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PARABIOSIS
by Penumbra (penumbra23@hotmail.com)
S/MSR/Rated R/315K
Timeline: Sixth Extinction through Requiem
Summary: Science and Mysticism conjoin
Tagline: Exceptions Prove The Rule
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"You want to hear my mummy theory?" he asks in the bath.

"Hit me." The wet kelp of her hair sticks to his chin as she reclines
against him. Earlier, she yelped and gasped, and knocked a candle,
hissing, into the water. He smells hot freesia wax, wet woman's hair,
female smells in his dingy bathroom.

"Our mummy has gone to Albuquerque."

"Mulder..." she growls and sighs. His arms around her slippery body
ride out the upheaval. She speaks with exasperated precision. "A
cadaver stuffed with natron reanimates and locomotes its way to New
Mexico. How's it going to get there, Mulder, thumb down a dromedary?"

The mirror he wedged over the faucets is fogged, but in a water
streak he can partially see her face, her eyes heavy-lidded, color in her
cheeks. His dark head is above hers, his arms are crossed beneath her
chin. She turns her head and idly licks a drop of bath water from his
shoulder.

This isn't real, he thinks.

This cannot possibly be happening.
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Brain Salad Surgery...Manta Rays...Mulder's Cosmos
...Altitudinal...The Elusive Idaho Skunkape...Helter-Skelter...
Endtime Prophecies...Into Sammyville...Zero At The Bone...
Gorman Fossick's Rolling Meth Lab...The Thanksgiving Fiasco...
One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts...Perigee-Syzygy
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"It's me," she called as she let herself in.

"It's you," he answered from the bedroom. They had quarreled at their
last encounter - she was jet-lagged and he'd had brain surgery - but
they both forgot it now in the little moment of seeing each other
again.

She stopped in the bedroom doorway and summed him up as she slipped
off her shoes. He looked terrible, bandaged and tragic. She tried to
remember at what he point he had begun to make her feel everything so
acutely.

Lobotomies went out of fashion in the '30s, when electroshock therapy
became the rage. If anyone ever touched him again they were going to
learn the true meaning of pain.

"This is hard-core sloth, Scully - you may want to avert your eyes."
His bed was a rock slide of books and folders, with Mulder tangled in
the middle, sitting up in one of his gray T-shirts. He brightened at
the sight of her, or perhaps at the pizza box that she tossed on the
bed like appeasement proffered an active volcano.

"Rough day, Mulder?" Fox Mulder had quixotic theories, dark eyes, and
he was six feet of long warm bones in the bed. She had been making a
fool of herself over him for years, staying in a ridiculous job
because Mulder was tall and mumbly and had once tried to make her
drink sardine juice.

She held out a plastic shopping bag. "Here. Happy late birthday." She
felt awkward about giving him a gift, even just a Yankees baseball
cap, so she sat down and opened her Anasazi book.

Mulder lifted his face with a misty expression. "...Sports
memorabilia, pizza and G-women...what more could a guy wish for in
life?" he asked her.

She felt her equilibrium yaw. She supposed it was a figurative
question. Somewhere between a beach of slaughtered mantas and the
moment in Georgetown when she found him too catatonic to meet her
eyes, he had fostered an ability to make her ultra-aware of herself
in relation to him.

She was conscious that this was the highlight of her day - Mulder's
quiet apartment with its good antiques and its bad feng shui, the
tilt of his Frankenstein head as he fished a piece of green pepper out of
the neck of his T-shirt. Scully ate a slice of pizza with a plate and
fork, and they watched the news. He did not mention the stars, and
she did not expect him to.
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Distressed, she ran south once, away from the ship. Over reflective
sand she ran barefoot, mindful of skates, of jellyfish. She was
pushed through with fear. Sun-glare off the slopping water and the slash of
air in her lungs tore and scattered the things about him she usually
kept level, kept undeclared and salted away.

