From: Zyllah Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 16:50:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: NEW "Drift" (1/1) Source: xff "Drift" by Zyllah Classification: VR, MSR Rating: PG Feedback: Will be quite comfortable at Distribution: Just tell me first so I can samba with my dog. Wouldn't want the neighbors to miss that. Disclaimer: CC and Co. own Mulder and Scully...Money? What is money? Summary: "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow." A rainy night between Je Souhaite and Requiem. Notes: 1st post. 1st fanfic. Fragile writer's psyche. Tread lightly. * * * * * * * * * "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow I learn by going where I have to go." -Theodore Roethke * * * * * * * * * Rain is a perpetual motion machine, starts and starts again, striking glass and cement maliciously. It is playing rock, paper, scissors, doesn't learn that water always loses to solid, dislikes its elemental boundaries. It speeds towards fate with the help of gravitational pull, challenging Newton and thermodynamics nervelessly, one more water-dance with the devil. Waiting for the outcome to change. * * * * * * * * * For her, this is familiarity, a litany built from every sleepless night since her teens when she still shuffled the order occasionally. A good night measures anywhere from Aluminum to Potassium, too many monsters will find her passing Barium twice, repeating the noble gases. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Berylillium, Boron, Carbon black like Egyptian soil, ancient Kemet, the Black Land... Damn. She has been doing this more, lately. Within her, confetti-sized bits of Mulder lie about softly, waiting to cross paths with her thoughts like lazy old West tumbleweeds. Strange - she never supposed prolonged exposure to one person caused osmotic tendencies. Here is her question; does Mulder do this too? Will he be thinking Basement Agent thoughts about Brown Mountain Lights and Santeria and just trip over the chemical formula of ammonia or the size of a parsec? The skeptic holds her doubts. It isn't really that she dislikes it, but she feels dismayed. She and her brain had really been quite well acquainted. She wonders if she somehow had a vital organ transplant and just never noticed. * * * * * * * * * He is squirming in the periphery of sleep, adhered firmly to the bed in resistance; the Call of the Couch is strong, should not be underestimated. These principles are a recent development, a stick up the ass, really, holding him at gunpoint and laying down the law. He is only vaguely sure why he is doing it, but he doesn't miss certain things quite as much. Perhaps comfort is learned; sleep attainable without the help of black leather armrests and the appreciably dull pain of TV glare through thin-skinned eyelids. He is keeping certain things on hand now, 'just in case' spoiling uselessly and happily in the chill incarceration of his fridge. The vegetables were fleshy, colorful EBEs, the week old orange juice a novelty, the yogurt an offense. It is comfortably ridiculous. He wonders if appliance mutiny is legal in Virginia, and doesn't care. Sacrifice is the name of the game; he is accustomed to being the martyr to his cause. * * * * * * * * * These weeks have been a pop quiz, and she's forgotten to do her readings. Scully, think fast - what do you do with a partner who is no longer so very difficult? Flirt with his tie, smooth his hand a little oftener? What? Peace has never been so eerie. Realization is heavy, comes geologically slow like the rending of Pangea. Time lagging to viscosity, wrinkling at the speed of cooling magma. This is the mystery of continental drift. They have played at obstacles for too long, too well. When motion becomes a frenetic thing like hamsters on a wheel it is possible not to notice changes in the status quo, or the fact that here is a destination you didn't see on the horizon. Mulder and thought curl like Melissa's hair, like a double helix or a Mobius strip from which she cannot be untangled. * * * * * * * * * They are magicked up by memory into a semi-solid vision of his mind's eye, dated a few days after she has helped him make three wishes. Depicted is their new TGIF habit, pizza at his place and the 6:30 Jeopardy before they have to find an excuse for her not to go home. They are keeping score with M'n'Ms, 7 to 3, Scully looking pleased, Mulder just looking. She is a few inches of couch away, folded up cross-legged and teenaged in old denim and socks. His poor performance is due more to Partner Fixation than M'n'M Distraction, although it is a little of both. He doesn't mind. Ass whipping is not devoid of its pleasures, and he gets all the M'n'Ms (and the possibility of her, asleep on the couch again) at the end anyway. Alex radiates superiority even while captive in a small black box. He reminds Mulder vaguely of a well-dressed armadillo; he has given up finding out why. She nudges him; he has missed his cue. "I don't know," he surrenders quickly. "Mulder. You don't know this one?" He gives her a hopeful look. "What is Attention Deficit Disorder?" She regards him coolly, mouth twitching. "Nope. You do not have ADD, and the last time I checked it was not a terribly famous author." "Perhaps not on *your* planet." "Which you are currently inhabiting." She returns to the magnetic lure of the television, where the contestants are shifting nervously. "E.M. Forster," she informs them gently. Alex affirms it, and she swipes a green-shelled candy from the brown bag and skitters it at her pile. "I can't believe nobody got that." She sounds slightly hurt. "I didn't know you liked Forster." She shrugs at the TV, absent. "When I was 14 or 15 Mom got the flu for Christmas, stayed in bed for a good week, couldn't do much. Bill and Missy were always busy, Charlie was mostly uncommunicative at that age, Dad was away. I think she was lonely. The radius of the Earth's orbit." Mulder's eyebrows hover politely. "What?" Her eyes are reflective, patiently glossed. "The formula for the radius of the Earth's orbit. r=GM/v squared." A red candy increases her