Fathoms Five ~ page 2

___________________

Scully bathed quickly, the sky outside purpling with dusk. The hair at the back of her skull was matted, and she soaked it and washed it gently. When she dressed, looking full on into her own eyes in the mirror, there were no visible signs of trauma, her hair combed down wet, loose shirt buttoned to the gold cross that lay in the hollow of her throat, cuffs folded back twice, everything as it should be.

She felt delicate, as though she had been ill, but the headache had deserted her, leaving her head buzzing softly like a seashell. The nap had rendered her dazed and soft.

Long ago Mulder had painted the sign for William's bedroom door that said 'Trespassers Will'. More recently he'd left the note that said 'Clean up this mess before I notify the proper authorities'.

The door stood half open and Scully frowned at the guitar laying across the unmade bed. William was oddly distracted by music. Scully had never been remotely musical. Mulder said that William showed natural ability and that the mathematical applications of musical theory probably advanced his thinking.

At the foot of the stairs she looked into the living room. The girl Arable Lewental was on the couch with the L.A. Times. She looked over the paper and gave Scully a tight smile with her V-shaped mouth. A fatherless classmate of William's, she'd been a semi-permanent fixture around the house since their middle school days, drawn to the Mulder family's intellectual and low-key family life, William's goofy sweetness, and Mulder.

Scully never quite knew what to say to her when she tripped over her in one room or another, but she took an interest in Arable in the abstract, and had ironed out a problem with her visa when she won an undergraduate scholarship to Cambridge. Arable was going to Cambridge to study trilobites. "Oh, Cambridge. I hear they have a great trilobite program," Mulder had said. The summer she turned 16, Arable discovered a new species of trilobite in the Burgess Shale. She named it Paradoxes Mulderii, as a gift for Mulder on his birthday. There had ensued a multitude of jokes comparing Mulder and fossils.

At the kitchen sink Scully was confronted by her nephew, who, grinning, threw out his arms, then hugged her warmly, dripping wet lettuce down her back. "Auntie Dane! You're alive! I heard you were taking a nap."

"I never nap," said Scully, extricating herself. Some of his vigor had rubbed off on her, and she felt slightly more awake.

Matthew shook a handful of wet lettuce over the sink. He wore shorts that looked like Pollack had had a go at them, a washed-out rose T-shirt, huaraches. "Look, we're about to eat. Tell me what you want to drink. I got this great wine but just say if you'd rather have water."

Scully leaned over Mulder in his chair, her arm around his neck, and whispered, "Actually, it was Modell I was calling a bastard."

"Ah," said Mulder, caught off guard, and unconvinced, turning a bottle of salad dressing around so he could read the label.

"I can't believe you thought that all these years."

Mulder shrugged nervously. She sat down, touching his cheek, stroking his five-o'clock shadow. William was watching them across the table. "Mulder," she said.

"Yeah." He reached across the table with the salad tongs, helping himself to a chunk of garlic bread.

A piece of bread hit Scully's plate. Arable sat down beside William, crunching a whisk of raw spaghetti. Her hair looked dyed goth-black but wasn't, and her haircut closely resembled Mulder's. William's hair had grown so shaggy that Scully found herself combing her fingers through the ducktails every chance she got.

William had had a strange, tense summer. He was about to immerse himself for seven years in physics, and he gave the impression of holding his breath and focusing on one objective, no matter what he was doing. He was going to Jesus College, one of just eight physics students accepted for the year.

Scully was viscerally ashamed of the stress she would contribute to his last week at home. She did not think she could eat.

"Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, amen," William said breathlessly.

He had to know, of course. They were both scientists, and scientists could not obscure facts.

"Your glass. Your glass," Matthew was saying to Scully.

"The Rocinante," Arable said, laboriously reading Matthew's T-shirt as he leapt up from his chair.

"Like it?"

"Um, Don Quixote's horse?" she asked.

"Steinbeck's pick-up," offered Mulder, emerging from his shell.