In a cove around the second point, she encountered a killing field of
butchered manta rays, the remains of a netful of devilfish that had
been dressed out for the market in Abidjan. Their little black faces
with the spiky ears reminded her of Batman's cowl. They were
filleted, and scattered, stiffening. A skin of flies lay over all.

Scully walked among them. The presence of death calmed her down and
directed her thoughts. She had come to the source of the matter, and
she would untangle his riddled fate here in the cradle of life. She
brushed at tears with the same saline content as the water athunder
beside her. She remembered Mulder calling her dog 'Quahog'. He had
held her child in his arms. He pointed out an airplane window at
Venus. He tore a page from a book and walked away.
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He read through the translations she'd made that day, enjoying the
way her notebook was battered and foreign. It said 'Cahier' on the cover;
it was stained with sand and locust spit. There was an amateurish
sketch of a pelican at the bottom of one page and a grocery list in
the back cover. (Oranges, eggs, lantern mantles.)

She had walked into the hospital, the flash of her cerebral cortex
like aurora in the night of his mind. It was the most revelatory
moment of his life. She was more tender and profound than she ever
let on, worn raw with feeling. He would never again doubt that she loved
him.

When he got home from the hospital he discovered that his bedroom
ceiling had Big Banged into some kind of astronomical smatter - it
was stippled with glow-in-the-dark stars. There were even stars on the
walls, giving a dome effect, and a few had fallen to the floor where
they lay in inventive constellations, simmering in the dark. When he
arose in the night he felt that he was moving out into the universe,
that Scully had described a limitless domain into which he might
tread.

He stole a look at her as she pressed open her book and touched a
passage with her finger. Lately there was a little curl at the tips
of her hair that was driving him quietly mad. After their time apart her
Hibernian features pierced him anew. And among her many glints of
sagacity, she could now read Ancient Navajo.
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That first night in the hospital his mother entered late at night and
caught them in bed together.

Teena Mulder ignored her and touched her son, her eyes narrowing with
love the way Mulder's own sometimes did. Mulder lay oblivious,
bushwhacked by pain killers. His mother's presence was so unobtrusive
that Scully closed her eyes after awhile, too exhausted to maintain
embarrassment. Under the blanket she clasped his homey fingers.

Before his mother left, she laid her hand on Scully's head. They
looked at each other levelly. This small, fierce woman, thought Teena
Mulder. This miraculous woman who would save her son.

Scully lay dreamily after she left. She turned her head and let the
vital scrape of him sift beneath her lips. This, then, was pure
happiness, a tranquilized visionary, trepanned and inert. She drowsed
against him, the ocean that was between them folded up and put away.
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It is inconceivable, what begins to dawn on her. It is too
whole-souled, too astonishing. It is like one of Mulder's
far-fetched, preposterous theories, the kind that almost always come true.
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"Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep
out, hair by hair, disguised like the smoke that dispels them."
- Maxine Hong Kingston
'The Woman Warrior'
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The Bengal tigress pressed the limits of her cell in an endless
figure eight, her huge paws soundless on the cement floor. She had the loose
underskin of an aging feline. She paused from time to time and looked
straight into Scully's eyes, looked through her with the madness of a
thwarted hunter. Scully considered the juxtaposition of her own soft,
defenseless body powered by a superior brain. She felt a clutch of
weariness as her blood sugar dropped.

Scully's informant leaned on the rail to her left, a small man in a
gray windbreaker, his crew cut darkening in the falling mist. As a
small woman Scully was leery of short men; they often singled her out
because of their insecurities about their size. Scully was aware of
her prejudice against their prejudice.

She knew that Mulder hadn't considered her size in years. Somehow she
had slipped under the yellow 'do not cross' tape and preempted his
fixation with coltish brunettes, in-through-the-out-door sort of
chicks. On some days, in certain filters of mood, she knew that
Mulder was the love of her life. What concerned her most was the
unlikelihood that she could herself be the love of someone's life. Dana Scully,
cloistered, infecund, cantankerous; you had to wonder.

Although there were times when the look in his eyes convinced her
momentarily otherwise.

