" he asked finally.

She just laughed at him, then when he gave her a sour, surprised look,
she explained, "This really is your first cat, isn't it? Look, I could
sell you a spray bottle and you could probably train the cat not to
get up on the counter when you're around. Or I could sell you
something called a scat mat. Gives a really mild electric shock. It
works on dogs to train them to stay off of thing, but a cat will
recognize that its the mat that shocks, not the counter.
I'll be honest and tell you that the easiest thing to do is to train
yourself to clean the counter every time before you use it."

He didn't like the sound of that. "Uh-huh," he said, non-commitally. 

She rang him up and as expected, it was more than he'd spent on
groceries this last week, between the litter and the food and
everything. This "free" cat was looking like it was going to cost him
quite a bit. 

Doggett walked back down the street. Once he was inside, he found a
convenient corner of the bathroom and set up the box just like the
instructions on the side of the litter instructed. "Okay," he told the
cat, who'd poked his head around the door, looking at the proceedings
with avid curiosity. "Men's room is  now open. Knock yourself out."

***

The cat seemed singularly unimpressed with the bowl of dry kibble that
Doggett set out before him. He spent several minutes sniffing it, his
nose twitching and swishing his tail. 

"Hey, it ain't like I'm trying to poison you," Doggett said, in sheer
exasperation. It seemed the cat was as paranoid as his namesake. At
that, the cat turned gracefully and stalked off, indignant. 

"Fine," Doggett snapped. "Don't think you're going to outstubborn me.
You'll eat it or starve."

Then he caught himself. Lord God, he thought to himself, I'm not just
talking to a cat, I'm yelling at it. And taking it personally. He
sighed and took a microwave pizza out of the freezer for dinner. The
chair in front of his TV was  waiting for its nightly appointment with
his ass.

As he flipped through the channels, hoping for something decent,
Doggett listened for the sound of little teeth crunching, but it never
happened. He was  sure that eventually the cat would break down,
afterall, it sure looked hungry enough. After a while, he did hear a
crash. Not a huge one, but a definite thud  from the direction of the
kitchen. He traced the sound to its source in the kitchen. 

The damn cat had knocked over the garbage can. At the moment, he had
his paw digging into a brightly printed waxy cardboard box, the box
he'd opened just a few minutes ago. The frozen pizza. Doggett
reclaimed the box from the cat. As he took it away, Fox batted at the
box, as if hoping to capture it again. Damn.  You spend nearly ten
dollars on a bag of food for the stupid creature and it'd
rather go digging through garbage for the ghost of a frozen pizza.
Doggett started picking up the scattered trash and started looking
around for a more  secure location to stash the garbage. 

***

Sometime in the middle of the early morning hours, Doggett was woken
by a hideous racket, dragging him straight from a deep sleep into
wakeful anger. It took him only a few seconds to identify the source
of the sounds. They went something like, "Awwwrouuuw! Awwwrouuuw!
Awwwwwrrrouuuuw! Eeeerrrrouuuuw!"  

The cat didn't even have a good, decent meow. The sound was the
feline equivalent of fingernails on the blackboard. It sounded like
the cat was protesting someone drowning or strangling him. Doggett
checked his alarm clock.  Three thirty or thereabouts.  When the
caterwauling kept on, he suddenly worried that something might really
be wrong with the damn cat, so he hauled himself out of bed and headed
off in the direction of the noise. He found the cat in the short
hallway connecting his bedroom with the kitchen, just on the
other side of the door he'd closed to keep the cat out of his room
while he slept. Far from being in any danger or ill health, the cat
was sitting up straight, looking somehow pleased with himself. 

"There a problem here?" he asked with the cop voice, just as stern as
if he were breaking up any other domestic dispute.

The cat just stood up and walked into the bedroom, tail high in the
air. Without further ado, he hopped up on the bed and started grooming
himself, happy as the proverbial clam. Doggett didn't like the idea of
sleeping in the midst of all that hair the cat was probably going to
shed. And at that moment, he had the sudden, unpleasant realization
that no matter how much you called it  "cleaning" what the cat was
really doing was spreading cat spit all over himself. That was the
sort of epiphany one had if one did too much thinking during this time
of night.

"Hey, Fox," Doggett said. He wasn't inclined to be indulgent, not
having just been woken from his much needed sleep. He picked the cat
up and dumped him on the floor. The floor of the hall outside of the
bedroom. "What did I tell you? Cats are not allowed to sleep on the
bed, so keep your hairy little ass off of it."

He shut the door on the cat and immediately the cat started up again
with the back alley, barbwire aria. "Oh, for the love of Pete, would
you stop that?" he said. Then he sighed heavily and opened up his
bedroom door again. "Okay, you can be in the room, but not on the
bed."

Doggett crawled back into bed pulling the covers over his head, into
his usual sleeping position- his stomach, hoping he wouldn't have a
problem drifting back  to dreamland. The cat joined Doggett, settling
himself over Doggett like an extra heavy weight blanket. A few well
placed shifts of the legs dislodged the cat. Then again and a third
time. But only for a moment. The cat bided his time, waiting until
Doggett stilled and finally slept. Then Fox jumped back
into bed for the final time that night. He walked onto Doggett and
curled himself into a neat ball, going to sleep, for a cat nap at
least, on Doggett's ass. 

***

The next evening, home from a long, tiring day of wiretap, Doggett let
himself into his apartment by the back door. He'd stopped to pick up a
burger on the way home, knowing he'd be too tired to cook. He set the
paper bag on the kitchen table while he went to go check messages,
hang up his trench coat and put his firearm in a locked drawer for the
night. 

No messages, not that he figured there would be. Trench coat hung up
in the closet by the front door, same with the table with the drawer.
Less than two minutes later and he was headed back into the kitchen. 

The damn cat was on the table again. 

Not only that, but the cat was in the middle of pulling his head out
of the paper bag that Doggett's dinner was in. Fox had a french fry in
his mouth. Doggett was torn, not sure whether to bust a gut laughing
at the ridiculousness  of the long fry drooping out of the cat's
mouth, or get angry at the beast for not only being where he wasn't
supposed to be, but disturbing his dinner. Doggett picked the cat up,
escorted it to the bowl of food, which despite earlier protestations,
had actually been depleted a little. "This is your dinner," he told
the cat.

That was when he noticed the hole in the bag of cat chow. A big hole
towards the bottom corner of the bag, with what could only be the tiny
round marks of cat's teeth around it. The tiny brown pebbles of cat
food were scattered all over that half of the kitchen. "Did you do
that?" he asked Fox. "Did you?"

Despite his best interrogation technique, the cat never confessed. Fox
sat back  on his haunches and began to groom himself, licking his paw
and running it over  his head. He ignored Doggett and his questions
pointedly. Doggett decided that there was no progress to be made with
this perp, so he started cleaning up the mess. By the time he'd swept
it up and found a plastic container big enough to hold the food, and
gotten it all squared away, his burger was cold.

***

Even so, once his cold dinner was finished, Doggett retreated to the
living room and his television, the cat following him. The instant
Doggett sat down, the cat jumped up onto his lap. It seemed the
natural thing to do, to pet the dang thing, just a stroke of the hand
down the soft back, a little rub behind the ears. The cat's fur was
softer than he imagined it would be. The cat's ears, other than the
bits with scars, were like velvet. And wouldn't you know
it, but the cat lapped it up like cream. It even started purring. And
Doggett for the first time since Fox had decided he was going to move
in thought that maybe the cat might be worth all the trouble he was
causing. Doggett relaxed, hardly paying attention to the channel
surfing he kept up as more of a reflex than anything. He was so
comfortable like this, so enjoying the cat's company, so loathe to
disturb the cat that when the phone rang, he didn't jump up to get 
it. Instead, he let the machine pick up.

It was Monica on the line. She said, "Oh, hi, John. I was hoping to
catch you at home, but you must be out having a good time in the big
city. Or maybe you're just working late like you always do..."

Once he'd realized it was Monica, he decided he was going to pick it
up, it was  only a matter of figuring out how he was going to do it
without disturbing the cat in his lap. The phone was just out of
reach. He stretched. His fingers almost brushed the receiver. Just a
little more. He reached further, having to lift out of the chair to do
it. The cat looked up, but thankfully, didn't abandon his lap. His
fingers reached the cord finally and he was able to pull
the phone towards himself.

"Hey, Monica," he said. "I'm here. I was just a little, uh, tied up."

"It's so good to hear your voice, John," she said. He pictured her,
curled up on her couch. She really was a pretty girl and it should
have been her that he was missing, not a certain other someone who was
certainly not missing him.  

"Good to hear from you too," he said. "How's the Big Easy treating
you?"

"I quit the Bureau," she said. "They were trying to drive me out,
giving me all  the worst cases. The equivalent of getting sent to
rescue kittens out of trees."

"Same here," he admitted. "But I'm more stubborn than that. I'm not
gonna let 'em drive me out."

"What's that noise?" she asked. 

Fox had decided to start purring again. He really was incredibly loud.
No wonder Monica had heard him. 

"My cat," he said. 

"John?" she asked, truly surprised. "You got a cat? I thought you were
just kidding about that. You know, you really are a dog person."

"I don't know why you keep saying that," he said, impatiently. "I
mean, just because of the name, doesn't mean a thing."

"Well, anyway, that's not why I called," she said, quickly, covering
her faux pas. "I'm a free agent now and I'm investigating my
possibilities. I'm not stuck here in New Orleans. I thought I'd look
at a couple of places, see where I really want to settle. I thought
I'd come up and see you." 

***

He'd bought flowers in anticipation of Monica's visit, nothing
special, just a mixed bouquet from the grocery store. A pure impulse
purchase from the buckets kept by the registers just for that purpose.
At five-thirty, he was plopping them in a vase. Monica was due at six.
Setting the vase on the kitchen table, he went off to make sure that
the rest of the place was up to his usual standards. It wasn't so much
for the romance thing, just seemed a nice thing to  do. But Monica
had, in a subtle, hinting kind of way made it obvious that she
was thinking something along the lines of come and get me, act now or
never. And he was thinking about acting now. She was, afterall, the
one he should be thinking of and thoughts about loving the one you
were with and that sort of thing kept running through his head. 

He didn't even hear the crash. At five minutes before Monica was due,
he went back into the kitchen. The cat was sitting on the floor
looking so innocent that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. When
Doggett walked into the room, the cat stared hopefully and pointedly
at his food dish. Doggett hardly saw that. His eyes fell on the vase
of flowers on the table. Or rather, the former vase, now in pieces on
the floor and the flowers, scattered across the table. Some of 
them looked chewed, with little teeth marks. And the water from the
vase was still dripping onto the floor, little runlets spreading every
which way. 

"You wouldn't happen to know anything about this little accident, now
would you?" he asked Fox. Fox, as usual, said nothing. Not that
Doggett was expecting  him to. Even though the damn cat couldn't talk,
that look of pure but wounded innocence made it clear the cat would
deny everything. As it was, Fox batted at  one of the streams of
water, like it was some kind of toy. There was nothing for it but to
grab a rag and start mopping up the water. He gathered up what
were left of the flowers and shoved them in an old plastic soda cup he
had sitting around. He'd only had the one vase and at least the cat
couldn't break the plastic, could it? He picked up glass hurriedly and
was nearly done by the time the doorbell rang. 

He hustled out to the living room and checked out the front window.
There was Monica, waiting on the front stoop, carrying an overnight
bag with her. He went  to go let her in. The front hall was kind of
dark and dingy, so he hurried her through it and into his apartment.
Once inside and the door closed behind her, she rose up on her tip
toes and planted a chaste kiss on his cheek. Then her eyes light up as
something caught her eye. She smiled and pointed, looking over 
his shoulder. "Oh, that must be..."

Doggett turned just in time to see the cat bolt into the hallway. 

"...your cat," she finished, voice falling. She slipped off her shoes
and left them by the door. They were expensive looking high heels. He
never understood that. Women who spent so dang much money on little
nothings of shoes, with heels so high they could hardly walk, then
just couldn't wait to take them off at any excuse. She said, "It's
very pretty. And your place is nice. You'll have  to give me the
tour."

"The cat is a he," Doggett said, leading her into the kitchen. For
some reason,  he suddenly found himself reluctant to share the name of
the cat, afraid she might take it the wrong way. 

The flowers were all over the table again. More little bites had been
taken out  of them. For the second time that evening, Doggett had to
mop up water, even as  he was explaining, "I got them for you. But the
cat keeps knocking them over."

She smiled as she started gathering the blooms up from the table,
rescuing what  she could. "Thank you, John," she said. Yeah, she was a
real pretty girl, with a nice grin. She'd dressed in some little black
knit thing that was pretty low cut and with a skirt that didn't touch
her knees. Her nipples showed slightly through the top. It wasn't that
he didn't like what he saw. He did. It was just  that he kept thinking
of another grin and another set of nipples he'd once seen 
through, not a slinky knit top, but a plain t-shirt. That despite that
managed to be a lot more appealing. 

"Why don't we head out for dinner?" Doggett said. It'd be easy to
cover his mixed feelings with food. "My truck's round back."

"Sure, John," she said. She took the flowers and having retrieved the
cup from the floor, stuck them in it. She filled the soda cup with
water, but left the whole thing in the sink. She explained, "If your
cat knocks them over again, at  least the water will go right down the
drain and not all over your floor. Let me just go get my shoes."

She walked back to the living room and Doggett fussed with making sure
he had keys and wallet. A feminine shriek came from the other room in
short order. He ran towards the source, wondering what the hell it
could be. 

It was Monica. She was holding up her shoes by then, a look of utter
disgust screwing up her face. She held the shoes gingerly by two
fingers each. 

"What's wrong, Monica?" he asked, innocently enough. 

A look of fury crossed her face for just a minute, then she calmed
herself, finding another one of her bright smiles. "I don't think your
cat likes me, John," she said, gamely. "He peed in my shoes."

"He what?" Doggett asked in disbelief. 

"Peed in my shoes," she said. She held out the shoes in question, put
them right under his nose.

Doggett got a whiff and wrinkled up his nose. Without a doubt, the
smell of cat  pee, one of nature's more pungent scents. Damn cat. What
the hell was it doing?  "I'm sorry. I don't know what to say," he
said. "I'll buy you another pair."

"No, don't worry about it," she said. "Just let me get cleaned up a
little and I'll change shoes, then we'll go out."

