Parabiosis ~  Page 8

__________________

She had disentangled herself and limped stiffly to the bathroom, where
she cleaned herself up and examined her face in the mirror.
Considering what she had just been through, she didn't look much
different. She dared herself to smile, and didn't.

Mulder stumbled in behind her, looking rumpled and wild. He paused as
though he'd never expected to see her standing naked in his bathroom.
"I think maybe you're bleeding a little," he said, indicating the
faint ring she'd left on him, like a high-water mark.

"I don't think it's anything," she said. "I think I just lost my
virginity again."

"Oh, me too," he said warmly, and they looked at each other in the
mirror. He came up behind her and squeezed her tight. Later, when she
left him, there was water in her eyes, but not to the extent that he
was supposed to comment. It was hard to leave him there with his
lovesick eyes and his hair a mess, the sheets and his skin painted
gold. She didn't dare kiss him. He held her hand in both of his and
she stroked his hair and tried to work up a smile. "Good night, sweet
prince," she said gruffly, drawing her finger down his nose, trying to
make him smile. He only blinked and opened her palm and pressed his
face into it, hoping to leave an imprint.
__________________

Mulder hove dramatically on the scene the next morning, pausing in the
doorway of the sanctum sanctorum to sink a crumpled coffee cup
overhand into the trash.

"My, aren't we chipper," said Scully, swiveling lazily in the desk
chair. He affected a world-weary slouch, but couldn't quite pull it
off. A trace of a smile flickered in Scully's eyes, and she busied
herself with the remote.

"What've we got?" he asked, divesting himself of his trench coat. The
silver light came down from the skylight against his face and her
heart crashed rhythmically against a stony shore.

"What do you know about making mummies, Mulder?" Another part of
Scully could carry on as ever, working. Work. Arbeit macht frei.

"Well," he said with condescending patience, "on certain nights when
the moon is full and romance is in the air..."

"I mean, what is the basic ingredient?" she coached, rewinding the
tape.

"For a mummy? Um." Mulder rolled up his sleeves, circled the room
thoughtfully. He looked pretty cheerful for someone who had gone with
so little sleep. "A dead guy." He sat down on the front of his desk,
qualmishly lifting his brows at her over his shoulder. "What's on this
tape, Scully?"

Scully crossed her ankles and hit 'play', enjoying the look on his
face. On the monitor two guys were kissing in the hallway outside the
Gunmen's, captured in flickering black and white, 'The Lovecats'
barely audible on the soundtrack.

"You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," she said.

"It's so bourgeois to make free with cliches, Scully."

"I thought you said it was bourgeois to be straight."

"Oh, that too. Even Ernie and Bert were gay."

Scully leaned on the armrest and folded her hand over her eyes.

"Sometimes they'd push those little beds together."

"Mulder - !" she groaned.

"You didn't think they were brothers, did you, Scully? Ernie's
obviously Hispanic!"

"Can't you be serious for once?" she asked. "Do you have any idea
what's on this tape?"

"I'm getting a terrible feeling," he admitted. "Why do you think I'm
cracking wise?"

"Because you're hopelessly impossible?" she offered.

"Come on, prepare me a little," he coaxed. "Is it awful?"

"Mulder, ever heard of a little thing called snuff porn?" she asked.

"Oh, shit. No way."

"Way."

Mulder rubbed his eyes. "It's too early in the morning. It's my first
day back at work. I don't want to watch this with you. I don't want
you to have to watch it."

"I've already seen it."

Mulder rubbed his face. "Maybe it's a simulation?" he asked hopefully.

"Nope, the real McCoy."

"Is it a guy?"

"Yes."

Mulder looked thoughtful. "Does he look Egyptian?"

"How did you know that?" she asked, surprised. Mulder was always a
step ahead.

He looked up at the skylight. "Wow, Scully..." he murmured. "And he
bites it?"

"He bites it."

"A dead Egyptian guy. Wonder what they did with the body..." Mulder
started going through his umbrella stand of rolled maps.

"Mulder, you're trying to get out of watching this." She sat on the
front of the desk and put her hand on the spot beside her.

