Parabiosis ~  Page 10

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The feel of the highway grinding under her continues as she takes his
head in her hands. The moon swims in the window, the bed moves beneath
them, the sharp taste of his skin in her mouth, grit and bomb range,
him. All they ever do is travel. Commute, ride, fly. Even lying in bed
she is traveling, covering the miles, a moving target. She pushes his
jeans down like the unfolding hills rising around the road, she leans
into his cushy mouth, mmm, his hand up inside her bra, Mulder.

She is a weak, weak woman when it comes to this man.

"I miss you," he said in the car, cutting through the usual
pretensions of civilized behavior. Back in the car together everything
that had happened faded to a surreal background memory, just another
lap in the potato sack race of their lives.

"We're on the job, Mulder," she murmured, looking away. She folded her
arms to keep from touching him. She imagined his hands exploring the
front of her bra, which was a new one he had never seen. It was black.
Mulder would like it a lot.

Mulder, the eternal cosmological puzzle, tapped his thumbs on the
steering wheel to some internal rhythm. "Not really," he said after
awhile.

Their eyes met and she challenged him to change her mind. "We're
flying out in the morning," he said. "We can just say we were out all
night. We'll get up and drive to Vegas early. I'll pay for the room
myself."

"You plead an interesting case," she said, gazing out at the empty
scrub. They had never been together in a motel. At home they were
forever putting their hands over each other's mouths, trying to muffle
the rhythmic creaks of furniture. The chance to make a little noise
was inviting.

"To be perfectly honest," he confessed, "I was thinking of The Little
A'Le'Inn in Rachel."

Scully closed her eyes.

She weighed the tawdriness of a roadside motel for UFO freakazoids
against the fact that she could, if she so chose, have badly-needed
mind-blowing all-night sex with Fox Mulder. She saw that there was no
contest.

Mulder knew he had her, it had been weeks - she was weak just thinking
about him touching her. Fevered. She allowed her burning eyes to drift
briefly to his, then disdainfully looked away. The car shot along the
highway.

She sits on the bathroom counter watching him wash his penis in the
sink. The rushing water accumulates more quickly than the drain can
contend with. She wonders how women allow themselves to feel so
distant from men, when all she wants to find are her similarities to
him, to experience what it means to be him. She remembers the myth
about a man who will save the world. He is a seeker, Mulder. She
thinks of him as her para-amour.

He puts his brown hand on the counter beside her, leaning close,
rumbly-voiced. He touches her breastbone with his wet finger. "So.
When are you going to open up this burning heart of yours?"

"I thought you knew everything about me." Breathless, her knees
meeting his hips and subtly gripping.

"Hardly."

His eyes are depthless and she stares into them like a terrified
freeway animal. "I thought you were my burning heart."

"I don't think anyone's ever really known you." His thumb finds her
lips, that lightning-in-a-bottle feel of his touch.

"I'm not easy to love," she says. She'd like to explain herself to
him. "I'm not good at relationships. I'm hell to live with."

"I'll be the judge of all that," he says softly. He smiles, lips
brushing the corner of her mouth.
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"Oh, God, Mulder."

"Easy, easy, slow down," he coaxed. Her fingers kneaded his hair.

Their mouths collided, over and over. Somehow, they were good at this.
It felt too good to slow down. Sex hadn't felt anything like this in
her 20s. She couldn't believe that it was Mulder who wanted her like
this, cool, unattainable Mulder, Mr. My-Work-Is-My-Life.

Mulder seemed to forget the mutated and the saucerized as they
concentrated on this torturous meter, noses touching. She fingered the
deep groove in his back. She liked the way she could make him groan
against her mouth, make him forget himself until the only word left in
his vocabulary was her last name.

She rolled him onto his back and collected herself, studying his face.

"Actually, I've always found you very easy to love," he confessed.

"But then, obviously I never adhere to the norm."

"And obviously I've stayed in this job because I'm in love with you,"
she said. "What does everyone think? That I have an endless
fascination with Swamp Things? Come on."