***

Monica's just getting cleaned up a little ended up entailing her
changing her whole outfit, not just her shoes, and took well over half
an hour. By the time she walked back into the room from the bathroom,
though she looked good and smelled better, Doggett was starting to get
hungry, and irritable. Still, he forced himself to smile at her when
she walked into the room. Though it'd been a good while since his
divorce and he was out of practice at it, he remembered
the sort things a man was supposed to say to a woman when they were
out on a date together, about how beautiful she was, how lovely she
looked, though if he  were honest with himself, that all seemed like a
lot of effort that he wasn't sure that it was worth making at the
moment. He was remembering the few dates, if you could really call
them that, that he'd had with Fox. The man could pull on a handful of
seemingly randomly grabbed clothes and in less than three
minutes, emerge looking like some kind of model. And for damn sure he
didn't need any compliments if you wanted to end up in bed with him at
the end of the evening. 

"You look lovely," he told her, only because she did. The black knit
outfit had  been exchanged for a sleeveless black dress and a
different pair of black high heels, these ones even higher and
strappier than the others. "You sure you want  to wear those shoes?
You know how parking in the city is. We may be walking quite a few
blocks."

"I'll be fine," she said. 

Right, he thought, wondering again why he'd thought it was important
to invite one of these strange, alien creatures called women back into
his life again, social respectability aside. He liked Monica, but he
could tell already that he  wasn't going to like her walking back to
the car, her hobbled by her own shoes.  "Okay, your choice," he said.

They drove into the city, until they reached the little bistro that
he'd heard about. As he expected, parking was nowhere to be found near
the place. Monica, game as always, walked the several blocks back to
the restaurant once he finally found a place, though he could tell she
was tettering uncomfortably on top of her stilts.

As he held open the door for her, he said, "I asked one of the
secretaries about where to take a girl for a first date. She
recommended this place."

The place was in the first floor of a loft building and it certainly
looked like it, the bare brick walls, the high ceilings with all the
pipes and conduits exposed, the floors of thick pine boards sanded and
sealed. Like all restaurants of this type, they had the big antique
advertising posters, including that champagne ad with the champagne
glass and the woman in the black  dress. Tattinger.

A short while later, they were seated, with menus in front of them,
and Monica had a glass of white wine coming to her. Suddenly it was
awkward, as if the well of conversation had dried up. This was real,
Doggett suddenly realized. She was no longer his coworker, his
partner. She was a pretty girl in a little black dress with shoes that
were obviously meant to say, "come fuck me." And he  just might have.

Except this was all wrong. 

Because no matter what he'd been telling himself about how she was the
right one, and how it would be good to have someone to care whether he
came home at night, it wasn't her he was thinking of in the long and
sometimes sleepless hours of the night, lying awake staring at his own
pillow. Love has a cruel and  bitter way of making something that
should be simple into a twisted mess, he thought. When she was lying
in a coma after that accident, he'd mentally tried on the idea of
kissing her, and while it made sense, it failed at some visceral 
level. And that hadn't changed. 

Impulsively, he leaned over and touched his lips to hers, to test the
reality of his thoughts finally, to see if his assessment was truly
accurate. 

It was nice.

But no more than that.

Her lips were soft, he could feel her lipstick smearing under his
lips, her kiss hesitant and delicate, making him feel that he could do
no more than taste  her, her reticence and reserve drawing out those
qualities in himself. He longed for another's kiss. Even as he let his
lips wander over hers tentatively, he remembered kissing Mulder, how
he'd never had to hold back, indeed, how Mulder seemed to always
demand the full force of his passion, just to match his own. 

Doggett decided he'd rather go without, rather than settle. He needed
to be able to run his engine at full throttle. Better to live like a
monk than at half speed. 

Besides, his cat didn't like her.

His decision made in the thirty seconds or so of their kiss, he backed
away from her. He looked her in the eyes and could see that for her,
in those thirty  seconds, nothing had changed. Her eyes were still
bright and cheerful. He'd have to let her down easy. But not here, not
in public. 

They ordered and somehow, he found small talk to make, catching up on
each other's lives since they'd been separated. Each asking the other,
circumspectly  of course, if they'd heard anything from Mulder or
Scully, or from Skinner. She  hadn't, which didn't surprise him. She
seemed to be surprised that he hadn't heard from Skinner. "But you two
got along so well," she said. "He seemed to really like you."

"I think maybe it's because he likes me that he hasn't been in touch,"
Doggett said, thinking of how the last time he'd actually had a chance
to talk to the man was that adrenaline filled evening spent breaking
Mulder out of jail. Skinner was compromised, no doubt about that, and
probably thought that he could only influence Doggett's career to the
bad now.

"You just seemed...close. You know, for a working relationship," she
said, then  suddenly seemed very interested in her salad, some
combination of spinach, walnuts and strawberries. He wondered what she
was trying to get at, but then decided he had no clue how her, or any
other woman's mind worked, and that it didn't seem to be worth the
effort to find out. He turned his attention back to  his own salad, a
proper spinach salad, with bacon on it. Soon though, she found 
some innocuous thing to say about the latest car chase movie, and soon
they were talking like old friends again and he was reminded why he
liked her. As a friend, though. 

The evening through finally, they drove back to his place. She'd
gotten a hotel  for herself, even though before she came they'd been
talking as if she were going to spend the night. That was probably a
good thing, seeing as how he wasn't going to be asking her to his bed
tonight, nor any night. He did ask her  in though, wanting to have
that talk with her. 

"You want anything?" he asked when he had her seated in the living
room.

"Maybe I'd better have a cup of coffee and sit awhile and let those
glasses of wine wear off," she said. 

He went off into the kitchen. The flowers were still intact this time,
but the first thing he noticed was that the loaf of bread he'd just
bought earlier today was missing from the top of the microwave, where
he'd left it. A quick search of the kitchen revealed that the loaf had
come to rest on the floor by the refrigerator. The plastic bag had
been torn open and several slices of bread pulled out. Little round
teeth marks, the hallmark of a certain resident of the household, were
visible on all those slices, though only part of each had been eaten.
Damn cat. He quickly picked up the partially destroyed loaf and 
tossed it. So much for toast tomorrow.

Bread dealt with, he went to start coffee. And nearly stepped in a
pile of cat puke. He couldn't say that he'd seen anything more gross
in a long while, at least not since he'd been taken off the X-files.
The main mass of the puke was partially digested bread, still in
obvious chunks. There was some cat hair in the mixture, as well as
plenty of frothy, liquidy stuff. He was a brave man though. Poison
spitting lizard creatures hadn't phased him. What could a little 
cat puke do to him? He grabbed several sheets of paper towels and
swabbed up the mess. If anyone asked, he would have stringently denied
that he was nearly gagging, feeling the bile rise as he mopped it up.

Eventually, he was able to get coffee on. Back in the living room, he
froze as he first entered the room, seeing what he was sure would be a
disaster, but unable to prevent it. The cat had jumped up on the arm
of the chair that Monica  was sitting on. She regarded him cautiously
for a moment and then decided it was just making a friendly gesture.
More quickly than Doggett could call out that he wouldn't do that if
he were her, Monica raised a hand to the cat, as if  to pat his head.
And the cat turned in a big snarl of hissing. Monica gasped in 
hurt surprise then drew her hand close to her chest. Fox hissed one
last time, then bolted, running for the hall. 

Monica held out her hand to show him the mark. There was no blood, but
there were a couple of red, angry streaks where Fox's claws had just
barely broken the skin. "I'm realizing now that that wasn't exactly
the smartest thing to do," she said wryly. "Your cat already made his
opinion about me well known. I just thought he might change his mind.
I'm always hopeful like that. Just like I thought you might change
your mind."

So, she did know. She did understand that it wasn't going to happen.

"We should get that washed up for you," Doggett said. "Cats are
filthy creatures."

"He seemed fairly clean to me," she said.

"Monica, that paw walks on cat litter every day," he said.

"Good point," she said, smiling.

They stood in the kitchen together, he gathering cups and pouring
coffee, she washing her scratch at the sink. 

"I'm sorry, Monica," he apologized. The words didn't come easily to
him, seeing  as they were about his feelings, and the whole scope of
those feelings that he was just starting to notice and explore
tonight. "I shouldn't have let you think, you know, that I was going
to make a move. I should have known that if I  was going to make a
move, it'd have been when we were still in DC. Hell, when
we were still in New York."

"You don't waste time, do you?" she asked, more a statement than a
question really. "I should have known that too. The only thing that's
got me curious is who you would rather have been kissing in the
restaurant tonight. Do I know her? Or him?"

Oh, hell. She knew. She had him pegged and made. He didn't think that
anyone besides Mulder knew about that particular aspect of his
personality. How had she guessed? He didn't quite splutter, but his
silence revealed everything.

"So it is someone I know," she said, triumphantly.

"Yeah, but I ain't saying anything more than that," he said, darkly
enough that  he hoped she'd take it as a clue to leave it at that. He
finally pieced together what she'd been trying to hint around about
Skinner. "And it's not Skinner, that's for damn sure."

"Well, you can't fault a girl for guessing," she said. "Though I think
I might feel better if it were some burly man, someone with something
I'm just not equipped to give you."

He'd heard Scully, Catholic as she was, say before that confession was
good for  the soul. Time, he thought, for a little confessing of his
own. "Trust me, Monica. If it were a woman, it'd be you," he said,
even as he couldn't look her  in the eye. His coffee mug was just
about the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen.

"John, John, John," she said, shaking her head. "I wish you'd told me
before."

Later that night, after she'd gone to her hotel room, leaving him
alone for the  night, he parked his ass in front of the television.
Fox jumped up on his lap, asking, no demanding tribute in the form of
petting his head and scratches around the ears. "We gotta talk," he
told the cat as he ran his hands down the cat's velvety soft flank.
"Monica's a nice girl and it's not like she's going to be sticking
around. You have nothing to be jealous of. I don't know why you
don't like her, but you can't be doing that crap to her."

The cat, of course, had no answer to that. 

(Continued in part 2)

 
Part 2
See part 0 for story information.


***

Fall, as you would expect it had to, eventually turned to winter, just
in time for Doggett to get taken off wire tap and to be put onto a
semi-permanent stakeout in an abandoned building next door to a bar
owned by their subject. Okay, if he wasn't willing to admit before
that someone from above was sending him the message, 'Quit! Quit
immediately!' he certainly was getting the transmission loud and clear
now. 

It was miserable. The building was an old brick apartment block that
had had a minor fire once. The section they were using was
structurally fine, but all the  windows in the building were gone.
They were boarded up, most of them, which kept out the worst of the
wind. Mostly. Someone had brought a little kerosene heater, but it
seemed like half the time it was out of fuel or they couldn't
run it for some reason or another, not that it made a huge difference
when it was running. After the first night, he took his clue from the
partner he'd been  given for the duration of the assignment and
ditched the suit in favor of anything warm. He shivered and drank
gallons of hot coffee and refused to quit.  The year changed and
January brought colder temperatures yet. He put on more
layers and refused to quit. His partner was a real sullen bastard who
never said anything beyond what had to be said for the job. Doggett
refused to quit.  

In the beginning of January, he picked up a bad cold, but kept
working. It hung  around to the end of the month, the cough deepening,
taking an entrenched position in his chest, sinking its hooks into the
soft flesh of his lungs. It was so bad that one night as Doggett
settled into his position at the camera and started coughing so hard
he had to cling to the tripod for support, his partner actually said
something to him. "Jeez, Doggett," the guy said. "You're
still sounding like shit. You might, you know, want to go to the
doctor or something."

Doggett just kept coughing while inwardly cursing the climate
conditions that had brought him to this place. It was a particularly
cold night, the temperatures taking their annual dip to near zero. The
wind was rattling the boarded up windows hard, and between them, the
windchill was decidedly subzero.  And wouldn't you know it, with all
of that, this winter didn't even have the decency to produce a nice
snow to cover up the frozen dog poop and brown grass.  There were
still some crusts left over from the six inches they'd gotten in
late December. The crusts were mostly gray and black from road crud.
To make things worse, they kept having small snowfalls, never more
than an inch, but enough to get the road crews out spreading their
salt. The streets were practically white with the accumulated salt.
And that in itself was enough to make him curse, because he felt too
crappy to do anything but collapse once he got off work, much less
take the truck to a car wash and get the salt off. Each 
time one of these little snowfalls happened, he mentally wrote another
year off  the life of the truck's body.

After that, they worked in silence broken only by Doggett's coughs. A
couple of  hours later, his partner spoke up again, "You know, I can
hardly stand to listen to you. Go home. I got a buddy owes me a favor.
I'll call him up and have him cover for you."

And so Doggett went home, protesting. He would have thought that the
first thing he wanted to do once home was fall into bed, but he was
too restless to sleep and it was a little easier not to cough when he
was sitting upright. So he ended up in his chair in front of the
television. He thought he was a bit feverish, so he took some aspirin.
The cat, almost on cue, jumped right up into  his lap. At least the
damn thing was good for something, some little bit of comfort.
Sometimes it felt so good to cuddle with the darn thing that he
wondered if cats didn't have some kind of drug that was somehow
transferred to people through the skin or something. An addiction to
whatever it was was the only thing that logically explained why he
kept the evil little critter around.

Nothing but nothing was on at three in the morning, even on the
premium channels, so after about twenty minutes of fruitless channel
surfing, he just shut the thing off in exasperation. The big picture
book about the Marines he kept on his coffee table. Carefully, so he
didn't dislodge the cat, he reached for it and randomly started
flipping through the familiar pages. Then he came across it. He'd
hardly remembered that he'd stuck it there. 

It was a photo of Mulder and himself, from one of the few, all too
brief, happy  times they'd been together. They'd gone out together for
dinner at the pier, just some mall thing meant for the tourists, but
it was busy enough that they could be almost anonymous in the crowd.
Mulder had insisted that they duck into  the photobooth. The photo
captured them looking at each other, Doggett looking doubtful at
Mulder, Mulder smiling at Doggett, looking so handsome and
charming. Even just looking at the photo, Doggett remembered exactly
how easy it had been for Mulder to seduce him once Mulder had decided
he was going to trust him. The sparks had been there between them
right from the start. It was just a matter of Mulder changing the
direction of the tension. Doggett had fallen hard, no doubt about it.
Only it had obviously never been anything but a  diversion to Mulder.
Afterall, he was gone, with hardly a word once Scully's
baby had been born, and not a word at all since he'd gone off with
Scully into the desert. It obviously hadn't meant a thing to the man,
as much as it hurt Doggett to admit that. Why did he have to have
fallen in love with someone who was obviously in love with someone
else? And why couldn't he fall out of love and move on with his life?
If he'd been able to do that, he'd have someone right now. He wouldn't
be sitting here alone, coughing his lungs out with no one but a cat
for company.

