From: penumbra23@my-deja.com
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2000 23:49:57 GMT
Subject: New: PARABIOSIS (1/13)

__________________

PARABIOSIS
by Penumbra (penumbra23@hotmail.com)
S/MSR/Rated R/300K
Timeline: Sixth Extinction through Requiem
Summary: Science and Mysticism conjoin
Tagline: Exceptions Prove The Rule
__________________

"You want to hear my mummy theory?" he asks in the bath.

"Hit me." The wet kelp of her hair sticks to his chin as she reclines
against him. Earlier, she yelped and gasped, and knocked a candle,
hissing, into the water. He smells hot freesia wax, wet woman's hair,
female smells in his dingy bathroom.

"Our mummy has gone to Albuquerque."

"Mulder..." she growls and sighs. His arms around her slippery body ride
out the upheaval. She speaks with exasperated precision. "A cadaver
stuffed with natron reanimates and locomotes its way to New Mexico.
How's it going to get there, Mulder, thumb down a dromedary?"

The mirror he wedged over the faucets is fogged, but in a water streak
he can partially see her face, her eyes heavy-lidded, color in her
cheeks. His dark head is above hers, his arms are crossed beneath her
chin. She turns her head and idly licks a drop of bath water from his
shoulder.

This isn't real, he thinks.

This cannot possibly be happening.
__________________

Brain Salad Surgery...Manta Rays...Mulder's Cosmos...Altitudinal...The
Elusive Idaho Skunkape...Helter-Skelter...Endtime Prophecies...Into
Sammyville...Zero At The Bone...Gorman Fossick's Rolling Meth Lab...The
Thanksgiving Fiasco...One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts...Perigee-Syzygy
__________________

"It's me," she called as she let herself in.

"It's you," he answered from the bedroom. They had quarreled at their
last encounter - she was jet-lagged and he'd had brain surgery - but
they both forgot it now in the little moment of seeing each other again.

She stopped in the bedroom doorway and summed him up as she slipped off
her shoes. He looked terrible, bandaged and tragic. She tried to
remember at what he point he had begun to make her feel everything so
acutely.

Lobotomies went out of fashion in the '30s, when electroshock therapy
became the rage. If anyone ever touched him again they were going to
learn the true meaning of pain.

"This is hard-core sloth, Scully - you may want to avert your eyes."
His bed was a rock slide of books and folders, with Mulder tangled in
the middle, sitting up in one of his gray T-shirts. He brightened at the
sight of her, or perhaps at the pizza box that she tossed on the bed
like appeasement proffered an active volcano.

"Rough day, Mulder?" Fox Mulder had quixotic theories, dark eyes, and he
was six feet of long warm bones in the bed. She had been making a fool
of herself over him for years, staying in a ridiculous job because
Mulder was tall and mumbly and had once tried to make her drink sardine
juice.

She held out a plastic shopping bag. "Here. Happy late birthday." She
felt awkward about giving him a gift, even just a Yankees baseball cap,
so she sat down and opened her Anasazi book.

Mulder lifted his face with a misty expression. "...Sports memorabilia,
pizza and G-women...what more could a guy wish for in life?" he asked
her.

She felt her equilibrium yaw. She supposed it was a figurative question.
Somewhere between a beach of slaughtered mantas and the moment in
Georgetown when she found him too catatonic to meet her eyes, he had
fostered an ability to make her ultra-aware of herself in relation to
him.

She was conscious that this was the highlight of her day - Mulder's
quiet apartment with its good antiques and its bad feng shui, the tilt
of his Frankenstein head as he fished a piece of green pepper out of the
neck of his T-shirt. Scully ate a slice of pizza with a plate and fork,
and they watched the news. He did not mention the stars, and she did not
expect him to.
__________________

Distressed, she ran south once, away from the ship. Over reflective sand
she ran barefoot, mindful of skates, of jellyfish. She was pushed
through with fear. Sun-glare off the slopping water and the slash of air
in her lungs tore and scattered the things about him she usually kept
level, kept undeclared and salted away.

In a cove around the second point, she encountered a killing field of
butchered manta rays, the remains of a netful of devilfish that had been
dressed out for the market in Abidjan. Their little black faces with the
spiky ears reminded her of Batman's cowl. They were filleted, and
scattered, stiffening. A skin of flies lay over all.

Scully walked among them. The presence of death calmed her down and
directed her thoughts. She had come to the source of the matter, and she
would untangle his riddled fate here in the cradle of life. She brushed
at tears with the same saline content as the water athunder beside her.
She remembered Mulder calling her dog 'Quahog'. He had held her child in
his arms. He pointed out an airplane window at Venus. He tore a page
from a book and walked away.
__________________

He read through the translations she'd made that day, enjoying the way
her notebook was battered and foreign. It said 'Cahier' on the cover; it
was stained with sand and locust spit. There was an amateurish sketch of
a pelican at the bottom of one page and a grocery list in the back
cover. (Oranges, eggs, lantern mantles.)

She had walked into the hospital, the flash of her cerebral cortex like
aurora in the night of his mind. It was the most revelatory moment of
his life. She was more tender and profound than she ever let on, worn
raw with feeling. He would never again doubt that she loved him.

When he got home from the hospital he discovered that his bedroom
ceiling had Big Banged into some kind of astronomical smatter - it was
stippled with glow-in-the-dark stars. There were even stars on the
walls, giving a dome effect, and a few had fallen to the floor where
they lay in inventive constellations, simmering in the dark. When he
arose in the night he felt that he was moving out into the universe,
that Scully had described a limitless domain into which he might tread.

He stole a look at her as she pressed open her book and touched a
passage with her finger. Lately there was a little curl at the tips of
her hair that was driving him quietly mad. After their time apart her
Hibernian features pierced him anew. And among her many glints of
sagacity, she could now read Ancient Navajo.
__________________

That first night in the hospital his mother entered late at night and
caught them in bed together.

Teena Mulder ignored her and touched her son, her eyes narrowing with
love the way Mulder's own sometimes did. Mulder lay oblivious,
bushwhacked by pain killers. His mother's presence was so unobtrusive
that Scully closed her eyes after awhile, too exhausted to maintain
embarrassment. Under the blanket she clasped his homey fingers.

Before his mother left, she laid her hand on Scully's head. They looked
at each other levelly. This small, fierce woman, thought Teena Mulder.
This miraculous woman who would save her son.

