Parabiosis ~  Page 4
____________________

"Mulder, is this typical, or what? The rest of the world is having fun
and here we sit, losing ourselves in discussions of lake monsters." It
struck her that they were saving a world they didn't know how to
inhabit.

"Just for the record, Cadborosaurus is a sea-going monster," he said.
They had reached that sentimental point in the evening when everyone
was slow dancing in the dark. Mulder and Scully, immune to such
things, sat on the crushy velvet sofa in the back room, preoccupied by
the otherworldly, by the twisted and rank.

Mulder sighed sharply. "Joseph Campbell said that all we seek in life
is the experience of being alive. I for one don't necessarily need to
slam dance to feel alive. Don't you think quantifying the
unquantifiable is a noble pursuit? Besides, how many things are there
that the whole world believes in but we can't prove exist? So many
things are taken on faith. Wind. Quarks. God, of course. And what
about love?"

"Love is phenylethylamine," said Scully, sucking the side of her
thumb. She had her shoes off and her feet on a plastic crate; she was
eating teriyaki popcorn with plum sauce. "PEA. It's merely a brain
chemical producing an amphetamine-like rush."

Mulder was startled. He thought that love was both more elemental and
more complex than the process she described. Brown eyed boy meets a
blue eyed girl. He saw that where Scully marked out her world in
equations, he described the same things in abstract terms. They were
speaking different languages, but ultimately, he hoped, saying the
same things.

"My point is, Scully, that there's more to the world than meets the
eye. We don't give our senses the credit they deserve. Most places of
ancient worship such as Stonehenge and many spots in North America
were built over pockets of uranium. Somehow humans were drawn to them,
even without Geiger counters. It's one of those unconscious
awarenesses, like the way iambic pentametre is based on the human
heartbeat."

Scully sighed surreptitiously.

"Kludges, worms and Active X modules," said Mulder.

She looked at him questioningly.

"That's what makes these guys feel most alive." He gestured at the
Gunmen's den. "And, obviously, kitschy decor. But hardware is their
raison d'etre. So, maybe I have the Ogopogo. Campbell had mythology.
What do you have, Scully?"

She looked at him almost fearfully, because what she had was Mulder.
She became distracted by a backscatter of light across his elfin
cheekbone. "I must say, that's a nice shirt on you, Mulder," she said
tangentially.

"Oh, this old thing."

She looked down, raising her eyebrows sharply, speaking carefully. "I
have so many things, a very full life. You must bloom where you're
planted. But I confess I still struggle with my decision to not be a
doctor. I mean, how could I not pursue the course that saves people's
lives?"

"You ARE a doctor, Scully. I don't know how many times you've pulled
my bacon out of the fire, medically speaking. You've given me CPR,
you've splinted my finger, you've clamped off my femoral artery,
you've watched me throw up. How much more doctory do you want to get?"

He nudged her, making her smile. Frohike had labelled it 'hot-doggin'
hell-bitch CPR' - he almost wished he'd been conscious to experience
it.

"You know how I know you're a doctor?" he asked, growing serious. "No
matter what you do or where you go in this world, you will wear a
watch with a second hand, in case you have to take someone's pulse."

This was true. She had never owned a digital watch.

Scully wiggled into a more comfortable slouch, her thigh warm against
his; they were in their usual little seclusive microcosm of
discussion. It was evident how clannish they had become. He couldn't
remember when he had switched over from thinking of her as someone he
worked with, to thinking of her as someone he couldn't wait to get to
work to see.

"I hear our movie's coming out this spring," he remarked.

"It's not 'our' movie, Mulder. From what Tea Leoni told me, I'm not
sure we'll want to claim any connection to it. It sounds like the plot
is wildly improbable, the characterizations utter confabulation, and
the pyrotechnics budget alone capable of pulling a third world country
out of poverty. My brother thinks I should sue Twentieth Century Fox
for defamation of the Scully name."

"He's probably right. At any rate, Tea Leoni could hardly hope to
capture the Scully mystique, no matter how diligently she peels the
onion."

"The 'Scully mystique'?"

"The reality of you. All the little things - the way you slur your
S's; the way you lie so badly; the way you don't always register on
automatic doors."

Frequently Scully had to stop and wave her hand to trip the electronic
eye. It was a refreshing change from setting off the metal detectors
in airports with her B-movie subcutaneous dogtag.

"I bet automatic doors see Tea Leoni coming a mile away," he said,
mock-derisively.