"Why did my momma have to raise such a fool?" he asked the cat. Then
he started  coughing hard to cause the cat to be knocked off his lap.
Life was looking pretty shitty these days, that was for damn sure.

***

He did manage to sleep a few fitful, miserable hours sitting up in the
chair, the cat keeping a cautious distance. Strange dreams, ones he
could hardly describe, haunted him and when he was awake, he felt like
he was hardly awake. His fever, he recognized, had gone up, not down,
but he also felt unable to do anything about it, not even enough to
drag himself to bed, or the bathroom for more aspirin. His whole body
ached, with a bright starburst of pain seeming to center in the side
of his chest, causing him to wonder briefly if he'd managed
to cough so hard he cracked a rib, but then he forgot about that.

At some point he became aware that someone else was in the room with
him and he  was just too out of it to do anything about it. He still
had his gun on, too tired to take his holster off once he'd gotten
home even, but he could hardly do more than try and fumble with the
snap. 

That caught the attention of his intruder, who, truth be said, was on
his way to Doggett's side of the room anyway. "Whoa there. Easy, big
guy," the intruder  said, the voice familiar and male. Doggett focused
his eyes. Brown hair, cut rakishly. Infuriating grin first, then a
sudden look of intense concern as his hazel eyes took in the
situation. Mulder. Fuck, he really was feverish. And he'd never been
so bad off before that the delirium had turned into out and out 
hallucinations. The effort of merely looking up had set off another
bout of coughing, which brought its own agony, not that it hadn't hurt
merely to breathe.

Mulder knelt by Doggett's chair, and first thing, he slipped Doggett's
hand off  his gun, then took the holster off Doggett's belt. "Okay,
I'm thinking it'd be a good idea if you hold off on any shooting until
you can hold the gun steady,"  he said. "What do you think about
that?"

"Whatever," Doggett murmured. He'd never, not once had a hallucination
so real before. 

After he relieved Doggett of the gun, the Mulder hallucination put a
cool, almost cold hand on Doggett's forehead. "Hey," he said gently,
almost a whisper. "You're burning up. I could call Scully for a second
opinion, but I think you've got pneumonia. We should get you to the
emergency room."

Doggett muttered something under his breath. Mulder hadn't quite
caught it, because he said, "What was that again?"

"I said," Doggett said, pausing between words to cough. "Why don't I
get a Scully hallucination too?"

"You think I'm a hallucination?" Mulder asked. "Hate to break it to
you, but I'm the real thing. And Scully's in Alaska. Here, let's see
if we can get you standing so we can take you out to the car."

It took a mighty effort, but between the two of them, they got Doggett
to his feet. With Mulder at his elbow, Doggett took tottery, unsteady
steps towards the front door. "Shoes, John," Mulder said as Doggett
reached for the door handle. 

"How'd you get in here?" Doggett asked suspiciously as Mulder helped
him put back on the boots he'd shed on the way in. 

"Well, your landlord leaves the front door to the building open, and
that tiny lock on your apartment door wouldn't keep a Girl Scout out.
One little hairpin," Mulder said.

"And you're in like Flynn," Doggett finished. Something warm and thick
suddenly  reached out and grabbed him around the shoulders. Oh, his
coat. Right. Miserable fucking cold out there, which is how he'd ended
up like this in the first place. It seemed like it wasn't really worth
the effort to go out suddenly. He'd just wait until the morning. Now
what he wanted more than anything was bed. He tried to turn that way,
but a firm arm around his shoulder  prevented him from making any
movement but forward.

It got harder to move once he hit the bitter cold. One breath of that
frigid air and any hope he had of making it anywhere without doubling
over was deflated like a balloon at a convention of pin makers.
Somehow, through it all,  Mulder kept him more or less moving and more
or less upright until they reached  a car parked on the street.
Suddenly, something soft and upholstered reached up  and hit his ass.
Mulder reached across him and buckled him into place. Then the 
door shut. The car was surprisingly warm. Mulder must have just gotten
out of it. After an eternity, the door on the other side of the car
opened, allowing a  blast of cold air in. Doggett's shiver was his
only protest.

"Okay, where's the nearest emergency room?" Mulder said. 

***

He must fallen asleep or passed out or something in the car on the way
to the emergency room because when he was conscious again, it was in
the way too familiar confines of a hospital bed. He had an IV in his
arm and an oxygen mask  on his face. So, he'd been bad off enough that
they were giving him oxygen, but  not bad off enough that they'd
intubated him. Well, that was a relief at least. 

"Oh, hey, look, you're waking up," a voice said. Except it wasn't
Mulder. 

He had seen Mulder, hadn't he? Hadn't Mulder been the one to drag him
out of his chair, out to the car and at least theoretically to the
emergency room? Or had he really been hallucinating? If he had been,
then he could just about kick  himself for giving way to wishful
thinking like that. And for being so damn disappointed that Mulder
wasn't here when he woke.

Not that he had anything against the source of the voice. It was his
new partner from the stakeout. Phil was his first name, right? Phil
Culvers. For all that they hardly spoke, Doggett thought they got
along more or less okay, and it wasn't like you could expect every
working partnership to have the sparks that passed between him and
Mulder. Or even the friendliness that existed between him and Monica.
Doggett opened up his eyes, and sure enough, there was Culvers' ugly
mug. Culvers was a fifteen year vet with the Bureau and 
he certainly looked it. 

"If I'd had any idea you were in such a bad way, I'd have told you to
go to the  emergency room instead of just home," Culvers said. "I
brought you some magazines and stuff."

Then Culvers dropped a brown paper sack on the bed just in reach of
Doggett's hands and turned to go. He paused in the doorway to say,
"Get better soon, okay? The guy they got in your place is a real
chit-chatty bastard. You're all right, Doggett."

And that was glowing praise for Culvers, a whole mouthful of it. More
than Culvers had ever said when they were on stakeout together. When
Culvers was gone, Doggett pulled the bag into eye's view. It was
heavy, looked like Culvers  had gotten him six or seven magazines.
Between the energy it took to sulk about  Mulder not really being
here, and absorbing the possibility of a work partner maybe actually
talking to him, Doggett couldn't do much more than shuffle
through the pile. Two car magazines, one of which he was a subscriber
to and he'd already read that month, one of which he normally didn't
think was worth his bother. National Geographic. Maxim, complete with
a mostly naked woman on the cover. One of those crossword magazines.
Newsweek. People. Like he gave a good goddamn about what the cast of
Friends was doing this week. Okay, so the magazines were mostly, but
not totally a wash. He hadn't read National Geographic since he was a
kid in the school library, looking for pictures of naked people, but
maybe he might be able to have a more mature appreciation for 
it now. There was also a paperback, the latest Richard Patterson
thing. 

When he looked up from the bag, there was Mulder, back like the
proverbial bad penny and grinning like a fool.

"Looks like the coast is clear," Mulder said, pulling a chair up
closer to the hospital bed and sitting down. "Sorry, I wanted to be
here when you woke, but I  also needed to be sure I'm not around when
any one from the Bureau shows up, just in case its someone who might
recognize me. Then my new bulletproof identity might not be so
bulletproof.

"You know, I was really missing you," Mulder continued. "And it's done
my ego no end of good to be able to show up and be your knight in
shining armor."

Doggett mumbled something. He didn't have enough energy for full
vituperous force, just simple spite. 

"What was that?" Mulder asked, sounding innocent.

"Asshole," Doggett said, pulling the mask slightly off his face and
making sure  to enunciate clearly this time. 

"Seriously, that was a real nasty version of pneumonia you managed to
pick up there, and they say it looks like you were walking around with
it for weeks before you collapsed. It took three days of heavy duty IV
antibiotics to get it  under control," Mulder said. "I was worried. So
worried Scully offered to come out of hiding in Alaska and join me
here. And that's really something. She's been happy there, especially
since we retrieved William."

Doggett didn't the energy left after his little outburst to do more
than listen  and nod. Mulder was about to tell him about how they'd
set up the perfect little family there and generally rub it in that he
was with Scully now. And Doggett could harden his heart and not let it
hurt, couldn't he? It didn't matter, did it? He was over it. All over
it.

"But I wouldn't let her do that. I couldn't tear her away from her
life and into danger again. She's finally settled in, found a big,
strong manly mountain  man who can give her everything she thought I
should give her but couldn't," Mulder said, and as he talked, his hand
reached slowly across the bed, skirting  the discarded magazines and
paperback, insinuating itself into Doggett's hand. "And now that she's
taken care of, I'm free to go to the person who can give me 
what I need."

Then, Mulder switched topics, in that lightening swift away of his,
"Oh, I've been feeding your cat. What's its name?"

Doggett hesitated. He might, for the moment, get away with claiming to
be too tired, too out of breath to talk. Or he might claim that the
cat had been named  "Cuddles" when he came into possession of it and
that he had just stuck with that. Afterall, the landlady was still
calling Fox that. Or he might suddenly decide to call the cat
something else. Afterall, it wasn't like the damn cat actually
recognized his name, or came when he was called or anything like that.
He'd never expected to see Mulder again, otherwise, he would never
have considered the name. But it was just too perfect a name for the
troublemaking little beast, who nevertheless had managed to worm his
way under Doggett's skin. Just like the original Fox had. Maybe the
feline Fox had a more limited scope, but they were much the same. The
original dug into international conspiracies and unearthed the
possible shitstorm of the century, whereas the feline Fox just dug in
his litter box and scattered sharp little pebbles of clay litter all
over the bathroom floor for Doggett to step on with bare feet
every morning. If the original Fox didn't like the comparison, too
freakin' bad. 

Doggett pulled his oxygen mask off. He didn't feel like he needed it
for the moment. "The cat's name is Fox," he said. 

Doggett was delighted to see that he'd puzzled Mulder and for once the
man didn't have some kind of snappy retort. He'd actually managed to
shut the man up. That was worth something, wasn't it? Mulder was about
to say something, but  then paused, his mouth still open. Mulder
closed his mouth after a second or two and remained in silent thought
for a while. He opened his mouth again, about to say something, then
obviously thought better of it. Finally, at long last, when he did say
something, he settled for, "You named the cat after me?"

"He's a big troublemaker too," Doggett said. 

Mulder didn't have a chance to say anything more. A nurse swooped into
the room, fussing and flustering as she descended on Doggett. "Oh, Mr.
Doggett, you  need to keep your oxygen mask on until your blood gas
levels are up to normal."

Then Doggett had a good reason to be quiet, to lie back in bed and for
once, be  the one that kept Mulder guessing. 

***

The oxygen mask had come off early the next day and Doggett was
feeling better,  enough that he could take a serious look around the
hospital room. It was pretty much standard issue, another bed in the
room that just didn't happen to be in use at the moment. There were
two bouquets of flowers for him. One was a generic florist's
arrangement, carnations, that kind of thing. He'd had Mulder
hand him the card. He read it. It was signed as being from everyone in
the office, but he recognized the handwriting as being from Elaine,
the friendliest  of the secretaries, a friendliness that he'd taken
pains to cultivate, because she was friends with the SAC's personal
assistant. You wanted in good in an office, he'd learned early, don't
discount the secretaries. 

The other bouquet was tulips, red tulips, no card. Must have set
whoever sent them back a fair penny to get them at this time of year.
They were big, full, lush tulips too, bending gracefully over the
sides of the vase in perfect arches, the red of the petals deep,
marked with a tiny bit of yellow at the bottom. Plain glass vase, no
extraneous foliage or the little white poofy flower things florists
usually put in with bouquets. So, whoever sent them had
good taste and a sense of what he liked. Not that he was much used to
getting flowers, or sending them either. He tended to give cards when
people landed themselves in the hospital. He wondered about who'd sent
them. At first he thought Mulder maybe, but the man hadn't mentioned
it, nor given any hint that he'd seen them. He hadn't even seemed to
be looking at whether Doggett was looking at the flowers. Still,
circumstantial evidence was strongly pointing to  Mulder. 

And that was far more a serious declaration of romantic intentions
than Doggett  was sure he could deal with at the moment. 

Having adjusted himself to the reality that Mulder was gone, that
Mulder wasn't  going to be back and that Mulder never really had been
a good idea in the first  place, Doggett was not going to allow even
the slightest of raising of expectations. Why would he want to put
himself through all of that again?

You weren't going to find that Sal Doggett's son was the same fool
twice. No way, no how. 

Mulder might be calling himself by a different name these days, living
under an  assumed identity and supposedly safe from pursuit by the
law, but Mulder was the same, infuriating Mulder he always was. He
hadn't said yet why he'd shown up at Doggett's apartment that night,
why he was still here and when he intended to leave, and Doggett
wasn't going to ask. He might be flat on his back in the hospital, but
he had some pride left. Still, Mulder would persist and just sit there
like some bump on a log, when it was obvious that Doggett
really didn't have that much to say to him.  

"Okay, I get the picture," Mulder said eventually, when Doggett
actually resorted to paging through the People Magazine, in order to
have anything to do  besides think about or talk with Mulder. "You're
angry with me for how I left, the mere fact that I left, the fact that
I didn't contact you at all, and the fact that I seem to expect to
just waltz back into your life and pick up where I left off. Does that
about cover it?"

To make it worse, he didn't seem to be angry himself, just sounded a
bit sad and...understanding? One corner of Mulder's mouth quirked up
in a rueful smile and he looked straight into Doggett's eyes. The man
still had the most amazingly beautiful eyes, changeable, sort of
green, sort of brown, stirations of gold through them. That grin was
hard to resist.

"And you have every reason to be," Mulder added. 

This understanding might begin to soften his resolve, Doggett decided
and that was, in no way, good. Pretty soon, Mulder just might be
begging Doggett to take  him back, and Doggett might find himself
listening.  