"It's a bar, actually. I did the design, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Matthew was a sophomore at CalArts, majoring in graphic design, stenciling surf boards on the side, cooking in a taqueria and waiting out his parents' posting to a Naval base in Scotland.

Busy as he was, Matthew came often up the hill to their house, and he threw himself into anything they were involved in, whether it was painting the duck house or one of their noisy family arguments which invariably resulted in the consulting of dictionaries or scientific websites. He took his girlfriends to William's basketball games and helped Scully with some of her office work, did the painting for the cover of Mulder's second book, took the dog to the beach to play frisbee. Tash invariably came home from the beach jaunts smelling of coconut, a bandanna tied around his neck, a partied-out glaze to his eye.

"What's your earliest memory of Grandpa?" Matthew was asking Scully.

"When I was a baby we were stationed in the port city of Nagoya, on Honshu, and everyone used to swear that there was no way I could remember this - but I remember watching him feeding seagulls."

Beneath the table Mulder's hand found Scully's leg.

Arable knelt on her chair, poking mesmerized at the contents of her plate. Suddenly she squealed, and flicked something over at William. "Idiots!"

The boys roared. "Oh, good," said William. "We weren't sure if it would survive being baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes." He picked up the black plastic spider and sucked it clean. "I can't believe she got it," he said to Matthew. "I couldn't remember which corner it was in."

"That's not food grade plastic, William," Scully said. "Think of the carcinogens."

"Yeah, William, the toxic fumes of a baked plastic spider," Matt chastised.

"I'm thinking," said William, blinking his sleepy Mulder-eyes.

"Well, this is the best carcinogenic lasagna I've ever had," said Mulder. "Salad, Matt?"

"Lasagna Arachnid, an old family recipe," said William.

Arable leaned over close to him, whispering something.

"No, you're a geek," William said happily.

"Math geek." Arable pointed her fork at him.

"Fossil geek."

"Art geek," they both said to Matthew.

There was a thoughtful silence.

"Science geek," said Mulder to Scully.

"UFO geek!" cried the table at large, pointing at Mulder. Arable laughed so hard that she had to lay her head on the table. Mulder smiled contentedly, and had a sip of wine.

"Now what exactly is a geek, again?" Scully asked.

"Geeks bite the heads off things," said Mulder. "Ozzy Osbourne was a geek. His children, alas, are merely gaffs."

"I'm sorry I knocked down your wall, Mulder," Arable lisped sweetly.

"Ah, that was you."

"She drives like Batman," said William. "Like Cruella de Vil."

"It's just that the dog was in the way. I swerved."

"It always sounds weird when they call us the Mulders, doesn't it?" asked William. Arable looked up, but said nothing.

"Yes, it sounds strange," said Scully. "It makes me think of a house full of Mulders."

"There's a Mulder hosing down the basketball court, a Mulder in the kitchen opening a can of dog food - "

"A Mulder reading a Bigfoot newsletter, a Mulder taking a nap upstairs," Scully said.

"A Mulder in his den penning a bestselling mystery series," said Mulder.

"A Mulder playing Scrabble with another Mulder," said Arable, who loved to play Scrabble with Mulder.

"Ten Mulders finally getting the weeds cut down by the pond," said Scully. "And one upstairs giving me a back rub." Mulder looked at her with interest.

"Mulder," Arable said, as the boys cleared the table, "Want to see the kilim I made? It took five months, I made it on a hand loom."

"Oh, Ar's rug," said William. "Terrible Arable and the Loom of Doom."

"Shut up."

"It's geometric," said Mulder, feeling it with his fingers.

"She knit her music thingy a sweater," said William. "She's like an old lady, knitting and watching TV."

"Shut up. It's William Morris. This part is llama hair I got off the fence."

"Alpaca," Mulder corrected, preoccupied. "What's the difference between llamas and alpacas?" he quizzed, holding the plate of cake up in the air, the dog begging at his feet. There was a hole in the knee of his jeans, and Scully couldn't take her eyes off him.

