Parabiosis  ~  Page 2
__________________

The Branch Davidians and Rajneesh Puram, Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, the
Manson Family in California, the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge - people
would always hole themselves off from society and there was little
that could usually be done about it, if anything should be done.
Mulder knew that as well as anyone and still he let it get away from
him, going zero-base in Sammyville, in a room bullet-proofed with
phone books.

On the bed in her motel room Scully flipped the evidence bag up at the
light, squinting at the brownish wad. She saw the tilt of the world,
an abrupt candescence in which she and Mulder lay in separate rooms
listening to separate TVs, divided by his bad behavior and her
obligatory vexation.

She almost left him once, like giving him up for Lent, but there were
so many things that bound them she knew the rest of the world would
lay crossed with traps, little pitfalls of reminder. The terrible
absence of him would tear at her. No one had ever been as quick to
trust her, to accept her, as he had. Scully had a withdrawn, defensive
manner that most people couldn't work with, but Mulder played off of
it with his own blase mien - walking them staid and tongue-in-cheek
through their days.

Mulder's tapered eyes lustred with fresh-brewed mirth. He had a way of
looking into her eyes as if it was the only way he could gauge the
meter of his own interest. His brain was a frightening wilderness of
information. He was genuinely interested in what she had to say, a
powerful thing for her. She read up on things he might ask her about.

He was perennially tragic with his lost baby sister, his father
issues, his failed love affairs. He sloped through the bullpen with
his treacle head ducked, and she wanted to leave him, to distance
herself from the enormity of what he could make her feel. That summer,
she had thought that love could be closely tied to pity.
__________________

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Thirty-eight days until the end of the world, not that he was
counting. And not that he thought the world was going to end. He
thought the world was always ending, a constant trample of doom. That
earthquake in Troy, 1275 AD. Bosnia. The comet that hit the Yucatan 65
million years ago and took out the dinosaurs. Anne and Margot Frank in
Bergen-Belsen. AIDS and Ebola exploding from the slashed-and-burned
tropical biosphere. Viking sails in the sunset. Red handprints on a
suttee gate. Typhoid Mary. Tiananmen Square. Eclipses, asteroids,
Hale-Bopp, Pol Pot, Y2K, supergerms, filoviruses, Hiroshima, Shiloh,
Zyklon B. The future's uncertain and the end is always near.

In 1456 Pope Calixtus III prayed for deliverance from "the devil, the
Turk, and the comet." Not exactly PC, but he was certainly covering
the bases.

Scully did not concern herself with Y2K. She stood firm in the face of
doomsaying media, fallout shelters, and a three year supply of pork
'n' beans. She had no plans for New Year's Eve. Mulder was not worried
about Y2K, but he was not immune to the uneasiness that hung over the
world. He re-examined Kurtzweil's warnings. He felt the dead air jolt
of living in a world that wasn't safe for sisters, for fathers, a
place that could be colonized, razed, exploded, exploited, or clotted
in nuclear winter, the ozone in tatters, the ice caps rinsing away.

Everything was significant to him these days, in the context of its
effect upon her. He would not have her insulted. Not Scully, who
quietly moved with measure through her troubled life, with her
grown-up yearnings and her sober gaze. He would not have her touched,
he would not have her harmed.
__________________

"Here are our options," said Mulder.

Scully opened the victim's mouth. She photographed the slashes in his
neck and down his arms. She scraped under his fingernails and vacuumed
his shredded clothing with her little forensic dustbuster. His family
would not authorize a post-mortem, but the cause of death was clearly
blood loss due to the graphic mauling he'd received. Poor skinny
senior, thought Scully. Cannon fodder, thought Mulder. The most
dispensable segment of society.

"We interview the friends of Mr. Keep, who last saw him a mile below
the pass when they split up as part of some elk-hunting strategy. We
interview the two hunters who found him lying on the pass the next
afternoon. Or, we interview the retrieval team who carried him out."

Scully measured the slashes with a tape measure and recorded her
findings. "Who were the two who found him?"