"Mulder, my friend, you live in a world of illusion," Scully said
fondly.

"Where everything's peaches and cream." He squeezed her shoulder,
since his arm was already kind of behind her on the back of the couch.

A riprapped pile of TVs against one wall played silent music videos.
Mulder shrugged off his jacket and stood up, his wildebeest hair
bristling in the spasmodic mercury light. As he left the room she
listed over with a groan of despair and pressed her face into the
lining of his leather jacket. The smell of him produced a cortical
rush.

"Damn it!" from Mulder, and she jerked up guiltily, afraid she'd been
caught huffing his outerwear. But Mulder had banged his head on a
truss garlanded with chili pepper lights, and he stood dizzily
clasping his frontal lobe.

"Oh, Sweetie," she said, "Muller..." She wanted to laugh, and
simultaneously felt immensely protective. Mulder swayed like a
lightning-flayed tree. She grabbed his shoulders to steady him. "Is
there a doctor in the house?" he whispered, his bad boy sideburn
rasping her cheek as he dropped his heavy head to her shoulder.

Scully kissed it better, nuzzling his minky hair. She wondered how
much longer it would be humanly possible to refrain from jumping his
bones.
__________________

Scully revived her primer coat of lipstick in the bathroom, leaning
close to the murky glass. With her eye-hand coordination at low ebb,
all her concentration was needed to perfectly navigate the sharp
corners of her mouth. A certain psychological school of thought
posited that women wore lipstick to emphasize their lips' resemblance
to their vaginas; Scully always frowned at her reflection when she
thought of it. Mulder was the psychologist - undoubtedly he had
encountered this theory at some point. She became gradually aware that
Mulder was standing behind her, watching her raptly in the mirror as
he held a washcloth of ice on his head.

Their eyes met in the mirror, no mean feat with tunnel vision.

Scully turned around slowly, rubbing her lips together. "I think I'm
going to take off," she said. It was definitely a good idea, the more
she thought of it. He was a little sweaty and she was a little
smashed, and she was beginning to feel that she only existed because
he existed, like propagating amoebas.

He seemed unprepared for such an eventuality, two worried chevrons
sliding up his forehead. "You know...veni, vidi, vici," she clarified.

"Eat, drink and be fat and drunk?" he offered unhappily.

"It suffers a bit in translation." She put a hand on his chest to move
him out of the way. She was surprised at how fast his heart was
thumping, and at the way her starfish fingers seemed to adhere to his
shirt.

Mulder stepped back; he always had excessive manners. Then his head
rolled back and he groaned sharply. Scully stiffened up. She'd seen
him poison-darted once.

"It's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale'," he explained. "I've been waiting all
night for this song." He looked bashfully at all the ice cubes he had
spilled on the floor. It took her a moment to realize that he was
holding out his hand.

Somehow she had always thought it would be 'Space Oddity'.
__________________

Scully was dancing with Langly, like little kids at a wedding, Langly
talking nonstop and Scully laughing her chuckly laugh.

Mulder should have known once he dragged her out on the dance floor
that she'd be in demand. He didn't like the looks of all these other
guys, men who put their arms around her as if they had the faintest
hope of understanding what she was all about. This one here, this guy
kept making Scully smile with whatever he was saying and he had his
arms around her and the back of his shirt said 'Give Me Rossignol or
Give Me Head'.

Mulder turned his back, his jaw tense with contempt. He set his
basketball cup down on some gunmetal shelves and picked up a computer
manual, flipping through it blindly. He felt both ridiculous and
vindicated in his jealousy, but he was too old to be going through
this. This was like something Phoebe used to pull just to vindicate
wild make-up sex. Without the prospect of that the whole situation was
absurd, and he knew Scully wouldn't want him to feel this way. He
should dance with someone else, but he didn't have the heart for it.
He should go home, but he could hardly abandon Scully to this pack of
cretins. He should go start drinking hard liquor with Frohike. He
should go track down whoever was tailing Scully and stick a fucking
gun down his throat. That at least would make him feel better.

He could still taste that cigarette, which had tasted faintly of
Scully's lipstick; he wanted another one. He was probably going to die
alone in that same old crappy apartment that smelled like cobwebs and
fishtank, and he might as well start smoking again, it would hardly
matter in the grander scheme.

Out of the blue Scully was sliding her arm around his neck, leaning in
to read his expression. She rubbed his back in quick solace as if
sensing his mood.

"Hey, pardner."

"Hey." He managed to make his voice sound normal.