"Alpacas are smaller; they have better fiber quality," William supplied over his shoulder, rinsing plates.

"It's amazing, Arable," Mulder said of the rug, and probably meaning it, if Scully knew him. Mulder had hung onto every plaster of Paris handprint, every noodle macrame objet d'art William had ever brought home from school. "I wish I had a kilim like that in my study," Mulder said.

Arable looked distressed. "I'd like to give it to you, but I already promised to my mom."

"This is the last time," Scully said suddenly. They all looked at her. "I mean, next week Matt will be in Big Sur, and then we're off to Europe, so this is probably the last time we'll all eat together."

Arable looked distressed, folding up her rug and keeping her head down. William was kicking his shoe against the sole of Matthew's foot.

Mulder might not have heard. He was looking into the dog's eyes and smiling.

_________________

Mulder plucked a kelp-like lasagna noodle from the sink's trap and shot a dash of Clorox down the drain, rasping out the stainless steel basin with a pot scrubber, even though he'd have a bleach sore throat the rest of the evening. He finished wiping the table, tossed the sponge across the room into the sink and took a sip from an unclaimed and tepid bottle of beer. He leaned against the counter, ankles crossed, his legs still jellyish from running too hard in the heat, his troublesome knee throbbing. The TV was on in the empty living room, and the dishwasher paused and clicked, keeping time under its breath.

He sighed, intently savoring the moment alone, his thoughts fanning out and then circling back and homing in on himself, on the jangling sensation in his chest.

He thought he heard music somewhere, but it was the cicadas doing a loud fade-up. It was the Kitsunegari case that he'd had nudging in the back of his mind, not Modell that time, but the moment when she'd -

Mulder closed his eyes.

He turned off the TV before he left the house. Lisa Simpson was in her 33rd year as a second-grader at Springfield Elementary. For a long moment Mulder stood patting the doorpost and looking up the dark stairs. Then he went outside.

It was a soft black night, the yard light just touching the flagstones he'd laid along the side of the garage where Scully and William had planted lavender and cosmos.

He walked around the side of the house in the dark, avoiding the wheelbarrow and a wadded garden hose. The kids were lounging in one end of the lap pool, sharing the tail end of the bottle of wine. "Shit, it's the Feds," Matthew said.

William had his arms folded on the warm concrete, and he laid his cheek down and looked sweetly up at Mulder. Arable wore a black T-shirt over her swimsuit, and kept her arms folded across her chest.

Mulder had reached that happy age when he no longer cared if he appeared incredibly dorky in the eyes of the young. Scully thought he was cool, and that was all that mattered. The kids paid selective attention to him. They were instantly bored by his lectures intending to dispense a profusion of wisdom accumulated over a diverse lifetime, yet they were always ready to hear about the time he escaped from a Siberian gulag armed only with a filed-down butter knife. William loved to feel Mulder's bicep and look at his gunshot wounds, count the holes in his head; he loved the story of Tooms and the escalator.

Below his wooly hindquarters the dog's hind leg was wet to the hip, his hock skinny and black. "Matthew tried to pull him in," said William.

"If there's dog hair in the pool filter, your mother will have a fit," said Mulder, but he didn't know why he bothered. Half a dozen dog toys floated on the narrow strip of water, and locust leaves eddied in the corners. The dog was the only one who swam laps with any sort of New Year's-type resolve. The novelty of owning a pool had quickly worn off, although, to his credit, not long ago Mulder had fooled around with Scully in this very spot, while William was away at Scuba camp.

Scully, very hungry and bitey and naked under the moon, her hair slicked back, her wet breasts in the starlight -

Mulder cleared his throat, and in a burst of industry knelt on the edge and grabbed at a baseball floating nearby, its horsehide gnawed through to the string core. It slipped slimily from his fingers. He leaned farther and the ball popped up out of the water, twirling into the center of the pool; Mulder stretched farther, calling "Wilson!" for levity.