"Come on," he whispered, pulling her forward.

"Oh God, Mulder," she said again.

"Yeah," he gasped, weaving his arms around her.

"Forever," she puffed, "forever is such an inadequate word."

"Spoken like a true scientist," he said in her ear. He looked over her
shoulder and saw lights in the sky.
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"Sir?" Scully yelled into her cell phone.

The 'motel' part of the Little A'Le'Inn Bar, Motel, & Restaurant
consisted of three or four mobile homes anchored on cement blocks at
the edge of the desert. Scully stood in the dirt parking lot and
stretched, the phone pressed to her ear, one hand in the small of her
back. Mulder, approaching with coffee, saw her wince. He had a few
tender spots himself.

"What the hell for?" Scully cried into the phone, hand over her ear,
head tilted to ameliorate reception. Mulder grinned, picturing
Skinner's face.

The sky was washing to morning glory blue as the last stars melted and
her warm fingers closed around his and the cup he was handing her.

Venus was still visible, half-blurred by the whip of dawn wind in his
watering eyes. The blue of the sky was duplicated exactly in her angry
irises and in the shirt under her jacket. He wanted to put his hands
around her waist and breathe the sexy smell of her neck, but she was
Agent Scully now, not the supple affectionate woman with whom he had
so recently shared a bed.

Scully scowled. "I see," she said, her tone conveying that she most
certainly did not see. She had a radiant divinity he'd seen replicated
in Renaissance madonnas in the Uffizi, in the Louvre, someone you
should get down on your knees before. Far-seeing eyes, ministering
hands, miraculous virgin women suddenly with child.

As he got out the car keys her roach stomper shot forward, pinning his
shadow to reddish Nevada dirt. Mulder was brought up short. She
snapped the phone shut. "Bastards!" she muttered. Mulder took the lid
off his coffee and inhaled, watching her over the cup. She glared at
him, sunlit. "Damn it, Mulder, they're auditing us!"
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That evening Scully went through her mail by the light of the fridge
while the neighbor's cat pushed a can of food around on the floor. All
she ever received were bills and junk mail. So thoroughly had she shut
herself off from her past that she barely got any Christmas cards any
more. Mulder's strange and stunning research might be the most
spellbinding work she'd ever done, but it came at a price. Sometimes
she wondered at the depth of her commitment to him, as though part of
her were standing back and watching, wondering how far she would take
it.

She picked up the cat, Tuck, who emitted a kitty belch. "Lovely," she
said, rubbing his velvety knucklehead. He was stout and orange with a
purr like an idling stock car. Crossing the hall, surreptitious in her
bathrobe, she deposited him back in his apartment. His people had gone
to Boston, and he watched her sorrowfully as she departed.

As Scully locked up his apartment, the door at the end of the hall
opened and Mulder appeared, slouching heroically. She could tell by
his striding, loose-hipped walk that he bore news.

He walked up to her and looked into her face. "Armyan Lillegard is
dead," he said shortly.

"How?" she asked.

She followed Mulder into her apartment, thinking again of that
underground room, and the blackened, atrophied thing on the table. It
was insanity to consider that it had once been mobile, that it had any
connection to Lillegard.

She watched Mulder plunder her fridge. "One percent!" he said
accusingly, holding up a carton of milk. "You might as well drink
water."

Scully folded her arms as she watched him pour a glass. The milk was
thin and blue.

Mulder turned, licking his upper lip. "The mummy's curse, Scully! He
was doomed from the beginning."

Scully shifted in annoyance. "Oh, of course, a curse! Why did we
bother to pursue this case at all?"

"Lillegard led us, Scully. He thought we could save him. But he was
fated to die, whether it be from fire or accident or poisoning, or a
burning car sculpture falling on his head." He gulped his milk,
looking at her over the glass. Scully approached, tilting her head.
"You know, one of those urban pop-culture nightmares, a pile of cars
welded together?" he said. "I didn't know they had stuff like that in
Las Vegas, but let's face it, they have everything in Vegas. The
sculpture had caught on fire somehow, and your buddy Lillegard was one
of the spectators."