Mulder shuffled his papers. "Pershins, father and son. They both have
criminal records. Odd, they haven't been interviewed yet. Says they
reported the body's location at the local post office and returned to
their place of residence without being called in for a statement."

"What were they convicted for?"

"Mmm...says - Erwin Pershin, the father - conspiracy to murder, thirty
years ago. Minimum sentence. The son, O.C., juvenile record,
marijuana, rape. Out on parole."

"Possession? Distribution?" she asked.

Mulder rattled his papers. "Growing."

'I grew hemp', thought Scully, snapping off the latex.
__________________

There is a girl who has spent two years tree-sitting in a redwood in
California. The logging company has tried to starve her out. She was
terrified during the El Nino storms. There is a quality about her that
reminds him of himself, a stubborn sense of right. He will not feel
quite level until she comes down.

He keeps his hand pressed in the middle of Scully's back as they climb
stairs amid the roars of savage dogs. She is the one he can protect.
__________________

The Pershins lived in an apolitical hamlet on private land, a sort of
refuge for those seeking to remove themselves from society and the
amenities thereof. When Scully pressed the issue Mulder felt inclined
to go with her intuition, and they convinced the local sheriff, Ian
Baxter, to escort them. They rode in the back of the cruiser the
thirty miles up the long valley and into the woods, while the sheriff
and his deputy regaled them with the full litany of local legend.

Nobody knew old Sammy's full name, or how he could afford his property
taxes. Sammyville had unfurled in the '60s in a flourish of corrugated
tin and squatterdom, two-by-fours, camp trailers, and backwoods
idealism. Rumors ran the gamut of poaching, child abuse, escaped
criminals, rape, hard drugs and murder. With cud-chewing
straightforwardness the sheriff related a death ritual possibly
enacted on large slain ungulates. Necrophiliac bestiality, was there
even a term for that? Mulder made a face at Scully, who observed him
cooly.

The snow was deep, and they ground among pines along a road that would
be gravel in summer. It was beautiful now, but Mulder looked at the
foot of new snow and was grateful that he and Scully had made it
safely out of the mountains before it really started to come down.
They had reached the trail head that morning in a thick cloud of
snowflakes that settled in Scully's hair and turned her seraphic.

The vehicle crawled and churned and his shoulder swayed companionably
against hers. He read O.C. Pershin's file and wondered just what they
were getting themselves into.

He saw wood smoke rising among the trees. The wire gate was open, hung
with 'no trespassing' signs. There was a clearing, the snow churned by
snow mobile tracks. Looking around, Mulder began to see the cabins.
They were all around them, scrappy, unlimned buildings surrounded by
chicken wire pens and the carapaces of cars. Dogs started up all over
the place in a great round of baying. It occurred to Mulder that this
was what the end of the world would look like.

Sheriff Baxter left his deputy with the vehicle and led Mulder and
Scully down an incline among the ponderosas. He was a tall and
narrowly muscled, taunt and tight and humorless with his aviator
glasses and impassive face.

They crossed a back yard filled with dogs chained to washing machines
and snowmobiles, leaping and choking and hurling spumes of snow. The
deep snow was laced with piss around the back porch; it was unclear
whether the Pershins had indoor plumbing or if they were just lazy
about using it.

The Pershins, father and son, met them on the back porch.

They had been the first to the crime scene, and judging by their
tracks had spent some time examining the area. Mulder wanted to ask
them about the positioning of the victim, since the retrieval team had
not taken photographs. When he and Scully went over the site they had
found little more than dried blood.

The Pershins had eyes only for Scully. Erwin Pershin was an
ectomorphic old yard bird, and he stiffened up at the sight of the
sheriff. His eyes had an inward glaze, contrasting with his
teeth-clamped smile. He held a pair of iron slip-joint pliers in his
long fingers. Mulder was reminded that only predators have eyes on the
front of their faces.

His son was bigger than him, with a squirrelly smile and a sparse red
beard. He wore a brown rancher's coverall, the front of which he
absently rubbed when Scully felt inside the breast pocket of her
jacket for her notepad.