The three of them watched him impassively. He had caught them, he realized, in the middle of a discussion or group thought. Matthew leaned back on his elbows, preoccupied, a shell choker around his golden neck, a clove cigarette stuck to his lip. Mulder had happened to be around when the kid was born, and had known him his whole life. Matt was broadly sunny, easy to be around, and Mulder was grateful for the closeness between the two cousins.

William was more down inside himself, always playing online chess, reading foreign comic books, or making a spear with a flake of chert. As a half-grown kid with braces, he'd had a sudden smile that hurt Mulder's heart. Mulder had never really gotten over the astonishment of producing William. It made him realize all the more what Emily could have meant.

Matthew's clove was burned halfway down. "Gimme that," Mulder said sternly. He tapped his bare foot on the tiled edge of the pool and inhaled until the roach crackled, letting the cicadas come loud inside his head. He wiggled his toes in the water.

"That's not the kind you hold in," Matthew said, grinning.

"I know," Mulder said, his voice squeaking amiably. "Were you the slackers who painted 'Class of 2020' up on The Boulders?" he asked William and Arable.

William smiled with one corner of his mouth. "We aren't the only kids who graduated this year, Dad."

"My God," Arable sighed, looking up at the stars, "who has time for vandalism?"

Along with William, she had spent part of the summer in a youth program apprenticed to Public Works - Round-Upping dandelions and painting over graffiti, quickly jaded by the prevalence of crushed soft-drink cups, sun-cooked filth and syringes that seemed to fill the world. England would be different for her, Mulder thought. Much different. She would always be cold, for one thing.

Mulder, cheering up, sank down into a crouch. His eyes met William's. He licked clove oil from his lip, feeling better, passing the cigarillo back into Matthew's wet fingers. "If your mom smells this, I'm history."

"To her, we're all history," William said quietly, and the cicadas went dead for several seconds.

Mulder glared at him, hurt beyond words, and rose and stamped away into the dark.

The land fell away at the back of the house and beneath the deck there was ample space for a defunct rototiller, a fiberglass kayak, a rotting box of floor tiles. It was also the perfect place for an eavesdropping child to sit and listen to the conversations above.

It was there, Mulder suspected, that William had first absorbed the problem they had discussed, or refused to discuss - for years - "I don't want to talk about it. There's nothing to talk about." At any rate, William seemed utterly aware of Scully's problem from the first.

William and Mulder never really talked about it, but there were other ways of communicating, notebooks left lying around, articles appearing on Mulder's desk. Early in the summer William had borrowed the neighbor's little brush tractor and carved a Golden Mean Spiral into the weedy hillside below the house, carefully marking out its geometric curl with stake and string.

Mulder could see the pale swathes fairly well when he climbed the little peak above their property, but it wasn't until it was mistaken for a crop circle and a local news station sent out a helicopter that he realized William's intent. On the evening news the snail stood on the hill, a pale curl moving inward, the footpath a geometric demarcation across it. It looked like a maze, like infinity, like a gunshot wound to the head.

Mulder spent an afternoon in the library at UCLA. In the Sacred Geometry school of thought, the Golden Mean Spiral was a valve binding together the ethereal and material worlds. Aristotle called it the middle between two extremes. It spiraled inward infinitesimally, ultimately breaking the third dimension, a rogue Fibonacci sequence playing forward, without end.

"It's the universal symbol for love," Scully said, out of nowhere, while they were drinking tea in the arbor.

William groaned.

"Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it," Mulder said. A few days later he and Scully killed a snake in the spiral while the kids clambered nervously onto the bench with the dog.

The snake faced them in a sloppy wad. Scully calmly pinned it down with a stick, and Mulder leapt forward and sliced off the triangular head with a shovel. The garlicky snake-smell came up and the snake's body doubled upon itself. Mulder looked at Scully and wondered if her heart rate had even increased. Fear had left her and taken with it a whole dimension. Mulder sliced off the rattles and tossed them aside.