Scully lay dreamily after she left. She turned her head and let the
vital scrape of him sift beneath her lips. This, then, was pure
happiness, a tranquilized visionary, trepanned and inert. She drowsed
against him, the ocean that was between them folded up and put away.
__________________

It is inconceivable, what begins to dawn on her. It is too whole-souled,
too astonishing. It is like one of Mulder's far-fetched, preposterous
theories, the kind that almost always come true.
__________________

"Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep
out, hair by hair, disguised like the smoke that dispels them."
- Maxine Hong Kingston
'The Woman Warrior'
__________________

The Bengal tigress pressed the limits of her cell in an endless figure
eight, her huge paws soundless on the cement floor. She had the loose
underskin of an aging feline. She paused from time to time and looked
straight into Scully's eyes, looked through her with the madness of a
thwarted hunter. Scully considered the juxtaposition of her own soft,
defenseless body powered by a superior brain. She felt a clutch of
weariness as her blood sugar dropped.

Scully's informant leaned on the rail to her left, a small man in a gray
windbreaker, his crew cut darkening in the falling mist. As a small
woman Scully was leery of short men; they often singled her out because
of their insecurities about their size. Scully was aware of her
prejudice against their prejudice.

She knew that Mulder hadn't considered her size in years. Somehow she
had slipped under the yellow 'do not cross' tape and preempted his
fixation with coltish brunettes, in-through-the-out-door sort of chicks.
On some days, in certain filters of mood, she knew that Mulder was the
love of her life. What concerned her most was the unlikelihood that she
could herself be the love of someone's life. Dana Scully, cloistered,
infecund, cantankerous; you had to wonder.

Although there were times when the look in his eyes convinced her
momentarily otherwise.

The man beside her shook his head, watching the tiger. "Payette County,
Idaho," he said. "Two years ago, with the snow melt, a road washed out
in the Payette National Forest. The Forest Service has sought to
rebuild, since there are still a few thousand acres in the back country
that they've neglected to log. During this interval, however, the river
has leaned into its new course. Rebuilding the road would cause damage
and erosion to the river bank, and that stretch of the river harbors
spawning beds for the endangered bull trout."

He turned and considered Scully, and his face was so plainly
unremarkable that her memory could not find a purchase on his features.
"Several ecology groups have gotten into the act," he said. "Among them,
radical environmentalists Earth First! They have employed their usual
tactics - tree sitting and barricading the roads. There have been the
usual arrests and people chaining themselves to back hoes. What may
interest you is a death that occurred in the area. At first glance it
would appear to be a hate crime, but nothing, as we know, Agent Scully,
is ever as it appears."

She wondered why all informants had to talk like they were on some
gritty cop drama. He drew out a manila envelope and handed it to her;
Scully did not open it. It was warm from being under his jacket.

He pointed to the tiger. "Now this, this is closer to the truth," he
said cryptically. He drew out a dollar bill, held it taut, and rolled it
over the rail. "Your partner will take the wrong lead," he said. He
handed her the bill. "You take the right one."

He was gone then, and Scully looked down at the money in her hand.
George Washington with his wooden teeth regarded her mildly.
Rubber-stamped beside his head was a speech balloon that said, 'I grew
hemp'. The tiger huffed, flaring her whiskers.

Scully clipped out of the zoo, and paused to let George spring for a
latte. She flicked open her cell phone and hit the speed dial, her eyes
brightening as she searched for her car, as she spoke to the love of her
life.
____________________

Mulder zipped their sleeping bags together on a night when the big pale
moon soaked an open mountainside and raked shadows through spinneys of
skeletal pine. The trail was white granite sand checked with fool's
gold. Something came over Scully in the final mile and she remembered
the quivering nausea of chemotherapy. She had an intense desire to lay
down and never get up.

Mulder stopped on a switchback and canted her face to the moon,
examining her pupils. She pulled away, not really in the mood to be
doctored by someone who could barely keep 'starve a fever/feed a cold'
straight. They argued fitfully while Scully swallowed and stared at his
hiking boots, unamused by the sense of cosmic irony at play. So, Mulder
got seasick and she got altitude-sick. Rough justice, perhaps.

Who had the energy to commit a crime at eight thousand feet? A murder,
no less. Scully barely had the strength to pry off her boots as she lay
on a boulder watching upside down as Mulder put up his tent. She was
cold and sick, not about to eat whatever freeze dried delectables he had
seen fit to procure. There was clear water cupped in a depression in the
boulder, she dipped her finger and traced it over her dry lips.


"Parmesan stroganoff with broccoli, mmm," said Mulder convincingly.

"I didn't realize haute cuisine was one of the perks of mountain
climbing with you." Scully was already in bed, watching him through  the
open tent flaps.

"Ye of little faith," said Mulder reprovingly, boiling water in a tiny
pan over a tiny stove.

"What's this deal with the sleeping bags, Mulder?" she asked, lowering
her tone.

Mulder carefully poured hot water into a foil pouch. "Well, I for one
don't want to freeze," he drawled, not looking up. "But if you'd rather
have it the other way, that's fine with me." He held up a plastic spork
and examined it incuriously.

There was no way she was moving again. Her dizziness subsided as she
began to acclimatize, and she felt oddly content lying in the subalpine
wilderness listening to Mulder brush his teeth. She realized that they
were the only two people within the frame of the horizon, cut off, as
ever, by their strange and unfathomable pursuits.

He filled the tent suddenly. "Taste," he said, holding out a crimp of
snow, his support hand wedging the sleeping bag against her thigh, and
she looked up at him, sleepy and confused in the eerie white twilight.
__________________

"No. What?" she asks.

"It'll make you feel better."

"No...Mulder - jet fuel, acid rain, fallout - " Obviously she is not at
the top of her game, listing only three things. He shakes his head
overridingly.

"Taste."

Scully opens her mouth and he drops in the melty slip of snow. The tip
of his finger accidentally brushes her tongue; she thinks she sees
something sharpen in his eyes before he turns away.

His finger was salty, unclean. It leaves a stroke of taste on the edge
of her tongue.

She is still savoring it long after the snow is gone.
__________________

Mulder hummed a snatch of ZZ Top as he climbed in beside her. The tent
was wall-to-wall bedding and Mulder's swear-by-it silver space blanket.
Even with all the clothes she was wearing she knew she would be grateful
for his heat. They kept their distance, like octopi in a jar. Mulder
folded his hands behind his head despite the chill; she pulled the
sleeping bag over her nose and they looked up through the no-see-um
netting at the moon. Two nights together in a bed in Kansas had been
awkward, but this was a different tension, borne of an astounding
promise she had made a few weeks before with the touch of her thumbs.

Mulder remembered that promise and something else she had once said
associating sleeping bags with gettin' lucky. He hoped she wasn't
worried he was remembering any of that now.

Scully remembered and felt a flare of apprehension. She rationalized
that Mulder wouldn't have to go to such elaborate lengths just to get
her into bed. He knew that, didn't he? Mulder shifted, and the sleeping
bag slid against her body.