Mulder felt the cold edge of control as he introduced himself and
explained their mission.

In through the kitchen where there was thawing meat bleeding out on
the counter, a gold pan of dog food, the smell of garbage and pack
rats. A chainsaw lay in pieces on the gritty kitchen table along with
an open bag of marshmallows. Two dogs whimpered angrily beneath.  The
sherriff left the back door open, the narrow room hollow with the
underwater sound of dogs.

Mulder and Scully followed the Pershins, ducking under a wire-laced
electric blanket nailed over a doorway. In the front room larch
sizzled behind the cracked smoked glass in the stove door. Regardless,
the house was bone cold.

Mulder looked around as the snow glare faded from his retinas. Floor
to ceiling, the walls were stacked with telephone books, leaving only
the window and the front door clear. The broad window sill of phone
books was washed in a jetsam of spiders and cigarette butts and
crumpled cans. The corners of the room were a dreck of clothing, skin
magazines, wood shavings and gnawed bones. Three rifles angled across
a rack of mule deer antlers. The room was redolent of snoose juice
fermenting in beer cans, the dry sourness of mice.

The older Mr. Pershin stopped and faced them with his legs braced,
tearing his flat eyes away from Scully long enough to light up a
cigarette. Mulder looked back at her and saw her sophisticated face
juxtaposed against a picture of a naked woman sprawling obscenely.
Judging by their fixed gazes, the Pershins also observed the
contrariety. Mulder suppressed a squeeze of anger, and moved further
into the room, hoping Scully would follow.

He moved to block the grinning O.C. Pershin's view of Scully. Mulder
felt bigger than usual, wide-shouldered, bullet-whittled. He was the
tallest person in the room and he wanted these two to feel it.

O.C. had captured a college girl on a gravel road. She had been
running and had sprained her ankle, had asked for a ride. He raped her
six times before throwing her out of a moving vehicle, and she still
managed to get his plate number. And who was the tough one that day,
boy?

He heard Scully's step on the wooden floor, and checked the sheriff's
position. Baxter stood tall and expressionless in front of the yellow
blanket, hands on his gristly hips, creaking with leather as he rocked
in his boots. The radio on his belt crackled with the ensuring promise
of dispatch prattle.

Mulder questioned the father quickly, and established that the body
had been found face down and fully clothed. Erwin Pershin belched
reflectively as he recalled the scene. Mulder decided not to move any
closer to him. "You're both hunters - trackers," he said. "You must
have tried to 'read' the scene. In your opinion, what killed him?"

The Pershins shrugged and shuffled and suggested cougars, bears. It
became evident that they wouldn't add much to the investigation. He
felt for the solidarity of Scully behind him, her back to the wood
stove. "We didn't hang around to find out what," grimaced Erwin. "O.C.
picked up something, though."

O.C. produced a wad of cloth from his pocket. Mulder felt Scully move
up on his left, shaking out a zip lock bag. O.C. looked at her and
smiled coldly, his teeth flecked with chewing tobacco.

Scully held out her hand, looking at him straightforwardly. He held
out the evidence and Scully cupped her hand beneath his. He jerked it
away suddenly, grinning at her annoyance. Then O.C.'s head whiplashed
back as Mulder's fist came over her shoulder and cudgelled into his
jaw. O.C. made a huge clatter as he hit the particle board floor. It
was the best sound Mulder had heard all day.

"Jesus, Mulder!" Scully hissed as the sheriff knocked her aside to
cover Erwin Pershin, who was edging for the gun rack. Mulder pressed
his boot into O.C.'s throat and removed the evidence from his dirty
fingers, reaching up to drop it into the bag Scully held out. They
didn't meet each other's eyes. The sheriff chewed his gum rapidly as
both Pershins yelled obscenities involving Mulder's parentage and
Scully's more obvious physical qualities. The dogs cringed in under
the blanket, one losing its nerve and peeing intermittently on the
floor.

Mulder jerked at the bolts on the front door. It opened outwards, and
he had a hard time wedging it into the unshoveled snow. Scully came
past him with her face hard and angry.