She put her arms around his neck, like slow dancing in high school. "I
was kind of hoping you'd cut in on that guy," she confided. "It turns
out that I have a low tolerance for homilies on skiing."

How amazing, that a moment so horrible could segue into another so
completely wonderful. She felt so comfortable against him, just this
one person out of everyone in the world. It was one in six billion
now, what odds...

"I must admit, Mulder, that even if your conversation runs to
spoonbenders and Godzilla's chromosome damage and the canals on Mars,
at least you're unfailing interesting to talk to."

Scully's fingers riffled the hair at the back of his neck, she was
looking seriously into his eyes, she barely seemed to be breathing. It
was hard to stay objective about her when he could see so far down her
shirt and her velveteen skin was damp and the sway in her back seemed
specifically, scientifically, gravitationally engineered to progress
his hands to her ass.

Fortunately, Mulder had long resisted the conventions of science.
__________________

"This woman," said Mulder, his arm around her, "this woman would make
a Gorgon yipe and turn tail." The sidewalk was scurfed black ice.
Scully reeled in her smile with difficulty, applying herself. "Can ya
dig it?" Mulder asked.

"I can dig it," said Frohike philosophically. "I had a rat terrier
once, was the same way."

"She can take out a giant bug at ten yards and not even break a
sweat," said Mulder cryptically. He beamed down at her in open
admiration.

"A giant bug?" asked Frohike doubtfully.

"You're the one who cut the fluke worm in half," said Scully, because
Mulder deserved a little credit himself.

"Get a load of this: she was my sergeant during the Civil War," said
Mulder, frosty-breathed.

Frohike watched them, two inebriated Feds who obviously didn't get out
much. If they didn't want people thinking them an item, they were
doing a pretty half-assed job of hiding it tonight. She was leaning
into his side with her hands in her pockets, sharp little shoulders
raised, her carelessly-buttoned blouse untucked. She flashed her
bedazzling slapdash smile at his abstruse Civil War comment;
undoubtedly it made perfect sense to her.

Her skin was glowing and her rufescent hair melted like copper slurry
in the icy blue light. Mulder mooned down at her like the lucky son of
a bitch that he was.
__________________

Langly slewed in against the curb in the chuntering VW bus. Mulder
whipped open the sliding door and disappeared into the gloom of the
back seat. Scully balked on the sidewalk, peering dubiously in at the
clutter.

"Do you think this is a good idea?" she asked.

"Langly's not drunk!" said Byers, Frohike and Mulder, all together.
They were tired of answering the question.

"I had two beers, maybe five hours ago," said Langly, fiddling with
the radio.

"Into the garbage pit, flygirl," Frohike prompted, waiting behind her.
At least it wasn't the Lincoln Continental in which she'd been cuffed
to the wheel.

At any rate, the streets were empty.  The motor rattled like chains
behind them. A cardboard alien with a submachine gun hung from the
rear view mirror. Scully held a film canister on her knees, wondering
what it contained, coiled and whispering. Frohike got the Zapruder
footage when it was bootlegged in 1974. The three of them had such an
odd fixation with Oswald, the lone gunman. Langly told her that the
FBI had failed to recover Kennedy's brain, missing these 30 years from
the National Archives. To her a brain in a jar didn't seem a matter of
national importance, more like something Igor would be sent to fetch.

The radio kept blinking out, and Langly was trying to wire something
together under the dash as he drove. They took a corner wrong and
bounded over a curb. Centrifugal force and a little good old fashioned
luck threw Scully against Mulder. Byers was forced to grab the wheel
and right their course. But now the radio picked up 'Jingle Bells'
loud and clear.

"I'm DRIVING," Langly whined, indignant. "Despite navigational
capabilities greatly impeded by co-pilot interference." He and Byers
punched at each other. The bus wandered from lane to lane.

"But for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost,"
Frohike remarked. Under the passing streetlights he looked like a
rumpled old hawk. Scully recognized the unconventional forms that
families can take.

Horseshorseshorseshorses sang Langly. Byers kept time on the dash.
Mulder had said that helping save the child in Chicago was all that he
needed for Christmas. It was all she needed, too. She considered the
chain of events that had tumbled her into this moment, riding at three
in the morning through the D.C. streets, Mulder's leg warm against
hers, his knuckles casually rubbing her knee as he looked out the
window.

She felt like one of the guys and she wanted to stay here forever with
them; they could road trip out into the great wide open, singing
Christmas carols.

