Disclaimers: The standard disclaimer applies. I don't own the X-Files characters. They belong to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions. No infringement is intended and no money is being made. The original characters are mine. Please do not archive this story without permission.

Rated PG-13 for profanity. Mulder's language did not magically improve just because he became a ghost. Beta-ed by Rhi and Merwyn who helped me prod my muses into getting this long-standing WIP finished. Yay!

Friday afternoon, December 11, 1998
X-Files Office

Scully barely had time to hang up her coat before her partner slammed into their basement office. Anxious to avoid a collision, she walked hastily over to her desk. She had known this confrontation was coming for the last four hours. Simon had maintained an icy silence in the car on the way back from the crime scene. He had stopped by the men's room, giving her a brief respite from his simmering anger. Scully couldn't remember ever seeing Simon angry before. Even Mulder was stunned into uncharacteristic silence, except for the chill touch of his hand against her back to remind her that he was there.

"Scully, what happened out there?" Simon asked gruffly as he flung his coat on top of the coat rack which swayed dangerously.

"Simon," Scully faltered as she tried to find the words to tell him that no, she did not intend to explain that she had been getting messages from a dead man.

"Don't try to tell me that nothing happened. I'm not blind. Either you trust me or you will continue to shut me out of something that directly affects our partnership," Simon interrupted sharply.

Part of her wanted to tell him he had no right to question her, but her common sense told her that he did deserve some sort of explanation. That was the problem, though. How much to tell him without betraying the fact that Mulder was still an integral part of the X-Files, despite the slight handicap of being dead?

"He's right, Scully," Mulder said, his voice coming from his favorite perching spot atop the printer table. "I'm not going to apologize for interfering to save your life, but I will concede that I probably could have found a more subtle way to do it," he admitted wearily.

Scully's eyes narrowed as she tried to find a way to negotiate through the treacherous waters of male ego, dead and alive.

"What was I supposed to do, let you stumble through a booby-trapped house without trying to help?"

Mulder sounded frustrated. "It wasn't only your life, you know. Some of those traps would have taken out Simon and the hostages as well," he snapped, more with resignation than anger, she noted. It was odd, but Mulder was sounding more tired recently. She didn't think ghosts got tired. She made a mental note to ask him what was wrong when they got home tonight. Providing, of course, that she got Simon safely derailed from his hot pursuit of her sudden ability to detect traps.

"What's going on, Scully? Why do I have this feeling that I'm being shut out?" Simon asked, exasperated by the intent look on Scully's face that made her look as if she were listening to somebody he couldn't hear.

"Simon, it's not a matter of trust. I do trust you, but... " Scully paused as she tried to find the words to explain the situation without giving away too much.

"Yes, there's always that 'but', isn't there? I've been patient for nearly six months. I've comforted myself by believing that as long as it didn't directly affect our work, whatever secret you're hiding didn't matter. Today, you were acting on information you had no rational way of knowing. You expected me to trust your judgment without question." Simon paused as he tried to forget the harrowing passage through the house, guided only by Scully's voice, while his seventh sense clamored that they were both in mortal danger.

"I gave you that trust. Don't you think it's about time that you trusted me?"

Scully began to get irritated. She hated being backed into a corner. Simon seemed possessed with the need to get answers to questions she couldn't answer. He was forcing this confrontation. She wanted to tell him to get out, but her conscience reminded her that this must have been how Mulder felt when she refused to accept what he believed without proof. She hoped Mulder would refrain from reminding her of her past unwillingness to believe him on simple trust alone.

"Simon, I'm tired and dirty and I have a shooting report to file," she explained, allowing some of her weariness to seep into her tone. "I promise, we'll talk, but right now, we are both too on edge," she offered, hoping that he would accept the delay.

Simon looked mulish, but he agreed to the delay with a curt nod of his head. Grabbing his coat and briefcase, he started to leave without saying a word. Scully tried not to wince at the notable lack of his usual good-natured goodnight. As he reached the door, he turned.

"I know I don't have any right to demand anything from you, but I want to be a partner you can trust, not just one you feel obliged to tolerate," he said wistfully. Before Scully could respond he had gone, leaving her standing beside her desk, wondering how everything had gone wrong so fast.

"It's been building for some time, Scully. My interference this afternoon probably only accelerated his frustration. He's been half-sensing me for months and getting pretty damn confused by your sudden leaps of deduction whenever I feed you an idea," Mulder said quietly as he carefully materialized.

"It's not going to work," she said wearily as she collapsed into her chair. She hadn't been lying when she told Simon that she was tired. The shooting report was going to require her full attention and she had no idea how she was going to explain why she knew the kidnapper had laid booby-traps throughout the house, nor how she managed to know the one safe path through the traps. Then she had to explain how she knew where the man was hiding. The report was going to be a nightmare.

"It will," Mulder assured her as he came over to sit on the edge of her desk. She did not feel reassured and gave him a skeptical look indicating that he better be prepared to prove it. Trust Mulder to be optimistic when common sense should be enough to tell him that things were falling apart.

"Scully, the only real problem is Simon. The report isn't going to be that hard. If we can manage to explain sewer monsters, we can explain the reason you deduced the pattern of the traps. After all, the first one was rather obvious," he pointed out with a scowl.

"Intentionally so?" Scully asked as she pondered the implications of Mulder's deduction.

"Very much so. Bryson fed off the terror his traps produced. I could feel him gloating like a fat spider in the center of his web watching the flies struggle to get free," he responded angrily.

Before she could say a word, Mulder controlled the electrical energy beginning to arc around him. Scully gave him an appreciative smile. He was doing better at remembering the consequences of his anger. She marveled at the control he had shown in Bryson's house of horrors. The effect of an electrical storm on some of those traps didn't bear thinking about. From the look in Mulder's eyes, she knew he had been very aware of the consequences of any lapse on his part.

"How isn't important. You saved the lives of your team and the three hostages. Bryson would have killed his hostages if you hadn't burst in and taken him down first. No one is going to look too closely at your report. They're too relieved to have the ordeal over, with only the suspect as a casualty," Mulder argued with increasing confidence. Despite her doubts, Scully felt herself being swayed by Mulder's certainty.

"Just consider this an X-File and demonstrate your usual skill at putting a rational explanation onto events that never come close to being rational."

Scully sighed and nodded. It could be done. With Mulder's help, she could probably come up with a plausible explanation. God knows, Mulder was an expert at making the paranormal seem perfectly natural. That just left Simon, and she didn't think he was going to be brushed off with a cleverly worded report.

"I don't think Simon is going to be impressed by my semantic abilities in report writing," Scully noted.

"Probably not," Mulder admitted. "I'm afraid you may have to tell him the truth, at least part of it," he conceded.

"You're suggesting that I tell him I'm hearing voices?" she asked incredulously. That would go over well, she thought sarcastically. She frowned at Mulder, who had started to chuckle.

"Well, you seem to have four options," Mulder said as he held up four fingers and started ticking off the options one by one. Scully gave him her best skeptical stare and waited uneasily for his recitation.

"Number one - tell him nothing. I don't recommend this one. It would only make him more suspicious. He'd make it his business to find out what you were hiding."

Scully nodded a reluctant agreement. She preferred this option, but it was unworkable.

"Number two - feed him the same bull you're going to feed Skinner. You analyzed Bryson's past and knew that he fancied himself some sort of warrior wizard out of one of those role-playing games and deduced that he would plant his traps along the lines of a Celtic circle maze." Mulder gave her a triumphant smile.

OK, this one had possibilities, she thought. Mulder was looking extremely smug, even though she suspected that he had only come up with the pattern in the past hour. The fear she had felt coming off him in the house had been too real for him to have known the pattern then.

"Interesting. I'm not sure Skinner will buy it, but I don't think he'll question it very thoroughly, either," she admitted. Part of her mind was now busy piecing together her report. Writing it would take some careful wording, but it wouldn't alarm anyone.

"The problem with this option is that it's the latest in a series of minor incidents that he is beginning to add up in his mind. We'd probably be able to get away with this explanation if this was the first time he sensed me interfering," Mulder admitted with an apologetic shrug.

"I know. You've tried to be careful," Scully reassured him. Mulder had done his best, but Simon seemed to have a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time to catch the edge of one of Mulder's infrequent contributions to the partnership.

"Number three - tell him just enough to get by. You sensed the traps, as if someone was telling you where they were. This is close to your 'hearing voices' explanation, but puts it a bit higher on the paranormal scale. Simon can make up his own mind about whose voice you're hearing, but he might suspect that it's me."

This one had strong possibilities, Scully admitted. It would have the benefit of being the truth, just not the whole truth. It would also explain most of the past incidents without revealing that Mulder was actually present as a ghost.

"I like this one," she acknowledged as she continued to consider the possible ramifications of confessing to hearing Mulder's voice offering advice. Not something she would want to go beyond the X-Files office, but she thought she could trust Simon not to gossip.

"What's number four?" she asked, then realized what the only remaining option was and started to shake her head, no.