They left the dim and rancid shack and walked through Sammyville in
close formation. Mulder remembered running towards Krycek in the back
of a truck with a honed shiv in his hand. Adrenalin twanged in his
nerves. He got behind Scully and watched their back. There were
people, dark bundled figures up among the trees.

The cruiser seemed tilted unnaturally, bellied down in the snow, and
the deputy was sunken in the front seat with his pistol drawn. "They
crawled to do it," he said pitifully. The tires had been slashed.

Mulder and Scully stared at each other for a moment before Mulder
broke into a lope and shook the handle of a locked pickup truck parked
at the edge of the clearing. He clambered up the side of a Southwind
RV and looked inside. "The keys are in this one," he called over his
shoulder. It seemed promising that the back wheels were chained up.
Someone shouted, out of sight among the trees. He jimmied his way
inside and fired it up. The motor home shook and juddered and coughed.
Mulder gave it lots of gas. The frozen steering wheel burned his
hands.

Scully trooped up the steps, pallid against the backdrop of drifting
blue exhaust. Mulder rubbed at the dust on the instrument panel. He
thought he heard the pop of gunfire. The sheriff escorted his deputy
inside, and Mulder stomped in the clutch and put it in low gear. The
side mirror was broken off.

They slid through the gate in a fishtail, metal pans spilling off the
stove in the kitchenette. Mulder was slipping all over on the vinyl
seat. The camper was rife with the smell of methamphetamine; he
recognized it the way he had been taught to recognize the smell of
schizophrenia. The chemical smell of meth was so strong that its
manufacturers often used RVs, parking somewhere out of the way while
they cooked the substance down.

"How's she handle?" asked the deputy, suddenly coming back to himself.
He sat in the passenger seat, still holding his weapon. Scully was
somewhere in the back, probably watching to see if they were tailed.

"She handles like a hovercraft," said Mulder. He felt a flash of
resentment towards Scully, and wondered why. She had done nothing
wrong. He was the one who had lost it, lost his temper, lost the
situation and put her in danger. The light lay long through the pines,
and he kept his eyes grimly on the road ahead. Lot's wife was never in
Sammyville.
__________________

It was late when Scully breached his dark motel room and sat on the
edge of the bed. Mulder was naked under the blankets, but she couldn't
tell that, of course.

"Whatcha watching?" she asked.

"Something about military hardware." Usually when this happened
Mulder acted like a moody jerk until Scully confronted him and yelled
at him and got that yelling dimple in her cheek. Ultimately they'd
both feel better.

It didn't seem to be happening this time, though. Scully reached over
him for his right hand and examined it delicately. It was stiff,
swollen, gashed by O.C.'s eye tooth. Scully arose for the ice bucket.
Under her coat she was wearing her pajamas, as if she had fully
intended to go to bed without reconciling with him. He wondered what
had changed her mind.

When she came back she had a tube of Neosporin and the ice bucket
packed with snow from the parking lot. "You have a fever," she stated,
sitting on her folded leg and lowering her face gravely over his split
knuckles.

"No, I don't." He watched her treat his hand, forgetting everything
but her steady hands, her slow intelligent blink. His apology was the
next concatenation in their cycle of dysfunction. "Scully," he began,
"I know I'm a real piece of work - "

She cut him off with a sharp look into his eyes. The fever was hot in
the back of his throat. The TV flicked blue and her eyes were large
and umbrageous, unreadable. Her grasp slid up his wrist, she held his
forearm in two briefly possessive hands. "You're also too good to be
true," she said.
____________________

Mulder went home with her for Thanksgiving. "Are you out of your
mind?" Scully asked in the car.

"The potential is there," he said. She regretted her words in light of
the excision of his God Module. He looked nice in his onyx suit, his
hair pretty much grown out. He sat in the passenger seat, holding a
peasant loaf of rosemary bread in a bakery sack, on his best behavior.
She was filled with intense apprehension.