On the television monitor Scully's informant approached, captured from
overhead on the grainy security video. His face was difficult to make
out, but Scully recognized his posture and build. He was abruptly
preempted by the lurid gloss of color film, a fleshy miasma of
cavorting priestesses. Mulder hit the lights and came and sat beside
her. The priestesses in their faux late-dynasty attire were attendant
upon the pressing needs of the leading man.

"Please, Scully," Mulder muttered, mortified.

"This is all evidence," she argued, but she cut to the chase.

There followed a vivisection so detailed that Mulder turned away a few
times, closed his eyes, looked at the wall, hummed 'Lovecats' to get
himself through it. Scully gave him sympathetic glances. Usually she
enjoyed trying to gross him out, especially around autopsies in
progress, but this morning she let her elbow touch his companionably.

She herself had found the evisceration fascinating, from a
pathologist's point of view. The victim screamed as the dagger was
inserted into the lower left side of his abdomen. The incision was
precisely six inches long; it took seven women to hold him down. An
anachronistic plastic five-gallon bucket came into play. They had
removed several feet of intestine and a kidney before he passed out,
lying moribund but undoubtedly alive for several subsequent minutes.
The Egyptian embalming process took forty days of draining and salting
and drying before a corpse was wrapped, and this was like a high speed
version of the practice. Once all the organs were removed, the body
cavity was rinsed with wine, packed with spices and cedar shavings,
and the autopsy slit was sewn shut. The brain was hooked out through
the sinus, via a puncture in the ethmoid bone. The corpse was packed
in natron, wrapped in gauze, and sealed in melted resin. Then,
abruptly, The Who were singing 'Pinball Wizard', and Mulder sighed in
relief.

He shook his head in amazement as Scully turned off the TV. "Well, I'm
ready for lunch."

"It's pretty amazing, the lengths humanity will go to for
entertainment. In this case, entertainment outweighs human life."

"It makes you think, doesn't it? The Roman Empire reached similar
levels of depravity right before its downfall. All I can hope is that
the segment of our society who classify this as 'entertainment' is
very small," he said.

"Why did he give us the tape? Why the games?"

Mulder picked up the phone. "I don't know, but I know a few gamers who
can probably find out." He looked at her over the receiver, a look in
his sepia eyes that potential spy cameras could interpret however they
liked.
____________________

Driving in from Quantico one snowy evening in late February she hit
ice rounding a corner and her car began to slide sideways down the
street. She tried to correct it without braking, feeling the momentum
spreading out before her, her hold on the earth skating away. A horn
blared past. Someone in oncoming traffic had their brights on and for
a moment she was looking deep within the light, gone neon blind,
flashing on a whirl of indistinct and unrelated memories. Then the
tires gripped gravel and she was miraculously back in her own lane,
straightening out, the street dark ahead of her. Despite heavy traffic
she had not so much as scratched another car.

She came down into her thumping heart and steady hands. She was
annoyed at herself but unafraid. She felt the strong lure of Mulder,
how it felt to hear his voice with her head against his chest. She
imagined the centralizing comfort of his couch, the tempo of his heart
beneath her cheek. His apartment would be warm and well-lit. She had
thought of him in those few racing moments, and she realized now that
she was vectoring towards Alexandria, though she had originally been
heading home.

She had never needed anyone like this. She liked being self-contained,
touching no-one and no-one touching her. This weakened her, meddled
with her concentration and her independence.

It was her birthday. The anniversary of the day she was born. It had
always seemed to her that the day of one's conception should be
celebrated instead, the moment of that first cell division, when one
first came into being. Of course as a date it could be a little harder
to pin down.

"I think of this as our day," she had confessed to her mother that
morning on the phone.

"Oh, so do I."

"You're the one who did all the work. Why should I get all the
credit?"

"Do you have any big plans tonight?" her mother asked.

"Oh, no, I hope not," Scully said. "I haven't gotten wind of anything.
If Mulder even remembers he'll probably just give me a key chain or
something." She flashed on biting Mulder's bare shoulder, and
straightened up, clearing her throat. She opened the fridge and tried
to get her mind out of the gutter. She had slept with Mulder once, a
week ago, and it had hardly been a casual encounter. It had been deep
and frightening and phenomenal. She couldn't presume it would become a
common occurrence.