The man beside her shook his head, watching the tiger. "Payette
County, Idaho," he said. "Two years ago, with the snow melt, a road
washed out in the Payette National Forest. The Forest Service has
sought to rebuild, since there are still a few thousand acres in the
back country that they've neglected to log. During this interval,
however, the river has leaned into its new course. Rebuilding the
road would cause damage and erosion to the river bank, and that stretch of
the river harbors spawning beds for the endangered bull trout."

He turned and considered Scully, and his face was so plainly
unremarkable that her memory could not find a purchase on his
features. "Several ecology groups have gotten into the act," he said.
"Among them, radical environmentalists Earth First! They have
employed their usual tactics - tree sitting and barricading the roads. There
have been the usual arrests and people chaining themselves to back
hoes. What may interest you is a death that occurred in the area. At
first glance it would appear to be a hate crime, but nothing, as we
know, Agent Scully, is ever as it appears."

She wondered why all informants had to talk like they were on some
gritty cop drama. He drew out a manila envelope and handed it to her;
Scully did not open it. It was warm from being under his jacket.

He pointed to the tiger. "Now this, this is closer to the truth," he
said cryptically. He drew out a dollar bill, held it taut, and rolled
it over the rail. "Your partner will take the wrong lead," he said.
He handed her the bill. "You take the right one."

He was gone then, and Scully looked down at the money in her hand.
George Washington with his wooden teeth regarded her mildly.
Rubber-stamped beside his head was a speech balloon that said, 'I
grew hemp'. The tiger huffed, flaring her whiskers.

Scully clipped out of the zoo, and paused to let George spring for a
latte. She flicked open her cell phone and hit the speed dial, her
eyes brightening as she searched for her car, as she spoke to the
love of her life.
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Mulder zipped their sleeping bags together on a night when the big
pale moon soaked an open mountainside and raked shadows through
spinneys of skeletal pine. The trail was white granite sand checked
with fool's gold. Something came over Scully in the final mile and
she remembered the quivering nausea of chemotherapy. She had an intense
desire to lay down and never get up.

Mulder stopped on a switchback and canted her face to the moon,
examining her pupils. She pulled away, not really in the mood to be
doctored by someone who could barely keep 'starve a fever/feed a
cold' straight. They argued fitfully while Scully swallowed and stared at
his hiking boots, unamused by the sense of cosmic irony at play. So,
Mulder got seasick and she got altitude-sick. Rough justice, perhaps.

Who had the energy to commit a crime at eight thousand feet? A
murder, no less. Scully barely had the strength to pry off her boots as she
lay on a boulder watching upside down as Mulder put up his tent. She
was cold and sick, not about to eat whatever freeze dried delectables
he had seen fit to procure. There was clear water cupped in a
depression in the boulder, she dipped her finger and traced it over
her dry lips.

"Parmesan stroganoff with broccoli, mmm," said Mulder convincingly.

"I didn't realize haute cuisine was one of the perks of mountain
climbing with you." Scully was already in bed, watching him through
the open tent flaps.

"Ye of little faith," said Mulder reprovingly, boiling water in a
tiny pan over a tiny stove.

"What's this deal with the sleeping bags, Mulder?" she asked,
lowering her tone.

Mulder carefully poured hot water into a foil pouch. "Well, I for one
don't want to freeze," he drawled, not looking up. "But if you'd
rather have it the other way, that's fine with me." He held up a
plastic spork and examined it incuriously.

There was no way she was moving again. Her dizziness subsided as she
began to acclimatize, and she felt oddly content lying in the
subalpine wilderness listening to Mulder brush his teeth. She
realized that they were the only two people within the frame of the horizon,
cut off, as ever, by their strange and unfathomable pursuits.

He filled the tent suddenly. "Taste," he said, holding out a crimp of
snow, his support hand wedging the sleeping bag against her thigh,
and she looked up at him, sleepy and confused in the eerie white twilight.
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"No. What?" she asks.

"It'll make you feel better."

"No...Mulder - jet fuel, acid rain, fallout - " Obviously she is not
at the top of her game, listing only three things. He shakes his head
overridingly.