Her mother loved him, but he was a joke to her family - that crazy
partner of hers, her overgrown familiar hulking along behind her with
his trench coat flapping. The things that burned brightly in him were
hologramic; not visible from obtuse angles. The worst of it was, her
brother knew she liked bad, exciting men, men with leather couches and
guns and sticky caseless porn tapes, men who showed up drunk and
dragged her to morgues in the middle of the night. Men like Mulder.
Specifically Mulder. And he was definitely not what her mother had in
mind.

Baltimore awaited them with a 29-pound turkey. Mulder ducked his head
and made for the living room after the ominous handshake with Bill.
Scully could practically hear the antlers clashing. She felt a rush of
protectiveness for Mulder, watching him settle awkwardly into a
recliner and click his fingers fruitlessly at a passing cat. It was
irritating that he had brought this on himself. On both of them. She
had not wanted him to come.

Through some gross technical error, Mulder was seated beside the baby
at dinner. His proximity to the spotlight made Scully all the more
anxious. Matthew was the evening's main attraction, but she sensed
that Mulder ran a close second. Mulder made the most of the venue,
charming the women with his baby skills while Scully scowled in the
candle light. Her mother caught her eye and gave her a questioning
look.

Mulder was adorable with the baby. Scully couldn't have a baby, not in
a million years, not even if she actually had sex with someone. Mulder
talked to the kid about sports and showed him how to put olives on his
fingers. Even Bill seemed to be warming to Mulder. Scully's mom and
Tara fussed over him, even if he wasn't a man in uniform. Mulder
worked his Foxy charm, grinned at Scully and actually flirted with
her, right there in front of her family. Scully felt herself getting
hot with anger, or something. Hot.
____________________

Upstairs in the sewing room her mother turned to her and said, without
preamble, "Why are you acting like this?"

Scully was aware that no matter how convoluted she made the maze, her
mother would soon gain the center.

"I didn't want him to come, Mom, because he and I are just friends,
and I knew what you would think."

"I don't think anything!" Margaret snapped. She searched the angles of
fortitude in her daughter's lovely face, a Catholic stoicism she
believed was inherited rather than learned. Her third child staggered
her, and broke her heart. "He and I have been through a lot together,
you know," she reproved. "I'd hate to think he was made to feel
unwelcome in my house. I won't tolerate that from Bill - and I won't
from you. Why do you think he wanted to come, Dana? Why is being with
your family important to him?"

Scully closed her mouth. This was the question she'd been avoiding
since Mulder called her that morning, and asked her what he should
bring.

She had a delicate look, as though she hadn't been sleeping. Margaret
ran her hand down her daughter's arm and remembered when she'd first
started pulling up on the furniture - a tiny squealing child with
dandelion hair.

She tilted her head. "I think his instincts are good, Dana. And I
think many people go their lives without ever finding a friendship as
unconditional as his." She smiled affectionately, with her worried
look. Her wedding ring had become embedded in her finger over the
years, until it lived in its own groove like a part of her body.
Scully noticed this for the first time, looking at her mother's hand,
and she could not smile back.

"Mom told me I had better play nice," Scully said in the kitchen.

"That'll make for a pleasant change," said Mulder, dripping water
everywhere from a cup. He avoided Scully's eye. He and Tara were
loading the dishwasher. Scully saw that he had fallen easily in with
her bantering amity.

"Fox tells me you once ate a cockroach," Tara said brightly, with an
eye to mediation.

"A cricket. And I did not." Scully said firmly. "Don't believe a word
he says." She was aware of herself in Tara's eyes, her fastidious
spinsterish quality. She eyed Mulder, who was beginning to wind up a
dish towel without much hope of flicking it. Matthew charged in then
and hacked them all about the knees with a plastic sword. They stood,
slow dull surprised grown ups, and amid the pandemonium his eye caught
hers, and then he looked away.
__________________