She wrinkled her nose as though against an internal pain, and moved
the milk to one side, looking for the baby carrots. "I have to get to
work, Mom. Was it a hard labor?"

"You looked like a little fairy from under a rock," said her mother.
"Have you read 'Angela's Ashes' yet?"
__________________

When Scully came to herself that evening, she was cross-legged on a
cushion on the floor of Mulder's living room, breathing the steam from
a bowl of hot and sour soup. A troika of Gunmen monopolized the room,
and she looked around at them in some surprise. Paul Simon's
'Graceland' album was on the stereo. Mulder was on her left, at the
end of the coffee table, scraping pork-fried rice from a takeout box.
On her right, Langly dipped a piece of sesame chicken in the hot
mustard and opened a Dos Equis. Frohike was tickling his laptop
one-handed as he ate, lounging on the couch like a tiny pongid Mae
West. Byers went to the kitchen for forks. Only Mulder and Langly used
chopsticks, Langly drumming his on the coffee table at intervals.

"He operates out of Albuquerque," said Frohike. He held out his plate
for prawns.

"But he does a lot of work in New York, and overseas," said Byers. "We
suspect he bugged Scully's car so he could find her quickly if he
needed to."

"But that doesn't make sense. I never take my car anywhere," Scully
objected.

"I don't expect the field of directing porno flicks attracts many
geniuses," Langly said. "Although apparently it can be lucrative. He
tends to get commissioned a lot."

"But I've spoken to this man, and he didn't strike me as particularly
foolish," said Scully.

"What's his name?" Mulder asked, tearing paper towels off a roll.

"Armyan Lillegard," said Frohike. "And his passport photo matches
Scully's positive ID on the video grab." He handed his laptop across
the table and Scully nodded at the photograph on the screen.

"Well, the field of cryptozoology-pathology tends to attract geniuses,
and only the rarest of geniuses. In fact, there may be only one such
in the world," Mulder said. The Gunmen stared at him, spellbound,
waiting. Mulder pretended to drop his napkin, and under the table his
hand touched her knee. It went against every unspoken rule they had,
and she raised her eyebrows, even as she went warm in the stomach. He
took his hand away.

"Scully pulled a partial logo off the bucket, the logo of a paint
company based in Seattle." Mulder reached up behind him to his
computer desk and grabbed a ratty piece of paper Scully privately
thought of as his Mummy Map. He smoothed it open on the corner of the
coffee table and tapped his finger on Seattle. The perpetrator's route
backtracked exactly through Seattle.

Mulder produced a photograph he'd printed out. "Look at this! Five
months ago, Seattle PD discovered the remains of human viscera in the
woods out of town. No body. Look at the ground, Scully. What are
those?"

Scully studied the grayish photo. Langly leaned over her shoulder.
"They're worms," she said slowly. "Night crawlers." The lumpy ground
was littered with them.

"Worms!" said Mulder happily. He played a little bongo riff on the
table, and ate a snow pea.

"And what does this mean to you?" she asked.

"Notice that the worms are dead," he said.

"I notice."

"What makes worms come up out of the ground?" he asked.

"If you pour soapy water on the ground, they come up," said Byers.

"Close," said Mulder.

"One of those worm-shocker things," said Langly.

"Warmer," said Mulder.

"Lightning," said Scully.

"The Birthday Girl takes round one!" said Mulder. "Open your
presents."

There were two presents in the middle of the coffee table, surrounded
by takeout boxes. Scully eyed them reluctantly. She was notoriously
hard to shop for.

"Wait. What exactly are you implying took place there, Mulder? And the
bucket doesn't even prove inconclusively that the film was made in
Seattle."

"Close enough for government work," said Frohike.

"Mulder, this man is dead. We saw him get killed. And VICAP finds no
connection between the deaths of James Keep and Kit Remmerde." Scully
stabbed violently at a water chestnut.

