By Pteropod
beth_monster@yahoo.com
Category/Spoilers: Post-ep for Orison, MSRish, Angst
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The world is glued together by the strong
force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force,
and gravity.
Feedback: It would delight me to no end.
Author's Notes: Deepest thanks to Zuffy, Revely and
Maria Nicole for fantastic beta. This one was
hard to pull out of my brain, and wouldn't have
made it without their encouragement.
-------------------------------------------------------
Starting and stopping, then starting again. Starting
in her crime-scene bedroom, every glance down another
piecemeal reflection of Pfaster-would've-killed-again.
Stopping just outside the apartment building. "I'll
take my car. Then you won't have to drive me back
tomorrow." "No. Get in." Almost an argument, right
there, over something as useless as that.
Starting again when he touched a hand to her face with
a quiet, "Please."
Now she's stopped cold and thinking about moving. Or
rather about not moving, about what it would mean to
stay. She's lying on Mulder's unfamiliar bed with a
split lip and aching shoulders and all she can think
is, God, I'm thirty-five years old and I still rent
and there's no way I'll get the security deposit back
now.
---
The room is lit by God knows what, probably
streetlights, and a faint flickering glow is coming
under the door. It's not her room, not her apartment;
she doesn't even know where the light comes from when
it spills onto the ceiling and creeps along the wall.
She's wearing her own underwear but a pair of Mulder's
boxers and one of his t-shirts over them because she
couldn't bear pajamas. Tiny invisible slivers of
glass are lodged in her back and arms and face,
ignored by the paramedics because she was fine, just
fine, and she can't help moving even though they slice
into her with every shift of her body. She squirms
painfully on the bed, feeling like a specimen, as
though some enormous disembodied eye is staring at her
from the ceiling when suddenly, suddenly, she feels
the motion of her right index finger pulling the
trigger.
She would've woken up, if she'd been asleep, and
Mulder might've heard her shout herself into
awareness. But she wasn't asleep, didn't even have
her eyes closed and she can't imagine when she'll
sleep again. Instead of jerking awake she gasps and
shakes out her right hand, over and over, the same
motion as flicking off water, or a beetle latched on
with sticky insect feet. Her hand snaps back and
forth under the covers for a crackling minute filled
with the pressure of a twelve-pound double-action
trigger pull. By the time she can still it, the
breath runs from her mouth hot and fast. She leaps
from the bed in a clumsy, startled motion and runs to
the door of Mulder's unfamiliar bedroom.
Even now, even with this, Mulder has anticipated her.
He flings the door open just as her fingers touch the
handle, and she lurches to a halt in front of him.
"Are you ok? Do you need something?"
She looks into Mulder's panicky face, sees him swallow
once, twice and she holds out her hands, palms up.
They stand still and silent on either side of the
doorway, staring at her upturned hands in the blue
strobe of the muted television. They stand until her
arms are tired, until the back of her neck is sore and
her calves begin to ache. She turns and walks back to
the bed when she can't stand anymore and doesn't know
what else to do. Mulder stays a minute longer, feet
in the hallway but body leaning over the threshold,
and then returns to the living room. He does not shut
the door behind him.
---
A SIG is heavy, not in the absolute sense of ounces
and grams but jutting out from the end of a female
arm, gravity a wobbly enemy. The two-handed grip is
safe, secure, the ticket home to fat-free frozen
yogurt and the chance to wear a holster tomorrow.
Tonight was one handed, barrel tilted rakishly toward
the sky. Twin blasts eight inches from his business-
casual ribcage, exit wounds chipping a hole through
his shoulder. The rulebook says know your target and
what is beyond; don't shoot at the ceiling when you
live on the first floor but it wasn't a rulebook kind
of night. They were absurdly loud, the explosions in
her hand, much louder than at the firing range or in
the average drafty warehouse. Her ears are still
ringing.
---
They didn't speak on the drive to Arlington. Twenty
minutes of nothing but turn signal clicks and the
whoosh of the heater but the silence sat easily
between them. Mulder's hand reached over at the first
stoplight and she took it, because the car was dark
and quiet and because Donnie Pfaster made her remember
the feeling of blood dripping from her nose.