With Mulder there she was self-conscious of the way she acted with her
family. Families have a way of immediately stripping one's dignity.
She knew he was watching her, and that he'd never seen Special Agent
Dana Scully (MD) going limp and petulant as a teenager when she
cuddled on the couch with her mom, or her face lighting up as she
received a toddler covered in pumpkin pie. They stood in the hall
putting on their coats and Bill threw his arms around her and squeezed
her back to all the comfortable memories of the years they had once
spent together, and she looked up and saw Mulder's frank curiosity,
his concentrated eyes with their inner light, there all out of context
in her mother's house.
__________________

In the hallway her brother grabs her around the waist and Scully
chortles, her face losing its watchfulness. Mulder forgets what he is
saying to Mrs. Scully and stares, captivated, one arm caught in the
sleeve of his coat. "Now, kids," says Mrs. Scully. Scully struggles
playfully, shrieks once, and tangles her leg around Bill's before she
notices Mulder watching. She sobers, resuming her supercilious pout.
Her little scream plays lascivious in his head; the hall seems crammed
with people. His mouth is dry with lust. He remembers Scully crowded
up against him in a sleeping bag and something to do with baseball and
he jerks the front door open quickly to get some cold air on his face.
__________________

The pulsar bursts of color, electroencephalytic trauma, as Scully
termed it, were gone, and he was back in the comfort of chromatic
blindness, night on the freeway, halogen and steel. Scully leaned her
temple into her hand, looked out her window at nothing.

It had been years since he had felt so uncertain with a woman. He knew
Scully and yet he didn't know her at all. For two people who were best
friends, they could be formal and terse. She didn't want to share her
family with him. There were days he wasn't sure she even liked him.
Yet should anyone dare challenge her position as alpha-female of the X
Files, she was lean, mean and ready to rumble.

He looked at her sideways, through the dark car interior. She was
supposed to be this good little Catholic girl, but at times she had
given him cause to believe otherwise. Still, he didn't know what she
expected of a relationship, or if they would even be sexually
compatible, if he dared presume she would want such a relationship
with him.

Scully glanced at him, her thoughts obviously distant.

Mulder shuffled his throat. "Scully, I apologize," he said hoarsely.
"I didn't know how awkward it would be. But I wish you'd told me you
didn't want me to go."

Scully looked back at her window. "It's not that I didn't want you to
go - "

"Right," Mulder said, combating flying snow with the windshield
wipers.

He passed an eighteen-wheeler that had slowed to caterpillar pace. A
backwash of dirty slush rocked the car and he reached to steady a
bottle of wine that was rolling around in the back seat. The semi
honked suddenly and Scully looked back into its headlights just as
Mulder jerked his arm forward to grab the wheel, and his fingers hit
her right in the eye.

Mulder gave a yelp of remorse, as though he was the one who had been
hit. Scully clamped her hand over her eye. He swerved into the
breakdown lane and pulled up short, hitting the hazard lights. She
braced her hand on the dash and the truck honked liberally as it
steamed past. Mulder ignored it, even as the car shuddered, and he
reached for the hand Scully had welded over her eye.

"Honestly, Mulder," she said.

"Let me see."

"Truly, it's nothing. We don't need to stop." Scully's eye felt like a
hot weepy explosion, a memory from childhood. She couldn't open it or
remove her hand.

"Let me see," he coaxed, flicking on the overhead light. There they
were suddenly, and he pulled her towards him, his face so devastated
that she wanted to smile. "It's not a big deal," she whispered,
watching Mulder lean closer. Tenderly he lifted her fingers away and
thumbed open her streaming eye.

He sighed, and let her go. "If only you knew that I have never meant
to cause you any grievance or pain," he said sorrowfully.

She opened the glove compartment for a Dairy Queen napkin. He kept his
hand on her shoulder, thumb reaching tentatively to brush her jaw. "Of
course I know that, Mulder," she said soothingly, blowing her nose.

"Sometimes it seems to me that all I ever do is hurt you." Mulder
picked moodily at the steering wheel.

"Mulder, it's a poke in the eye, not a heart attack. An accident.
Frankly, I'm amazed we've gone seven years without a previous
occurrence."

"I'm not good for you, am I Scully," he said tiredly. She was hard
pressed to hear him over the traffic spraying past. Mulder turned off
the dome light and sat holding the wheel, wincing to himself. Scully
unfastened her seat belt suddenly.