Mulder pointed a chopstick at her. "However, we do, Scully. The
question here is: why were we given the tape? Obviously your informant
wants us on this case, because whatever he inadvertently created has
become a threat to him."

"It's alive," muttered Scully facetiously, taking a slug of beer.

"Why can't you admit it?" he asked, annoyed. "Scully, you've seen the
lab results, you've seen the bodies, you've seen the video. How much
more proof do you need?"

"Brainsuckers, Moon Monsters, where will it end?" she asked of no-one
in particular.

"It was a Fear Monster," he snapped.

"Lucy and Ricky," muttered Langly from the corner of his mouth.

"Basil Fawlty and his little piranha-fish," whispered Frohike.

Mulder and Scully's heads turned as though they'd forgotten they
weren't alone. "What?" Mulder asked.

"Don't fight in front of the kids," Frohike said. "You want to warp us
for life?" He passed Scully the first present. It was a book, from
Mulder, gift-wrapped at the store. "So what does this make you,
Scully, twenty-five?" Frohike asked. Scully favored him with a look.
She didn't want to hear any comments about 36-year-old women. "Hey,
when you get to be my age, everyone looks like a spring chicken," he
said contentedly, cracking open a fortune cookie.

How did it get to this point? she wondered. When she'd first met this
klatch of oddly-spoken misfits she'd dismissed them on principle. When
she'd first met Mulder she'd found him conceited and difficult. Now
the five of them together constituted a working fellowship of sorts.
In high school they probably wouldn't have spoken to each other. She
was surprised to look up now and find that she'd accepted them, and
been accepted in return. Mr. Basketball Star would have been too cool
for her, she thought.

Mulder had given her 'The Tao of Pooh'. She wondered if he was trying
to convert her to Eastern religions. Or children's literature. Inside
he had written:

Feb 23 2000
Thanks for making the journey with me.
XX Mulder

"Thank you," she told him, touched despite herself. He smiled softly
at her. She was trying not to smile back, at least not in front of the
guys.

She opened the Gunmen's present with greater trepidation. The box was
wrapped in the Sunday comics and tied with raffia. You never quite
knew what to expect from them - it could be the director's cut of
'Barbarella' or hemp-butter zucchini muffins.

Inside was a plastic bag containing a goldfish, which she would have
to keep at Mulder's. "Your own fish," said Langly. "No reason for
Mulder to get to have all the fun of pet ownership."

"And this way you won't have to clean the tank," said Frohike. The
Gunmen were suddenly mobilized, shutting down the computer and
carrying their plates to the kitchen. Langly's grandma was coming in
on the bus. They had to pick up their laundry from the laundromat.
"Byers may go and get married on us," said Frohike, disgusted. Byers
stood silently proud. They all looked at him with the mistrust and
envy of single people.

"You've talked to Susanne?" Scully asked him.

"We've been in touch," Byers said quietly. Mulder was cleaning up the
coffee table, and Langly in his Deep Purple T-shirt stood rolling the
basketball down his arm.

"Killer groats, man," Frohike told Mulder. Scully kissed Byers in
congratulation as the Gunmen left. She followed Mulder to the kitchen
with her hands full of bottles and glasses.

"Don't you dare put your hands in that dishwater," Mulder said,
putting cartons of leftover Chinese food in the fridge. It looked like
he would be eating it for a week.

"Thank you for dinner. And for remembering," she said. "Not that I
want to remember."

Mulder stopped and put his arms around her waist. The water in the
sink was running. He looked into her face. "I want to remember," he
said. "I want to remember every minute."

Langly, slouching back in in his high tops to retrieve Frohike's hat,
happened to glance toward the kitchen, and that was how the Lone
Gunmen accrued irrefutable eye-witness substantiation of the
long-debated, non-definitive Mulder-Scully Relationship.
__________________

Mulder put up no opposition when Scully said that she wanted to go
home. He zipped a suit into his garment bag and packed up a few extra
things as she stood watching in his bedroom doorway, feeling a little
dazed. Heat rushed up her body when he looked at her. "Is it all right
if I stay the night?" he asked. She could not find an answer, and she
stared at him, managing to nod. Mulder held a pair of forgotten shoes,
stood staring at her in amazement.
__________________