He was out of breath now, just walking up the steps through the lawn, and coming up below the deck to the back of the garage his chest felt squeezed. It was back, the jangling panic, the anger at something he couldn't confront and couldn't fight, could hardly name, and the dismay that William, in the end, was the one who would be forced into facing the problem.

He was angry at Scully for being perfect and frozen and impossible to wholly love as an evolving woman over a lifespan, in the close comfort of middle age and on into everything life brings, through everything, the true, vital living Scully, whom he had somehow lost, and who had been replaced by a Scully who was afraid and trapped, who took the coward's way and couldn't admit what she was doing to the rest of them.

He was afraid his heart would break when William left, William, who was like himself and Scully synthesized, all brains and heart, so that Mulder had twice as much to worry about as he once had, with William out there walking around, doing the stupid things that kids do.

Mulder was afraid he himself had let the family down, by not being brilliant enough, after all, when it counted.

He stared into the sparkling valley, his knees in the lavender, and glancing around caught sight of a silvery wet shoulder.

His bare feet patting the warm flagstones, reflexively he took the boy's face in his hands and kissed him on his flossy head, which was nearly at the height of Mulder's. William's pheasant hair smelled of memory, of suntan lotion and tomato sauce and a base note, fundamental, of the salty sun-basted ledge rock from the beaches of Mulder's own youth. The smell of him made Mulder loop-the-loop in time.

"It's okay." Mulder's throat was tight. Water leached into the thigh of his jeans from wet swimming trunks, all the world ending and somehow the worst of it being the never-ending bits, which existed, he saw now, in tiny pockets here and there: the Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish and styrofoam and Bismuth-209 and atoms that have existed since the Big Bang and still free-float, on and on into forever, living their lives as larkspur and Greenlanders and stop signs. There was Philospher's Stone and the Holy Grail, direct mind-computer interface. There were fictional immortality precedents too: Hercules, Nosferatu, Freddy Krueger, Satan.

William held onto him hard. "...Something happened?" he asked into Mulder's T-shirt.

"Sometimes I'm just so troubled by a lot of things," Mulder tried to explain, and evade.

"Me too." William's forehead balanced against his shoulder.

"I had a little sister," said Mulder, desperately trying to catch sight of the stars in the dim smoggy void above him. "I still miss her so much." William's head nodded under Mulder's cupped hand. "Sometimes it seems like my life stopped when she left, and then it started again when I met Scully," Mulder confessed. "Sometimes it seems like it's still stopped. And then there's you. But you're not her, you're not Samantha. And it still doesn't make sense to me that I'll never see her again."

"What happened, Dad?" William asked. He was not inquiring about the past. Light flecked a crescent of wet eyeball as he blinked. A wind curved through the patio and William's arms went to wet gooseflesh under Mulder's hands. William was born tuned in, and he wasn't missing anything now. "Has it happened?" he asked.
________________

Mulder stood in the kitchen with the dog watching him. He listened to a car start up and roll out of the driveway. The dog's kibble had been topped off. The kitchen was clean, the counters cleared and wiped, and it was this ordinary functionality that seemed incredible to him. Mulder's day had ceased to contain a mote of reality, and he couldn't balance the disparate elements. The boy's mother put a gun to her head, the boy shot some hoops and loaded the dishwasher. The dog slept against the door, pedaling through a dream.

"Could someone just stop?" William had asked when he was eleven. It wasn't the first time Mulder just got up and left the room, and it wouldn't be the last. Scully thought Mulder's inability to discuss the issue was more damaging than the actual discussion would be.

Mulder thought that it was just that - an inability. And not that Scully was so great about discussing these things, either.

That was the year William started reading Einstein. That was the year he became a physicist.

It hurt to watch William throwing himself into this puzzle as if he were born to it. "He's turning into you," Scully said once, and she did not mean it as a compliment.

Mulder put his hand on the rail and walked slowly up the stairs, struggling against a great fatigue, and the aged dog labored after him.

In the bedroom doorway he got his shoulder comfortable against the jamb. William lay in bed with Scully, her hand clasped between both of his, the look on his face as he lay looking at her fingers the same expression he had when he watched a fire on the beach, a meditative look.