"You know, this isn't exactly the best time to be having this
conversation," Doggett said. "Seeing as I still feel like death warmed
over and served on dry toast. We can talk about it later, about the
same time you're going to tell me what the hell you were doing
breaking into my apartment."   Mulder hesitated. "Not exactly one of
my brighter ideas, but the heater in my rental is broken
and I thought you wouldn't be home. I was going to wait for you
inside, away from the cold. It's a good thing you were sick, because
otherwise, I have this feeling that I might be the one in this
hospital bed."

"You really think that?" Doggett asked. He always at least tried to
ask questions first, using his weapon as a last resort. For some
reason, he thought  of a certain day in the Arizona desert, where he'd
gotten his first look at Mulder. Or at least at some entity that
emulated Mulder's physical form perfectly. 

His first thought on seeing Mulder, quickly squashed, had been about
how the man was even better looking than his picture. And then when
Doggett had had his  first encounter with the real Mulder, he had
thought about how much more beautiful the man was when the fierce
tides of anger had crossed his face. The passion in the man, more than
anything, was why he hadn't really fought back at  all when Mulder had
shoved him that time in Skinner's office. He'd stalked away 
from Skinner's office more confused than anything, about Mulder's
paranoia, that was true, but more than that, about how attracted to
Mulder he'd been. 

"You can be a suspicious man, John," Mulder said. 

Doggett thought about the number of times someone had broken into his
house since he'd gotten involved with the X-files. Logically, he
should be even more suspicious than he was. "And that is the kettle
calling the pot black," he said. He shifted in bed a little and picked
up the magazine again, wondering just when the hell he could check
himself out of this joint. 

***

The very next day, his doctor, young, female and pretty, decided that
he could go home. "You're looking much better, Mr. Doggett," she said,
checking over his  chart. She was blonde too, and that should have
tripped his trigger right over.  Instead, he couldn't help but be
distracted from the conversation by thoughts of Mulder. 

"I'd normally keep a single man like yourself in for a day or two
longer, just because you don't have anyone to take care of you. But
your friend, Mr. Martin,  has promised to take the best care of you.
You're so lucky to have such a good friend conveniently in town."

Doggett seriously wondered for a minute what line of bullshit Mulder
had been feeding the girl, but then decided that she, like most
people, had fallen hook,  line and sinker for Mulder's effortless but
almost graceless charm. 

Yeah, lucky, that was it. He sure was lucky, to have to put up with
the man again, to guard his heart against the inevitable talk that was
coming, the one where Mulder was surely going to beg Doggett to take
him back. It had to be coming. One thing was for sure, Mulder was
taking extra pains to be sure that Doggett knew that Scully was with
someone else now. All of Mulder's small talk seemed to be about
Scully's new life, her new husband, how they were raising
William, all of that. So, that was the background being laid. The
implication was clear, that Mulder was free and footloose, no
obligations. The importuning to Doggett to reconsider a relationship
of some kind couldn't be far behind. 

"Mr. Doggett?" the young and pretty doctor asked. "Did you hear me? I
said that  I thought it should be at least a week before you go back
to work. Longer if you've got an active job. I'm sorry, what was it
you said you did again?"

Just what did he really do? He'd had a pretty clear idea once. It had
all seemed so clear cut. Catch the bad guys, bring them to justice.
Then Mulder had  happened to him and not everything was quite so clear
cut any more. He'd thought of himself as one of the good guys, but he
was clearly being punished for doing what he'd thought was his job.
The bad guys had offices in the upper floors of the JEH, the justice
system itself was riddled with corruption and he  could hardly tell
black from white, much less all the different shades of gray. 
"I'm an agent with the FBI," he said as blandly as he could. 

"Well, if it's a desk job, another week," she said, then sent him off
with instructions for the medications he was supposed to take,
antibiotics to finish  the infection off for good, and asthma
medications to make sure that his "airways stayed open."

Then she was gone to finish filling out his release paperwork. 

"Only four and a half days, not bad," Mulder said as they were getting
into Doggett's truck. Mulder had taken the liberty of driving it to
pick him up, he'd said, because he'd figured that Doggett would
appreciate the luxury of heat, especially considering it was snowing.
Mulder continued as he carefully pulled out of the hospital parking
lot into the slow moving traffic along Harlem Avenue, "The time I was
in the hospital for pneumonia, it was aspiration  pneumonia. I was in
the hospital for weeks."

The traffic crawled as the medium flakes drifting down slowly turned
heavier and the wind picked up. The sky was heavy and leaden with
clouds and there was already a good inch of churned and gray slush on
this major street. "I thought the weathermen were saying this was
going to miss us," Doggett complained. 

"I guess not," Mulder said. "It's not so bad and most people here seem
to have a good idea about how to drive in it."

Actually, Mulder was acquitting himself behind the wheel better than
Doggett would have expected in these conditions. Despite the heavy
slush, the truck didn't slide or slip once. Indeed, Mulder pulled the
truck into Doggett's parking space in the garage without a single
incident. Doggett glared at Mulder  as the man got out of the truck
and walked around, as if Doggett needed help getting down. The day he
needed help getting out of his own truck was the day he was just going
to pack it in and order the casket for his own funeral.
Mulder shrugged off the glare as if he hadn't seen it. Instead, as
Doggett went  for the side door to the garage, Mulder reached behind
the seats and pulled out  the two bouquets. 

"Why'd you bring those?" Doggett grumbled. "Fox is just going to trash
them."

"We'll put them on top of the fridge or something," Mulder said. 

Then they went out into the snow and cold. It was picking up rapidly.
The snow stung Doggett's face and whipped his hair for the whole of
the quick trip from the garage to the back porch. Maybe he was better,
but he sure as hell wasn't well, he decided. It was less than fifty
feet from the garage to the steps, but  it felt like he'd walked miles
by the time he put a foot on the first step. He was wheezing
practically. Doggett still insisted on being the one to let them
into the apartment, nearly pushing Mulder away from the door, when the
other man approached it saying, "I found your spare key."

Once inside, it wasn't so much that the place had been trashed.
Mulder, by nature, wasn't a slob. But everything had a certain layer
of detritus to it. It  wasn't a huge sink full of dishes, but there
were cups and plates scattered here and there through the whole place.
There were small piles of sunflower seed shells here and there. The
cat's dish was full, but Mulder hadn't taken the time to sweep up the
kernels of cat food that the cat dug out of his bowl and, as a game,
would bat across the floor. The cat himself was too busy using
the wood casing by the hallway door as a scratching post to even look
up and acknowledge that the human he lived with had returned from an
extended absence.  And Doggett had once wondered why the casing around
that particular door had looked newly installed, not the heavily
painted over stuff that was around every other door. 

Mulder, true to his work, put the floral arrangements on top of the
fridge. Then he snapped on the little TV on the counter, turning the
channel to the weather channel, where news about the storm that was
hitting them was breaking.  First thing that Doggett heard was, "We're
now expecting eighteen to twenty inches here in Chicagoland, very
possibly a record breaking amount for this day. As you can see here in
this picture, crews are working frantically to ensure that O'Hare
remains open, but it's looking like roads are closing down
all over the city..."

Peachy. Just peachy. He was going to be snowed in with Mulder for God
knows how  long.

He might have done it more gracefully, but still feeling sick like
this made him peevish and ill tempered. Between that and the fact that
he didn't want to be nice to Mulder, didn't want to have Mulder be
nice to him, didn't want to have his heart or resolve softened.  He
was being a real bastard. He looked at Mulder who was watching the
weather avidly and snapped, "I won't send you out in that, but once
the roads are clear, you're out of here. Back to Alaska or
whatever rock it was you crawled out from under."

Having said his piece, he stalked off to his bedroom and found an
unpleasant surprise waiting for him. Guess the cat had noticed that he
was gone afterall. More or less the entire contents of his closet were
scattered over the floor of  the room. Suits, shirts, ties, all in big
piles on the floor. Piles in which, if you looked closely, you could
see the impression of a little cat body. The contents of the drawers
of his dresser had been spared, but little else. He was 
sure if he examined them closely, he could see the snag marks of a
certain feline's claws. If he hadn't known better, he would have
assumed that someone had broken in and trashed the joint. Except given
what he knew about his feline  roommate, that seemed the far likelier
explanation. Occam's razor cut that one by a good clear margin. The
light frosting of orange cat hair on the clothes in  certain piles was
a pretty strong bit of physical evidence linking the perp to
the crime. 

"Fox! What the hell did you do to my room?" Doggett yelled, without
thinking to  hard about it.

A moment later, Mulder's head popped around the doorway as Doggett had
sat down  on the bed, starting to contemplate whether he'd be able to
rest with the room in its current state or whether he could find the
energy to start rehanging the  clothes and sorting out which ones
would need the attentions of the dry cleaner. 

"What?" Mulder asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.

"Oh," Doggett said, embarrassed, then angry again at his forced upon
him houseguest. "Not you. The damn cat."

"Your cat did this?" Mulder looked around in disbelief.

"You think I leave it like this?" Doggett said. "Unlike certain people
I can think of, I don't have a trust fund to spend on fancy clothes. I
take care of my suits."

And he definitely had better things to be spending money on than the
dry cleaners, he thought as he reached for a suit jacket, even though
he wanted more than anything to lie down. Thinking unkind thoughts
about HMOs that pushed  patients out of the hospital before they were
truly better, he started to clean  up, only the thought of preventing
more creases keeping him going. 

"You lie down," Mulder said, grabbing the suit coat from Doggett's
unresisting hands, then starting to look around for a hanger. "You
look like you're about to fall over. I'll take care of this. I've got
a travel steamer in my bag. I can probably get the worst of the
creases out without taking them to the dry cleaners."

So, Doggett let himself fall into his nice, soft bed. He quickly
decided that it was far better than the hospital. Nobody was going to
be coming by every two  hours to stick him with a needle and enact the
vampirism of "blood tests" on him. As a rest cure, hospital time
definitely didn't have anything to recommend  it. Mulder quickly
worked gathering up clothing and matching it up to hangers.
Doggett started to drift, almost ready to fall asleep again when the
crash happened. 

Though it startled Doggett awake again, it didn't frighten him. He'd
almost been expecting it. Mulder, on the other hand, just about jumped
out of his clothes. He covered it pretty well after his initial
reaction, but he'd definitely been scared, maybe thinking broken
window or something. "What was that?" he asked. 

Doggett groaned, then pulled himself out of bed by main force. "Let's
go see what the furry little bastard has done this time," he said.
Actually, he had a good working theory as to the source of the sound
of broken glass, but he just wanted to confirm it, then rub it in
Mulder's face. 

They made it to the kitchen in enough time to see Fox sitting on top
of the fridge, one of the tulips in his mouth, biting it, then
dropping it and batting  it around, like he was playing with a
captured mouse or something. Water was still running down the side of
the fridge. Several of the tulips had dropped to  the floor in a
scattering of red among the widely spread shards of glass. For
the moment, the other arrangement hadn't been touched, but Doggett was
sure it wouldn't be long until it too, had reached a sad, unpleasant
fate in the jaws of the cat. 

"Did I or did I not tell you that he'd just trash them?" Dogget
demanded. "Your  fault. You clean it up."

"But how'd he get up there?" Mulder spluttered. "I didn't think he
could possibly get up there."

"You," Doggett said, poking a finger at Mulder's chest. "Have
obviously never had a cat. Get rid of the other one while you're at
it, before he gets any ideas."

"Well, looks like I'll have to get you another bouquet," Mulder said
as he looked around for paper towels to mop up the water with.

"No more flowers," Doggett snapped. "Got that? Back off, Mulder. No
more flowers. No more of this nursemaiding me. You're out of my life,
soon as the storm lifts."

With that, he stalked back to bed, laid down and went to sleep
soundly. In a while, he woke just long enough to notice a small, furry
body settling in for a  cat nap on top of him. He didn't even wake up
enough to protest or shift when a  certain feline curled up on top of
his ass, then started to purr and very shortly, fell asleep as well. 

When Doggett woke up, it was dark outside again. He looked out his
window and saw that snow was still coming down hard and heavy, blowing
nearly horizontally. At least they still had power. He could see a
light on in the kitchen from just beyond the door he'd left cracked
open so that the cat could come and go as it pleased without raising a
ruckus. Cats, Doggett had discovered, had this way of always wanting
to be on the exact opposite side of whatever closed door they happened
to be on. Nearly without exception. 

Doggett sat up in bed and felt, for the first time in a while, nearly
human. The cat had come slept with him a little while, he vaguely
remembered, but there was no sign of him now. Something savory was
cooking and the delicious smell drifted in to his room. He turned on
the light so he wouldn't have to stumble and trip over the clothes on
the floor. 

There weren't any. They'd all been hung up neatly. Mulder had made
himself busy  then. At least he'd worked silently. Doggett checked the
closet, just to see if  Mulder's work was up to his standards, or if
things had been hung up willy-nilly.

They hadn't. He didn't check every suit, but the sample he checked,
all of them  had the right pants with the right jacket. Not only that,
but Mulder had arranged them by color, dark grays together. Blues
together. Same for the ties that had been neatly hung up on their
rack. He checked the suits for signs of cat hair or creases, but he
couldn't find any. Okay, so maybe Mulder knew his way around a suit.
Doggett decided that the sweats he'd worn to bed would be
just fine for the rest of the evening around the house. It wasn't like
he'd chosen to have company over. He padded out of his bedroom in
stocking feet.

Wandering through the kitchen, Doggett lifted the lid on the big pot
on the stove. Chili. Something was in the oven too. He opened the door
and peeked in to see cornbread. He knew he shouldn't, but he stood in
front of the open oven door for a little while, basking in the extra
heat and thinking about how much exactly he really, truly hated
winter. Things around the room had been cleaned up a little too. The
dishes had been done and were draining in the rack, none
of the sunflower seed shells were in evidence, nor was even the
tiniest speck of glass from the doomed vase. Mulder had even gotten
rid of the other arrangement like Doggett had said. The man could be
infuriating. He wasn't supposed to be likeable, kind or amenable. 

Doggett tracked Mulder down to the living room where he occupied the
big chair in front of the TV. When he heard Doggett approach, Mulder
stood up to allow Doggett the prime TV watching place. A small stack
of videos were on the floor beside the television.

"I hope you don't mind. While you were sleeping, I did a little
shopping for you, while the stores were still open. And I found a
rental place that hadn't quite closed down yet. The pickings were kind
of slim. I think people are planning to be stuck inside for quite a
while," Mulder said. "Dinner will be ready in just a bit."