"You got to admit, telling Simon the whole truth might make things easier in the long run," Mulder argued.

"He's eventually going to figure it out. Why not just tell him now and save all of us a lot of worry? He's making me nervous, picking up my presence even when I'm practically not here," he added, sounding a bit aggrieved.

"Too dangerous," she shot back instantly. There was no way she was going to tell Simon that the ghost of the man he accidentally killed was haunting her. Mulder grumbled, but gave in without argument.

Now she was beginning to worry. This wasn't like the Mulder she knew. She sighed in sheer mental exhaustion as the day's events settled on her like a lead balloon.

"Let's go home. You look beat. We've got the whole weekend to come up with something to tell Simon," Mulder said optimistically as he drifted over to get her coat.

She was tempted to argue, but he was right; she was tired and she had a headache. The argument with Simon had only intensified a dull ache into a single throbbing bass drum beating time in her head. She nodded her agreement and looked up to see Mulder disappear, still holding the coat.

Scully shook her head and started shoving papers in her briefcase. So much for a nice relaxing weekend, she grumbled to herself. A moment later Mulder reappeared, holding out her coat.

"It's starting to snow. Just a light flurry, but you know that a single snowflake is enough to send this town into hysteria," he advised as she wiggled into the heavy winter coat.

Just what she needed: a commute home with panic-stricken D.C. drivers. This day kept getting worse. Mulder loved driving in snow and had always taken a perverse delight in maneuvering through traffic snarled by timid drivers confronting snow flurries. She could tell he missed being able to offer her a ride home. It added to the already tired expression in his eyes.

A final check of the office and she was gone, walking down the corridor to the elevator with Mulder barely visible at her side. Leaving the office each night with him had become a comfortable routine, a patch of normality in an otherwise extremely abnormal situation.

As they waited for the elevator to arrive, she wondered if her reluctance to include Simon in the secret was simply a desire to keep Mulder to herself. She studied the hazy form of her partner as he waited beside her. To her admittedly unskilled eyes, he looked different. Maybe he was still stressed out from his extreme exertions in Bryson's lair, but he seemed diminished somehow.

The sound of the elevator arriving was Mulder's signal to disappear. Recently, he had taken to going directly to her car and waiting for her; avoiding the walk through the upper halls of the Hoover Building. Tonight he stayed with her, keeping his hand lightly touching her back as she entered the elevator. Knowing he was there, beside her, was reassuring. Even in the crowded hallways, she felt him shadowing her and saw the ripple effect of his presence in the shivers and odd looks of the people they passed.

Taking advantage of the nearly deserted garage, she reached out and touched the edge of the transparent fog drifting beside her. They had determined that this hazy half-materialized form was invisible to most people. So far, only Skinner and Simon had sensed something unusual. For convenience sake and to give her something to focus on, Mulder adopted this form whenever they were in public, but not in a crowd. At her touch, Mulder solidified slightly, until she could make out the physical features of his face and body.

"I'm fine, really," she reassured him by touch and words. He didn't look convinced, but he nodded.

"See you at home," he whispered softly, brushing his fingers against the hand resting on his arm. "Call if you need me or get stuck," he said as he slowly dematerialized until nothing was left but his voice.

Scully felt him leave. The air simply felt empty. There was no other way she could describe the sensation of Mulder not being there. Her ability to sense his presence had developed to extraordinary levels. Unless he withdrew completely into the gray fog he described as sort of a cocoon, she could sense him moving around in the area around her.

His silent, invisible presence had become an integral part of her life now. When he wasn't there, she felt his absence like an aching tooth. The only thing that bothered her was the fact that she couldn't read him as well as she could when he was alive. The minute signals of his body language had become muted. His eyes still betrayed him, but the language had changed and she was still learning this new dialect.

As she carefully negotiated the impending traffic jam, she let her mind drift over his recent behavior. He had been quieter than usual, almost somber at times. Death had not robbed him of his talent at deflecting her questions, but he could not deflect her doubts. Something was bothering him. As long as they were discussing what to do about Simon, this weekend, she intended to find out what Mulder's problem was. She might lament his talent for mischief, but it was part of who he was and its absence was unnerving.

"Do ghosts get depressed?" she wondered aloud as she turned her entire attention to getting home in one piece. Rush-hour traffic, snow, and Washington drivers required complete and total attention to avoid joining in on the ever-popular fender benders.

She wished Mulder were here, but they had agreed that his presence in the car was too distracting. Scully made a mental note to revise this agreement. Traffic jams required some healthy distraction. Hoping she wouldn't startle him, she called out to him, trying to send reassurance through the link. She had no idea how this worked, but she knew Mulder could hear her call him somehow.

A soft whistle in a minor key announced his arrival, followed by, "You called?" Mulder materialized in the passenger seat, barely visible, even to her.

"It's OK, Mulder. I really doubt if anyone out there will recognize you," she admonished him.

"You forget what happens when I materialize fully, Scully. Do you really want to be chipping frozen fog off the inside of your windows for the next ten miles?" he asked with a cocky smile.

She was relieved to find him in a good mood. Maybe he was glad to be called. She filed this thought away for consideration. Maybe she was too sparing with the times she really wanted him around, but didn't want to impose.

They spent the remainder of the long, slow trip home talking over old cases and debating over the paranormal. Scully was having a hard time holding to her usual strict scientific party line since she was aware that she was debating the matter with a ghost, scarcely an orthodox scientific event. It was pleasant just to relax, talk about nothing important, and simply enjoy being together.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Mulder faded away completely once Scully turned into the driveway for her apartment complex. He had enjoyed the drive. It had been way too long since they had just kicked back and enjoyed being in a car together. Usually she preferred making the commute alone. He distracted her, if he remembered how she phrased the request for solitude correctly. Anxious not to make a pest of himself, he'd agreed. At the end of every workday, he disappeared into the ether until he heard her call him when she got home. She had adapted remarkably well to his reappearance; he didn't want to press his luck.

Speaking of luck, it appeared that his had just run out. It was inevitable that Simon would begin to put the pieces together, but this afternoon's fiasco couldn't have come at a worse time. Simon was proving to be entirely too sensitive to even the slightest hint of his presence. In the last three weeks, Mulder could count on one hand the times when he felt safe enough to risk even the barest manifestation when Simon was anywhere nearby. He had to resort to existing as a thin mist hiding in the darkest corners of the office. While Scully seemed to know when he was around, she didn't seem to realize how much distance he had to keep between himself and Simon.

His usual practice in the field was to maintain a tenuous contact with Scully. This arrangement had been the result of a long series of discussions that had gotten heated at times when he balked at her demands that he not try to over-protect her. Mulder quickly realized that his definition of over-protectiveness and Scully's were miles apart. Eventually, he had given in; he really had no choice. She promised to tell him when she wanted his assistance. He would provide said assistance as unobtrusively as possible.

For the most part, he had been able to comply. There had been a few incidents when he had sparked a near electrical storm out of sheer worry, but he had tried not to interfere. Scully was very sparing in her use of his unique talents. Other than the cost to his peace of mind in terminal frustration and worry, Mulder conceded that she deserved the chance to shine on her own.

This afternoon, things went terribly wrong. Even now, nearly six hours later, he could still feel the flash of terror as he realized that Scully had activated the trap which had armed all the other traps in Bryson's house. The leaden click as she stepped onto the pressure plate chilled his soul and haunted him with the premonition of her death throughout the ordeal of guiding her through the maze.

He had taken a big chance yelling at Scully the way he had, but fear overrode all other considerations. Half a block away, dogs howled and Simon actually flinched before looking for the source of the shout. Anyone with a grain of psychic ability must have heard him. Scully was so startled she recoiled. Simon nearly got to witness the full manifestation of a panicked ghost when Mulder tried to materialize enough to keep weight on the pressure plate. One of the other agents made a nervous comment about smoke grenades, so Mulder was fairly sure Simon had seen this amorphous blob of haze suddenly appear in front of his partner.

All in all, Mulder knew he had handled the situation poorly, but there hadn't been a lot of time to map out a discreet plan of action. He had done his best and luckily it was enough to guide Scully through the traps in time to rescue the hostages. Mulder had barely restrained the urge to tear Bryson apart. If Scully had been a hair's breath slower in arriving, she might have come through the door to find the walls splattered with Bryson's remains. The static electricity in the room was fierce until Mulder fled the area. Scully didn't need to be distracted by his emotional outbursts when she was trying to give a coherent report to the ASAC.

For most of the afternoon he had been careful to keep his presence at the lowest possible level; just a hint of a touch now and then to let Scully know he was still beside her. He sensed her concern and wondered why she was so worried about him when she had nearly been blown into the afterworld. She really needed to get her priorities straightened out, he muttered with a sigh just as the front door opened with a blast of cold air.