"Taste."

Scully opens her mouth and he drops in the melty slip of snow. The
tip of his finger accidentally brushes her tongue; she thinks she sees
something sharpen in his eyes before he turns away.

His finger was salty, unclean. It leaves a stroke of taste on the
edge of her tongue.

She is still savoring it long after the snow is gone.
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Mulder hummed a snatch of ZZ Top as he climbed in beside her. The
tent was wall-to-wall bedding and Mulder's swear-by-it silver space
blanket. Even with all the clothes she was wearing she knew she would
be grateful for his heat. They kept their distance, like octopi in a
jar. Mulder folded his hands behind his head despite the chill; she
pulled the sleeping bag over her nose and they looked up through the
no-see-um netting at the moon. Two nights together in a bed in Kansas
had been awkward, but this was a different tension, borne of an
astounding promise she had made a few weeks before with the touch of
her thumbs.

Mulder remembered that promise and something else she had once said
associating sleeping bags with gettin' lucky. He hoped she wasn't
worried he was remembering any of that now.

Scully remembered and felt a flare of apprehension. She rationalized
that Mulder wouldn't have to go to such elaborate lengths just to get
her into bed. He knew that, didn't he? Mulder shifted, and the
sleeping bag slid against her body.

"A bipedal primate," she said, to break the silence.

Mulder recognized her opening gambit, stomping on their common
ground. "A strain of wild hominid," he said, taking up the thread.
"Documented throughout time and in most parts of the world. There's the Chinese
Yeren, which is quite small; the Florida Skunkape; the South African
Waterbobbejan; the Vietnamese Wild Man; the Sumatran Orang Pendek;
Bigfoot; the Australian Yowie; the Nepalese Yeti; and the Mongolian
Alma, which allegedly uses primitive tools."

"A 'Skunkape', Mulder?" Scully asked. She would never quite admit to
herself how much she enjoyed listening to Mulder explain the
inexplicable.

"They stink, Scully," said Mulder patiently.

"I think 'alleged' is the operative word here, Mulder..." She felt
herself relax fractionally, as they slipped into their habit of
quibble. Folklore and fables, myths and fish stories, Mulder believed
them all. And she, who was sent to confound his work, only found
herself gathered into the bafflement, tilting at unnatural worlds
with her own innate curiosity.

In the night she snapped awake, surprised that she had fallen asleep
and that she was now much closer to Mulder than she'd started out.
Perhaps they were on an incline. The moon had drifted over several
hours worth of sky.

There was something outside. She heard it then, a deep blow of breath
that made the back of her neck tingle. They had come to investigate
the scene of an unexplained and brutal attack, and she felt
vulnerable and blind inside the tent. There was the movement of weight shifting
over crushed stone, then the carnassial grind of tricuspids in
polymer.

Beside her, Mulder gave a sharp sniff of awareness. In her midnight
daze it seemed right to have him there, like another part of her
consciousness. They got up without saying anything and knelt together
on the space blanket. Scully felt along the wall of the tent for her
gun.

"My clip is out there in my pack," Mulder whispered sheepishly. He
seemed to be more awake than her, and she passed her weapon to him,
leaning past him to open the tent. His head was beside hers, and she
had only to turn her face to whisper in his ear. "With bears, your
best chance at piercing the skull is to go in through the sinus
cavity."

Mulder sat back on his knees, his grin faint in the moonlight. They
listened to the crumping of fangs. "What if it's something else?
Skunkapes can go to three hundred pounds." He rubbed his face
thoughtfully. "Scully, I'm not going to shoot some poor old bear," he
said seriously.

"You may not feel so magnanimous if he's gotten to your turkey
jerky," she said, feeling exhilarated to be up in the middle of the night,
about to go into battle. Mulder seemed to feel the same way. She saw
his head raised, and heard his soft chuckle. It must be the thin air
that was making her feel so giddy.

Mulder handed her back her weapon. "I defer to your marksmanship," he
whispered. "Safety's off."