Then Mulder picked up the videos and tossed them onto Doggett's hands.
Doggett looked through them. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Seen
it, wasn't impressed. The Fast and the Furious. The Great Escape. And
finally, at the bottom of the pile, Caddyshack. "How did you know this
is one of my favorites?"  Doggett asked, holding up the video
suspiciously. He actually had a copy, locked up in storage, back in
DC. 

"It's a classic," Mulder said, grinning big. "Why don't you pop it in
and I'll be back in a little bit with dinner."

Too much more of this, Doggett thought, and it would be hard to kick
the man out into the snow. "Damn it, Mulder, I told you to quit
fussing over me."

"This isn't fussing, John," Mulder said, sounding perfectly
reasonable, and as if Doggett were the unreasonable one here. "We have
to eat, so I made some food. I figured videos seemed the most likely
option for entertaining ourselves  without jumping down each other's
throats."

"Fine," Doggett said. He took the seat Mulder had recently vacated and
leaned over to pop, not Caddyshack, but The Great Escape. Mulder
wandered off into the  kitchen and started making noises. Mulder,
Doggett noted, looking over by the door, had left a pair of shoes by
the door, in the exact same spot where Monica  had left that ill-fated
pair of pumps. Out of simple spite, Doggett decided not 
to warn Mulder, though it possibly might be too late by now. 

Mulder entered the room, having found a tray. He bore bowls of chili
and fragrant corn bread. He settled the tray on the floor next to
Doggett and took up a spot on the couch, taking a bowl with him.
Doggett tentatively put his spoon into the chili then took a bite.
Mulder, he decided, though he'd never been given a clue to it before,
was a surprisingly decent cook. The chili had just enough spice for a
little kick, but not enough to singe his taste buds off. There were
plenty of black beans in between the chunks of beef, and little 
bits here and there of extra hotness, probably finely diced hot
peppers. The cornbread was light and fluffy and for a while, Doggett
was happy. 

After a while, they were done eating. Bowls were set aside. The cat
came up to lick at Doggett's bowl, but abandoned it after one brief
lick. Guess the chili was too hot for the cat. They settled in to
watch the movie in almost companionable silence. Well fed, warm and
feeling almost better, Doggett was inclined towards generosity for a
brief moment, even to Mulder, which was why when the cat investigated
Mulder's discarded bowl, and Mulder's hand reached out to pet the damn
thing, Doggett said, warningly, "He doesn't seem to like
other people much."

Mulder gave Doggett a funny look as his hand came to rest lightly on
the cat's head, Fox petting Fox. Wouldn't you know it but the cat had
to prove him wrong?  The cat started brushing up against Mulder's
hand, bumping it with his head, in  the motion that the lady from the
pet store had described as 'marking.' In other words, the cat was
saying, 'I like you. You're mine.'

"We seem to get along famously," Mulder said as the cat continued to
brush himself against his hand. 

"Did I ever tell you that a cat once saved my life?" Mulder said,
after allowing the cat to pet himself on his hand for a while.

"Uh-huh," Doggett said. He was doubtful, but he didn't actually tell
Mulder he was full of shit. That was about all Mulder could hope for
considering the circumstances.

"Yeah," Mulder said. He then proceeded to tell some cock and bull
story about sea monsters and how a cat had lured him out into the
freshwater rain, where the sea monsters growing in his neck had died.

Doggett vaguely remembered it. "You didn't mention any cat in your
report on that," he said. 

Mulder shrugged and added, "It didn't seem important at the time." 

Then Mulder flicked the movie off of the pause he had put it on to
tell the sea  monster story. He stood up and collected the chili bowls
and other dishes and went off to the kitchen. The sounds of water
started coming from the sink, along with the assorted clinks and
clicks that indicated that Mulder was doing the dishes. Doggett, for
his part, thought hard. Long and hard about his relationship, such as
it had been, with Mulder. 

It hadn't been for very long, but those short weeks had been the
happiest his life had seen for a very long time. Before that had been
the lonely, empty time  after his divorce, before that, the general
trainwreck that his life had been since Luke had died and the divorce
had happened. It'd been years since he'd been happy. It wasn't so much
that Mulder himself made Doggett happy. It was the emotions that
Mulder brought out in Doggett. When Mulder was around, things 
seemed sharper, brighter, more highly wrought. Even struggling in the
wake Mulder left behind, life ran at a higher pitch.

Even now. Doggett had to admit that he'd laughed more at that sea
monster story  than he'd laughed at anything in months. He might have
been pissed at Mulder for dozens of very good reasons, but even that
made him feel alive. They sparked, that was all there was too it. 

Perhaps because it had been so good, then to have it ripped away so
quickly, it  made it all the hard to have him here now. It made him
want again, and that wasn't good, because Mulder would never, could
never do anything but disappoint  him. Run off the next time that the
direction of the wind changed. 

Mulder was taking far longer than he should have, just to wash off a
few bowls and plates. And Doggett was no longer hearing the
comfortable sounds of dishes being washed. He got off his ass and
padded into the kitchen. Mulder had stopped washing and was staring
out of the dark window over the sink into the snow driven night. The
snow had thinned considerably, though it still blew hard. Doggett
figured the worst of it was just about over. Another day, two,
then Mulder would be out of his life again. 

God, but wasn't the man beautiful. Doggett remembered lying in bed
with Mulder,  in lazy, post-coital bliss, tracing a finger down the
sharp curve of his jaw and cheek. The way the deadpan serious
expression could turn to amusement fast as lightning. Mulder's
languid, loose way of standing was just like it had always been. And
the jeans Mulder was wearing tonight were tight. They cupped
the curves of that gorgeous ass as close as a good race driver could
take a tight corner. The jeans themselves were well washed, well worn
to the point where the surface was soft, almost velvety looking, but
they hadn't yet started  to wear through. Soon though. 

Doggett swallowed hard, just thinking about that ass, what he'd done
to it before.

Then a certain portion of Doggett, one he had been almost sure had
decided to take early retirement and move away to Florida, decided it
was going to stand up and take notice of Mulder. This was, in no way,
good. He didn't want to be turned on by the man. He didn't want to be
flashing on memories of just how damn good it had been. None of that.
His body was traitorous. Even if he didn't, it wanted Mulder and in a
bad way. Out and out kissing Monica hadn't gotten him even the
slightest bit hard, and just grabbing a quick look at Mulder's ass had
gotten him nearly a full on woody. In a world that made sense, 
it would have been the other way around, but ever since his life had
intersected with Mulder, not one goddamn thing made sense. 

(Continued in part 3)

 
Part 3
See part 0 for story information.


Then, before Mulder even became aware that he was being observed,
Doggett cleared his throat and announced gruffly, "I'm going back to
bed."

Mulder turned around to watch Doggett retreat down the hall, and said,
"Good night." He seemed utterly unaware that he'd been observed, that
anything had happened.

Once Doggett was in the bedroom, he shut the door behind him. The damn
cat would have to be happy to be on the other side of it for once. And
it wasn't like Fox didn't have Mulder, traitorous little slut for
affection. He laid down  and intended to first sulk, then sleep. He
turned the light off and waited for sleep to come, but it didn't. He
laid awake and couldn't help but think of Mulder's body. The sheer
perfection of the man's abs and torso, slender but still muscled,
defined enough to have a six pack, but not any more than that.
Those long legs. The rakish way his hair fell across his forehead. His
woody was getting even harder and harder to ignore. 

He tried to think of baseball statistics. He tried to remember all the
state capitols. He tried thinking about the case he'd been working on.
Nothing kept his mind from drifting back to Mulder and memories of
what it had been like to fuck the man. 

Okay, he thought, admitting defeat silently to himself. Just this
once. 

If he took care of it quickly, without fuss, he could get on with the
business of getting to sleep, passing the time until the roads would
be clear and Mulder  could leave, couldn't he?

First he reached to make sure that the box of tissues was in easy
reach, then he eased his sweats down his hips. As he started with a
nice, slow stroke, he thought about the first time Mulder kissed him.
After that mess with that case Monica had drawn Mulder in, the murders
that she thought were tied in some way to the death of his son,
Doggett had gone over to Mulder's apartment, looking for some kind of
answers from Mulder. Something more conclusive than the line
of bullshit that Mulder had fed him earlier. He didn't remember
clearly exactly  what they had said to each other, until he said to
Mulder, "Why can't you just give me a clear, decisive answer, Mulder?
Even if it's total bullshit? I just saw a normal, no, a woman who
wouldn't hurt a fly try and kill Agent Reyes. That woman ended up in
the loony bin because of what happened."

"I don't have answers for you, Agent Doggett," Mulder had said.

"What do you have then?" Doggett had demanded, practically irrational
by this time. He hadn't noticed how close he had come to stand to
Mulder, so close they  were nearly touching. "The way Agent Scully
talks about you, you're the man with the answers. Damn sun and moon
rise and set because you tell 'em to as far  as she's concerned."

Mulder had looked to the side and shook his head a little. "All I can
tell you,  is that you can never really know. You can never know why
Katha Dukes snapped when confronted with the loss of someone she loved
and why you didn't when your  son died. You can never know when little
green men are going to abduct you. You  just have to live for the
moment, make the most of the opportunities to love that are presented
to you, because the unthinkable could happen at any time."

And then, suddenly, Mulder had closed the remaining space between
them. He hesitated only precious seconds, just long enough for Doggett
to notice his smell, strong, masculine sweat, as if he'd just come in
from a run. It was a heady, intense odor, one that made Doggett think
of pleasures abandoned when he  got married. Then Mulder's lips were
touching his. The merest brush at first, tentative, as if Mulder
hadn't been sure that Doggett wouldn't slug him. Doggett had stiffened
at the unexpected touch, but there had been an almost chemical change
suddenly. It was as if the kiss was a force of its own. It had
been the moment when everything he thought about Mulder changed, even
if he'd not been willing to admit it yet. Every muscle fiber in his
body melted and he had slumped back against the wall. Mulder had moved
closer, continuing the kiss, slowly and thoroughly. There hadn't been
any tongue, just his lips moving  languorously across Mulder's, all of
his resistance softened. Mulder's hands moved to the back of his neck,
to further control the kiss. 

It was the soft touch of Mulder's tongue on his lips, questioning if
Doggett would allow admittance, that had snapped him out of it, woke
him up from the drug like spell that kissing Fox Mulder was. He had
been about to do something he sure as hell hadn't intended on when
he'd set out. He pulled Mulder's hands off the back of their neck,
even as his skin protested that they didn't want that touch
interrupted. He'd been skin hungry, had gone so long without sex or
much human contact. 

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," he'd said, pushing Mulder away to a
safe distance.

"I'm sorry," Mulder had said. He'd been unable to look Doggett in the
eye. "I misjudged. I shouldn't have. I misinterpreted."

"Damn straight you did," Doggett had said. He'd turned on his heels
and had fled. He'd been ashamed of himself for fleeing. He'd once,
when younger, been a  cocksucker on a regular basis, even having a
brief relationship with a guy when  he was in the Marines. And there
he'd been, a big case of homosexual panic. And  he had always thought
of himself as such a big man, able to face the truth about what he
was, in all its tarnished glory. 

For weeks, the alternate ending to that moment, the one where he
didn't flee like some sissy, had been jerk off fodder, just like it
was now. The ending where he'd pushed Mulder away, but only to kneel
down in front of the man and unzip his jeans. They'd been tight and
worn, especially over the crotch, just like the pair Mulder was
wearing tonight. Unzipped in his imagination, Mulder's 
jeans had dropped to the floor, puddling around his ankles. Mulder's
cock would  be enticingly full, but still ready to be teased to full
life with flirting, nipping sucks. The skin of cock would be velvety
soft, like all cocks were, the  softest skin on the human body. The
feel of the swelling member in his mouth and the intense, earthy,
sweaty smell of Mulder's body, concentrated in his groin would cause
Doggett's own cock to grow, harden. 

Alone in his bed now, Doggett increased the pressure of his hand in
response to  his body's cues that he was about to come. Doggett had
hardly gotten to going over the feeling of Mulder's strong hands on
the back of his head, the way Mulder's fingers would weave into his
hair, when he felt the familiar, delicious contraction start. Focusing
as much as he could on the underside of his cock, he kept reaching for
fulfillment. 

When he came, he forced himself to silence. Little more than a gasp
escaped him, then he melted back against the mattress, too exhausted
for the moment to even reach for a tissue. The semen on his belly, now
warm, would cool off soon,  then dry and get sticky. But he could deal
with it later. So he told himself as  he started to drift to sleep. 

He woke when weak sunlight finally spilled into the room. He looked
out the window and found that it was still snowing, in a lazy,
desultory way, big, fat flakes drifting to the ground. Pretty much
everything was buried under mounds of pure white. The snow had drifted
halfway up the garage wall. Shrubs in the yard were visible only as
higher mounds in the snow. Still snowing, but the sky  was lighter
than it had been yesterday, so the cloud cover was thinner. The
snow would probably come to a stop soon, and then they could see if
the roads remained open. He might be able to get Mulder out from
underfoot by this afternoon even. 

Sitting up in bed, Doggett found that his sweats were still down
around his hips and his belly was sticky with dried come. He hadn't
last night, had he? Gone to sleep by jerking off to memories of
Mulder? He vowed not to give into any more moments of a weakness like
that. 

Walking into the kitchen, he was amused to see the cat sitting on the
table, swishing his tail and Mulder on the floor, wiping up a big pile
of cat vomit. Mulder looked suitably squeamish, not quite grossed out,
but unhappy to be in the position he was. When Mulder had swabbed up
the last of it and deposited the paper towels in the garbage, he
started washing his hands. Then he said, "I  left the corn bread out
on the counter. Your cat got into it. I wrapped it up, didn't think
that he'd bother it."

"For love of Pete, Mulder. Don't do that again. The cat's allergic to
corn," Doggett said. He'd found that out after some expensive vet
bills and having to switch cat food twice. "I'll be lucky if a bit of
throwup is the worst of it."

Actually, Fox looked like he was in fine fettle, generally enjoying
the proceedings. He vacated the table with a graceful leap to the
floor and sat down by his food bowl, looking expectant. 

"Aren't cats supposed to be carnivores?" Mulder asked. 