"Mulder, we need to talk," Scully announced as she shook the snow off her coat and hung it up to dry. Mulder materialized slowly in the far corner of the room and nodded. Sometimes it seemed that his entire afterlife was spent in having significant conversations with Scully. Perhaps this was his atonement for relying so heavily on the bond between them that often made words redundant. He missed the old ways they had of talking with their eyes, the slightest change in expression, even the way they moved their bodies, all spoken eloquently of their changing moods, fears and, above all, the unshakable trust they shared.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Scully bustled around the apartment, starting water for tea and changing into sweats while Mulder anticipated the impending conversation. Whenever Scully shifted into bustling mode, Mulder made a point to stay out of her way or vanish altogether if that seemed best. Since Scully had clearly stated her intention to talk with him, he stayed put and visible.

Perched on the back of an easy chair, feet dangling through the cushions, he tried to gauge her mood. She was humming, a good sign, and her tea of choice was orange spice, a nice mellow-mood tea. This was looking promising. Analyzing the situation, Mulder decided that Scully wasn't preparing to deliver a lecture. The situation with Simon was inevitable. It was just bad timing that the crisis came now and not three to four months down the road when he and Scully had gotten more used to each other.

They made a damn fine pair, in his opinion. He had told Scully this on more than one occasion. He had not mentioned that admitting this fact had come after several long wrestling matches with his jealousy. His reward was seeing Scully relax and begin to flex her investigative muscles with Simon. He was still jealous, but he was learning to go off somewhere far away from Scully and vent.

The problem in this case was acerbated by his damn lingering sense of guilt for haunting her. He transformed every flub into a serious transgression or worse. He could get inside the heads of psychopaths, but his own psyche was a mystery. Death was supposed to answer questions. Not only wasn't he getting answers, he was getting a whole new set of questions.

Actually, as he recalled, Scully had only lectured him a handful of times, usually when some of his antics had tried her patience or when she was simply tired of trying to reconcile science and ghosts. At least she had made it clear that no matter how frustrated or irritated she got, she did not intend to tell him to get lost.

" . . . tree tomorrow," Scully finished saying as she collapsed wearily into her favorite overstuffed chair. She closed her eyes and inhaled the spicy scent of the tea with a sigh.

"Sorry, Scully, I phased out for a moment. What's this about a tree?" Mulder gave her a apologetic smile as he flopped down to sit on the chair opposite her.

"Tree, as in Christmas tree, Mulder," she responded with a touch of exasperation.

"Oh yeah. Sorry, my parents didn't go in for Christmas very much. We just sort of exchanged gifts on Christmas morning beside the fireplace. No trees, lights or anything else that required a lot of fuss and bother to put up or take down." Mulder tried to make the comment sound as matter of fact as he could.

One of the reasons he never really missed Christmas was because he never really knew what one was. It was clear that Scully came from a family with a lot of Christmas traditions. It might be interesting to see what a real Christmas was like.

"Uh, Scully, your neighbors might get a little suspicious if they see a tree walking into your apartment all by itself."

"I'll just tell them I was a very good girl this year, so Santa loaned me one of his elves."

The lateral shift in Scully's mood disconcerted him. He was prepared for a range of reactions to the day's events; humor wasn't one he had anticipated. He couldn't decide if Scully was just employing a new avoidance technique or whether she genuinely was relaxed enough to joke.

"Oh, Mulder, the look on your face," Scully chuckled as she shook her head. She had him at a severe disadvantage since he couldn't check a mirror to see himself. He suspected that his expression was a conglomeration of indecision and amusement with a touch of bewilderment thrown in for good measure.

"Gotcha."

Scully's smile was still gleeful and definitely gloating. Mulder laughed ruefully and acknowledged her victory. He kept forgetting how wicked her sense of humor was when she decided to let go of the restraints she kept on it.

"Yes, Mulder, I'm concerned about what to tell Simon. I'm also trying to come to terms with what happened today. If I wasn't holding onto this tea mug, my hands would be shaking."

Scully took a deep breath and let it out in a long breathy sigh. Now that he was looking for the signs, he could see the slight tremors that shook her shoulders. He was willing to bet that they weren't all due to his frigid presence. Guilt, relief, and sadness clouded her eyes before she closed them and took in another deep breath. This time she exhaled slowly and when she opened her eyes, they were clear.

"I'm alive. The rest of the team is alive and, most importantly, the hostages are alive."

Scully was serious now. Clearly she was talking to him rather than trying to convince herself that something good had come out of the near-disaster.

"You did most of it, Scully. You kept your head and took control in a scenario where the odds were solidly against you," Mulder assured her. He wanted her to understand how much he admired the way she handled Simon and the local police in a critical situation.

"*We* did it. All the cool heads in the world wouldn't have made a difference in that maze if you hadn't been able to warn me about the traps and then guide me through the maze."

Both of them knew the ghastly possibilities in the might-have-beens of Bryson's plan. No one would have come out of that house alive or even in one piece. Bryson had enough C4 planted to obliterate a city block. Even in his disembodied form, Mulder quailed at the thought of the destruction Bryson had planned to unleash. A madman had orchestrated his own Gotterdammerung and damn near succeeded.

"You have no idea how close to panic I was," Mulder confessed.

"I couldn't tell. I just heard your steady voice guiding me. You being there saved all of our lives." Scully dismissed the matter of Mulder's fear.

"That's what scares me," Mulder admitted slowly. The gnawing fear that had been simmering in his subconscious in the long hours since Bryson had been killed was beginning to surface and take solid form. He was tempted to bolt, but forced himself to stand fast. Besides, if what he feared was true, then there was no place he could run to. Better not to make Scully's last memory of him be one of panicked flight.

Scully gave him a startled look. It was obvious to him that she had been expecting a display of guilt. Fear was unexpected. She waited for him to continue.

Mulder wondered if he could explain his reaction. His promise not to run away and try to deal with his problems alone was proving to be difficult to deal with. A lifetime of habit wasn't easy to break in just five months. Now, it was even easier for him to retreat where Scully couldn't find him and drag his fears and doubts out into the light, but his promise held him fast.

"What if this is the task I was sent back to accomplish?" Mulder knew it sounded petty and he really doubted if Scully would understand the extent of his fear, but he would try to explain without sounding like a dependent idiot.

To his relief, Scully didn't immediately dismiss his comment, but sat back and gave the matter her full attention. Her expression changed as she considered the problem from all angles. Science might not be much help, but the scientific method was still a reliable way to examine problems. He might have, and still did, disagree with some of the conclusions she drew from this way of examining the evidence, but the questions she asked and the scrutiny she gave was invaluable in sifting out the wheat from the chaff.

As he waited, Mulder remembered how, as a boy, faced with the insurmountable task of coping with the cold, angry silence of his truncated family, he had run to his secret place to fret and think. There he could drop his defenses and let his misery show. He had spent hours perched on a sea-swept rock, just below their deserted summer-house on Rhode Island, trying to sort out his grief and his guilt until the sea drove him back to shore. Once or twice he had actually considered letting the sea take him and swallow him up, but there was always Samantha, waiting for him to redeem his pledge to find her. Oddly, as strange as it felt to allow someone access to his private fears, Scully was now his secret place. Unlike the sea, she didn't offer him storms or the lure of obliteration, but instead offered him a safe harbor from his own storms. Perhaps this shared bond with the sea was at the central core of the bond that held them together, in spite of their frequent disagreements, even in the face of death. It was an interesting point to ponder. Hopefully, he would not have to ponder it stuck off in a corner of the afterworld somewhere alone.

"Why would you suppose that this was the task?" Scully asked slowly. Mulder felt like a stray piece of evidence being examined under a microscope.

"It fits the criteria. Gordon wasn't exactly forthcoming, but I got the impression I had something to do that only I could do. Then my tenure as a ghost would be revoked." Mulder tried to remember the exact words used by the angel he knew only as Gordon. A little difficult since Gordon communicated more by impression and emotion than with words. Now that was going to be fun to explain to Scully.

"That could mean quite a few things. Have you seen this Gordon around since the incident this afternoon?"

A reasonable question. Mulder tried to remember if he had felt that peculiar feeling of serenity that surrounded Gordon. As far as he could tell, serenity hadn't even been close to the emotions swirling around in his mind since he heard the awful click of a pressure mine being activated by Scully's foot.

"No," Mulder admitted, feeling even more foolish for trying to share his fears which were about as insubstantial as himself.

Scully nodded as if she had expected this answer. Her expression didn't change, but she seemed to relax as she studied him. Mulder could sense worry, confusion and curiosity, but no exasperation or irritation. Apparently his confession of fear was another piece to a puzzle she was constructing. From the look in her eyes, she was close to unraveling the mystery. He wished he knew what he had been doing to create the mystery.

"What's the problem, Mulder?" she asked softly, even gently. He sensed the resolve and felt her picking her way through his defenses in that stubborn, insistent manner she had that both irritated and comforted him.

"Hey, you react to stress by making hot tea and taking a long soak in a bubble bath. I can't exactly go out for a five-mile run. Well, I could, but it's not quite the same. Guess leaping to conclusions is my way of channeling stress these days," Mulder quipped, hoping to divert her attention. He wasn't sure what she was stalking, but old habits died hard and even with his promise, he was reluctant to let her pry around inside his mind.