"In Africa I saw a man," she said. "A tribesman." There was a
didgeridoo of wind under the eaves. Mulder lay across the foot of her
bed, holding her feet, his hip washed bronze. She felt so heavy and
lazy she couldn't even lift her head from the pillows. She was chafed
and cherished, scent-marked. She wanted to tell him everything of
importance inside her, how she felt as if she were finally coming of
age. How it had felt when he was ill and she could find no cure, how
it felt when he was missing. He pressed the sole of her foot to his
hard raspy cheek and she remembered when he was above her, her foot
curved to follow his jaw, her knee beside her own cheek.

"He spoke to me," she said, experiencing his whetstone skin with her
toes. "He said, 'Some truths are not for you'."

"You get more visitations than Bernadette of Lourdes," he said.

"He was real, Mulder, I saw him."

"And you believed he was trying to tell you to go home."

"He was right, though. I was not able to divine the truths of the
ship. They were not for me. A complete human genome on a buried space
craft?"

He gripped her foot and thoughtfully smelled her toes. "And the fish
came back to life," he said.

She pushed off his chest with her foot and sat up against the pillows.
"Scully, you really don't think you need any birth control?" he asked
quickly, his nerve gathered. He saw the swift closing of her face, and
she looked away, trying to hide it.

He got up and moved up the bed to lie gingerly beside her. "You don't
know for sure," he murmured. "You still menstruate."

"But YOU said!" She turned towards him, the grief in her face almost
more than he could take. "Besides everything that's happened to me, we
both know that I've been exposed to high levels of radiation. And not
just during my cancer treatments. You told me, Mulder, because you
knew it to be true." She looked away. "I don't see any reason to
discuss it."

He dropped his chin to his chest, arms folded. This was as far as he
intended to take it, anyway. Sex had never been so raw and elemental,
so unhindered by prophylactics, and he didn't want to change a thing.
Sex with Scully was having the breath sucked from his mouth, having
her stare into his soul and drown him in her depths.

"Mulder, a few years ago I came up against this wall with you," she
said. She folded her arms beneath her breasts, her head tipping on the
pillow. He had tilted the mirror over the bureau earlier, and now he
could read her expression in it, her eyebrows rising and falling as
she spoke. "At that point you were just another man in a series of
domineering men whom I wanted to please. Eventually with these men
there always came a point at which I rebelled, I was punished, and I
escaped. But with you, something changed. We worked through it
together. We became friends, equals."

He reached over and she interspliced their fingers. "I grew up,
Mulder. I didn't walk away from you. I didn't make it be your fault.
That never happened to me before."

"I grew up, too," he said. "I could have just let you be a sister to
me. All I've ever wanted is my sister."

After she'd locked the door to her apartment, he had brushed the snow
from her collar, and she'd backed up against the wall. There was a
sharp aggressive light in her eyes and their gazes locked as his
shadow slid over her. He had not meant to dominate her but it made her
breathe so fast that he loomed over her, hands on the wall,
discovering that his partner had a dark side she had hid well for
years. There was something rough in her rapt gaze, in the sound that
tore loose in her throat when he pulled her hands up against the wall
and kissed her.

Now, she slid his hand over the satiny surface of her belly, her eyes
closing. He half-rolled against her and nuzzled the rough ends of her
hair. "I guess what it all comes down to is that we're all,
individually or collectively, shuffling towards the divine, towards
our rumors of fate. And in the end the only question is, will we do it
alone, or together?"

She didn't answer, but their hands together circled and circled over
her skin.
__________________

Spring this early smelled of thawing leaf mould, chill dawns, and a
sepulchral killer beside her, dredged in his bitter ash.

The eye in the gargoyle face had a lizard's glassine stare. He hunched
in the window of her car one windy spring morning, walking death, a
dying man with the gift of life. He was minatory,
conspiracy-mongering, and when she was with him she felt the noosphere
crawling with smoking rolling metal, buildings expanding and
contracting like lungs, emitting xenon, contaminated rivers running to
the seas.