"Well, an opportunist is what this one is," Doggett said, starting to
reach for  the plastic bin of cat food. Disgorged contents of his
stomach notwithstanding,  the cat looked like he was ready to eat. Of
course, once the food was actually poured into the bowl, the cat
sniffed it, then walked away without even touching a kernel. He'd be
back. He always was. Doggett turned to the task of making coffee. He
messed silently with grounds and filter, ignoring Mulder as
much as he could get away with, but when the maker had finally started
to burble, he had no more excuse. He walked away, planning to go to
the living room and look out the window at the condition of the
street. And Mulder just had to follow him.

The sight waiting Doggett from the front window of the apartment was
not exactly encouraging. Some people had started digging out the
sidewalks in front  of their house, but the street was just a river of
snow, hummocked on either side by big humps that must have been buried
cars. No one had even started digging out their cars yet. There
wouldn't have been much point because there was nowhere they could
have gone anyway. 

"If you weren't just in the hospital from pneumonia, I'd drag you out
there and  we'd make snowmen or something," Mulder said, a hint of
glee in his voice. "This is great. We've never gotten this much at
once in Anchorage."

"I hate the winter," Doggett snarked. He took his familiar position in
the chair in front of the television and started searching for weather
news, hoping  to hear that the major roads were starting to clear at
least. 

He found it at last, and wasn't heartened by what he heard, not the
least bit. "Finally, this morning at five," the weathercaster said.
"They managed to clear  the last of the area expressways. In some
places throughout the region, they got even more inches than
predicted. The hardest hit was the western suburbs, with as many as
twenty-five inches in some places. Village and city officials
say it may be another day before streets are clear."

"I think coffee is done," Mulder said after more of the same, damn
depressing new. "I'll go get it."

After a short while, Doggett heard a girly scream coming from the
kitchen. It had to be Mulder, but what could get him to scream like
that? Doggett decided to investigate. He walked in to the kitchen as
fast as he could get away with, his lungs still protesting a little. 

Mulder was standing, staring at the cat. The cat had a mouse tail
handing out of his mouth. Just the tail. 

"What's the racket about, Mulder?" Doggett asked. "Why are you
screaming?"

Mulder pointed. Okay, so maybe the tail in the cat's mouth wasn't so
gross. It was the rest of it, scattered around the kitchen floor that
must have set off that little display. Once upon a time ago, Doggett
wouldn't have guessed that a  creature as small as a mouse could make
such a mess when the force of nature that was his cat was unleashed on
it. Now, it was familiar territory to him. He  wouldn't have minded
the cat killing mice if Fox would actually eat them or something.

"I think mouse guts are definitely your territory," Mulder said.

Doggett unrolled some paper towels and got down on his hands and knees
and started cleaning. They were pretty well scattered. Fox must have
been busy, to find the mouse, catch it, then disembowel and scatter it
in a few short minutes. "That carnivorous enough for you?" he quipped.
"And it's not that gross. No need to go screaming like some kind of
girl."

"That was not a girly scream," Mulder protested. 

"Mulder, that was a girly scream if I ever heard one," Doggett snorted
as he dumped the paper towels into the trash. "I know you saw a lot
worse, why the panic?"

"That was not panic," Mulder said, defensively.

Doggett paused before he spoke next on hearing the edge to Mulder's
voice. He'd  been thinking about Mulder's time in VCU, then on the
X-Files, where dealing with corpses in various nasty states was just
part of the job. But the Mulder that had come back from the grave must
have been a different man, more vulnerable, with hidden emotional
landmines that hadn't been there before. With  what had happened to
the man, it was probably lucky he wasn't a total basketcase. Doggett
could find it in him to be, if not exactly gentle, then at
least not cruel. He said, "Whatever," then went to wash his hands.
Only then was Doggett able to collect his cup of coffee. He was about
to walk out to the living room again when Mulder moved to stand in his
path. 

"We never did have that talk you promised me in the hospital," Mulder
said.

"I can't see as it's really necessary," Doggett said, stepping around
Mulder. "I don't care what you're doing here or why you came, just so
long as you go back to where you came from as soon as you can."

"John," Mulder said, moving to close the distance between them again.
"I think you're protesting just a little bit too much."

Then, just like he had the first time, Mulder stepped up to Doggett
and moved into Doggett's space. A moment later, before Doggett was
even sure what was happening, Mulder's lips were on his and a kiss was
happening. His traitorous body, remembering just what it had once had
and still craving it like it was smack, responded. No, not just
responded. Responded like a drunk to a bottle of  Night Train after a
week in the lock up. Doggett found himself pressed up against his
cabinets, setting the coffee mug down on the counter, and opening
his lips to Mulder's questing tongue. Soon after, Mulder's knee
insinuated itself between Doggett's legs.

Before Doggett could recover himself enough to push Mulder away,
Mulder himself  moved away. He said, more than a little bit cocky,
"Thought so." 

"Wait a minute now," Doggett said, willing the woody he'd just sprung
to subside. "You can't expect me to turn my dick off like its some
machine, but I'm thinking with the big head here. Same with my heart.
Feelings don't enter into this. The smart thing to do is to send you
packing and that's what I'm going to do."

Mulder stepped closer to Doggett again, and while he didn't kiss
Doggett again,  he wrapped his arms around Doggett. Doggett resisted
stiffly at first, keeping his muscles board hard against Mulder, not
wanting to melt against that embrace. Mulder grinned for a moment,
then put his right hand up to John's chin, just touching it lightly.
"Sometimes, John, the only thing you can do isn't the smart thing. You
know, we never really got a chance to see just how good it could be.
We could now. Nothing's in our way anymore. It's just you and 
me and the snow."

It was then that Mulder kissed him again. Not the intense kiss of
before, meant  to make him submit, if not to Mulder, then to his own
feelings. No, this kiss started out as tentative as their first kiss,
just Mulder brushing his lips delicately against Doggett's. But it
didn't remain tentative. Before long, Mulder's mouth was opening to
him, and by opening, somehow demanded that Doggett's tongue follow in
response. Doggett ran his tongue over Mulder's teeth, sought entrance
between their hard porcelain, was surprised at just how
hot Mulder's mouth was. Mulder was his weakness, the only one in so
long who had known where the chinks in his armor were. Just being
around Mulder softened  him, eliminated his resistance. Mulder's chest
was pressed up against his, Mulder's hands snaking into Doggett's,
stroking them, rubbing the palm, a gesture that somehow managed to
convey a full measure of lust. He had to push Mulder away for a moment
to catch his breath, the gesture affecting him more than a full caress
from another would.

He didn't want this, yet he craved this exact touch more than he had
anything in his life. He was skin hungry. No, more than that. He was
hungry for the fire  that this man sparked in him, for the way that
every feeling was more intense in his presence, whether this lust that
was building, or even, he had to admit,  the anger. Life with this man
was running a wide open throttle, no doubt about that, full
catastrophe living at its finest. 

Mulder broke the kiss to trail his lips over to near Doggett's ear, to
plant a small, wet kiss at the exact corner of Doggett's jaw and then
whisper, low and meaningful, "We could start again. Turn the clock to
zero. It could be a brand new day for us."

Then his lips were back on Doggett, used for things far more important
than words. Doggett groaned as he realized, that for at least this
moment, this one time, he was capitulating. Maybe when it was over, he
might be able to think clearly, but right now, the struggle was over
and he'd lost. Or had he won? It was hard to remember exactly why, as
Mulder's supple and beautiful lips closed down on his earlobe, that
this wasn't a good idea, why he'd been so opposed to it. It wasn't
really thinking with his dick. Though that was definitely
interested in what was happening, it was like every bit of his body
wanted this  and had taken him captive.

Mulder must have been needing this every bit as much as Doggett's body
did, because the instant he heard the groan, he took that as a signal
to rev up the engines. Suddenly, he was thrusting his hips up against
Doggett's, reaching for  the zipper of his jeans, pulling down
Doggett's sweats. He knelt in front of Doggett finally and completely
engulfed Doggett's cock in hot wetness. Doggett resisted the urge to
thrust into Mulder's mouth, but instead, let Mulder take
it all from him- his resistance, any last, rational thoughts he might
have had. 

Last night's orgasm notwithstanding, it had been way too long since
he'd been with someone, not since his last time with Mulder.
Swallowing him hard, Mulder took Doggett's cock as deep as it would
go, at the same time questing fingers reaching behind for the cleft of
Doggett's ass, for the tight pucker that he would find there. Just the
thought of what Mulder seemed to be intending, sent him over the edge.
He could feel his balls draw up, then he couldn't help but
thrust into Mulder's willing, soft mouth, his hands finding the back
of Mulder's head, fingers twining into that silky hair. The other one
of Mulder's hands found its way between Doggett's thighs, parting them
slightly, then starting questing upwards, searching for a particular
spot at the base of Doggett's cock.

Oh, no, Doggett thought. Not that again. But even as he thought this,
Mulder found what he was looking for, and then a short moment later,
Doggett was coming. 

When Doggett returned to his senses, Mulder was still kneeling at his
feet, big  grin on his face, like the cat who'd gotten the canary.
Mulder's jeans were tangled around his ankles, his t-shirt still on,
though he started to pull it off. Oh, no, Mulder was not done yet.
That little maneuver he'd pulled just before he made Doggett come had
assured that he wouldn't be denied his fun. It was only a partial
release that Doggett had been allowed, orgasm without ejaculation.
Doggett was still rock hard, even more sensitive than before. 

T-shirt off, revealing those beautiful abs, Mulder stood, kicking off
his jeans, so that he stood naked. Nestled in the curls of pubic hair,
Mulder's cock was sticking straight out, hard and proud. It was
beautiful, Doggett thought, shocked as always to be thinking that
about a cock, but it was true. Mulder kept smiling as he opened a
couple of cabinet doors, looking for something. It took Doggett, in
his fuck stupid state, a minute or two to figure  out exactly what,
but when he did, Doggett said, "Let's go to the bedroom. I
should have some lube in there. You're not fucking me with cooking
oil."

At that moment though, Mulder laid his hands on a small bottle of
extra virgin olive oil. He pulled it out of the cabinet, set it on the
countertop and turned  to Doggett. That look on his face was back. The
one that meant that nothing, but nothing could dissuade him from the
path he'd decided on. Doggett had only gotten to see it a few times in
a sexual context, but he knew enough to know that he was in for one
heck of a ride and that he might as well relax and enjoy 
it. Because his own traitorous body seemed determined to not just
respond to Mulder's touch, but to submit to Mulder's every whim.

"So at least we're agreed that I'm fucking you," Mulder said. As he
did, he reached for Doggett's sweatshirt and started to pull it off. 

Then, with a firm, but gentle hand on the back of Doggett's neck,
Mulder directed him to bend over the kitchen table. Doggett couldn't
find any words in  himself at this exact moment, but he moaned
slightly as he felt the cool, smooth wood of the table contact his
belly. He didn't think the shiver that ran  up and down his whole
spine was entirely due to the cold. The table was a small 
one, sturdy and solid wood, though he hadn't exactly had this use in
mind when he'd picked it out at that garage sale. He'd be able to
scoot up a little and grab the far edge of the tabletop to brace
himself. No doubt the table could support both their weights if
necessary.

Mulder for his part, knelt behind Doggett. His warm breath on
Doggett's ass, as  he spread Doggett's cheeks and paused to look,
caused Doggett to shudder. Get on with it already, Doggett thought.
But Mulder would not be rushed. He traced lightly with one finger
around Doggett's opening, just a tease, a maddening tease. Then, when
Doggett was sure he couldn't stand it a second longer, Mulder 
made his move, suddenly, decisively. Mulder's mouth was on him,
dragging his moist, hot tongue in circles around Doggett's pucker.

"Oh...God," Doggett exhaled breathlessly, hands now scrabbling for
that table edge. That only encouraged Mulder in his attack. He was
still coherent enough that he forced himself to release one hand from
the table's edge. He put that in his mouth, to stop himself from the
mindless babbling about how good it was that Mulder always seemed to
force him to, but that he hated to hear coming from himself. 

The finger that insinuated itself inside him was inevitable, but
Mulder's comment surprised him. "You're as tight as a virgin, John.
There hasn't been anyone else while I was gone?"

That gave Doggett enough coherency to string together a few, sensible
words, "Never let anyone but you do this to me. Never will."

It wasn't exactly that Doggett hated being fucked, because he knew
already that  Mulder was going to make him come and come hard,
probably harder than he had in  over a year. Since the last time
Mulder did this to him. It was that he couldn't imagine anyone else
who could so cause him to lose himself that he could allow them to
breach that tight barrier. Not just the ring of muscle, but 
the mental resistance of being the one penetrated. 

Mulder drew in a hard breath when he heard Doggett say this, then he
leaned over and suddenly Doggett could feel damp, soft lips touch
gently, a gentle kiss, right at the top of his ass crack. This,
somehow, caused Doggett to shiver with excitement. The handful of
times he'd allowed Mulder this before, he could always count on Mulder
to be both tender like this, and to be ruthless, relentless, not just
making Doggett come, but stealing it from him. 

"I'll take it easy on you," Mulder said. The voice was low and quiet,
but it was not gentle. It seemed to quiver with suppressed lust. "Just
like our first time."

Doggett put his hand back in his mouth. 

As always, Doggett didn't have to force himself to relax to accept
the intrusions into his body. No, his body just seemed to take them
in. A second finger joined the first, then, in a while, the third.
Then Mulder was in him. Doggett was so far gone he didn't even care if
Mulder had found a condom somewhere or not. He was trembling, not so
much because the sudden thrust was painful. It hadn't been. He
couldn't quite explain exactly the source of his sudden fear, though
part of it might have been fear that once he allowed himself this kind
of pleasure again, he'd never be able to say no to it. Part
of it was fear that Mulder would not be satisfied that he'd conquered
John's body, but would demand full capitulation, mind, body and soul.
And that he would get it. 

Mulder laid himself full length, so that his chest was on Doggett's
back, his weight heavy on Doggett. He reached up to stroke the back of
Doggett's head, and he said, "Easy, easy. I've got you."

That, Doggett thought to himself, is exactly what I'm afraid of. 

Then Mulder raised himself up and starting thrusting in earnest, long,
slow strokes, taking his time and making sure to stroke Doggett's
prostate every time. After a while, Doggett had to take his hand out
of his mouth, for fear he  was going to do some damage to it. He
grabbed the table edge with it, then started whimpering,
"Please...Please."