"It's more than just today. What's wrong? Ever since Thanksgiving, there has been something gnawing at you. You've been too quiet, almost depressed, if ghosts get depressed," Scully continued relentlessly. She did smile at her own attempt to psychoanalyze a ghost. Mulder tried to smile back, but it was a lame attempt. Damn, she was good, or else he was getting extremely sloppy in hiding his emotions.

"How would I know? No one gave me a book on how to be a ghost," he retorted in a tone more morose than he intended.

Without answering him, Scully stood up and walked over to him. Warily, Mulder stood up and watched her approach, fighting an urge to flee. In life, these kind of raw emotional moments always held the potential for breaking through the last barrier between them and unbalancing their delicate perch on the razor's edge. Now, thinking herself safe, Scully constantly pushed the boundary. Because he couldn't find a way to tell her that even though he was dead and only a spirit, he retained the passion and desires of a living man, she felt free to be more open with physical contact. He felt a hug looming and in his present state, he wasn't sure he had the strength of will to push her away.

As small as she was, he felt himself being folded into her arms. Fear, passion, need, even love seethed within him. He stood there, arms to his side, not daring to make a move to return the embrace; afraid that once he started he would not be able to stop.

"It will be OK, Mulder. Whatever it is that's bothering you, we can deal with it, just like we dealt with Bryson and his traps." Scully gave him a final hug and stepped back. He gave her an apologetic shrug for his lack of participation in the embrace. There was an odd expression on her face that he had never seen before. It stirred fear and desire in equal measure.

Her eyes were burning. Apparently the desire and passion wasn't entirely one-sided. One false step and they would cross a line with consequences he couldn't even begin to imagine. He couldn't speak, but he managed to shake his head in answer to her unspoken question. His form was smoky black with barely suppressed passion. If she beckoned, he knew he would go wherever she bade him, even if it damned him for all eternity.

"Mulder, would you mind terribly disappearing until I go to sleep?" she asked in a husky voice. "I'm sorry. Seeing you makes me realize the chances that we squandered and can't get back again," she confessed. Her eyes were banked fires now, covered with a mist of regrets.

"Scully, you aren't the only one with regrets. We had all the time in the world, I thought." Mulder paused with a sad smile. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow, go see your mother and let her help you buy a tree. Do the normal things you do every Christmas. I think we both need time to come to terms with what happened today. I'll drop by when you get home and we'll talk about Simon and whatever else you want to talk about. Deal?" Mulder offered his hand. It was risky, but if things had gone so far between them that a simple handshake ignited a bonfire, then he needed to find this out while he still clung to a few shreds of self-control.

"You're trying to get rid of me," Scully accused, with a twitch of her lips as she attempted to squelch a smile. The air lightened as passions began to retreat back into the silent places in their hearts. Humor was always his best defense and offense when his emotional barriers were threatened.

"No, just trying not to monopolize you. I'll be around. If you need me, just call."

"OK, deal." Scully took his hand. Mulder felt the fire's breath, but nothing more. They had always been experts at self-denial.

Smiling, Mulder let himself fade into the gray fog that was his resting place. To his relief, there was no hint that Gordon was anywhere about. Maybe his fear was just his way of reacting to stress. Someone really needed to write a handbook for ghosts. He drifted in formlessness wondering how many other poor ghosts were out there trying to figure out the mechanics of their situation and having about as hard a time adapting as he was.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Saturday, December 19

It was past midnight when Mulder returned to Scully's house. Even before he materialized as a filmy gray mist, he sensed that she was asleep. Her dreams were troubled. She was tangled in the covers as if she had fought a fierce battle, only to be consumed by the blankets and dragged into sleep.

"Just rest. I'm here. Nothing can harm you."

Over and over he whispered this reassurance. Nightmares were beyond his province, but he hoped she would take comfort from his presence and relax. He wished he could sing even passably well. However, death had not magically given him a pleasing baritone. In fact, when he considered the matter carefully, death really hadn't made any improvements on the original Mulder-model - unless you counted the ability to move through walls. Oh, yes, there was also the remarkable talent for turning his best friend into an iceberg every time he touched her, so even soothing caresses were out.

As if she could sense him, Scully sighed and snuggled into the covers. Her restless gasps relaxed into a slow rhythmic breathing as whatever nightmares plagued her lost their grip and allowed her to fade into a deep dreamless sleep. Mulder carefully sat down on the end of the bed and watched her sleep until first light seeped into the room and Scully began stirring upwards towards wakefulness.

"Enjoy the day, Scully. You've earned it. See you later," he whispered as he faded into the ether.

Faced with an entire day to amuse himself, Mulder decided to pay the Gunmen a visit. For several weeks now he had been leaving cryptic notes on their computers, defying their best security efforts. At first the guys had been alarmed, convinced that the MIBs were about to descend and cart them away to anonymous prison cells. When several weeks passed with no midnight raids by government storm troopers, the notes turned into a game between them and their unknown hacker. Mulder had hovered in a corner watching as Langly and Frohike tore apart the computers and rebuilt them from scratch while Byers tested and re-tested every communications line they used. Impressed by this Herculean effort, Mulder waited for several days after this mammoth effort before leaving another note.

Today, Mulder simply wanted company. The notes were fun, a way of tweaking the guys' paranoia, but he didn't want to scare them too badly. He was hoping that eventually they'd start considering the extreme notion that they had a ghost. Frohike looked like he was beginning to get suspicious. Every so often, he'd spin around and glare into the shadowy corners of their office as if looking for someone. Knowing Frohike, there should be some very fancy surveillance equipment set up to catch their intruder in the act. The question for Mulder now was whether he *wanted* to be caught.

To his surprise, Frohike was alone when he arrived. Byers and Langly were nowhere in the building, as far as he could tell. There was only one living soul within a fifty-foot radius and he was sitting across the office in front of his computer. There were gadgets he couldn't even begin to identify set up in every corner of the room. Frohike obviously believed in electronic overkill. A low buzz sounded when Mulder emerged out of the ether as a hazy shadow in dark corner as far from Frohike as he could manage. Startled, Mulder spun around and came face-to-face with a hypersensitive temperature gauge. Frohike was not fooling around. A flash of light behind him was punctuated by a triumphant "Gotcha" from Frohike.

Damn. Now he remembered Frohike's passionate belief that ghosts could be caught on film with the proper electronic equipment and special cameras. Mulder wondered if Frohike could be bribed to keep silent about this. He had no intention of showing up as a feature article in "The Lone Gunman." The only saving grace was that the most Frohike was going to be able to develop should be a filmy mist, vaguely man-sized, coalescing in the corner. Scully, in the old days, would have dismissed it as a defect in the film or some other naturally occurring phenomena.

"Man, Byers is going to owe me. I told him we were haunted," Frohike muttered happily to himself as he reset the camera. So far, it didn't sound like he had any suspicion that the haunt was his old friend. Poised on the verge of retreating back into the ether, Mulder considered whether to let Frohike in on the secret. He trusted him, even if Frohike was more paranoid than he ever was. It might be nice to have someone other than Scully to talk to when being dead got to be too much to bear alone.

Fascinated by the gadgetry, Mulder wondered if this was what a mouse felt like trapped inside an electronic mousetrap. Unlike the unlucky mouse, however, he could leave whenever he wanted. The question was whether he wanted to. Scully would, no doubt, have persuasive arguments in favor of him beating an immediate retreat. Her arguments would probably be logical and eminently rational, but his entire existence right now was neither logical nor rational. Maybe letting Frohike know about him and seeing how he reacted might help him predict how Simon would react to knowing that his partnership with Scully was a threesome. It might also help Scully to know that she had someone to talk to about having a ghost in her life. Frohike was a good listener and he would rather die than hurt Scully.

Ultimately, Mulder knew he was a gambler. Alive, he had always pushed his luck, trying to grab the gold ring. That he failed more often than he succeeded never stopped him from trying the next time around. He was tired of being cautious. Letting a few people know he was still around wasn't going to be like announcing his existence on the evening news. As far as he knew, there were no union rules about manifesting when and where he chose. It was his option, apparently. Other than Scully being upset with him, not a particularly new situation, he really didn't see any reason not to tell Frohike that he was still around.

Mulder waited until Frohike was busy rearranging the cameras. He was still a bit shy about materializing in front of someone. It felt a little too intimate, almost like a striptease. Even now, if he didn't give adequate warning ahead of time, Scully tended to jump and gasp. Frohike would have no warning at all. Hopefully his heart was up to the shock. Mulder paused a moment to listen to the rhythm of Frohike's pulse and decided that it sounded strong enough to cope.

At the last moment, Mulder decided to just appear, rather than ease into the materialization. Frohike's attention was distracted and it only took a moment for Mulder to become a semi-opaque figure in the corner of the room. He was still mostly obscured by shadow, but he was visible and recognizable, at least to people who knew him.

"Hey." Not very original, but Mulder couldn't really think of anything witty to say.

"What the hell?" Frohike spun around, alarmed at the sound of someone else's voice. Capturing manifestations on film was one thing. Hearing voices out of thin air was something else entirely.