He breathed abhorrent smoke, exhaling it as if from his cancerous
soul, a toxic smudge in the air.

She would never believe that this man could be Mulder's father.
Mulder's eyes were the softest she'd ever looked into, and the icy
refraction of this man's stare could be counted out in blood-slicked
corpses, unmade kings, could be uncrumpled and measured, page by page,
in the diary of a young girl.

He had a longing for a legacy of more than fatal mischief, as if he
hoped to stop contaminating everything he touched, herself included.

She had always known it would come to this. Scully kept her hands
tight on the wheel, and drove through a night waiting for the heavy
earth to roll its belly to the sun.
__________________

In stiff limbic flashes he dreamed of greenbloods and the galvanic
texture of chicken wire, of men who put dogs and monkeys into space,
killed his parents, took Samantha. There were clashes of aural
dissonance as he smashed light bulbs with a book; he was rolling a
tire through the woods, he was shouting uselessly at the roaring sky,
black oil in his eyes. He wanted Scully to come home. Kazakhstan,
Antarctica, Bellefleur, Skyland Mountain, Arecibo, Ruskin Dam: they
would take her. Lights flipping overhead, nothing on earth is this
bright, nothing pierces your corneas like this, little fuzzy foo
fighters, enormous humming craft.

Then he rolled over in the sheets and he was down in the Jungle Room,
someone touched him, someone ambushed him, he was dead or dead alive.
Krycek death-kissed him with a gun in his face. Krycek smelled of
leather, vodka, maybe sex, he was unshowered and he liked to fight.
Mulder liked to fight too. Krycek smelled of oil and rust. Scully
smelled of fire.

The Nazca lines spread out below him, alien runways unrolling to the
distances in ephemeris time. He flew above them, he rose,
stratospheric, he called out to her. At the times when he was slung
about with her knees and arms, the wildness of her hair in his mouth,
he was happiest and unhappiest, and most alive.
__________________

"Did he touch you?" Mulder asked.

"No."

There had been no question about exchanging her freedom, her life, for
a world free from human disease. Nor would she hesitate to sacrifice
Mulder's happiness along with her own.

She had closed her mind to Mulder, that long night before the
exchange. There would be plenty of time for remorse during the walking
death her life would become, chained to a monster who stroked her
hair. Her distaste for the Smoking Man was only a slight measure of
her sacrifice; living without Mulder would have dealt her true
destruction. His arguments boiled up inside her head and she pressed
her face into her palms, remembering his stupid jokes, his warm
kisses. She wondered if he would understand why, what it meant to her
to hold a medical license, her pledge to humanity. It did not make it
easier to know that he would.

She did not sleep that night. The sound of the river was constant, its
cycling waters endlessly changing, her own life standing still.

"You would have done the same thing, Mulder, given the choice," she
said, late afternoon in her living room, still shaking off the echoing
accusation of the empty office building. "You said it yourself once.
You have to stand up to make a shadow."

In the silence his jacket creaked. Mulder was half in shadow, his
inclement eyes upon her. At least now he was looking at her. His head
moved fractionally.

Her hand gestured between them. "Look at us - our lives are worth
nothing! What do we matter compared to the millions of people who are
right this minute dying without this cure!" Her voice rose; she was
struck by the reality of what had nearly come to pass, and began to
shake.

"Your own mother, Mulder. She could have been saved by this. Don't
tell me you wouldn't have done anything in your power to save her,
that you wouldn't have expected the same of me."

His dark eyes burned at her, and his voice was hoarse with emotion or
repressed tears. "One thing I do know is that I'd never come to a
decision like that without discussing it with you."

"Mulder, the deal would have been off if I'd even spoken to you."

Mulder paced closer. "Why did he deal with you anyway? Was it because
he realized he couldn't string me along with Samantha anymore? Or was
it something else?"

Scully shook her head, her eyes refusing to focus. She felt the hard
geometry of the freeway rippling under her feet.

"Did he tell you he saved your life? Did he appeal to your sanctity,
Scully?" Mulder was nearly shouting, and she felt a lunge of anger.
She was too exhausted for this. She was the one who had had to face
giving up everything that made life worth living.