Perhaps at another time, Mulder might have teased him, might have
demanded, "Please what?"  But this time, Mulder just reached around
for Doggett's cock and started stroking it in time to his thrusts,
finally giving Doggett the release that had become all important.
Doggett's come must have triggered Mulder's as well, because a few
seconds after Doggett came to himself again, Mulder shoved himself in
deep one last time, groaned low and throaty, then collapsed on top of
Doggett. They were sweaty with their efforts, Doggett so
limp he couldn't rise up and force Mulder off of him. They laid there,
long minutes, Mulder's softening cock still imbedded in him, but just
starting to slip out. Doggett's thighs were dripping with his own
come. 

"Shower," Mulder said after a while. He'd roused enough to play with
Doggett's hair, was running it through his fingers, seemingly
fascinated by it. 

"Shower," Doggett agreed. The last thing he needed was to catch cold
again from  standing naked and clammy with sweat in this cold kitchen.
They separated, and though every part of him but his mind protested,
his brain was glad to have enough blood supply to think clearly
again.

Doggett led the way to his little bathroom. The tile was pink-
carnation pink, just like in the box of crayons, but it was a rental
and nothing could be done about that. The white towels he'd owned
before hadn't cut the femininity of the  room enough for him, so he'd
gone out and bought dark blue, and a dark blue shower curtain. He
reached around that now and started the hot water. "Me first," he
said, intending, despite what they'd just done, for them to take
turns.

"Not enough room for me in there?" Mulder asked. The edge to his voice
meant not just the shower, but everything. Mulder had made his move,
volleyed his shots. Now he was waiting to see exactly how Doggett
returned fire. 

Being reminded now so viscerally just how good at least the sex had
been, Doggett wasn't sure he'd find it in him to send Mulder away
again. That barrier  had been breached, come tumbling down like a
certain wall in Berlin a while back. But on the other hand, he needed
a little immediate separation, a little time to think, to figure
things out, to sort out hormones from real feelings, to evaluate,
figure out what this all meant. 

"Oh, sure," Doggett said, realizing with that edge to his voice that
Mulder was  just as vulnerable at this moment as he was. The
difference was, Mulder never seemed to fear his own vulnerabilities,
but instead embraced them. Mulder had always been the one to stand on
the edge of the void and poke it in the figurative eye. 

"I just wanted to, you know, have a bit of time to think. About
things. About what I'm going to do," Doggett said. He reached out and
pulled Mulder closer. He kissed Mulder briefly, then said, "You walk
in here. You change all the rules like you always do. You gotta give a
guy five minutes to adjust."

Mulder nodded sagely. He'd always been an expert at pushing Doggett's
buttons, but he'd always known when to stop too. Before he walked
away, he said, "let me  know when you're done."

Doggett stretched out his normal brisk, business-like shower for as
long as he dared, not wanting to completely deprive Mulder of hot
water. He might have been spiteful on occasion, but he wasn't entirely
cruel. He tried to think, tried to lay out exactly all the reasons why
it was a foolish, stupid thing to even consider taking up a
relationship with Mulder again, but every time he did, all that came
to him were flashes of just how good it had been, what Mulder had done
to him. You could have that all the time, one rebellious voice
insisted. Maybe the time is right this time. Maybe this was meant to
be.

Finally, he had to shut off the water, get out of the shower and start
toweling  himself off. He walked down the hall to his bedroom. Fox was
sleeping on his bed, on the pillow, where he would be sure to leave
the maximum number of hairs  for Doggett to breathe in as he was
sleeping. Fox looked up and blinked sleepily at him, then settled back
down into his catnap, burying his nose under  his tail.

Doggett grabbed himself a fresh pair of sweats. If the cat hadn't
been sleeping, he might have asked Fox what he thought of recent
developments. Fox hadn't peed in Mulder's shoes. That was a positive
sign for sure. 

Dressed, Doggett padded off in search of Mulder, to tell him that the
shower was all his. Mulder was in the living room, on his cell phone.
Whoever he was talking to, it raised that big, brilliant Mulder smile.
Doggett hesitated just on the other side of the living room door to
listen. "'Ove you too, Billy boy,"  Mulder was saying. "Let me talk to
mommy again."

There was such sweet regard in Mulder's voice that Doggett couldn't
help but be  glad. It was one of the greatest things in the world,
something that had been ripped away from Doggett. He didn't think he
could stand it if Mulder didn't grab that opportunity like he did
everything else. 

Meanwhile, Mulder was saying, "Yeah, he really is doing just fine,
Scully. I just made my move. I don't know if I screwed up by moving
too soon, or if I just succeeded."

Mulder listened to what Scully was saying carefully. What Doggett
wouldn't have  given to be privy to the other side of this
conversation. After a brief moment,  Mulder said, "You're right. I
should let you go so you can get back to sleep."

Mulder looked up at Doggett and smiled. So, he hadn't been unaware
that Doggett  had been listening. "I forgot that it's only seven in
the morning back home, Scully was about ready to kill me, but she's
glad to hear you're doing better."

"Shower's all yours," Doggett said, finding his seat and the remote.
Truth be told, while he was much better, he probably hadn't really
been up for this morning's activities. He was thinking nap or at the
very least dozing in front of the television for a while. "Mulder,
this afternoon, we'll talk and you'll tell me what couldn't wait that
you had to break into my house to ask me."

Mulder toddled off to the shower and Doggett prepared to settle in to
some television. He gave one last look out to the street though, to
see if there was  a chance it had been cleared yet. No luck on that
front. But Culvers, from work, was out front, armed with a shovel and
doing some serious excavation. What the hell? His landlady was
standing by, watching without comment, though she appeared to be
pleased with Culvers progress. Had Culvers come to see how
Doggett was doing and been roped into the job? Normally, his landlady
did it herself. Or rather, Doggett always tried to get out and do it
before she did, not finding it in him to stand by and watch an old
woman work. He would have gone out to do it earlier, only he was sure
that would be inviting another bout  of pneumonia. He'd been thinking
about sending Mulder though. 

Mulder. Culvers. Shit. He was going to have to make sure those two
didn't intersect. He went back down the hall and knocked on the door
of the bathroom. "Hey, Mulder," he called over the sounds of running
water. He opened the door and stuck his head into the steamy pink
room. Mulder stuck his head around the shower curtain, water dripping
everywhere.

"My partner Culvers is at the front door. Right now he's shoveling the
walk for  my landlady, but no doubt he was dropping by to see how I'm
doing," Doggett said. 

Mulder responded by shutting off the shower. He pulled open the shower
curtain and reached for a towel, allowing Doggett another good look at
his naked body. The man was just gorgeous. There were no two ways
about that. His abs, if anything, were even more perfectly sculpted
than before. From foot to rakishly cut hair, there just wasn't a
single thing wrong with the man's body. And you could have that,
Doggett thought. Every single day. Not only that, he wants
you. That is the man that wants you.

"Right," Mulder said. "I'll get dressed, then make myself scarce for a
bit."

Doggett went out to the living room to wait, and a few minutes later
there was a knock on his door. Doggett sighed and went to go face
Culvers. He opened the door and immediately, Culvers thrust a brown
paper bag at him. "My wife made soup for you," Culvers said.

Culvers had a wife? Of course everything that Culvers had said up to
now about his personal life could be summed up by the word nothing.
Culvers apparently had a wife, and one who cooked. Doggett found
himself wondering if the man had kids. Doggett stared for a second or
two, then caught himself, remembering his manners.

"Thanks," Doggett said, taking the bag. "Come on in."

"You'll have to heat it up again," Culvers said, indicating the bag.
He remained standing in the doorway, so it didn't seem that he was
planning to stick around, thankfully. "I was helping your landlady
with the walk. I figured  you probably would have if you were up to
snuff. You're looking good, Doggett. You sure the doctor hasn't
cleared you for field duty yet?"

"I just got sprung from the hospital yesterday," Doggett said,
defensively. 

"You know, I was thinking. What you need is a wife. A wife would have
sent you off to the doctor's long before that cold turned to
pneumonia."

"I had a wife once and it's an experience I don't much care to
repeat," Doggett  said, thinking of the bitter acrimony that his
marriage had dissolved into. No,  whatever sort of significant
relationship he might get into next, with whoever it might be, Mulder,
or not, definitely he wasn't going to take a wife.

"That's too bad. Best thing in the world, to have someone care for you
like that," Culvers said. "Eva's the best thing ever happened to me.
Oh, hey, your landlady was telling me about your friend George Martin,
the one who got you to  the hospital. He still around?"

So, that was what Mulder was calling himself these days, a combination
of two pseudonyms he'd used in the past. Doggett paused to consider
how to handle this  one. He could lie and say that Mulder was gone,
but lies tended to bite you in the ass when you least expected it. 

"He's here, but he's sleeping," Doggett said. "He's still on Alaska
time."

"Like four hours behind or something. Okay, I just wanted to thank him
for saving your ass. You don't know what a relief it is to get a
partner I can live  with," Culvers said. "I can't stay. Gotta get some
sleep before heading out to work tonight."

Then, thankfully, Culvers was gone. Doggett headed back down the
hallway to the  bedroom where Mulder was hiding out and he saw that he
hadn't really been lying. Mulder had settled onto his bed, stretched
out on top of the blankets, grabbing a quick nap. He'd pulled on a
pair of jeans, but nothing else. Fox had  snuggled up to Mulder and
was sleeping, curled up on top of Mulder's legs. Fox's eyes opened up,
as if asking, "Why don't you join us?"

Doggett sighed. A nap definitely had been on the agenda, but now
apparently his  bed was occupied. There was no reason he shouldn't
join Mulder and Fox on the bed, but he was still digging his heels in
against what seemed to be an inevitable conclusion. He hadn't really
made up his mind to take Mulder back, he was still telling himself. He
didn't want the intimacy yet of actually sleeping together, even
though they'd just had mind-blowing sex. Then Mulder sighed in his
sleep, shifted and turned onto his left side. Doggett was
reminded of the few times they'd spent the night and how they always
managed to  drift into a spoon position, him on the outside, Mulder on
the inside, both on their left sides. Having been ousted by Mulder,
Fox found another spot, settled  himself against Mulder's chest and
went back to sleep. It seemed like a good place to be. Doggett
hesitated for only a minute longer then joined the pair of 
them. 

The whoosh and crunch of the snowplow coming through a few hours later
woke him  up. The next thing he noticed was that  Mulder was still in
bed with him, in his arms, warm and solid. He'd missed it, sleeping
with someone, just the sense  of another's presence in the bed. And
Mulder was a good person to have in your bed in the winter. It was
like having a personal furnace in bed with you. A living, breathing,
cuddly heating pad. It was the first time in a long time
he'd woken up with his nose in someone else's hair and it felt better
than he cared to admit. Mulder's hair smelled good. Even though it was
the same shampoo  Doggett used, on Mulder it was nicer somehow. Like
grass and herbs and summer afternoons. 

"Sounds like the roads are getting cleared. Should I start packing
now?" Mulder  asked, but he sounded confident, as if he was sure the
answer was no. Arrogant bastard, but the thing was, like always, he
was right. 

"Look, Mulder, or George or whatever you're calling yourself these
days, I'm not saying I'm taking you back," Doggett said. "What I'm
saying is there's room  for discussion. Negotiation."

Mulder turned around in Doggett's arms and started nuzzling him, at
the moment a creature of pure animal lust. Despite their earlier
activities, Mulder must have woken with a hard on and now he was
grinding it against Doggett's hips. "Talk later," Mulder murmured.
"Make love to me now."

It took every bit of willpower that Doggett could muster as his own
cock started coming to life again, but he managed to think with the
big head for this once. He pulled away from Mulder and said firmly,
"No, we talk and get everything out on the table before any of that
happens again."

"So talk," Mulder said, rolling onto his back with a sigh. "Tell me
what you want to know. I suppose it just all seems so simple to me at
this point. I love  you. I want to pick up where we never really got a
chance to get started. I want you as one of the most important parts
of my life. I want...everything with you. I was hoping you'd feel the
same about me. But I can see now that things might not be as simple
for you as they are for me."

It was a hell of an attractive thought, waking up with Mulder like
this every morning. He thought about how Mulder had hesitated on the
word everything, as if it were too small to contain the extravagance
of his feelings. He thought about full catastrophe living with the
most outrageous, gorgeous man he'd ever known. He thought about having
someone to share cleaning out the damn cat box with.

He still had questions though. He couldn't just forget about how
Mulder had walked out on him without a word. Not that he questioned
the right of the man to preserve his own safety, but to just leave
like that, as if he didn't even trust Doggett enough to tell him. All
this time with hardly a word, then he was  expected to just forget
about what still felt like betrayal, as much as his brain was telling
him it wasn't.

"You're right. They're not," Doggett said. 

"Nothing in my life ever is," Mulder said. "What can I tell you that
could even  start making things right?"

"First of all, I want to know why. Why come back now? After all this
time," Doggett asked. It'd been two years since Mulder had disappeared
from his life the first time. Seeing him in that courtroom and then
springing him from the military jail had been so brief they'd hardly
counted, especially because they'd been around so many people, and
he'd had to pretend that Mulder was nothing special to him.

"Scully's finally settled and happy. I told you that. So now I can
settle down," Mulder said. He shifted onto his side, propped his head
with his hand. 

"What about your so-called invasion. End of the world, all of that,"
Doggett asked, thinking of Mulder's crazy quest. While he was still
sure that half of it was the total bullshit he'd always thought it
was, truth was, he'd seen some  weird ass shit during his time on the
X-files. "You know, with all I saw, I'm starting to think my light
saber might be around here somewhere."

"I've been a busy guy. Things are taken care of," Mulder said, soberly
and succinctly in a way that made Doggett wonder if he would ever know
what really happened in the time Mulder had been gone. Then Mulder
added, "You did get your  anti-terrorist smallpox vaccination, didn't
you? Or the booster they were offering if you got one earlier in
life."

"Yeah. I work for the government, remember? We got it first," Doggett
said, then the light clicked on. He'd wondered vaguely at the time,
but then dismissed it as paranoid suspicion. "Mulder, what were we
given?"

"A vaccine," Mulder said. "The Russian syndicate developed it. The new
American  syndicate perfected it. I stole it and got it to the people
who were willing to  put it to use. If you got it, you're now immune
to both the black oil and the supersoldier virus. Oh, and smallpox
too. So, you can see, for the first time in years, I'm free.
Completely free."