At Hegal Place she leaned over the front seat and squeezed Langly's
shoulder. "Drive careful, now," she said affectionately. She leaned
further and kissed Byers' cheek. "Goodnight, Scully," he said soberly.

She hugged Frohike on the sidewalk. "Night night." Mulder came back
down the sidewalk and hugged him in Scully-parody. "Night night,
Melvy," he cooed.

"Night night. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," said Frohike, climbing
back in the van.

"Wow, that really opens up our options," said Mulder, walking
backwards.

The Gunmen pulled away, rubbernecking like meerkats.
__________________

As Mulder unlocks his door her breath takes shape in the spinning halo
of light above her. Squinting upwards, she can't remember where the
floor is, proprioceptors dulled, and has to reach for the wall. She is
hammered, she is plowed. At parties she and Melissa used to feel their
noses, gauging the degree of numbness. She can't feel her nose. It is
several years since that millisecond killer bee kiss with Mulder in
this very corridor, with little interim progression. As the Eagles
would say, they spend all their love making time.

He goes straight to the fish tank, as though his goldfish are yelling
for food. His fish see him coming and mill beneath the surface in
anticipation. She imagines how he looks to them, great blurry
biomorph, obscenely alien, inhabiting a medium of corrosive oxygen. He
puts them in a mayonnaise jar when he cleans their tank. It's possible
that they love him in the unquestioning, forever way that she does.

She clamps her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering, nervousness and
cold and alcohol rife in her bloodstream. She presses her knee against
the coffee table to center herself in the room, a quirk in her vision
popping like fragmentation grenades up by the ceiling. She wonders
what the stars are like in his bedroom when he opens his eyes in the
dark - luminaries awhirl like van Gogh's starry night above him. Does
he think of her? Or is it crop circle ozone and oat chaff, secrets to
be wrenched from interplanetary sperm-thieves, their caustic landing
lights scorching his retinas?

Mulder winds the antique mantel clock that keeps ill time. He has said
before that its ticking grounds him. He has said that a ticking clock
sounds civilized.

This room has too many books and files, too much secrecy, history,
pornography, espionage, bad blood and bad water, too much arguing and
sublimating, sitting together in the dark. Suffocating summer nights
in Alexandria, Mulder relenting to sleep on the cowhide sofa, roscoe
on the coffee table, a gangster come to rest. Mulder dragging in a man
he'd just shot in the face, real death faked on the Navajo rug. Hot,
hot summer nights. She appears, and they wait together, for cancer,
for fire, for the end of the world.

He looks forever past her, over her head, at the marginal worlds that
she cannot see and he cannot attain.

"I realize that everything comes second to your work," someone says.
It is Scully, but she's not sure she wants to take credit for the
words, especially after she sees his face. But it's true - everything
and everyone come second to the first woman in his life, Samantha.

Later she will remember it in clips of sidewalk, shoes, an angle of
lamp or wainscoting, his shoulder and arm, and the front of his shirt,
into which she weeps. The crying feels too good to stop, even as she
distantly registers that she is sobbing drunkenly and self-piteously
all over her best friend. At some future point she will know utter
humiliation. She had more control when she was dying. When he was
dying. This is complete surrender to the deepest fears - that she will
lose him, that she loves him more than is right or healthy. That this
thing between them will never be allowed to culminate.

They wait for her cab on the sidewalk and he pulls her inside his
jacket and holds her tightly. He seems unable to speak.
____________________

Scully was tricked out in the most amazing silver body armor, with hip
boots and a torpedo bra, and slick purple hair. "Fox, Fox, I love you!
But we only have fourteen hours to save the world!" she squealed.

The alarm went off and he whacked it until he realized it was the
phone ringing. His hangover suckerpunched him between the eyes. Rain
scraped the black windows.

"Are you remembering our flight?" Scully snapped in his ear. She was
most certainly not wearing a space princess bra. Mulder groaned in his
bed.
__________________

Scully was not averse to horror flicks, or even schlock sci-fi, and
Mulder called it research.

The bitterness of the snowbound Twin Falls evening reminded her that
Earth was still coming out of an ice age. Her feet were iced bone from
the cold morgue floor. She had tried to banish her numbness in the
bathtub, the faucets flashing forth a planet's core of steaming froth.

A transfusion of sangria straight into her bloodstream would have been
the most expedient method, but she made do with several ounces sloshed
unceremoniously into her empty stomach from a motel water glass,
standing naked under the timer heat light with her hand clasping her
opposite shoulder.