Scully turned her head and when her eyes met Mulder's he saw that he had already been shut out of the scientific part of it, anyway, and here was the real problem: this problem of metaphysics had become a matter of science.

The old dog went to Scully's side and rested his chin on the bed, waiting for her to meet his eyes, focusing on her all the love he could muster.

Mulder felt rather than heard the discussion resuming as he turned and went downstairs.

____________________

It was one more beautiful day. Scully untwisted the sheet from her ankle and padded into the bathroom. Mulder stood at the sink in his boxer shorts anointing his armpit, a toothbrush protruding from the corner of his mouth. He turned on the faucet for cover noise so she could pee. Scully picked up her panties with her toes and overhanded them into the hamper, ran her hand down Mulder's silky back as she turned on the shower. He muttered something around his toothbrush.

She stood under the lukewarm water and looked at the little sky blue window lined with shampoo bottles, and felt the small shift in water pressure as he rinsed his toothbrush. Mulder pulled open the shower curtain and leaned in for a kiss, eyes wandering downward. "Breakfast in twenty."

Scully smiled, idly washing.

Mulder took her chin and looked at her hard, and kissed her again, making it stick. The curtain snapped closed and a draft swirled over her, and the bathroom door was shut.

_________________

They brushed a few fallen grape leaves aside and sat around the low table in the arbor. Scully lifted a cobalt glass of orange juice, letting the sunlight drip into it. Mulder doled out scrambled eggs, toasted buttered bagels, sliced strawberries and kiwi.

William put down Robinson Crusoe and picked up the paper and rumpled it around. "Mom, say you're on a desert island."

"Hmm?" Scully asked.

"... You can only take three books."

"Does the encyclopedia count as one book?" Mulder asked.

"I don't want to be on a desert island," Scully said.

"If you're stuck on one with me you won't be needing any books," Mulder said, working his eyebrow.

"Three books, Mom," William pressed.

Scully's eyes moved back and forth between them. "The OED," she said.

"That's one."

"Could she have thirty years of The New England Journal of Medicine bound together in one volume?" Mulder asked. "Would that count?"

"You couldn't lift it," said William.

"Maybe you could start a signal fire."

"You could use it for a raft," said William. "You could brush up on bursitis while drifting toward the shipping lanes."

"I don't want to be on a desert island," said Scully.

"Mom, what was Dad like when you met him?" William asked, hunched over his plate.

"He was - " Scully stopped, because it was impossible to think of that time without remembering the excitement of discovery. She met Mulder's eyes. "In VICAP they had said that his intuition was scary. He would be talking about absolutely ridiculous things, and at the same time giving the impression of being one of the most forthright people you had ever met in your life. And he lived in this rattly little apartment, where he slept on the couch like a vampire."

"Vampires don't sleep on the couch," Mulder said curtly, biting into a bagel.

"You know what I mean." Scully crossed her arms in an X over her chest. "He was always typing and thinking, and most people annoyed him, but he would talk to me, and I loved that about him. He would talk to me like it was important to him that I understood."

"And my apartment wasn't all that rattly," Mulder said. "It was a stylin' pad."

"It was this dark, musty little stylin' pad," Scully told William, "down in Old Town Alexandria, with a view of the alley and a bullet hole in the wall."

Mulder stood up and picked up his plate. "I thought you liked that apartment. You told me it meant 'me' to you."

"Oh, I did love that apartment," Scully said genuinely.

"Anyway, it doesn't exist anymore."

"What?" Scully asked, half rising.

"They knocked it down," Mulder said lightly, turning through the French doors.

Scully followed him into the kitchen. "What? How do you know? When?" Her eyes weren't adjusting to the dark interior.

"Last time I was in D.C., when I stopped to catch up with Skinner. It was a couple of years ago. I drove by the ol' stomping grounds, and the building had been demolished."