"A bipedal primate," she said, to break the silence.

Mulder recognized her opening gambit, stomping on their common ground.
"A strain of wild hominid," he said, taking up the thread. "Documented
throughout time and in most parts of the world. There's the Chinese
Yeren, which is quite small; the Florida Skunkape; the South African
Waterbobbejan; the Vietnamese Wild Man; the Sumatran Orang Pendek;
Bigfoot; the Australian Yowie; the Nepalese Yeti; and the Mongolian
Alma, which allegedly uses primitive tools."

"A 'Skunkape', Mulder?" Scully asked. She would never quite admit to
herself how much she enjoyed listening to Mulder explain the
inexplicable.

"They stink, Scully," said Mulder patiently.

"I think 'alleged' is the operative word here, Mulder..." She felt
herself relax fractionally, as they slipped into their habit of quibble.
Folklore and fables, myths and fish stories, Mulder believed them all.
And she, who was sent to confound his work, only found herself gathered
into the bafflement, tilting at unnatural worlds with her own innate
curiosity.


In the night she snapped awake, surprised that she had fallen asleep and
that she was now much closer to Mulder than she'd started out. Perhaps
they were on an incline. The moon had drifted over several hours worth
of sky.

There was something outside. She heard it then, a deep blow of breath
that made the back of her neck tingle. They had come to investigate the
scene of an unexplained and brutal attack, and she felt vulnerable and
blind inside the tent. There was the movement of weight shifting over
crushed stone, then the carnassial grind of tricuspids in polymer.

Beside her, Mulder gave a sharp sniff of awareness. In her midnight daze
it seemed right to have him there, like another part of her
consciousness. They got up without saying anything and knelt together on
the space blanket. Scully felt along the wall of the tent for her gun.

"My clip is out there in my pack," Mulder whispered sheepishly. He
seemed to be more awake than her, and she passed her weapon to him,
leaning past him to open the tent. His head was beside hers, and she had
only to turn her face to whisper in his ear. "With bears, your best
chance at piercing the skull is to go in through the sinus cavity."

Mulder sat back on his knees, his grin faint in the moonlight. They
listened to the crumping of fangs. "What if it's something else?
Skunkapes can go to three hundred pounds." He rubbed his face
thoughtfully. "Scully, I'm not going to shoot some poor old bear," he
said seriously.

"You may not feel so magnanimous if he's gotten to your turkey jerky,"
she said, feeling exhilarated to be up in the middle of the night, about
to go into battle. Mulder seemed to feel the same way. She saw his head
raised, and heard his soft chuckle. It must be the thin air that was
making her feel so giddy.

Mulder handed her back her weapon. "I defer to your marksmanship," he
whispered. "Safety's off."

She crawled in front of him, and rolled her shoulders once as he
unzipped the tent.

On the white slope of sand the black bear clawed at Mulder's
possessions, bulky as a panzer, the tintype moonlight rolling along his
autumn hide. Scully was outside, feeling the cold planet through the
knees of her sweats. The bear turned, pricking small round ears. He
waved his muzzle at them, observing them by scent. He ambled a step
forward.

"FBI, freeze!" Scully yelled, preparing to discharge a round above her
head, her shoulder tilted to plug her ear.

The bear turned and rambled off flat-footed, smacking his cloyed tongue
unhappily.

"I guess he didn't want no trouble with the law," Mulder said over her
shoulder. "I didn't think there would be bears up here above the tree
line."

The bear had eaten everything but Scully's six-grain cereal, confirming
Mulder's suspicions of its palatability. "Even a bear wouldn't eat that
stuff, Scully," he would say the rest of his life.
__________________

"If there's one thing I know about women, it's that their feet are
always cold. Especially in the mountains in November," Mulder said.

Scully wondered what else Mulder knew about women. She decided not to
argue, turning away and getting her cheek comfortable on her folded
jeans, her feet casually coming to rest against him. He was solid and
warm, and she was reminded how long and heavy his body was in comparison
to hers.

"Ice," said Mulder, disapprovingly. "You know that I hate thinking I've
caused you to suffer."

"Don't be melodramatic," she said sleepily. "It's nothing like the South
Pole."

"Still, I'd hate to lose you to hypothermia this late in the game." She
heard him exhale. "I can't imagine going Skunkape hunting with anyone
but you."

Scully cast about unproductively for a flip reply. She closed her eyes
and held the sense of the moment within her. It had long ceased to seem
strange that her affiliation with Mulder was the most connective,
significant relationship of her life, despite a lack of physicality.

"You know, I thought you were about to Mirandize that bear," he said
quickly, to cover his confession. "How did you know where to shoot a
bear, Scully?"

"You know, if there's one thing I know about men, Mulder, it's that they
never know when to quiet down and go to sleep," she said easily.

"Ah, so you have experience in these matters," said Mulder. She sensed
his interest in the topic.

"Maybe..." She stretched her back a little and yawned. "But you seem to
have some experience with women's feet."

"Maybe," said Mulder. "But you seem to have experience bedding down with
talkative men."

"Perhaps," said Scully, "but it's been awhile and I'm a little rusty at
the getting-them-to-shut-up part."

"Well," said Mulder lamely, "you can't win 'em all." They were two
soldiers, bonded through adversity, and they were well aware of each
other's tactics. She smiled to herself in the dark, and Mulder guessed
that she smiled, and they lay silent together before they went their
separate ways to sleep.
_________________

When he awoke in the grey light Scully was snugged tight against his
side, completely submerged, and his arm was crooked above her head to
trap her heat. It had been years since he'd awoken to the symbiosis of a
warm body aligned with his, and he blinked in adjustment. Mulder loved
to be touched, and he loved to be loved, and he denied himself these
things out of a sense that he must sacrifice himself to nobler ends.

He was careful not to let out any heat as he slipped from the bed.
Outside he boiled water over the minute canister stove, and made instant
coffee from a foil packet dented by bear's teeth.

He carried his cup around the gully in the fog, gleaning dead wood. He
imagined that he was some kind of desperado and Scully was his feisty
little gun moll. They hid out in the high places and life was pure and
as simple as keeping the campfire small and not silhouetting oneself on
the ridge line.

He had to admit to himself that he would manage to complicate any life
he inhabited. Scully would be the first to point out that he was not a
peaceable being.

He built a campfire purely for the pleasure of watching her stand over
it, warming her hands in the smoke. She gripped a cup of coffee and wore
the shell-shocked stare of the newly-awoken. She had a pillow crease in
her cheek and long underwear on under her jeans. She was damp,
diaphanous, bed-haired early-morning gorgeous, and Mulder felt a kind of
religious awe that his life contained this moment.
__________________

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.
___________________

Mulder invited her to a party.