"Did he touch you?" Mulder shouted.

"Yes!" she hissed. He was impossible to argue with. She wanted to
scrape some of her pain off onto him. She wanted him to leave her the
fuck alone so she could sleep, covers pulled over her head to make it
all go away.

"Oh, baby, where?" he asked, aghast.

She shrugged, twitching against a sense of violation. "I was asleep,"
she said. "He put me to bed."

Mulder croaked her name in his jagged voice, pushing her coat off her
shoulders. She struggled with him, walking backwards into the wall,
fighting felt good and she plied the pressure of her forearms over
his, slowly forcing him away. He let her win, and his hands were
gentler as they came back to her clothes, pulling her against him. She
drifted in the grip of weariness, Mulder walking her backwards. They
were in her bathroom now, he was pulling up her shirt, gripping her
arm as he reached in to turn on the shower. She leaned against his
shoulder, smelling leather and his angry fear-sweat.

In the shower he scrubbed her like dirty marble. She washed him
ineffectively, eyes closed, mouth sucking on his collarbone, beginning
to feel secure for the first time in days. She was so glad to be out
of those clothes stained with boats and snipers and into his arms, his
fingers combing back her wet hair. "Your altruism would kill me," he
said into her skin.

"It would kill us both," she admitted. She couldn't help but feel that
he was washing her with the energetic distaste with which one washed
the doorknobs in a new apartment. She stepped onto his feet and
plastered their bodies together, opening her mouth over his.

Scully was potter's clay in his soapy hands, alive and safe against
him in the beating shower, her arms around his neck. She gave a little
cry as her mouth careened into his, wet and hot as weapons grade
plutonium, and his fingertip tested her buttery depths.

They made common cause in her insulate bed, struggling to get a
purchase on each other's wet skin, gathered up in the brunt of
repossession. And in the afterlude they slept, hours and hours
together in the warm undersea currents of the bed. They had not saved
the world, but they were together, safe and tangled, and he felt her
ribcage rising with a tentative sense of peace.
____________________

The tightly origamied leaves uncrumpled in green flourishes along the
streets. Out in the countryside floppy Pierrot magpies flashed on the
fenceposts and the fields exploded with yellow mustard. There was a
can of shaving cream on Scully's bathroom sink and three of Mulder's
socks in with her laundry. They seemed to be moving to each other's
apartments.

There was a pair of her pajamas in Mulder's sweats drawer, but she
never seemed to end up wearing them. When she slept over she had
Mulder wrapped around her, radiating warmth like a St. Bernard. Mulder
had to buy a fan for his bedroom window, complaining about the way she
got him overheated.

They weren't having lots of sex. Work came first, the responsibilities
of real life. It wasn't as if they were kids who went into pheromonal
overdrive at the sight of each other. They were professionals, and
there was no consorting on assignment, no motel room sex. It was rare
when they found a moment to kiss each other. They seemed to be on
constant trips to California. On the long transcontinental flights
they talked about politics and cases, articles they had read, the
coming election year.

They got by on anticipation and the promise of next time. Work always
came first, and if it wasn't her idea of a normal relationship, it was
her idea of a relationship with Mulder, and their transition from
platonic to romantic was nearly flawless. As ever, Mulder could leave
the toilet seat up at his own apartment to his heart's content,
whereas at Scully's retaliation for the same act would be swift and
fatal. For her part Scully had not suddenly earned the God-given right
to criticize his friends or his expidentures. She kept her peace. She
liked Mulder pretty well the way he was.

She liked his bed and his unwavering focus, and the fact that he liked
it all as much as she did. She liked that he still gave no ground in
their arguments, that he read himself to sleep with poetry, that he
seemed to find her body the pinnacle of the female form, even if
Scully herself did not. She was nearer forty than thirty,
short-bodied, a retainer of water. Mulder thought her breasts were
exactly the perfect size, but he was biased and capable of endless
post-coital praise, most of which she tuned out while reveling in his
perfect form.

But it was remarkable that when she was with him she became something
finer than she had ever expected to be. And it was a mark of Mulder
that he could surprise her even about herself.
__________________

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