"Hi," Mulder said neutrally.

"Who are you and how did you get in here?" Frohike demanded, irritation and alarm sharing equal time in his tone. So far he hadn't twigged on to the fact that the manifestation he had just captured on film had a voice and an identity.

"It's me, Frohike. The guy who enlarged your tape collection about six months ago," Mulder replied with a bit of resigned humor. Frohike had dutifully shown up when Scully cleared out his belongings to collect the two boxes of erotica and seven boxes of assorted books and papers that Mulder indicated were to go to him. Those tapes had been a long-standing joke between him and Frohike, but it was obvious that the man never wanted or expected to collect on the joke.

Frohike peered at the corner where he heard the voice. Mulder heard a tape player being activated and suspected that motion sensors and other electronic gizmos were being pointed in his direction. From his point of view it was getting very noisy in here as the electronic hum began to grate on his senses. Some of the sound waves actually tickled.

"Turn off the surveillance equipment, Frohike. It's messing with my ectoplasm." Mulder decided that the only way to convince his friend that it was really him was to be as matter-of-fact about the situation as possible. At least with Frohike, the issue of whether ghosts existed was already a given. There were times he wondered if Scully had ever really come to terms with the implications of his appearance. He suspected that she merely compartmentalized his existence since she still maintained a strong skeptical streak towards all other evidence of paranormal activity. How she did that without spraining her mind was almost an X-File in itself.

Scowling, Frohike reached over a flipped a switch. A spotlight as bright as a small sun was pointed towards the corner where Mulder stood. Reflexively, Mulder cursed and tried to shield his eyes from the high intensity beam of light before he realized that while the light was warm, he wasn't at all affected by the brilliance. Taking his hand down, he stood there in the light wondering how much of his form Frohike could see in the light. To his surprise, he could see perfectly well through the spotlight. Frohike was frowning and mumbling to himself. Mulder squelched a laugh at the variety of curses Frohike was calling down on the head of whoever was playing this practical joke.

"It's no joke, Frohike. I'm really here." Mulder tried the calm, reasonable approach again. Frohike was turning out to be more stubborn than he anticipated. This could be fun, he thought with a spark of his old mischief rising to the forefront.

"Yeah," he replied scornfully. "Langly, I'm going to change the locks on the beer cooler if this is your doing. Damn it, guys, this isn't funny." Frohike actually sounded choked up, almost an angry sob making his curses virtually unintelligible as he started searching for something Mulder thought he called a holographic video projector.

"Frohike," Mulder said quietly as he moved silently over to his friend's side. "It's me." Mulder laid a hand on Frohike's shoulder. There was no easy way to do this. Mulder felt Frohike's shuddering gasp and braced himself for the inevitable flinch when he realized that there was a ghost touching him. One thing Mulder had learned, however skeptical someone was, no amount of rationalization could explain away the cold a ghost's touch produced. Scully said it was like the marrow in her bones turned to ice. She also said that it did get better as she got used to it, but every single time he touched her, he saw the flinch in her eyes as she felt death.

"What the hell?" Frohike shuddered and pulled away, looking wild-eyed at the phantom he saw standing beside him. This was no holographic projection. His bones ached with the cold the thing radiated.

"It's really me, Frohike." Mulder stepped back about five feet. He had learned that when he was in this smoky opaque form, he produced an aura of intense cold in a five-foot radius. Despite his best efforts and all of Scully's scientific investigation, he still didn't know where the cold came from or what caused it. Philosophically he supposed he simply opened up a doorway between dimensions. Wasn't it Luther Boggs who said that death was a cold, dark place?

"Mulder?" Frohike asked incredulously.

"Yeah," Mulder replied simply. He moved over to a table and sat down, selecting a clear spot away from some of the more sensitive computer equipment. No need to flash-freeze the guys' computers.

"Too frigging amazing," Frohike said with a combination of awe and stunned realization that a ghost was sitting six feet away talking to him.

Mulder watched as his friend came to terms with meeting the paranormal face-to-face. It was always interesting to see how people who professed a belief in ghosts actually reacted to seeing one. To his relief, Frohike seemed to be adjusting fairly well, even getting this speculative look in his eyes as he considered all the ramifications of the situation.

"What happened? You get lost?" Frohike asked with a chuckle. Mulder's sense of direction, in Frohike's opinion, was cavalier at the best of times.

"Nah, I flunked harp-playing 102," Mulder retorted. It felt good to fall back into the old routine. Playing tricks on the Gunmen was no substitute for actively participating in one of their discussions.

"They have entrance exams?" Frohike started to look a bit concerned at the notion.

"No, but they have some really tough bouncers at the gates. One of them decided that heaven wasn't ready for me yet and sent me back to the bush leagues. So, here I am."

"Son of a bitch. Who thought up that rule?" Frohike demanded irritably.

"God knows," Mulder quipped with a hope that deities and archangels had better things to do than eavesdrop on his conversations.

"Why didn't you stop by earlier?" Frohike sounded wounded, but he didn't look too offended. There was a definite sparkle in his eyes as he settled in for a chat.

"I've been by, I just . . . I couldn't seem to find the right time. It's rather awkward just appearing and announcing 'hey guys, I'm a ghost.' Scully knows about me, as does a very old friend we ran into on a case. Oh, and a very eccentric lady somewhere in St. Louis who summons ghosts to escort children on Halloween, but other than that, no one else knows I'm still around."

"I see your point. Still, it's good to have you back. Are you really a ghost?"

"Yeah. Believe me, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. For the most part, it gets pretty boring. This is not a career move I recommend," Mulder replied in a resigned tone. Frohike knew him well enough to read between the lines and understand what he wasn't saying about the loneliness.

"Langly is going to be pissed at you. He's run so many virus scans that his computer flinches every time he comes near it. He was certain someone had hacked us and deposited a new super virus in our system." Frohike grinned. Mulder sensed that a bet had just been won in the ongoing friendly war between his two friends.

"I'll make it up to him. I did leave him clues," Mulder protested in a vain attempt to defend himself.

"Well, we weren't exactly expecting ghosts. I mean, I believe in them, but not in my own home."

"Where are they?"

"I sent them out for groceries. I told them that if we were haunted, the fewer people cluttering up the offices the better. Man, will they be surprised when they come back and find you here." Frohike paused. "You are sticking around until they get back, aren't you?"

"Unless Scully needs me. Why? Afraid Langly and Byers won't believe you?"

"You got something better to do?" Frohike asked curiously.

Mulder made a show of thinking about the question before shaking his head. "No, actually, I don't."

"Could I interest you in an exclusive interview for our next issue?" There was definitely a hopeful note to Frohike's voice.

"No. Don't even think about trying to make me into a feature story," Mulder warned sternly, anxious to squelch Frohike's journalistic enthusiasm before it got both of them into trouble. He understood his friend's zeal, but he didn't need the publicity.

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Frohike replied plaintively.

"Being a ghost is all the adventure I can cope with at one time." Mulder paused for effect, then fired off the clincher. "Do you want to see Scully hurt just to boost your circulation figures?"

"That's a low blow," Frohike protested, but the reporter's gleam disappeared from his eyes. "It would have been a great story," he commented sadly.

Mulder relented, just a bit. He remembered how it felt to have a genuine paranormal event in his grasp only to see it snatched away from him.

"I promise, if I ever decide to go public, you'll get exclusive rights."

"Deal." Frohike perked up and grinned. Mulder knew he'd keep the secret and seemed to be pleased that Mulder trusted him to keep quiet. "Hey, do you mind if I check out what the cameras caught? Langly was sure this setup wouldn't work."

Mulder squelched the feeling that he was betraying a horde of unwitting ghosts by cooperating with Frohike. As far as he could tell, on admittedly limited experience, it was every ghost for himself out here. Besides, if a ghost was annoying, it needed to be reminded to behave. Just because someone was dead didn't excuse a lapse of manners.

Mulder watched from a safe distance as Frohike carefully developed his film. The profane muttering coming from the dark room told him that all Frohike got for his trouble was a fogged film. He had a feeling that Frohike would keep on trying, especially since he had a ghost to experiment on.

Preoccupied with his film, Frohike didn't hear the outer door open, but Mulder did. He was pretty sure it was Langly and Byers, but he discretely faded into the shadows just in case. A ripple in the odd foggy world he existed in distracted him. It wasn't like anything he had felt before. Without a second thought he sped towards Scully, who he discovered, was chatting with her mother over an early brunch at a small cafe. She looked relaxed and happy. Obviously whatever the ripple was, it wasn't a call from her. If she was fine, then why did he sense a darkness gathering around her. Hovering wasn't going to do any good and would only alert her to his presence. She seemed to be fine. He was going to have to trust her more than his instincts, but he knew that wouldn't stop him from worrying.

"Damn," Mulder swore as he realized that he'd left Frohike in the lurch with Byers and Langly. This called for an extra-special appearance. It shouldn't be difficult to make this lapse up to Frohike. Mulder considered various stage entrance plans as he sped back to his friends.

