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PARABIOSIS
by Penumbra (penumbra23@hotmail.com)
S/MSR/315K
Timeline: Sixth Extinction through Requiem
Summary: Science and Mysticism conjoin
Tagline: Exceptions Prove The Rule
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"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.

________________________________________________

Chapter 2

 

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.

______________________________________________

Chapter 3

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.

_______________________________________________

Chapter 4

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."

_______________________________________

Chapter 5

"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,&quo