"Do you know what it was?" she asked, looking down at her open hands.
She drew a deep breath. "Mulder, it's just that it's gotten to the
point that if I walk through that door with someone of the male
persuasion in tow, my family is immediately going to be picturing Matt
in a size 3T ringbearer's suit."

Mulder raised his eyebrows, staring out the windshield.

"They probably think we're engaged or something, now. They know how
close we are..." She untangled herself from her seat belt and knelt on
her seat, leaned to him and kissed his cheek. "But nobody knows how we
are," she murmured, her voice slipping lower when she caught his
shaving cream smell.

She returned to her seat with a sigh. She probably shouldn't have done
that, but she could always blame the wine she'd nervously consumed,
which was the reason Mulder was driving in the first place.

Mulder watched her buckle her seatbelt. What was all that about? They
seemed to have shaken off disaster by another narrow margin. They had
survived Thanksgiving, but the New Year was a strange and looming
presence, and he felt subdued by the enormity of events yet unlived.
Snowflakes blasted into the windshield, each individually delicate
until it melded with the others and became something vastly nobler and
stronger than itself.
__________________


'I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'

Tennyson -
'Ulysses'
__________________

They breezed into his apartment in the afternoon, Mulder shedding his
trench coat like a wad of caul. He ripped at his tie and went into the
bedroom to change while Scully warmed up his computer.

Alone in the living room, she looked around, indulging in her secret
predilection for his apartment, for the things that were so
exclusively his - his Eurotrash couch, the picture of the Andromeda
galaxy over his TV, his glass and soldered rebar shelves. The room
itself was narrow, cramped and moody, exactly like Mulder.

"There's something here from you," she said, checking her e-mail.
Mulder changed with the door open, trusting her not to look.

"Ignore it. What says the lab?" She heard the thump of the laundry
hamper, the opening and shutting of drawers. She printed out the
report.

"Resin," she said, as he reappeared wearing sweats and carrying his
basketball shoes.

"What?"

"Seriously, Mulder, what is it?" She turned off the printer and went
back to her e-mail.

"One of those things that seems like a good idea in the middle of the
night, a passage from something. Delete it," he said, circling around
the coffee table. He reached for the mouse but Scully put her hand
over it and quickly exited her account. If Mulder had sent her
something she knew she would end up printing it out and folding it
into whatever book was beside her bed; she would lay back in the
bathtub and read it by candle light, know it by heart. He had read
Browning to her once. He had recited T.S. Eliot in conjunction with
pornography. He had even read 'Moby Dick'. Mulder was a man of
letters, (however he might skew them) and she loved to know what
interested him.

They sat down and scanned the results. Cotton surgical dressing. Lint
from O.C.'s pocket. Carboxylic acid.

"Hmm."

"What?" Mulder was tying his shoes.

"We were right - it's pitch. Aromatic mastic, a Mediterranean resin."

"Gauze soaked in pitch. It wasn't an indigenous resin, say pine
pitch?"

"Doesn't look like it. What about the fingernail scrapings?" She
flipped through the papers. "Don't have them done yet."

He slapped his knee. "Well, I hate to throw you out, Scully, but I'm
meeting some guys for a game."

They looked at each other. She reflected upon his galumphing grace on
the court.

"Too bad you don't play basketball," he said.

"Yeah, since I've got the height for it."

He shrugged, smiling sideways. He seemed to be putting his arm around
her for a moment, but he was only reaching for his basketball on the
back of the couch.

He ran circles around her in the hall, bouncing the ball and making a
ruckus. Scully played defense, trying to slap it out of his hands.
Mulder hooted and traveled and cheated. Scully felt jostled and a
little het up by the time they gained the elevator. "Oooh, you fouled
me!" he crowed, grinning and poking at the buttons. Don't tempt me,
she thought, looking at his damp collar bones, at the firmness of his
bare arms, and trying not to look. She'd like to be the one to rip the
sleeves off this T-shirt.
____________________


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