She crawled in front of him, and rolled her shoulders once as he
unzipped the tent.

On the white slope of sand the black bear clawed at Mulder's
possessions, bulky as a panzer, the tintype moonlight rolling along
his autumn hide. Scully was outside, feeling the cold planet through
the knees of her sweats. The bear turned, pricking small round ears.
He waved his muzzle at them, observing them by scent. He ambled a
step forward.

"FBI, freeze!" Scully yelled, preparing to discharge a round above
her head, her shoulder tilted to plug her ear.

The bear turned and rambled off flat-footed, smacking his cloyed
tongue unhappily.

"I guess he didn't want no trouble with the law," Mulder said over
her shoulder. "I didn't think there would be bears up here above the tree
line."

The bear had eaten everything but Scully's six-grain cereal,
confirming Mulder's suspicions of its palatability. "Even a bear
wouldn't eat that stuff, Scully," he would say the rest of his life.
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"If there's one thing I know about women, it's that their feet are
always cold. Especially in the mountains in November," Mulder said.

Scully wondered what else Mulder knew about women. She decided not to
argue, turning away and getting her cheek comfortable on her folded
jeans, her feet casually coming to rest against him. He was solid and
warm, and she was reminded how long and heavy his body was in
comparison to hers.

"Ice," said Mulder, disapprovingly. "You know that I hate thinking
I've caused you to suffer."

"Don't be melodramatic," she said sleepily. "It's nothing like the
South Pole."

"Still, I'd hate to lose you to hypothermia this late in the game."
She heard him exhale. "I can't imagine going Skunkape hunting with
anyone but you."

Scully cast about unproductively for a flip reply. She closed her
eyes and held the sense of the moment within her. It had long ceased to
seem strange that her affiliation with Mulder was the most
connective, significant relationship of her life, despite a lack of physicality.

"You know, I thought you were about to Mirandize that bear," he said
quickly, to cover his confession. "How did you know where to shoot a
bear, Scully?"

"You know, if there's one thing I know about men, Mulder, it's that
they never know when to quiet down and go to sleep," she said easily.

"Ah, so you have experience in these matters," said Mulder. She
sensed his interest in the topic.

"Maybe..." She stretched her back a little and yawned. "But you seem
to have some experience with women's feet."

"Maybe," said Mulder. "But you seem to have experience bedding down
with talkative men."

"Perhaps," said Scully, "but it's been awhile and I'm a little rusty
at the getting-them-to-shut-up part."

"Well," said Mulder lamely, "you can't win 'em all." They were two
soldiers, bonded through adversity, and they were well aware of each
other's tactics. She smiled to herself in the dark, and Mulder
guessed that she smiled, and they lay silent together before they
went their separate ways to sleep.
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When he awoke in the grey light Scully was snugged tight against his
side, completely submerged, and his arm was crooked above her head to
trap her heat. It had been years since he'd awoken to the symbiosis of
a warm body aligned with his, and he blinked in adjustment. Mulder
loved to be touched, and he loved to be loved, and he denied himself
these things out of a sense that he must sacrifice himself to nobler
ends.

He was careful not to let out any heat as he slipped from the bed.
Outside he boiled water over the minute canister stove, and made
instant coffee from a foil packet dented by bear's teeth.

He carried his cup around the gully in the fog, gleaning dead wood. He
imagined that he was some kind of desperado and Scully was his feisty
little gun moll. They hid out in the high places and life was pure and
as simple as keeping the campfire small and not silhouetting oneself
on the ridge line.

He had to admit to himself that he would manage to complicate any life
he inhabited. Scully would be the first to point out that he was not a
peaceable being.

He built a campfire purely for the pleasure of watching her stand over
it, warming her hands in the smoke. She gripped a cup of coffee and
wore the shell-shocked stare of the newly-awoken. She had a pillow
crease in her cheek and long underwear on under her jeans. She was
damp, diaphanous, bed-haired early-morning gorgeous, and Mulder felt a
kind of religious awe that his life contained this moment.
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