"Am I to actually believe - Mulder - that you still know how to party?"
She tried for sardonicism, to cover her surprise.

"You never forget how to party. Come on, Scully, it'll be fun." He wound
the clicky teeth and sent them chattering across the desk towards her.

"Witnessing the regression of grown men into troglodytes isn't exactly
my definition of 'fun', Mulder."

Mulder's eyes narrowed challengingly. His office weapon of choice was
the staple gun - Scully turned her head away and waited patiently as he
fired off a few rounds in her general direction. She preferred staples
to rubber bands. He pushed back with his foot against the edge of the
desk, tilting his head in appraisal. Scully began to feel uncomfortable.
She dropped her eyes and checked her watch.

"Don't be a square, Scully-O."

She felt piqued. "Oh, you're really one to talk, Mulder!"

He tilted his head the other way, switching tactics. "How often do we
get invited to parties? And how often does the world feel like this?"

"How does the world feel?"

He flicked a damp sunflower hull from his fingers, seeking out the
Ticonderogas in the ceiling tiles. "It feels...verging. Penultimate."

Scully exhaled in irritation. "Mulder, nothing is going to happen. Even
the Russian nuclear power plants are prepared. It's just premillennial
tension."

"Please," he said, looking at her directly. "The end of the world
wouldn't be the same without you."

She lifted her chin. It was hard to argue with that. "All right, I'll
go," she lied.
__________________

There are rental cars, hallways, rafts of paper. There are hollow cement
parkades and still-life motel rooms. There are gritty winds, plane
tickets, piles of bulldozed snow. Their apartments are contrasting and
separate. They don't even live in the same state. It gets dark by four.
The terricolous  office, where they discuss and ponder, is garbed in a
bewildering pastiche of carcasses, space ships and basketball trophies.

Beyond the city the ground is slimy, and wicked things crawl.

She sleeps curled on her side, exhausted, holding the blankets close.
She remembers to switch sides so that the shape of her skull will be
even. Before the alarm goes off she thinks that he is a completion that
bides in reserve.
__________________

The Lone Gunmen threw a party. It was the night of the winter solstice,
and the moon was full, at perigee-syzygy maxima. It was unsettling, the
moon so close at hand, like a face in the window.

A party could entail any scenario from baked brie and Riesling to pork
rinds and a garbage can of jungle juice. Not that the distinction
mattered, since she wasn't going.
__________________


Pod Monster Suite...Venus Adrift...Drop Dead Red...Geek Goddess
Blues...Egyptian Princess...Vanishing Man...Moonshot...Kludges, Worms
And Active X Modules...The Pomptitous of Love...Dead Man's Party...Heavy
Magick...New Year's Day...Red Right Hand...Goats Go To Hell
__________________

Mulder thought of creatures that slash with incisors and claws. The
British Columbian Reptile Man, Windigos, El Chupacabra, the Boqs of
Bella Coola legend. Lycanthropes, Matlose, the Flintville Monster; the
pupating aliens, all slime and teeth.

He felt contented, waiting for his sandwich and Scully, not necessarily
in that order. The pub was cozy with the rain outside and the murmuring
lunch crowd. He sprawled his leg out of the booth like their private
signal, a blazed tree on their road to damnation.

He thought of this creature that existed, that even now lurked somewhere
with bad intent, a rotten smell under its nails. You killed it with a
wooden stake, a silver bullet, garlic, an odious chant. You didn't look
it in the eye or hark to its singing.

He listened for the bell over the door amid the plate-clashing of the
kitchens. She took him by surprise, scattering beads of water across the
table as she tossed her wet umbrella into the booth.

When did Scully get so hip to the babeness factor? All tailored and
slouchy, black bras, polished hair, insane shoes, a clattery,
unbuttoned, hot-breathed little bundle of ticking clock and rampant
hormones. He remembered how he felt in his own sexual prime and
calculated that her comportment was nothing short of miraculous.

"Hey," she said seriously, facing him across the table.

"What ho, apothecary?

The holidays weighed on both of them like clever mediums of torture.
After Thanksgiving they were avoiding any mention of Christmas. He knew
Christmas was especially hard on her because of her dad and Emily.
Atmospherics were sobersided and laden with long-term entendre; he
seriously doubted she would be opening sleepy presents on his couch at
five a.m. this year.

"I just got a call," she said.

He nodded once. Her silky shirt was pretty tight, so in keeping with
their custom she would leave her coat on, probably all day, as though
that somehow cancelled out the fact that she wore a tight shirt, and
that she was self-conscious enough to only reveal glimpses of it to
Mulder.

"Hydrous sodium carbonate," she enunciated. "It's natron, a
preservative." She shook out her paper napkin as their hot sandwiches
arrived, and they considered the fingernail scrapings of a corpse.

"This mountaintop attacker was covered in natron?"

"It's curious," said Scully, over her sandwich. Mulder ate her Greek
olives. He liked the oscular challenge of unpitted olives. He tried to
calculate the benefits of having a shark-toothed skullpunch tongue. He
had a vague idea it could be used in the drywall trade.

He didn't like to think about the creature's last moments alive.

"Gauze and natron," he said.

"Go ahead and say it, Mulder," she said, swallowing her club soda.

"Say what?" he asked, surprised. She got feta on her lip and he gave an
exaggerated lick of his own lip to demonstrate where. They resisted
smiling at each other.

"The Egyptians used natron as a preservative in the embalming process.
Along with resin-soaked gauze."

"A mummy?" he asked, incredulous, delighted.
____________________

There was a luna moth on the Coleman lamp.

The ring of light intersected the table but did not clasp her in its
circle. Scully was motionless in her chair, her eyes hard and bright as
she watched the moth. There was a strange sensation in her palms,
perhaps emptiness.

She tried to be rational about it, tried to picture how he would look
closed off and still. Perhaps they would have had to shave him. Humans
are simply energy converters; they are merely vehicles for gene
reproduction; they are just molecules jumping. The cycle dips like a
water wheel, plumbs the medium of death.

(Mulder - )

She had stared blankly at the boy who came from the University to tell
her, a tall, tall boy in a faded shirt. He reached towards her in a
half-finished conciliatory gesture, and the palm of his hand was much
lighter than the back, like the belly of a springbok.

Scully had stepped back, even as she recalled that Americans are
considered one of the coldest societies on earth. Mulder, on the other
hand, had the sense of personal space of a Bedouin, a Brazilian, a
Greek. She looked at Dr. Ngebe as if for translation, although the boy
had spoken in English.

Venus was originally a part of Jupiter, snapped off like Eve from Adam's
rib, careening for a time adrift about the solar system. Mulder would
have said that this planetary havoc caused such phenomena as the parting
of the Red Sea.