He sounded to relieved, so happy, that Doggett felt envious for a
minute, remembering how it felt the first day he realized he was free
from his grief for his son, that he would always miss Luke, but that
he no longer wore mourning like a cloak, and how it had felt the
weight of the world had been taken off his shoulders.

"So, you're free," Doggett said. 

"Well, not exactly," Mulder said. "I've got a son. No one with kids is
ever truly footloose and fancy free. And I bought a house. The mortage
payments and the cable bill and all of that tend to tie a guy down.
But for the first time in years, I'm free to do all of that, making
decisions based on what I want, not on international conspiracies and
intergalactic contingencies."

"You have a house with cable?" Doggett asked. Presumably in Alaska. It
was hard  to imagine Mulder, the quintessential apartment dweller as
the owner of a house. In Alaska.

"Just ten minutes outside of Anchorage, about five minutes away from
where Scully and her new husband live with William," Mulder said.
"It's on the side of a mountain. My neighbors are out of eye shot
range. There's trees all around. I had a moose in my yard last week
and a mountain goat the week before."

That last was said with near unholy glee. Fox Mulder, being thrilled
to pieces by the thought of a moose. Who would ever have thought
that?

"It's so beautiful there, John," Mulder said, starting to plead.
"You'd love it  there."

This was a humdinger of a problem. Mulder had just about convinced
Doggett to take him back. Until they got to this roadblock. If winter
here in Chicago had just about killed him, wouldn't Alaska be ten
times worse?

"I can appreciate what you're trying to do here, Mulder," Doggett
said. "But winter and I have some fundamental, irreconcilable
differences. No way you're going to be able to talk me into heading up
there."    "John, I could..." Mulder started.

"No, you couldn't. No way I'm taking you away from your son and that's
final," Doggett interrupted Mulder, wanting quash from the get go any
ideas about him moving down here. 

"I wasn't going to say that," Mulder said. "I was going to say that I
could work something out somehow. I'm not sure how yet, but we could
figure that out.  You could come for extended visits in the summer.
You'll love Alaska during the  summer."

At this point, Fox appeared from nowhere, stalking into the room with
his tail pointed straight up in the air, its little tip waving a bit
in rhythm to his walk. With a smooth, graceful leap that hardly seemed
to use muscle power, Fox leaped up onto the bed, between them. For a
minute, Doggett thought Fox was coming to complain about an empty food
bowl or the fact that the bathroom faucet he liked to drink from was
turned off or some other something that was offensive to his delicate,
cat sensibilities. Instead, Fox made a beeline straight for Mulder and
butted his head up against the hand Mulder held out to pet him. Fox
the cat and Fox the human engaged in mutual adoration as the
conversation was forgotten. Doggett might have been inclined to be
jealous of both the cat and the human, but together they made quite
the picture, especially as Fox started to purr and do that bread
kneading thing cats did on Mulder's bare chest. Mulder's expression
turned into a comical combination of pleasure and suppressed reaction
to pain. The cat, when he did that, sometimes let his claws slip out
of their sheathes a little. That cat was a born sadist,
yet when he did it, it was hard to stop him because it was an action
obviously born of such affection and pleasure in your presence. Mulder
kept up the petting, despite the pain, which somehow Doggett loved him
for. Eventually, the  fickle nature of cats took over. Fox found
something else to capture his feline  imagination and stopped
molesting Mulder. Fox hopped off the bed and stalked back out of the
room again. Maybe he heard another mouse or something. 

Mulder let out a big sigh, both of relief and probably also regret. He
laid on his back and swept his arm over his eyes dramatically. "Razor
blades. I think your cat keeps razor blades in his paws."

Doggett looked and there were little dots of red, not really blood,
just markings, from Fox's claws on Mulder's bare, sparsely haired
chest. He would have shrugged if he hadn't been lying down. "You try
holding him down to trim his claws," he said.

(Continued in part 4)

Part 4
See part 0 for story information.


Doggett had tried once, not long after he'd gotten the cat, or rather,
the cat had gotten him. It had been the biggest mistake he'd made in a
long time. All he was willing to say on the matter was that bat beasts
had nothing to that cat  when claw clipping was on the line. It'd been
done at the vet the one time they'd been and not since then. They'd
ended up taking the cat to another room to do it and even through a
closed door he had heard both the cat and the vet tech screaming
bloody murder. When the vet tech returned to the exam room with
the cat, she'd been holding him with one hand grabbing the scruff of
his neck, the other wrapped around him tightly and she was wearing
heavy leather gloves. "This one really has some spunk to him," was all
the vet tech would say.

Mulder rolled over onto his side again to look Doggett in the eyes.
There was such a look of serious, devoted tenderness that for a
minute, Doggett was tempted to capitulate totally again, just tell
Mulder that he'd give it chance,  that he'd brave the wilds of Alaska,
and the sub-zero temperatures and the ice and snow. For a short,
unbelievable time, he'd been so happy with this man and
here was his chance to have that again, if he didn't blow it. All he
had to do was just grab it. Just decide that his hatred of winter was
secondary. He wondered if what Culvers had said, about a wife getting
him to the doctor before he'd caught pneumonia, applied to a husband.
Would Mulder look out for him? It was crazy to even think about life
with Mulder, but then the minute Mulder stepped into your life, all
kinds of crazy happened, and not all of it bad crazy. 

Mulder had laid out all his cards on the table. With total honesty,
Mulder had laid his heart bare and didn't Doggett owe it to him to
consider them all carefully, without making snap judgements based on
concern for his own comfort?  Before Mulder could open his mouth
again, Doggett said, "I wasn't just imagining that we were happy
together, weren't we? For those two, three weeks. That was really
something good, wasn't it?"

"Probably the best weeks of my life," Mulder affirmed. "John, we will
work it out somehow. I have no intentions of letting you slip away
just because you can't commit to moving to my home. I'll come to you
whenever I can. Lots of people have done long distance dating. We can
too. If I can't have everything, I'll settle for anything you'll let
me have."

"Mulder, shut up," Doggett said. The hell he was going to date someone
who lived nearly three thousand miles away. Especially when he didn't
mess around with dating usually. He'd always been a dive in head first
kind of guy. He reached over and put a hand on the back of Mulder's
neck, then pulled Mulder in  close for a kiss. 

***

Doggett paused before opening the door to the big SUV, Mulder's SUV,
his own truck being on a barge somewhere between here and Seattle.
This was it. He was finally here for good after a year and a half of
day long plane trips. Of waiting for the transfer to the Anchorage
office that never came and finally deciding to say screw the Bureau
and getting a job with the Anchorage PD. A year and a half not seeing
his lover anywhere near enough. There'd been selling  the house in
Falls Church to distract him too, packing up the rest of that life 
from his storage unit and shipping it ahead of him. 

Fox had been drugged for the plane trip, so he could ride in a carrier
under the seat, but he'd begun to wake up in the Anchorage airport,
and had yowled the whole way home from the airport. Better get that
cat out of the car. 

Doggett opened the door and stepped down to the gravel drive and
looked around.  Even though it was nearly eleven at night, if one went
by their watch, it was as bright as any summer afternoon. The air
smelled sweeter than it had back in Chicago. The aspen leaves rustled
in a slight breeze. Summer in Alaska, land of  the midnight sun,
almost made up for the winters, though winter in Anchorage
hadn't been as bad as he'd been imagining. Though there had been a
brief moment  of panic when Scully and her new husband had been making
noises about moving to  Fairbanks, where it wasn't uncommon for it to
get to fifty below. Mulder would have followed and therefore Doggett
would have too. Thankfully it'd just been talk.

He looked back down the long, twisting driveway they'd just driven up.
It was longer than the block he'd been living on back in Chicago and
twisted out of sight, hidden by the trees. Behind him was Mulder's
house, more of an overgrown  cabin really, two levels tucked into the
hillside, painted brown to blend in, the only real luxury to it the
big deck complete with a jacuzzi tub. 

Mulder hopped out of the car as Doggett was retrieving the cat
carrier. He nuzzled Doggett's ear, tickling a little, then said, "The
welcome party I'd planned is going to have to wait a bit. Looks like
Scully's here waiting for us."

And just then, the door opened and Billy ran out. He was three and a
half, getting close to four, fleet and steady of foot as one of the
mountain goats that sometimes ventured down to their part of the
mountain. Scully was right at  his tail as he ran, not to greet
Mulder. Not to Doggett. Right to the cat carrier and tried to poke his
fingers into it. "Kitty!" Billy cried out with far more enthusiasm
than a kid should have at eleven at night. 

Not that he mistrusted Fox normally, but the little critter was in a
strange new situation and might snap. Doggett lifted the carrier up
out of Billy's reach and said to Billy, "We'll take Fox inside and
then let him out of the cage. Maybe he might want to say hi to you or
maybe he might just want to hide.  You know how tired you are when you
get off the plane."

"Oh...Okay," Billy said. He ran back to the house. The kid had two
speeds- off and full-throttle, warp speed. Doggett followed, leaving
Mulder and Scully to chat in the driveway. Actually, it was a familiar
little bicker about trying to  get the kid to sleep at "night" when it
was still bright daylight. Doggett looked over his shoulder as he
walked to the house and was rewarded with a wink  from Mulder.

Billy was Scully all over again, delicately boned, face that was
nearly too pretty for a boy, at least until the kid snarled it up into
one of the "monster  boy" faces he'd been practicing lately. For all
that he looked like Scully, there was no doubt that the kid was all
boy, for which Doggett was grateful, intensely grateful. He had a
chance, not to replace Luke, but to love another wild, scruffy little
boy again. He was "Uncle John," not daddy, but that was
good enough for him.

Once they got into the house, Doggett sat the cat carrier up on the
kitchen table, so as to give Fox a chance to escape small hands. He
opened the crate's wire grate and Fox bolted out like a bat out of
hell, down off the table and into the living room, too fast for Billy
to catch him.

"He's probably pretty cranky and needs a nap," Doggett said to Billy.
Then he gently suggested, "Maybe you need a nap too."

Billy shook his head vigorously, "Uh-uh, look at my new monster boy
face, Uncle  John."

Billy snorted, hooked pinkies into his nostrils and drew them up so
they flared  then made horns by his ears with the rest of his fingers.
He snorted again and again, getting louder. 

Billy might have looked like all Scully, but definitely part of his
personality  had been rubbed off of Mulder. Definitely the parts like
this, that were so cute that Doggett found impossible to resist. The
little boy, just like his dad, and a certain feline had wormed their
way into his heart like some kind of  virus that it was impossible for
him to resist, something that he simply had no  immunity to. He
thought about how not too long ago, he'd been ready to give up
on love, on having anything more than a lonely existence rattling
around like a  bb pellet in a can. Who could have thought that he
would have started opening the door to love by opening a screen door
for a mangy ex-tomcat?

"Ohhhh," Doggett said to Billy. "That's awful scary. I think I'm gonna
have to get the monster trap out."

Then he scooped up Billy, threw the giggling boy over his shoulder and
went out  to find Scully and Mulder. 

"I think I'll take that," Scully said, holding her hands out for
Billy, with a smile on her pretty face. This woman who Doggett was
getting to know was hardly  anything like the Scully he'd known on the
X-files. She was calmer, more expressive, more open. Not the worried,
pinched soul she had been. Paul, the man she'd found here, had done
for her what Mulder was beginning to do for him,  Doggett thought.
Paul had poured the healing balm of love over her, and she was 
a better woman for it.

Billy, meanwhile, kept up the giggling like a maniac, even after the
transfer had been made from his arms to over Scully's shoulder. It was
still strange to see Scully like this, in practical clothes- t-shirts
and polar fleece, flannel and denim. But she'd adapted and just like
Doggett had before he'd moved, she'd  dumped all her fancy work
clothes, the beautiful suits that were standard form at the Bureau.
Nobody but nobody wore them here, pretty much. 

"Okay, see you tomorrow then," Scully said, heading for her SUV. "I'll
let you two get on with whatever welcome Mulder has no doubt planned.
You probably want  me out of here for what he's got in mind."

The last was said with a wink, though that wasn't what made Doggett
blush, but the way that Mulder sidled next to him and out of sight of
Scully and the boy, grabbed his ass and gave it a big squeeze. There
were some protests from the peanut gallery as Scully buckled Billy
into his seat, but she was firm. "Home,"  she said firmly. "I said you
could say 'hi' to Uncle John and you did. You're already up way past
your bedtime."

In short order, she and the boy were gone, leaving him alone with
Mulder. And Fox, once the cat decided to come out of whatever hole
he'd bolted into. "So, what kind of welcome did you have in mind?"
Doggett asked Mulder as they walked  into the house and started
climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. 

"How about a soak to start?" Mulder asked. 

That sounded real good actually. Something about long airplane trips
made you feel limp and sort of grungy. Doggett was more than ready to
be done with such frequent travelling.

They passed through the living room out to the deck. Some of
Doggett's furniture had already been moved in, shipped up months
ahead. It seemed to fit in with Mulder's pretty well. Doggett saw
things he recognized from Mulder's Alexandria apartment too, since
they'd cleared out Mulder's storage unit when they were selling
Doggett's house. The wacky coat rack was visible in the
corner. On one side of the room was his leather couch, on the other
was Mulder's. Hunkering between them was his sturdy coffee table. 

Once out on the deck, they both quickly stripped down to the skin.
Even if the neighbors hadn't been so far away, nobody could have seen
a thing, considering how heavily wooded the lot was. Doggett finished
stripping first and went to fold the tub's cover up and out of the
way. 

"How 'bout I get you a beer?" Mulder asked. 

"You trying to loosen my inhibitions so you can take advantage of me
later?" Doggett asked as he slid himself into the warm, bubbling
water. Oh, yeah, this was just exactly what he needed. He felt muscles
loosen and kinks start to untie themselves. Mulder was a smart man.
Without letting Doggett have a preliminary soak, Mulder's chances of
getting lucky tonight, after that plane trip, would have been slim to
none. 

"Guilty as charged, officer," Mulder said, with a grin. He turned to
go back into the house, but paused as he caught sight of something in
the window. That particular window there wasn't enough of a ledge to
support the full grown, eighteen pound cat that Fox had become, but
there was a visible set of paws and  a head peeking out into this new
and apparently exciting world. The ears on that head were twitching
with excitement, and Doggett could almost imagine the tail swishing
back and forth. Fox would get along here just fine, Doggett
decided. And so would he. 



### The End ###