Scully turned and left the kitchen and went down the steps into the yard. Halfway down the hillside a bench sat sideways, facing the neighbor's bitten llama field. Alpacas. Whatever. Scully idled along the gravel path, plucking at the heads of the tarweed, and settled on the bench with her arms around one knee. The coastal mist hanging in the sunlight made her feel dislocated and oddly safe, as if the outside world had gone away and she had nothing further to worry about.

It was the thought of that space still existing, hanging on its own in the air, the swirl of microbes where they had spent so much time together, a space that meant 'Mulder' to her. How could it be gone? William might have been conceived there.

William came down the path, barefoot, in shorts, tanned, hung over, Scully's beautiful son, so fresh in his youth, so mortal and precious. He sank down beside her, sighing, and rubbed his face.

"Did you feed the ducks?" Scully asked.

"Yes, I fed the ducks." He hunched over, elbows on his thighs, staring at nothing, and she put her hand on his back.

Scully's old dog came down the path, padding and guilty, one ear turned inside out.

"What's he have?" The dog had a bit of plastic bag stuck on his tooth. William freed it. "Has he been into the garbage?" Scully asked, of no one, and of the universe.

William pulled the dog's lips up into a ferocious curl, growling as he did it. Old Tash's tail wagged doggedly on. He blinked milkily in the sunlight. "Scully, Scully, why don't you love me?" William made the dog say in a high voice.

"I don't want to let myself love you, Tash," Scully said to the dog, quite seriously, ignoring William. "And I don't ever want to have a dog again."

Mulder came down the path with two cups of coffee. William threw himself back and rubbed his face and lay draped backwards over the bench staring so riveted at the sky that Scully looked up, but there was nothing there. Mulder sat down on the other side of Scully and put his arm around her.

"Did you feed those ducks of yours?" Mulder asked over Scully's head.

"Yes, I fed the damn ducks," William said.

"In your bare feet?" Scully asked. "Do you need me to show you a work-up on hookworm? On avian flu?"

William snorted lazily. Scully was starting to feel the sun, but she had ceased to seriously sunburn. She leaned back in Mulder's arm. The ducks came up the path, Indian Runner ducks narrow and upright, with their dour beaks, two fawn, two blue, peeping as they walked. The fawn drake had a roguish bandit mask across his eyes, and he faced William, quacking loudly.

"These ducks don't look fed," said Scully.

"I swear they're fed."

The ducks stood out of reach, commenting among themselves. Tash's tail thumped and his eyes rolled guiltily at Scully.

"I guess I forgot to tell you about my apartment," Mulder said.

Scully swallowed hard. "I'm sorry, it just - hurts. I mean, Hegal Place." She sniffed against his neck, chuckled and rubbed her teary eyes against him.

"So, there's this guy?" Mulder said. "I think he was Russian. He survived without ill effect a horrific 10,000-volt electric shock which naturally caused him to arrive at the obvious conclusion that he was immortal." Mulder paused, and sipped his coffee. "So. He's in his early forties, he's got years ahead of him, right? Either way. So, this guy invites the media to watch him drink a litre of anti-freeze."

"So, what happened?" asked William.

Mulder twitched irritably. "What do you think happened? He fell into a coma and died. Do I need to show you a blood work-up on anti-freeze?" He glanced at Scully, but all the fight seemed to have gone out of him. The ducks turned in a squadron and hurried down the hill. William leapt up and pitched a rock hard across the field.

Mulder got up too, and stood with his hands on his hips. "I'm going to re-mow it."

William shook his head evasively, standing on one leg and plucking at the weeds with his curled toes, hands in the pockets of his shorts.

"Why not?" Mulder asked him.

"Don't badger me, Dad. Let it go. It's my portal recipe, not yours."

Mulder grabbed William's arm and put him in a hammerlock. "Yeah, but it's on my property," he pointed out. William blinked peacefully, Mulder's arms around him. Mulder put his chin on William's shoulder and smiled at Scully. "Look, Scully, this kid is going to be bigger than either of us!"
____________________

Home   Page 1 Page 3   Page 4