"Mulder and Scully, FBI", he always said, getting out his badge, as if
they were a singular force. When he encircled her with his arms she'd
had the infinite sense of a mobius strip, as if they were palindromic in
their connection.

When she could breathe it was through clenched teeth, her fingers
trembling on the table. She went outside and threw up whiskey in the
cold sand, suddenly too weak to stay on her feet. The gibbous moon came
up large as she sat shivering.

Down in the wet sand she wrote his name by moonlight, his strange Dutch
name. The racket of the surf seemed to match that which was so enormous
inside her. This was the water of home, the Potomac, the Chesapeake. The
cold Atlantic rushed to meet her with its amniotic slap, the water full
of stinging sand.

Out past the first breakers, head tipped back to the sky, she made
winglike motions with her arms in the water. The sky was beautiful and
cold: perhaps he was there now.

She tried not to think of her mother.

The moon twisted at the ocean and the ocean tugged at her and there was
no longer anything under her feet, just void, thoughtless suspension;
she was flying in the moon-charged water, looking up towards the
surface, all alone.
__________________

Mulder leaned against the refrigerator beside Byers and fathomed the
moiling foam depths of his cup. He was surprisingly hurt that Scully
didn't show, although he should have expected it. This was hardly her
scene, a cellarful of plastered subversives.

Still, he had asked her nicely.

He had miscalculated their bond, supposing that, like him, she could no
longer enjoy the moments of her life without him to share them. She
remained independent while he foolishly and rather romantically imagined
that they were like whooping cranes or albatrosses, paired for life. Two
morose and skulking loners thrown together in a basement - of course you
would read things into it.

I washed this shirt special, he thought. He had wanted to see her face
here in these catacombs of tangled Christmas lights, among the slam
poets and the moshers, the students of Bauhaus and techgnosis and Sufi.
He wanted to hear her talk, the inner things that rise to the surface
under the muzzy addle of blackberry microbrew. And he wanted her to
listen to him in kind.
__________________

She reached for the six-fingered girl.

Byers tore up her twenty. She was shipwrecked in Georgia with Mulder.
They faced each other with wavering pistols. "Gatorade," said Scully.
"You need the electrolytes."

She wanted to absorb him like radiation, like poison, like light. He
cast his thoughts out at frequencies only she could intercept. Mulder
was an outrider, and she his gallowglass.

So much for turning off the phone and going to bed early, then waking in
the panic of Mulder lost, her hands in the bathroom trembling as she
rinsed the sleep from her face and underlined her eyes.

Even with a piece of celery clamped in her teeth, the black scooped
sweater was just too froufrou for a cyberpunk encounter. She liked the
white blouse for its adjustability. What worlds could be said with
buttons. Black bra under it, throw something over it, find her car keys,
one last grinch in the mirror - just let her lay eyes on Mulder, assure
herself the world still contained him, and then come home.

As Scully descended to the Gunmen's bunker, she was distressed to
identify the unmistakable cadence of AC/DC singing 'Back in Black'. She
trod in deliberate counterpoint. She wasn't sure what appalled her more
- the fact that the nature of the party was as she had feared, or that
she could actually name the song.

She stood ankle-deep in mountain bikes and rang the buzzer until she
realized that no one could hear it. She considered turning and leaving
but recalled that her cowardice would be captured on videotape. The
reinforced door moved when she pressed it, the noise behind it like a
force of nature pushing back.

Scully stood in the doorway and peered into the mill and sway of the
crowd, the luminosity of faces and teeth and hands. A blazonry of
Christmas lights garbled across the low ceiling like the work of some
demented psychedelic spider. A passing dog spared her a disinterested
glance. Scully stood on the cuspal edge of the rabbit hole, and scanned
for Mulder.

Frohike materialized as if from a TARDIS, wearing motorcycle pants and
his sheepskin vest, his glasses reflecting a strobing amber construction
light. "The sublime Spookette!" he profused. With ceremony, he stamped
her hand with the likeness of Daffy Duck.

Scully smiled uncertainly. "Looks like a great party," she yelled
politely. Mulder loved it that she actually looked down on Frohike.

Frohike scowled affectionately. He held up a stern finger. "The rules
are, beer-bonging only over the sink."

"I'll try to adhere to that," she said faintly, her eyes sweeping
desperately. Frohike pressed the door to and regarded her shrewdly. He
held out his hand. Take me to your Mulder, she thought, feeling small,
feeling nebbish.

It was strange to hold Frohike's hand, his small mitted paw. He led her
into the crush and it was very much like being led into Faerieland by a
benevolent troll. Frohike was surly to anyone who impeded their
progress. A good-looking slacker guy touched Scully's shoulder and
smiled at her and when she checked her stride Frohike whirled like a pit
bull. "Back off, jive turkey!" Scully could only smile apologetically as
she was pulled away.

As they were siphoned centripitally into the room she knew uneasily that
she would never find her way out. Time ground down to a peripheral
smear, whole minutes to take a step, to draw a breath, as she
overextended between two planes. Mulder was crowned with stitches and
ichor and she had failed him at the most desperate moment of his life.
Mulder looked over his shoulder with his puckish grin and it took her a
moment to realize that here he was, alive and whole, regarding her with
surprise and expectancy, with the anticipation of one who was just now
unfolding the map of his life.
_________________

By the end of the evening they will both be crumpled, sopped and
ash-flecked, smelling of sweat and incense and cigarettes, and Scully
will have laughed that surprisingly goofy laugh that she trots out only
rarely. Mulder will have knocked his head on a low beam and felt the
cold moon lay its hand over him on a rooftop and he will have watched
Scully laugh and wondered why sometimes happiness hurts.

For now they are hesitant and spotless, and sobered at the sight of each
other. Scully winches up a smile as fakey as the Piltdown Man. Mulder
realizes that even if he likes sports and has a cool haircut, he's still
just a geek like all these other geeks, just as preoccupied and
undatable, and what's more, this is undoubtedly obvious to Scully.
__________________

What comely wench is this with hair as bright as Prometheus' stolen
flame?

"Look who crashed the gate," said Frohike.

Scully's lips were aggravating and her hair was orange. Even garbed in
her quotidian Morticia black she struck him all over again with her
pleasing aesthetics. And it wasn't like he was expecting little Miss S.
in a minidress. She seemed more sharply in focus than anyone else, like
a building surrounded by streaking taillights in a time-lapse
photograph.

They eased closer, like water seeking its own level.

He grabbed her and pulled her into the bathroom. There, the music
muffled, they jostled each other getting the door locked. The bathroom
was tiny and wreathed with smoke that smelled like skunky hay. Scully
took the shallow breaths befitting a federal employee.