She was homesick for the happiness of the evening before, wistfully
nostalgic over the madeleines of her mnemonic - the shoes she had
worn, the earrings, the green ink stamp now fading from her hand. It
came back to her now as a kind of nitrogen narcosis - a diver's
euphoria of underwater worlds strung with lights and strands of music,
Mulder pulling her into a waltz in a dim corner aslant with chips of
light, as if this was what it had been about all these years,
discovering this deeply perfect closed circuit they made.

Mulder began to lean on the cell phone. She ignored him, sliding
torpidly down into the ticking water, depressed beyond measure.

She had embarrassed herself inordinately, even grading on the high
curve of the Dana Scully relationship-blunder scale.

It felt prudent to maintain her distance, after what she had said to
him last night. They had spent the day apart, Mulder examining the
vehicle in which the crime had taken place and interviewing the
motorist who had discovered the body. Scully had gone straight from
the airport to the necropsy room.

Mulder tried the room phone. Then he was at the door, calling her
name. Scully, who didn't plan to exit the tub until her core
temperature exceeded 101 degrees, yelled "Later, Mulder!" She reached
for her glass. She might have known the man would drive her to drink.

She let Mulder in while she was brushing her teeth, so that she had to
rush back to the bathroom to spit. "Natron," she called, tapping her
toothbrush on the sink.

"Yes!" said Mulder triumphantly, with the Black Power salute. She kept
an eye on him through the crack in the bathroom door. He slouched on
the foot of her bed still dressed for work, his jaw etched with
stubble.

Odd to think that he was nearly a middle-aged man. The term didn't
seem to apply to Mulder, impetuous Mulder, to the brazen complication
of him. He was thirty when she met him, entirely too rash and
enchanting for his own good. There were miles and miles of silence
inside him. For the first time since high school, she had started to
focus on someone her own age.

He was thirty years old when she met him, all scapegrace and mettle,
and built like a poem.
__________________

Dead Pharaohs gone bad rampaged and women screamed and Mulder lay on
the bed cracking his way through a bag of sunflower seeds. Scully
slept peacefully in a nearby armchair. He had caught her grabbing a
buzz in her room, her eyes hooded and smoky, the bottle, three
quarters full, forgotten in plain sight. She acted carefully normal.
Brownian motion seemed the architect of her procedure: first thing
upon entering his room she knocked a glass of ice water onto her
shoes, which she'd luckily just vacated in that blowsy way she had of
shedding bits of clothing. Mulder tossed her a towel from the bed
without bothering to tear his eyes away from Boris Karloff in 'The
Mummy' (1932). He could act carefully normal, too.
__________________

She had jabbed them both with B12 that morning to cure their
hangovers, Mulder sitting on her kitchen table rolling up his sleeve
in the early stained-glass light. He was sullen and he looked away
when she stuck him, closing his eyes.

"Wow, Scully, you weren't kidding!" he said a moment later, perking up
to an alarming degree. "Here I thought it was just some hippie placebo
like kava or carob."

She said nothing, swabbing his arm a few more times than strictly
necessary. The skin inside his upper arm was that rare exquisite
softness of a lab rat's belly.
__________________

Mulder came up close and bent over her. "Don't put these on," he said,
holding out her shoes. His arm slipped under her knees and he scooped
her up in one smooth motion, like a carnival ride. She was not really
awake and she threw her arm around his neck before she could think.

"Mulder, this really isn't necessary." She tried to look neutral.

"Sshh," he breathed in her ear, his tone implying that certain laws of
the universe could be trusted to fly out of whack, were she to speak.
He crunched down the steps into the snow and she clutched him for
balance, trying not to poke him in the back with her shoes.

A sorbet tulle fog glowed in the sky.

She couldn't let it go.

"This is bad for your back, Mulder." It felt ridiculously good to be
carried by him, but she couldn't appear to enjoy it.

"But good for my macho image," he pointed out. She was gathered up in
his flexed muscles and gunslinger walk, pressed against his
Mulder-scented warmth.

"Hey...last night - I didn't mean what I said." She looked over his
shoulder at the cherry flash of a radio tower.

"In vino veritas, Scully," he said stiffly.

Three doors down he dipped his knees so she could lean out of his arms
and unlock her door. "I believe you're capable of a real life," she
said, while her eyes were on the lock.

He was silent while he swung her bare feet to the carpet. "I guess I'm
a little hurt at your perception of my priorities. And I know you did
mean it at the time." He fiddled with the outer door knob, narrowing
the gap in the door.