"Hey, Frohike, caught any ghosts yet?" Langly shouted good-naturedly as he came into the office, closely followed by an amused Byers. They both just stared at the elaborate surveillance setup and shook their heads.

"You might say that. Hey, where'd he go?" Frohike asked in alarm as he came out of the dark room and realized that Mulder wasn't there.

"Who?" Byers asked curiously, walking over to look at the corner Frohike was staring at. "There's nothing here, Frohike."

"Have you been at the cooking sherry again?" Langly asked with a sigh. "This kind of joke isn't funny," he admonished his friend.

"It's no joke. We have a ghost. I was just talking with him," Frohike protested as he scanned the room. "Damn."

Mulder arrived and listened to the teasing for a moment. Frohike was adamant that he had found a ghost, but wasn't revealing who it was. Byers was examining the corner where Frohike insisted the ghost walked out from. Mulder grinned as he latched onto the perfect entrance line.

"Right here?" Byers asked skeptically from the corner. Abruptly, he felt something cold brush up against him and shuddered. Langly's eyes grew wide and Byers spun around to see what his friend was staring at.

"Hi, guys," Mulder said with a smile. Byers jumped back as his eyes bulged in shock.

"Frohike, if this is your idea of a joke. . . ." Langly's voice trailed off as Mulder moved just close enough to let him feel his cold aura. Byers took one look at his harrowed expression and quickly moved out of the vicinity.

"Guys, this is our ghost." Frohike sounded like a fond parent. Mulder scowled at him and he quickly shut up, but from his expression, he was enjoying the payback. Mulder suspected that he had come in for a lot of teasing from Byers and Langly before they left him alone with his experiment.

"Sorry, Byers. You were crowding me and you really didn't want me going through you," Mulder apologized in a matter-of-fact tone as he fully materialized and stepped back so that none of his friends were within range of his aura. Byers appeared ready to bolt while Langly was attempting to control a shudder. Frohike, on the other hand, having slightly more experience, was grinning as if he was personally responsible for Mulder's return.

"Mulder?" Langly asked cautiously as he tried to get his voice to work.

"Yeah. It's me. I'm a ghost. That about covers the situation." Mulder was beginning to realize that there was a depressing similarity to the conversation he had when he announced his presence to Scully. Mulder smiled encouragingly at his friends, willing them to accept him even if he was not entirely cohesive anymore.

"How long have you been around?" Byers asked in a cracking voice. His breathing was settling down and Mulder sensed that his heart rate was beginning to slow down as well. Paranoid his friends might be, but they rallied to surprises remarkably fast.

"Since that damn ball made oatmeal out of my brains. I've been hanging around with Scully, but I missed you guys. I did leave you clues, but I guess they weren't very obvious." Mulder double-checked to make sure he was mostly opaque and semi-solid before lounging in a chair. Maybe if he acted normal, the guys would begin to relax and just accept him as a very eccentric, but friendly, apparition.

"Mulder, only you would consider those notes as clues," Langly griped through a dawning smile. "You sticking around, or are you just passing through?"

"I'm here for awhile. It's rather confusing, but apparently there's something I have to do before I get to pass Go and get into heaven, or whatever is out there," Mulder said with a resigned shrug.

"Hey, can you really pass through walls and stuff?" Langly suddenly looked very hopeful.

"Yes, but I can only go where I've been when I was alive. No, I can't break into the Pentagon's secret files because I don't know where they are. Besides, how would you explain how you got hold of the secrets?" Mulder tried not to laugh at the looks of dismay and disappointment on the faces of his three conspiratorial friends.

"Oh well, couldn't hurt to hope," Langly conceded.

The conversation began drifting into the nature of ghosts, what the three had been up to since his death, and the state of the guys' ongoing attempts to hack into the vast network of secret government files they believed existed. Mulder relaxed as he slipped back into the easy camaraderie he had always shared with these three unlikely friends. It was nearly supper time before he realized that he hadn't missed Scully once, nor had she tried to contact him. Maybe they both needed this break. He'd try to remember that in the future and give her more time to do her own thing without him hovering nearby.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

A slight tug alerted him to Scully's call. It was nearly seven o'clock; she must be home by now. He hoped she had enjoyed the day. Spending the day with his friends had been relaxing. He could almost forget that he was a ghost -- almost.

"Sorry, guys, gotta go. If you want me, just call my name and think about needing to see me. I don't know how I hear you, but I do," Mulder explained cheerfully. This could be interesting. Was there a way to distinguish who was calling him? If it worked like he thought, a type of harmonic resonance, then he ought to be able to tell Frohike's and Scully's calls apart. "I'll give you warning before I materialize, just to be on the safe side."

Byers looked relieved at that. "It's good to have you back, Mulder," he said seriously.

"Yeah, it's been way too dull," Langly added with a smile. Of the three of them, Langly seemed to be taking his ghostly status in stride. Byers was wary, almost twitchy, while Frohike kept trying to analyze him, in a friendly way. Mulder couldn't really blame him. He supposed, if the situation had been reversed, that he would be intensely curious about the physical make-up of a ghostly apparition. The problem was, Frohike's electronic gadgets tickled.

"Take care, man. No telling who's watching," Frohike cautioned. Despite his curiosity, Frohike was the one who seemed to understand how complex and uncertain Mulder's new existence was.

Another tug reminded him that Scully was waiting. Mulder waved as he faded from view and followed the thread that bound him to Scully with unerring accuracy.

"There you are. I wondered if you were lost." Scully sounded mildly irritated as she waited for him to materialize after his warning whistle. This was an unexpected mood considering how relaxed she had appeared at lunch.

"OK, what's the problem?" Mulder asked bluntly. Her call hadn't sounded particularly urgent. No danger loomed. What did a few minutes delay matter?

"Were you in here today?" Scully asked sharply. Her body language was telling him that she was in full investigative mode, but her eyes were worried. Mulder decided to answer the eyes.

"What happened?" His tone was calm and curious, meant to soothe rather than agitate. Something had happened to alarm her. They didn't need to lapse into an accidental argument because he took umbrage at her tone. Being dead did give him the advantage of being able to sense her heartbeat, a bit fast, and feel her mood, which was a mix of uncertainty, worry, and agitation, not all directed at him. In fact, he got the distinct impression she was hoping he'd confess to some prank so she could stop worrying and just be mad.

Scully didn't say a word, but just stood there staring at him. Under the intensity of her gaze, Mulder began to shimmer slightly, a ghostly equivalent of fidgeting. He glanced around the room, but couldn't find anything out of place. Still, there was a sense of wrongness, very similar to the feeling he'd had earlier when he thought Scully had called him.

"No, I didn't think you'd do something like this," she conceded with the air of a judge pronouncing a rapscallion defendant innocent.

"Fine, now, would you like to tell me what you suspected me of doing or do I have to guess?" Mulder asked smoothly, with just a hint of a smile. He was trying to loosen her up, get her to relax from her wary defensiveness enough to talk to him.

Without a word, Scully stepped aside. Now that he had a clear view, Mulder could see an elaborate flower display sitting on the coffee table. Gaudy white lilies and dark red roses nestled in a broad fan of ferns. It looked like it had been liberated from a funeral parlor. To Mulder, it felt like an echo of death. Just looking at it made him uneasy. This is what Scully thought he'd do? This was an obscenity in the house of the living. He couldn't quite explain in rational terms why he felt this was a death threat, but he knew with a grim certainty that whoever was responsible for this had death firmly in mind.

"I found that when I got home," she said tonelessly. Mulder recognized the signs of Scully exerting iron control over her emotions. He had to do a bit of control himself. Anger was already beginning to flicker around him like a thousand lightning bugs. Damn this ectoplasmic state where every single emotion was hung out for Scully to see. Still, it might not hurt for her to see his anger at her accusation.

"Shit, you thought I'd be capable of doing something like this," Mulder asked in a tightly controlled tone. If he still had teeth, they would be gritted around each syllable. The tiny lightning flickers were intensifying, but he was still in control. This time Scully owed him an explanation for her suspicions.

"No one else had a key. There was no sign of forced entry. It's just gaudy enough to be something you'd like," Scully paused warily as the static electricity field around Mulder exploded. Grimly, Mulder seized control of his temper and forced it back. "If it wasn't you, then someone can get in and out of my apartment without leaving a trace. I . . .," Scully's voice trailed off as a look of sick realization hit her face. "I wanted it to be you because that was easier than the alternative," she said in a voice not much more than a whisper.

Mulder's anger flickered and died. His form wavered in a ghostly sigh as he carefully walked away from the funeral bouquet and went over to Scully. She shivered slightly, but allowed him to wrap his arms around her in a comforting hug. Her body was stiff against him as she fought against the comfort, but gradually she melted into his arms as he gently soothed her.

"It's OK, Scully. You really thought that I'd pull this kind of sick joke on you? I thought we'd settled the issue of trust." Mulder felt her flinch slightly and lightly stroked her back. They'd find a way to deal with the situation; they always did.