"So," he asked, "gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine?"

"I can't stay, Mulder. It's a week night," she said, backing into the
sink. Mulder handed her his Knicks cup and she took a sip, just to cool
off.

He batted at the smoke above his head, hitting the string hanging from
the lightbulb. Loops of shadow shot over the walls. "What you don't
realize is you're their resident goddess, Scully. You don't know what
your endorsement means to these guys."

Marvelous. She's a goddess for geeks.

The Gunmen's bathroom was papered with clippings, photographs, cartoons
and scribbled quotes. There was Sinead O'Connor ripping up the Pope;
Page with his twelve-string; Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Buddha, Bob
Marley, Muhammad Ali. Frohike and Janis Joplin on Haight-Ashbury in the
'60s. Frohike's celebrated photograph of Monica getting out of a cab.
Nuke the gay whales for Jesus. Edward Abbey, Marshall McLuhan, Timothy
Leary. A recipe for a fertilizer bomb from the Anarchist's Cookbook.
(Nitrate and fuel oil.)

Mulder looked around himself happily, swinging his arms. "T. Rex,
Scully, wanna dance?" His concession to the evening was a black T-shirt,
reinforcing his image of a rebel with many a cause.

"To 'Get It On'?" she asked. "I think not."

He brightened further. "Scully, you know rock and roll?"

"Mulder," she reproved. The bathroom wasn't getting any roomier, and it
didn't help that he was standing so close, as if they were conferring on
a case. She took a tiny draft of beer, just to settle her nerves. As
usual, she was at eye level with his xiphisternum, or his rather fine
pectorals, if she cared to peruse.

Mulder borrowed his cup for a moment, then handed it back. He drew his
teeth over his succulent lip. "There's something I want to talk to you
about," he said, leaning forward, the bathroom crowding in around them.

Clearly there was no room for argument.


In line at the keg Mulder shuffled closer behind her so he could speak
in her ear. The kitchen floor was muddy and wet, and a rubber chicken
hung by its feet from the ceiling.

"Did I tell you my mummy theory?" he asked.

The low timbre of his voice grated pleasantly through her. His chin
touched her shoulder. "You have a mummy theory? Why does this not come
as a surprise?" she asked him.

"Some say that a mummy sank the Titanic."

Scully turned around, folding her arms. "So much for the iceberg
theory?" she asked dryly. The floor thumped with bass and they were
forced apart by two people on a skateboard. How telling that she and
Mulder could lose themselves in contemplative discussion in the midst of
a primal gathering.

"No, no, the mummy's curse brought the iceberg," he said, as they
reconvened. "There was a mummy being transported aboard the Titanic, and
it was saved when the ship sank."

"That's just it, though, isn't it, Mulder? That's how mummies are
purported to kill - through a curse, not some gnashing and clawing
homicide. And they cursed tomb-raiders, not elk-hunting highschool
boys." Someone handed her a dripping cup.

"There's the rub," he admitted.
__________________

They were years-deep in the process of pair bonding. When the
conversations of others sidetracked them they stood back to back and she
felt him shifting slowly on his feet, as was his habit. As always, they
were subconciously aware of each other's proximity, or distance, at
every moment of the evening.

Mulder became entangled in a conversation about sports with a guy who
had acid lime hair and his shirt tied around his waist. They both
gestured big slam-dunking maneuvers with their arms. Mulder seemed to be
enjoying himself. He was hardly drunk, but he was loose and blithe,
big-footed. She had always admired the way he could connect with people.
She could only imagine what it would be like to dance with him.
__________________

Mulder was sitting in an alcove on a swaybacked wine velour sofa,
listening dreamily as his friend Chuck Burke picked out 'Sugar Magnolia'
on a zithery-sounding sitar.

His face warmed to a smile when he looked up and saw her. "Doctor
Scully, I presume."

"Isn't that a line from 'The Planet of the Apes'?" she asked glibly.
Ancient history, that.

"Are you having a good time?" he asked softly, as she claimed the other
end of the sofa. Chuck sat hunched on a plastic milk crate, stroking the
sitar pleadingly.

"Bearing in mind that I didn't intend to come, yes, surprisingly."

"You wouldn't come to the last party in the world?"

"Mulder, the world is hardly ending, and if it were, do you think I
would be sitting in some hackers' basement swilling beer from a plastic
cup?" She felt a little buzzed, and pleasantly argumentative.

"I believe they prefer the term 'remote systems operator'. So...what
changed your mind?" he asked.

"Nothing - just a dream." She spoke stiffly, feeling invaded. Mulder and
his continuous little invasions slowly altering her, whittling away at
her resolve. Her past, which she could not acknowledge. All the mistakes
that she had once made with men but had avoided making with Mulder,
turning him into something untouchable.

"A dream?" asked Mulder.

"'The oxen is slow but the earth is patient'," remarked Chuck.

"You sucked a goof butt," said Mulder amiably. "'The road lengthens as
we continue to travel it'."

"'The questions are more important than the answers'," said Chuck.

"'The wise man listens to fools and says nothing'." Scully was familiar
with this game.

"'I'm just mad about Saffron'," said Mulder. She thought he was looking
at her when he said it.

Scully debated the validity of classic rock lyrics, but felt oddly
complacent for a moment, blinking against the floaters in her vision.

The room was separated from the main part of the basement by a tunnel of
wiring and vapor barrier plastic and half-framed walls. The timeless
party scene at the end was done in hopped-up mirrorball fresco. Scully
saw Langly go by on Rollerblades. She saw someone in a gorilla mask. She
saw three girls pause, and look in at her. They stood and seemed to wait
for her, giggling and smoking and dancing in place.

There was something endearing about this thrift store chic nowadays,
girls dressed like old ladies in their cat's eye glasses and print
dresses and junk jewelry, like children playing dress up. Their shoes
were clunky and they laughed shyly and held each other's arms and they
yielded a manila envelope replete with a violent homicide.

Scully did not relate well to women. She was too close to the rawness of
their experience and she couldn't face it in herself half the time, let
alone in other people. But she was trying. She knew it was an unnatural
way to feel. She looked into each of their faces and tried to feel their
energy, their courage and force, not see their vulnerabilities, the ways
they could be hurt.

Mulder was drawn into it by this point, with his morbid taste for bones.
Scully's informant had approached the girls and described her to them,
and they had delivered the envelope, as instructed. As she had suspected
at the zoo, her source was indescribably plain. The girls could not
agree on the color of his clothes, let alone his features.

Mulder and Byers checked the VCR for the security camera, but to their
surprise, it was empty.
__________________

"Oh man, it's wideband spectrum surveillance," said Frohike. The experts
had been called in.