"Then prove me wrong," she said quickly.

His eyes were like nightshade as he stepped backwards, away from her.
"Don't let the Fiji mermaids bite," was all he said.

She shut the door and threw herself against it, watching him through
the peephole. He was a warped cameo, encircled, slipping from her line
of vision. The nap of the carpet was chilled along the bottom of the
door and she scrunched her toes, remembering the sex-crime motel room
carpet at Quantico.
__________________

He didn't see her for a week. Despite the fact that he wasn't feeling
very Christmas-y, he took his mom to Handel's Messiah. When they arose
for the Hallelujah Chorus, he cellphoned Scully so she could hear it
too. He didn't identify himself when she answered. There was the
possibility that she would think it was some phone pervert with a
classical bent, but he knew she didn't because she stayed on the line.
He pictured her curled in a chair in her mother's living room near the
big Christmas tree, her beautiful eyes distant, attached to him by
this rapture of sound, and he hankered for her with a headlong slide
of longing.
__________________

Fourteen years before, Scully mentioned the Majestic Twelve in her
thesis on time travel, and perhaps that was the initial moment it all
started to roll down to this, God and Einstein and the Smoking Man all
unwittingly conspiring to create a moment a thousand years and seven
in the making.

She donned lipstick for courage and chanced a glimpse in the watery
mirror at her pale battle-worn body; a blue-eyed woman who lived by
the sword, small naked Amazon frowning critically in wintry morning
light. Full metal jacket through the lower abdomen, zombie bites in
her neck. She smoothed her hard stomach, felt the sinewy tension in
her lower back, weighed the purposeless handfuls of her breasts,
wondering what he would make of it all. He had branded and sealed her
with his kiss, marked her like a secret knock upon a door.

As soon as her lips met his, she knew he was running a fever. She
kissed him anyway, having wanted to badly for far, far too long; by
this point their first kiss would have had priority over nuclear war
or invasion by galactic slavers. Einstein would have called it a
cosmological constant. Mulder would have called it fate.

Scully knew that, among other things, she was wildly happy, but she
didn't let herself think about it too much. Mulder would have been
surprised to know that there were times she wanted to believe in
magic, to believe there could be things so unaccountably miraculous
that the real world couldn't honestly explain them. Nor would he
believe that she was so superstitious about jinxing it that she hardly
dared think of the future, curbing her movements to the proper gravity
required.
__________________

Why hadn't he realized that the end of one world was the beginning of
another?

The January street below is stroked and notched with the energy of
transit. There is a great abundance of life in his neighborhood -
sparrows toughing out the D.C. winter in fast food parking lots;
tagging crews bombing the gasping busses. A kid from his building
flies a plastic bag on a string, his small square face upturned in
amazement. Mulder feels a similar awe, despite his light-years removal
from the spacey drift of childhood.

He could have laid out his soul when he met Scully's eyes by the light
of the flares, gunshots suspended in the ringing air, the things
people become to each other in war. She dropped to her knees beside a
dead undead and touched Frank Black, her hot pistol gripped in her
hand, glancing alertly about the room. Then she came to Mulder and he
felt her piercing, anodyne touch, and the deep, locking stillness of
her gaze.

The street jerks forward with life; a sandwich flipped from the window
of a car; a slush ball war between paperboys. Power lines writhe among
the trees. A woman flings out a hand as she negotiates the street,
lifting her face to the tumbling kite: Scully.

"I see we can still count you among the living," she says. "The dead
wouldn't leave a mess like this."

She pares a Fuji apple with his serrated pocket knife, catching the
helix of peel on a back issue of The Lone Gunman, scanning an article
about the Lindbergh baby. He wonders if she feels as changed as he
does. Her crenellated gold watch band flashes, and in his subfusc
apartment she is crisp and fresh as a crocus piercing the dirty snow.

Three men push a red Chevette out of a parking space and away up the
street, a child steering. The plastic bag glides and rolls up out of
the darkness of the buildings and fetches into the sky with a burst of
levity.

Mulder, his cheek to the window, feels his heart open.

"You try doing everything left-handed," he says detached, his breath
flocking the cold glass.

The Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper were both left-handed.

She sticks a slice of apple in his teeth, turns back on her way to the
kitchen. "And you're hardly ambidextrous," she notes, something very
wicked at the back of her eyes.

He bites down, his mouth filled with the tart first taste of love.
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