Agent Scully entered the room after a single annunciatory rap on the door that caught her partner's attention. 

"Autopsy came up dry," she responded to his anticipating look. He let his upper lip out from where he had tucked it behind his teeth, and out with it, a sigh of defeat. 

"Mulder, I can't think of any other way we could possibly get any leads on this case. And not even good ones, just leads." Mulder's only response being to press his forehead against his desk, littered with meaningless information on the mentioned case, Scully continued. "I've just been through the photos again for the third time this morning." 

Mulder lifted his head slightly.

"I hate to admit this, Mulder, but I honestly have no earthly idea what killed that man." 

"The photos."

"What?" 

Mulder sifted through his papers noisily. He isolated one and raised a pencil in the air. "Photographer had a new camera." 

Scully waited, her logical, skeptical brain tugging an eyebrow towards itself. "And?" 

"He took more pictures than we have." 

"What do you mean?" 

Mulder swung his coat from its peg to his shoulder. "I saw him taking pictures, testing out the camera--not of anything important, you know. Except maybe they were." 

Scully sighed as Mulder brushed past her. "Mulder," she said, in her motherly, scolding tone, that always stopped him in his tracks as it did now, if only for a moment. "Mulder, our agents, the police, they've all scoured the place. What are you expecting to turn up in a couple of unprofessional photos that they wouldn't have noticed?"

Mulder grinned and bounced impatiently, like some kind of puppy. "I don't know, but you said it yourself, Scully. Any other way we could possibly get leads on this case." He waved the slip of paper with the photographer's address on it in her face and slipped off as soon as a smile ghosted Scully's lips. 

~o~

Mulder held in his hands a crisp white package, all clean and smooth, which he admired for a moment before setting it on his desk and taking a seat. The packet contained dozens of photos, which Mulder now slid out into his palm. It would take hours to examine all of them thoroughly. Well, he would skim through them once now, and then call Scully to help.  

As he thumbed through the clean-edged photographs, one broke the surface of his skin, and he stopped to wince and and suck on the cut. His thumb in his mouth, Mulder glanced to see his offender, and was surprised to find himself in the picture. He stood next to Scully, the two of them bent over files or paperwork or something of that mundane sort. It was an ordinary moment that had been captured, like thousands of other moments he and Scully had shared, yet he had never stopped to consider such a moment; to step back and contemplate it. Sure, in all the dangerous and near-death experiences they had had; when Scully's hand would grip his, her flawless face marred with worry--in times like those he had paused to consider, to consider how far they had come, and where they stood now. 

But now, as such a simple picture of such an average day made him smile as softly as he did, something in him stirred, and he realized how much he treasured those everyday moments, just he and Scully, working together. And he wondered to himself, whether he would have come this far, whether he would have devoted himself so wholly to his work, if he had still had Diana for a partner. Scully didn't believe in the things Mulder believed in, and yet, she believed in him. 

Scully liked to tease him, to say that he had no life, and he'd say 'my work is my life.' But perhaps that was true, perhaps he was content to live only in his work, because in his work, he had the best of partners and the greatest of friends. And as Mulder looked at that picture in his hands, traces of his lifeblood stained on its clean white backing, he turned to look at his wall, all proudly cluttered with photos and newspaper clippings of his favorite cases, and, taking a thumbtack from his desk, he pinned up another piece of his work, of his life, of his heart.