Mulder looked around at them with the bemused, slightly reserved
expression he retained solely for them. "Shake it down, fellas," he
said.

"Scully's got a bumper beeper," Langly said nasally.

"I'm being tracked?" Scully squeaked.

"It's top-flight remote detection - an SwRI tracking beacon providing
signal analysis using developed algorithms and portable DF systems,"
said Byers hoarsely. He was the one who had thought to check Scully's
car. "Employing correlation processing triangulation from several low
earth orbit satellites, it can determine your position within thirty
meters."

"Who's this punkass shagging Scully?" Frohike asked, as if it was
Mulder's fault.

Langly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "You want us to
find him and pound him for ya?"

"I think Scully's sufficiently capable of kicking ass in her own right,"
Mulder said reassuringly, but he was obviously distracted by the
discovery.
__________________

In the bathroom Mulder tapped out the police report and they looked at
the interior of an SUV roped and lashed with blood. The photograph was
taken from the back seat at night, the flash rebounding off the
windshield. Blood gummed the open CD tray. Scully wondered why the body
had been removed before the scene was photographed until she saw the
victim wedged down under the steering wheel in an attempt to hide, the
top of his head just visible to the left of the steering column, ruined
forearms congealed to the driver's seat. What was left of Kit Remmerde,
southern Idaho freeway, 11:14 pm.

"So, we go to Idaho tomorrow."

"Mulder, look at this." Scully had found a picture of them on the
bathroom wall. He moved up and looked over her shoulder, snorting in
amusement. It was taken years ago, the first time he introduced Scully
to the guys. He had thought that Frohike was taking pictures of her, but
the two of them were centered together in the frame, sitting on a desk,
Mulder on the right with his arms crossed, Scully in a black trench
coat, looking skeptical.

"Look how young we were."

"You look like a co-ed," he said. She had traipsed into his life and
blinded him with science.

"I thought the world was so much simpler then," she sighed. "I had quite
a crush on you at the time, if I recall."

Mulder smiled, surprised, turning his face to study her profile.

"Good thing I snapped out of it," she said, smiling at him.

"I'll say." His throat was dry. "Good thing."
__________________


"Mulder and Scully at a party. Look at them!" said Langly.

"They look the same as ever," noted Byers.

"My point exactly. Look at Mulder's hair! Looks like it was cut with a
tiny lawnmower," said Langly.

"This is your brain on drugs," said Frohike. "Any questions?"

They drew in around the table, eating hummus and corn chips.

Scully looked at them circled there and thought that she'd be lucky to
make it through the evening without hearing a recitation of the Dead
Parrot Sketch.
__________________

They went up to the roof of the building to look at the moon, thirty
people struck drunkenly awed by this reminder of their position in
nature, faces tilted to the clear citrus satellite. Scully felt lucky to
be here with these other considerate human beings, witnessing this great
rumbling miracle of a moon.

"Dude," someone said reverently.

"Dude." Heartfelt agreement.

People tried to light cigarettes in the wind.

"Did you know that's like called 'refraction'? That when you feel the
moonlight you're actually feeling sunlight?"

A Goth guy put his arms about his girlfriend.

The moon appeared to be leaning, peering. They looked up at it, and the
moon looked down. Refraction to the contrary, it seemed to be glowing
from within. It was cold up on the roof, and Scully found that she was
leaning back against warm unyielding Mulder. He didn't exactly put his
arms around her, but he did take her elbow surreptitiously in his
fingers. He squeezed her funny bone.

"It only lines up like this once every hundred and thirty-three years,"
said Langly. The guys had an elaborate telescope that took some time to
set up. Scully tipped her head back until she was looking at the bottom
of Mulder's chin.

Their crowd waved at the people on another roof, feet coaxing creaking
sounds from the frozen tar. Dogs jingled past. Scully imagined a city of
people on rooftops, their faces turned spaceward, forgetting for a
moment their trammeled, earthbound lives. Mulder dipped his face and
looked down at her. They exchanged self-conscious smiles.

People began to let out fogged breath and turn around, looking at each
other with new appreciation.

"Man, it's cold!"

Scully shifted away from him and disappeared towards the telescope.

Mare Imbrium, Mare Frigoris, Tycho, Copernicus, the Sea of Serenity.

Langly scuffled joyously with some other hacker dude.

The roof emptied out suddenly, the door propped against a brick, leaking
honey light. Scully was abruptly apparent, like a rock at ebb tide.

Her arms were folded and she held a lit cigarette half-hidden under her
elbow. She looked at Mulder defiantly and took a snappy drag.

They blinked and looked away from each other.

Scully sighed out the smoke. She shivered. He sidled a few steps closer,
hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, edging in sideways. They
looked out over the city. He sculpted the loose angle of her arm, and
the cigarette changed hands without a glance between them.
_________________

"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.
__________________

She called the next night and rousted him out of a comfy moment of
bachelor domesticity -  he was cleaning his service weapon and watching
porn. He had soup on the stove and his gun was in pieces all over the
coffee table and the stitches in his arm were itching and she wanted him
to drop everything at ten thirty at night and come over because she'd
received an unsettling e-mail. The odd thing was, he didn't mind.

She had been sent a photograph. It was taken at night with a flash
camera designed by the US Fish & Wildlife to be tripped by deer at a
mineral lick. Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah. Mulder stood over the
computer to the left of Scully's pine armoire and tried to puzzle out
the image. The flash glare picked out brush and trampled snow and a
ragged business bounding out of the upper left corner, a hind leg that
may or may not have been humanoid. It was a long extended leg, encrusted
or thatched with fur or perhaps cloth, the foot obscured in a shadow.

"Wow, Scully," he said thoughtfully.

"Pretty inconclusive," she said, standing there with her arms folded.

"But what a piece of Forteana." Scully's white bathrobe made her look
like a tiny bird fluffed out against the cold. He edged towards the
door. Occasions like this made him feel immense and ungainly in his
boots and denim and leather, tracking snow like a caribou. He had felt
the contrast most acutely when she was terminally ill and he was loping
about bursting with health and adrenergic panic; and not a cell of him
any use to her as a cure. He had been ready to rip out his heart for her
if it meant she might live. As it was, he would have no heart without
her.

"Are you going already?" she asked.

"It's late. I don't want to keep you up."

"I just made a pot of tea."

"I'm snowy," he said, looking down at his feet.

"Sit down, Mulder. Like I give a damn," she said mildly, padding towards
the kitchen.

Mulder sank onto the end of the couch. A fire lay low in the grate,
hooks of flame oscillating across the ceiling. The heavily overcast
night was so warm that the window was open. The lamps were turned low.
Scully leaned over the back of the couch with a hand-thrown Chinese cup,
molten, ambrosial. He clasped it in his palms.