He felt a slight arousal as he held her close, but ruthlessly dematerialized that part of his anatomy before it created a problem. Last night's brush with intimacy was still vivid in his memory. Sometimes being a ghost did come in handy, but it wasn't anything he'd recommend as a way of controlling lusty thoughts.

"I may play practical jokes on occasion, but I'd never do anything to alarm you like this. You scared me with that hanging judge stare of yours. I swear I was recalling sins of omission and commission from five years back and wondering which one you'd found out about," Mulder joked with a straight face. To his relief, he felt her chuckle. Another chasm successfully bridged. They'd get through this, just like all the others. If she could laugh, then the barrier of fear was breached and now she'd be ready to talk.

"Mulder, I do trust you. Sometimes, I just don't understand you," Scully confessed a few minutes later as she slowly sipped tea and watched Mulder sitting cross-legged on her coffee table in front of her. She reached out and touched his face in a gesture that was part apology, part wistful longing. Her touch burned, but he understood her need to touch him. Somehow, all their apologies to each other involved a touch. When they connected physically, all their misunderstandings seemed to melt away. Pity they had never realized this when he was alive.

"What I don't understand is why you would even think that I'd be capable of this sort of stunt?" Mulder replied in a tight voice. He wasn't really angry at Scully, but her suspicion hurt. "Do you realize how terrified I was in Bryson's house? It's not something I'd joke about."

"I can't explain in any way that makes sense, Mulder. I just know that I was suddenly praying that this was your odd way of making me laugh about what I . . . ," Scully paused for a moment, staring at Mulder in that direct, penetrating gaze of hers. "No, what *we* went through. You were afraid, weren't you?"

Mulder nodded slowly, his eyes dark windows into the fear that nearly paralyzed him when she triggered the first trap.

"I never realized. I mean, at the time, all I could hear was your calm, steady voice telling me where to step next. You sounded so sure of what to do that I didn't think about what you were doing or even how. I trusted you then, Mulder, with my life and the lives of the rest of the team." Again she paused, eyes hooded as she thought about something. "It's strange, I trust you implicitly about the big things. Even when I don't agree with you about the truth, I trust that you believe. Somehow, when it comes to the small stuff, I don't find it as easy to trust," she concluded slowly in a puzzled tone.

"I know. It always confused me when I was alive. To tell the truth, it still confuses me," Mulder admittedly cautiously. He wasn't sure he was ready for this conversation, but if she was willing, he'd certainly give it his best effort.

"How did we ever make such a good team?" Scully asked with a sad smile.

"Luck. Fate. Maybe just what you said, the ability to trust each other on the big things and a willingness to argue out the small stuff." Mulder was smiling as he remembered how resolute Scully was whenever anything threatened their partnership. She might tell him he was crazy and upbraid him about his willingness to believe in the paranormal over science, but let an outsider presume to disparage him and she stood with him in an implacable wall of defiance.

Scully sighed. "I guess I should take this in and have it checked for forensic evidence." She looked doubtfully at the flowers. She looked up and gave Mulder a hopeful look.

"Sorry, my talents don't include backtracking flower hijackings," Mulder told her. He scanned the room, but any trace of the intruder was long since erased by Scully's movements. The odd sense of danger he picked up earlier in the day had new meaning. That posed an interesting thought. If he was attuned to this apartment, then perhaps he had been alerted to an intrusion without realizing it. This had possibilities.

"If this is some kind of threat, I need to report it," Scully said with a worried frown. Mulder knew how much she was going to hate being at the center of an FBI investigation. "I checked with my building manager and he didn't let anyone in while I was gone today. Mrs. Gilman, next door, doesn't remember hearing anything, but she has the TV on all day so I doubt if she's the most reliable witness." Scully sounded frustrated.

"Before we let the FBI in on the fun, ask the guys to see if they can find out anything." Mulder offered. Frohike would be delighted to be asked to assist Scully. They had mentioned how much they missed doing side-line investigations for him. Scully looked doubtful for a moment, then nodded, looking slightly relieved.

"Scully, you know what those flowers signify, don't you?" Mulder asked cautiously.

"I thought they were just very gaudy, hothouse-type flowers at first. Then, the more I looked at them, the more uncomfortable I felt. The cloying, sweet smell is sufficient to explain the headache and the subsequent unease I felt. They're just flowers, Mulder. I'm much more concerned about the fact that someone might have easily broken in here than about the flowers."

"The break-in was incidental. Whoever brought those flowers meant them as a threat. They reek of death."

"Mulder, that's ridiculous," Scully replied dismissing his argument.

It felt like old times, but Mulder didn't have time to reminisce. Scully had to understand the danger was not just that someone could break into her house.

"Trust your resident expert on death. Someone is threatening your life."

"Well, I can't exactly tell the FBI forensics lab that I have it on the best of authority that the flowers smell of death, now can I?" Scully retorted.

"No, but you can tell your partner."

"Mulder. . . ." Scully gave him a stern glare.

"Scully, you of all people should know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of my protective instincts in the middle of a case. He's your partner, Scully. Don't shut him out. Remember how you felt when I shut you out, for your own good, of course," Mulder said with the air of a man delivering the fatal thrust in a fencing duel.

"Why put Simon through all of that? It's not as if knowing the truth would put him in danger. At least I had the excuse that I thought I was protecting you. Knowing the truth won't put Simon in any more danger than he already is." Mulder argued his case carefully. Simon needed to know before the silence fractured the fragile trust he was building with Scully.

"No." Scully was looking stubborn, but Mulder sensed that she was wavering.

"He already suspects that something is going on. If you don't tell him, he's going to start putting the pieces together. Wouldn't you rather tell him up front than have him blindside you one day with the truth? Besides, he's upset because you aren't trusting him."

"Damn it, I'll lose every bit of scientific credibility I have if I confess that I have a ghost wandering around with me," Scully shot back, sounding a bit plaintive. Mulder repressed the urge to grin. Now they were at the heart of the matter.

"That's pride speaking, not logic," he said gently. With a nod and a grimace, Scully conceded his point.

"You need him, Scully," Mulder urged as Scully just looked longingly at him. He shook his head sadly. "You need a flesh-and-blood partner. You need a partner who knows you trust him with this kind of secret."

"This is going to complicate things."

"Probably."

"Let me sleep on it. I'll think about what to tell Simon in the morning."

"Sure. Meanwhile, do you mind if I move those flowers out of sight? They bring back rather unpleasant memories." Carefully, Mulder carried the flowers to a closet and firmly shut the door on them.

Scully looked startled. Mulder didn't elaborate. One of the things they never spoke of was the several days between his death and the afternoon after his burial when she finally acknowledged his presence. Mulder preferred not to even think about the morbid fascination of seeing the casket containing his body waiting in the funeral home.

"Now, you mentioned something about a tree?" Mulder asked cheerfully. If he wasn't careful, he'd spend the rest of the evening in a funk worrying about who was behind this threat to Scully or about his own future. Setting up a Christmas tree ought to prove to be an amusing diversion.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Getting the tree up took a lot less effort than Mulder envisioned. Scully sensibly bought a tree she could manhandle into her apartment by herself. He just made sure it didn't hang up on anything. Once inside, he held it up while she positioned it into the tree-stand. Then, all he had to do was help string lights, stand back and watch her decorate, until it was time to attach the star on the top of the tree. Scarcely tasking work, but he found that watching Scully's serious concentration on the placement of each ornament was interesting. Left to his own devices, he knew he probably would have scattered some icicles and a few gaudy ornaments in random fashion until the effect resembled the trees he'd seen in his friends' houses. Scully, on the other hand, had a master plan and stuck to it until she had transformed the tree into a glittering fairy-land of lights and glittering ornaments.

Finally, Scully stepped back from the tree to ponder the effect.

"What do you think?" she asked seriously as he came to stand beside her.

"Hmmm, well, despite the obvious lack of alien glow-balls, it looks fine," Mulder replied just as seriously, though he had to fight to keep a straight face when she choked and looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "It's beautiful, Scully. I never realized you were hiding a talent as a tree decorator."

"Mom or Bill always got to do the tree, then Melissa took over from Mom. I had my own special ornaments I was allowed to add each year, but Bill made sure I put them in the back. They were rather ugly, but I liked them," she admitted in a low voice. Mulder grimly wondered if Bill would like a visit from a Christmas ghost. The man was seriously overdue for the Scrooge routine.

"Do you still have them?"

"Have what?" She sounded startled. Mulder suspected that her mind was a million miles away in the far past. Despite the sad smile on her face, he hoped that not all of her Christmas memories were of Bill and his imperious rules.

"Those special ornaments."

"I suppose Mom has them packed away somewhere with all the rest of our stuff." Scully sounded casual, but he thought he could detect a faint note of hope buried deep under her nonchalant attitude.

"Why don't you call your mom and ask her? This is your tree. I'll bet you'll allow yourself to put those ornaments right up front if you want."