"It fell on him?" she asked.

"Get this, Scully. You know how the mummy's trajectory had suddenly
changed? It began heading towards Las Vegas because Lillegard had
recently switched his base of operations to there. Creepy, huh? I
don't know how to explain it, but somehow that mummy knew, and
rerouted accordingly."

"And despite the fact that the mummy was indeed terminated, Lillegard
went on to be killed in an accident."

"Not just an accident. He was the only one hit. He was crushed and
burned. The guy was obviously cursed." Mulder finished his milk. "Call
it what you will, Scully, but I'd say that despite its little run-in
with Area 51, that mummy completed its mission." Mulder rinsed his
glass. "Busy day tomorrow, and I'm parked on a hydrant." He sighed.

"Are you upset about getting audited?" she asked him.

Mulder sagged. He shrugged. "It's old hat. They're always picking on
our division, but they can never vindicate shutting us down
completely." Suddenly he seemed ambivalent about leaving, pulling
himself up on the counter and giving her his attention. "Are you OK?
You look tired."

"Well, I didn't get much sleep last night," she observed, trying not
to smile.

He considered her, eyes darkening at the memory. "You were pretty
voracious."

"Mulder," she admonished.

He was looking at her curiously, as though she still held the capacity
to surprise him. "What is it you expect from a well-lived life,
Scully?" he asked.

"Are you suggesting that my life is not well-lived?"

He shrugged carefully. "You tell me."

Scully looked at him nervously. "My life is sufficient. It's - happy."

The word was awkward on her tongue. She didn't believe for a moment
that it fooled either of them.

His dark head had a vulnerable droop, and she went to him and stood
between his knees. He took her face in his hands. "You don't have to
lie to me, Scully. Believe me, I want everything you want."

His nose looked more bulbous than ever and she felt a crash of love
for him. She closed her eyes against his warm stomach, ridiculously
close to tears. "I'm not lying. You do make my world a happier place,"
she choked. It was suddenly important to make him know. He put his
head down on top of hers. She tightened her arms around him, besotted,
and prayed that he was hers forever.
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Ships have crashed on the crusted surface of the planet, crashed and
rebuilt themselves, one regenerating its silver skin on a beach where
emaciated lions lick at rotting fish, another rising to hang humming
above rainforest, its beam drawing in the sojourners, the
telemetrically-chipped, the true believers.

If he goes in her place, maybe they'll never take her again. His
genetic-remnant DNA comes alive, for he is part of this - comes from
this.

The bioluminescence blooms like toxic flora. The shock of it stuns
him, statical blue protoplasm beamed from the wobbling UFO. He reaches
up for it, feeling the labor of his four-chambered heart, the pull of
his feet from the clay.

We see the subtlest forces -

Scully is morningsick, he is sure of that now. The impossible has
happened, and now he and Scully will go beyond the stretch of their
own lives, interfused. They will continue in mingled genetic code.
Forever is such an inadequate word -

Scully -

He must know for her sake. She is rare earth, rara avis, the quietest
place inside him.

He sees that the planet is battered and beautiful, an orb scorched and
flooded, lit by watch fires, a place where he has been stung by sea
monsters and healed by holy men. The place where Scully threw in her
lot with his, because she saw where others did not.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we were -
The ship lifts, spins. It will rise through the stratosphere, past the
dying sun and the reaches beyond, and he will believe.
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For Geek Goddesses everywhere
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10,000 years of happiness and chanterelles, morels and porcini to Kat
at the Black Hole Farm for many many kindnesses, much music, and the
pinnacle of proofreading.

A nasty, floaty brain in a jar to Jesemie's Evil Twin, who, although
horribly evil, still found time for benediction and beta.
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Free 3D glasses at:
http://www.slightlyfoxed.net
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This story is NOT supplemented by an NC-17 'addendum to casefile' -
'upsidaisium' - sorry about that, gang.
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