"You don't come over much," she commented, curling up at the far end of
the sofa.

"You need time to yourself," he explained. "Get away from me and the X
Files."

"You need time alone, too."

"I have more than enough time alone." He bared his teeth. "I sound like
a real loser, don't I?"

"Mulder, you've never struck me as a loser. And you aren't an intrusion
here, you know." Unlike the rest of the human race, she might have said.
Scully didn't have any friends, and maybe now and then she did need
someone to come over and shake things up, put CDs in the wrong cases and
rifle the fridge. Her fridge was clean, with nothing dripped down into
the bottom. Mulder would be happy to spill and clutter a little in the
name of friendship.

"You don't feel like anything out of the ordinary," she said. "I miss
having a dog," she said unexpectedly. He didn't quite follow her train
of thought. "You and he were the only ones I could wear my bathrobe
around, and not worry about fixing my hair."

He looked at her finally, and she ignored him, sipping her tea. He was
pleased that she didn't fix her hair for him. Of course it was hard to
tell; she looked as soigne as ever.

She narrowed her eyes, feeling his scrutiny. "Besides, Mulder, the X
Files aren't something I can just leave at the end of the day. They've
become a part of who I am, much as I sense they have for you."

He felt himself beginning to relax. It seemed that, all smooching aside,
Scully simply sought to reaffirm their friendship. "Funny you should say
that," he said. "When they took us off the X Files last year I read this
article about New Guinea tribesmen being assimilated into modern
culture, and it said: 'you can take the people out of the forest, but
can you take the forest out of the people?' and that's exactly how I
felt, you know...that they couldn't take the X Files out of us."

Scully's cheek curved as she smiled. He began to feel good about
staying. "Are those the same people who can fell a tree by yelling at it
ceaselessly for three or four days?"

"South Pacific islanders. Remember that documentary I showed you?"

She was still smiling. "Yes, I remember," she said, amused that he
thought she might not remember every second of their time together.

His tea was cool enough to sip. Scully drank green tea to combat free
radicals. She was big on fighting things - traffic, and shower mold, and
malevolence in its many forms. She fought the aging process and usage of
the word 'irregardless'. Most of all she fought Mulder on every issue
known to man, and a few that weren't. Odd, at the end of the day, how in
accordance they still were.

"I don't usually enjoy winter, but this one feels so peaceful," she
said.

"How can you say that, after the zombies?" He instantly regretted any
allusion to New Year's Eve.

"I wasn't thinking of it in a work capacity."

Mulder grunted affirmatively into his cup. She was right, the evening
was still and breathless.

"Mulder, what is that thing?" She tilted her head back towards the
computer, where the dark image still hung on the screen. Mulder shook
his head.

"I e-mailed the Fish & Game and they didn't send it to me. Someone got
into their files and sent it. The tracking device - none of it makes
sense."

"It's that informant of yours." And Mulder brooded a little. "He's so on
top of this case that we should be following it backwards from him. Get
a composite of him drawn up tomorrow, and we'll try to figure out who he
is."

"Mulder, there's no way he's the killer - "

"No, but he seems to know who is. And next time he contacts you, we'll
bring him in."

Talk of the case broke their mood of contentment. Mulder got up and set
his cup in the kitchen sink. From the dark kitchen the living room
looked cave-like, and Scully yawned suddenly and let her head fall back
on the sofa. "You going?" she asked softly.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Wait. How's your arm?" she asked.

"It's fine. It itches."

"Good. Drive safe."

She didn't expect him to kiss her, he saw with some relief, and some
regret.
__________________

"So, have you had your prostate checked yet?" she asked casually. She
was removing the stitches from his arm, pre-lunch.

"Scully - !" he said, horrified. She jerked suturing material from his
skin, unmoved. Nothing was sacred with her. She had okayed the removal
of every conceivable organ of his, in the event of his untimely demise.
She was always after him to give blood at the blood drives. She didn't
weigh enough, so apparently it was up to him to contribute for both of
them, as a sort of sanguinary emissary of the the Mulder-Scullys. She'd
say 'Look at you Mulder, you big lug, sitting there just full of that
nice O-neg; you're healthy as an ox and you won't even feel it.' She'd
thwack his arm and Mulder would sigh and trudge upstairs where they'd
give him a cookie and bleed him light-headed like a bunch of
government-funded vampires.

"I had an AIDS test in '94," he offered. It had seemed like a good idea,
post-Kristen. He eyed Scully sideways to see if he had managed to put
her off the scent. She frowned, obviously doing the math, and set down
her scissors. "It was negative," he added helpfully. Her eyes flicked to
his, and he saw her curiosity, but he wasn't about to elaborate.

She rolled his sleeve down slowly, buttoning his cuff for him.
Apparently that was enough playing doctor for one day. "Let's get some
lunch," she said.
___________________

She slept badly, falling ten feet at a time, landing sprawled in an X to
clasp the earth.

Fear has a long memory.

She had never effaced the memory of plying Donnie Pfaster with a can of
Tub & Tile; nor, apparently, had he. For a moment though, it was the
sticky, bilious fingers of Eugene Tooms, his copious, raw-liver breath;
it was the trunk of Duane Barry's car; it was Leonard Betts trying to
carve a tumor from her face. It was the steel, smashing hands of a man
who looked like Mulder.

When the dark side came for her she threw herself into it alone, for
what are we, ultimately, but alone? Scully raged with abyssal reserves
of anger, feeling trapped in a swarm of locusts, a small part of her
impressed by her noise and destruction. All that mattered was getting to
her gun, shedding this anathema, putting a bullet in its squirming
brain.

For days she would feel her battered skeleton illumined like an X-ray
through her flesh, lay her cut hands upon her bones with a mixture of
wonder and fear. Pain was a sure sign she still walked the planet.

She went to confession and obliquely admitted her sin. She craved the
runoff of penance, to make her way through the rosary over and over, her
bruised knees aching, the lift of a burden shared. Blessed art thou
amongst women. She wanted to understand what she had confronted, both in
Pfaster and in herself. "Go back to hell!" she had screamed. Mulder
sterilized her bathtub for her, reclaiming it. The devil had touched her
and she washed and washed, a cruciform burn at her throat.

Mulder spoke to her gently of the toughness of warrior angels - Gabriel,
Raphael, Michael. He probably had an X file on it, biblical vengeance.
She wanted to be annoyed at his conciliatory tone, at his willingness to
lie for her, but she wasn't. Ultimately, he was what she had fought for,
for the broader scope of human goodness, for things wider and worthier
than her own narrow life.

She followed him to the city of angels.
__________________