Scully looked at him as if she was expecting the punch line of a joke. Mulder sighed. Why shouldn't he be serious? He might not be an expert on Christmas and the assorted decorations that go along with it, but he was willing to bet that this tree would look a lot better to her with her special ornaments proudly displayed. Short of one of them being Speedo!Santa on a surfboard, he knew they'd look just fine to him. One of the few benefits of being dead, he didn't have to pretend to have taste.

"I'd feel silly," she protested, half-heartedly.

"Any sillier than standing here talking to a ghost?" he asked with a mischievous chuckle.

Scully opened her mouth to reply, then caught the humor of the situation and shook her head in defeat. "I'll call Mom in the morning. You don't fight fair," she accused him with a stern stare that dissolved into a smile.

"I don't have to. I'm a ghost. We're not bound by the Geneva Convention."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Later, when Scully was asleep, Mulder came back out into the living room and stared at the tree while he pondered the mystery of the funeral flowers. Unless someone from their past had abruptly decided to resurface, the prankster had to be from a recent case. Cancer Man was a possibility, but he didn't think the man's ego could have resisted adding a cryptic note. Besides, Scully had been carefully avoiding taking cases with even a hint of the conspiracy about them. In spite of his frustration, Mulder understood her reasoning -- give Simon a chance to find his feet before exposing him to the dangers of messing with the conspiracy's little projects. Unfortunately, eliminating Cancer Man left a very small list of suspects to choose from.

Carefully holding onto his self-control, Mulder reluctantly flowed into the closet to take a closer look at the flowers. There was no hint of who sent them, or from what funeral home they'd been taken. In fact, there was really nothing to connect them to a funeral parlor at all, if he could ignore the aura of death that clung to them like a thin sheen of oil. The air was greasy with the stench of grief and death, but few people would have picked up on that -- certainly not Scully with her rationalism and preference for science over psychic answers, although she had become a little less rigid in that regard than she used to be. Having a ghost in your life had a tendency to make hash of the rules, but she hadn't progressed to the point of detecting auras, yet.

Why did the suspect go to some much trouble to create such an obscure threat? The break-in was too obvious. It distracted attention away from the more serious intent of this stunt. Mulder didn't like the idea that they were faced with an intelligent and subtle suspect who had a talent for breaking and entering and a knack for leaving behind no clues. He preferred his criminals to be inept, clumsy, or braggarts.

Realizing that staring in morbid fixation at the flowers was only serving to depress him, rather than garner any useful clues, Mulder flowed back out of the closet. Restless, he drifted from place to place, always coming back every few minutes to check on Scully. He patrolled the entire block around her apartment, scaring several dogs and seriously irritating a couple of cats. The Gunmen were all tucked in their beds when he passed through. Pausing only long enough to leave a message asking them to check out any reports of vandalism from local funeral homes, he left them to their dreams.

Eventually, he ended up in the basement of the Hoover Building, surrounded by his files. Even with Scully's rearrangement of the layout and Simon's unmistakable presence, this felt like home to him. Surrounded by the evidence of his life's work, he allowed himself to materialize and pretend, just for a few moments, that he was still alive. What was more important than indulging in fruitless nostalgia, however, were the files containing all the reports of recent cases, both solved and unsolved. If this was an unsolved case, it made no sense to threaten Scully. Why take the additional risk of being identified? This either indicated extreme overconfidence, or else the man was blind to the dangers involved. Either way, the prospects gave Mulder a headache, or what passed for one in his state. He knew it was a headache, but it more closely resembled a contraction of his ectoplasm to the point where he felt like a size eleven foot stuck into a size nine-and-a-half shoe.

Mulder made a mental note to remind Scully to ask Simon if he had received any unusual gifts. If Scully was the sole target, then that might narrow down the already slim list of suspects. Unless the unknown stalker had a serious problem with women in authority. Anything was possible, but Mulder felt certain that the answer lay in the case-files. No doubt Simon and Scully would cover all the bases; Scully was too good an investigator not to consider all the options. The flowers, by themselves, might be taken for a gesture made by an ordinary stalker. Without him present, he suspected that a lot of time would be wasted tracking down the wrong paths. A stray thought skittered across the surface of his mind, vanishing before he had more than half glimpsed it. It had something to do with the significance of the flowers, but it was gone now. These stray thoughts always seemed to occur in the early days of a profiling case. Later, when he had enough clues to begin a serious reconstruction of the puzzle, they would reappear and he would end up kicking himself for not realizing he had had the key to the whole mystery in his head early on in the game.

Recalling the exact sensation of the odd ripple he had felt earlier, Mulder committed that feeling to memory. He suspected that it marked the moment the stalker broke into Scully's apartment. He intended to give the stalker the surprise of his life if he tried that stunt again. If he was that closely attuned to Scully's apartment, he wondered if he would also be able to detect an intrusion into the X-Files office? It was worth a try. Of course, this was a much more public place than Scully's home. There were actually a number of people authorized to enter this office when Scully, or Simon weren't in. He might end up making a lot of jumps back here on false alarms, but he had the time to spare. "That's an understatement," he grumbled.

Until the investigation got underway, there wasn't much else he could do here. He hated waiting for the stalker to make the next move, but with no clues, and only a slim lead, he didn't have much choice. Hopefully, the stalker planned on a slow escalation of fear-inducing threats. Some patterns were more or less universal, and he hoped this suspect wasn't going to break new ground.

Scully was just beginning to wake up when he returned. She had this pattern of restlessness that marked her slow climb out of deep sleep. Watching her tangle herself in the sheets, he wondered what it would have been like to sleep next to her, and feel her rub against him as she moved around in the process of waking up. "Don't go there," he warned himself. It was no good dwelling on what-might-have-beens. That route led to madness and Scully did *not* need an insane ghost on her hands.

When she looked to be on the brink of waking up, Mulder flitted off to the kitchen and started the coffee-maker. She had fussed at him for this, but he finally convinced her that he enjoyed doing this small service. Besides, she was easier to talk to after she had her first cup of coffee. Occasionally, before the caffeine hit her system, he caught her looking at him as if . . . well, as if she had seen a ghost and was marshalling all the arguments against the existence of such phenomena. Mulder didn't want to take the chance that one day she might just argue him out of existence.

"Mulder, I'm going to write up a report for Skinner," Scully announced as she slowly sipped her second cup of coffee. "Go bother the Gunmen for awhile. I don't want you around while I skirt around the truth." Scully managed to make the request sound just a hair short of a command. Mulder felt like a dog being kicked off the comfortable couch, but he understood Scully's need to surround herself with rational reality while trying to compose a report that would satisfy Skinner without actually lying.

"Simon?" Mulder asked, risking a cold look in return, but he wasn't going to drop the subject. Her safety was now on the line, and that meant his kid gloves were off.

"Damn it . . .," Scully started, then regained control. "When I finish the report, I'll call you and we'll *discuss* the matter of Simon, then, and only then. Understood?" she snapped.

"Getting mad at me isn't going to change the fact that you either trust Simon, or you don't. I learned to cope with the fact that you didn't always tell me everything, but Simon doesn't have the background of trust we shared," Mulder replied as gently as he could. He watched as Scully's eyes narrowed and she drew in a breath to retort, then continued. "Isn't telling him the truth a small price to pay for trust?" Mulder faded from sight before she recovered enough to respond. She might be angry, but it was time she realized exactly what the stakes were in this odd triangular partnership she shared with him and Simon.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Scully wondered why she never managed to think of a snappy comeback until after Mulder vanished. It occurred to her that perhaps he was counting on the time it took her to organize her thoughts to make his escape. Arguing with Mulder had been difficult enough when he was alive. Now that he had the power to vanish completely in the twinkling of an eye, it was next to impossible. Unless she pinned him down before the conversation even turned towards a spirited debate, and forced a promise not to vanish, she was often left with her brilliant retorts unspoken.

"Damn," she muttered, with a vague sense that she was cursing both Mulder and Fate.

The leaden gray skies with the dreary drizzle of sleet matched her mood perfectly. Staring at her laptop, she briefly considered saying to hell with her reputation, her sanity, and probably her career, and simply tell Skinner the truth. If Mulder was so sure that telling Simon the truth was a good thing, perhaps he should get to deal with Skinner as well. The notion of seeing a ghostly Mulder trying to explain his existence to Skinner made her feel much better. She couldn't do that, either to Mulder or to herself, but revenge was sweet, even if it was only in a dream.

Feeling better, but slightly guilty over her vengeful imagination, Scully settled down to the task of composing a report that bore a reasonable facsimile of the truth without revealing too much of what actually happened at Bryson's house. Four hours later, she had a report that would endure official scrutiny without giving Skinner a heart attack. What it didn't say was a testament to her years of experience in submitting her "little reports" to Blevins. Those reports had gradually mutated from strict scientific evaluations of Mulder's investigations to cleverly crafted expositions that justified them without crossing the line of scientific responsibility.

Mulder had obligingly stayed away while she wrestled with words and her conscience. Despite her frequent irritation with him, she knew he meant well. What was worse, she also knew he was frequently right, especially in his judgments of other people. Well, there