lead. "She wanted to hear a Room With a View. She loved it. I liked it too, I guess." He digests this. "Hey Scully?" "Mm?" "How come you never read to me?" She huffs a young laugh. "I don't recall you ever asking me to." He mines the contents of his brain for a good response. "Maybe I'm just afraid of your choice of material. Anyone who doesn't like Caddyshack...I don't know, Scully..." "I'm not sure a Bill Murray movie should be the universal standard for good taste." "C'mon, I'm curious. What would I be in for?" "Mulder, I never said I'd do it, just that you'd never asked me." "Just go with it, Scully." Her lips draw up into a thought chrysanthemum. "Lewis Carroll," she says finally. He laughs a tilted laugh. "Don't tell me I look like an Alice." He tries to avoid the image of a large, walnut colored book within the shadows of his apartment. The cover is embossed in gold leaf, the second bisque page scrawled over possessively with thin blue hieroglyphics; variations on a theme, 'Samantha'. "You okay?" Her eyes are highbeams in the swiftly darkening room. "Mulder?" He swallows, feels fluttery. "He lectured at Oxford, you know." The worry lines iron out. "I know. For years, on math. And I think his real name was Charles Dodgson." Her head slopes away from him; Alex has presented a particular challenge. He clears his throat, scraping at her inattention. "I used to read him to Samantha." Her breath catches delicately. "I got a book of his for Sam when she was seven or something. I don't even know if she liked it much, just some big brother nonsense." He laughs weakly, shuts his eyes against his voice. He never expected peace to still be painful, and wonders why he didn't, wonders if he thought he had cornered the market on pain. In a moment he feels her fingers, tracing the seam of his t-shirt sleeve, a gentle pressure north of his bicep. "Do you still have it?" A heartbeat. "Yes." Her hand comes to rest there, and she leans her head against it, the cool slide of her hair at his shoulder. "Good," she says definitely, curling against him, her other arm wielding the remote like a weapon to raise the volume an increment as they settle in for Final Jeopardy. And he kisses her hairline and watches her lips curve upward in the underwater glow of the screen and feels the room go wide and round and rainforest warm with calm. Now he smiles at the dark and the close edge of sleep and at their image on pause. Yeats, who told him needlessly that things fall apart, failed to mention how they come back together. This is who they are. Still hunting up the Snarks and the Jabberwockies and lessening the atoms between themselves; their answers still coming in the form of a question, their lives going curiouser and curiouser. * * * * * * * * * She has begun dreaming again, benign night fabrications which clutter her atmosphere the next day with smoky intent. It has been going on for awhile, now, an oddity she loves but hasn't investigated too closely because she doesn't quite want to get that close. She was dream-celibate for over two years, a long, lengthened winter; perhaps she has hibernation sickness. She remembers a few things, too. She may not have an eidetic memory but she can still conjure up the memory of finding months proofread out of her life like a bad movie script. The immense amount she didn't feel and the molecules she did. She was angry; she remembers that. Her mother had never warned her about this sort of thing. Years of med school had offered no remedies. The hospital had somehow overlooked printing an insipid pamphlet on Getting Over Your Alien Abduction. Denial was her only recourse; soon she was suffering from something she didn't believe occurred. It worked, mostly, except that her dreams had mutated in her absence. Nightmares had never come in this species, rough faceless sketches of violence and instinct in sick grays and yellows. Too many hours spent wide-eyed and rigid, blinking dumbly at the ceiling. Silent and so hollow in the boundary of night and morning, no breath to scream or sigh and no energy to sleep. No capacity for shame when her bedside lamp began burning yellow vigils that waited out the dawn. Emily made the lamp obsolete. Subsequent nights were dully dark and timelessly cold. If she managed sleep, in the morning dreams fled the scene criminally like one night stands. She knows morning-after flavor, the cotton-dry taste of toothpaste and tears. She remembers this, too. Waking to the suction and scratch of her skin against leather and wool. She watches herself on instant replay. She is a morning ghost misting quietly into Mulder's room, kneeling beside the bed with her chin and elbows on the edge for so long it becomes uncomfortable. She watches him, lumpy, mussed and buried, almost face down in the fabric. Time expands and contracts like reflexive pupils; at some point she rises, shadows him, and kisses the back of his neck gently, before adjourning to the bathroom to dress. She stands before the mirror like Narcissus, transfixed, still heated from a Jackson Pollack dream. Colorful nonsense registering in the warm end of the spectrum like and infrared monitor. A starring role played by a Mulder-like Buddha or a Buddha-like Mulder. She smiles sleepily into her pillow when she thinks she will ask him which he would rather be. Someday seems sooner than it used to. Perhaps she is just another product of global warming. Antarctica is thawing, just a little, filling up the sea; soon she will start leaving small Ice Age puddles at her feet wherever she goes. * * * * * * * * * The 3AM moon is a startled, bright angel stranger, speechlessly tracing its own orbital destruction through a mine field of stars. The clouds have slunk away, defeated. Time to wake up and smell the ozone. They sleep. They have the time. * * * * fin * * * * Of course, they don't, do they? The specter of Requiem looms on the horizon. Shh. Don't tell them. Leftover Halloween candy to anyone who made it through this. =) Gotta love tiny, foil-wrapped sins. Send Button anxiety will soon set in, I believe. My computer is looking immensely chuckable. Come help.