Scully started to reach for her keys as they walked
down the fourth floor hallway, as if she were coming
home.
---
It's been seven years and people have tried to kill
her before, several people and innumerable things. At
the beginning it took weeks to recover, weeks of
sleeping with the light on and dinner with her mother
every Sunday. Now she's an expert at personal
tragedy, in and out of shock in half an hour and on
with her peripatetic life. Disaster numbs; absolute
disaster numbs absolutely. In recent years even her
nightmares have grown mundane, everyday dreams of
falling and loss and swarms of insects. She's
living, breathing proof that the human mind can become
accustomed to anything, including regularly scheduled
dates with death.
Tonight, though, tonight she lies wide-eyed and raw,
twitching her way toward morning on an unfamiliar bed.
There's a tightness balled inside her chest, something
like fear but thicker and heavier. It feels like
waking up underground to a mouth full of mud, like a
tube touching her belly through the narrow passage of
her throat.
Donnie Pfaster left her alone while he ran the bath
because she was a sure thing.
---
An hour ago she turned the clock to face away from
her, but now in insomniac restlessness she turns it
back. 2:36a.m. and her mind follows inconsequential
pathways and circles the airport in a holding pattern
and gets off at every exit on the Garden State Parkway
but always ends up back where she started. Where she
started, alone in a dark room with tiny invisible
slivers of glass in her back and death fetish filth
creeping through every pore.
---
Mulder listened to his answering machine while Scully
was changing for bed. She heard it through the
cracked doorway, loud at first and then going abruptly
soft at the word 'Donnie'. One arm in the t-shirt and
the other out, head flung left and then right as if
Pfaster could be in the room with her, could've
climbed out of his body bag and into the back seat of
Mulder's car. She didn't remember the half-on shirt
until familiar footsteps sounded outside the door.
---
Mulder's asleep, feet propped on the coffee table and
head twisted down toward his shoulder. The TV is
tuned to AMC, Olivia de Havilland wailing silently
through 'The Snake Pit'. Scully is oddly pleased that
she can identify the movie, proud that a piece of
trivia remains lodged in a sticky corner of her mind.
Mulder starts awake as she enters the room.
"Thirsty," she whispers to the air above him. "Can't
sleep."
He pats the couch and fetches a glass of water from
the kitchen, so solicitous it feels like second grade
and the chicken pox. She sits, gingerly, head dropped
to her hands. Mulder settles beside her and she
straightens, reaching for the glass of water.
---
Almost an hour on the couch, breathing in graceless
harmony and the water glass sweating a ring onto the
coffee table. His breaths are longer but hers deeper,
open-mouthed and raspy.
"I can't sleep."
She feels Mulder's wry smile beside her. "I noticed."
"I don't even know why not. There's this feeling in
my chest and I don't know what it means."
"Welcome to my world." He lifts an arm and curls it
around her shoulders, pulls her body toward his and
smoothes the hair away from her face. She winces and
he lightens the weight of his arm, lets her adjust her
body.
She leans into him and doesn't fall asleep.
---
"I need to take a bath." Something like four in the
morning and Mulder just nods slowly. "If I don't take
one now I never will again."
Another nod.
"I.. I need your help."
---
She hasn't thought it all the way through, what it
means to need help taking a bath. Need is signals
leaping across synapses, the absence of thought. Need
is one of their secret words, hidden in hallways and
hospital rooms.
---
Mulder's bathroom is bachelor grimy, the corners not
bearing examination. Scully steps into the empty tub
and stands upright in the middle, fully clothed and
military stiff. Her toes knead silently at the
scuffed porcelain. I will do this, she thinks, and
steps back to the floor. I will do this and never
have to think about it again.
There are a thousand things it could mean when she
whispers a choked, "I'm sorry," but she doesn't know
which one it is. Her clothes, the clothes she had to
borrow because her own provided inadequate protection,
slip to the floor.
Mulder watches from the doorway, fists opening and
closing at his sides.
Winter-white skin, watery and translucent across her
chest, blue veins pulsing down the insides of her
arms. She looks down and sees herself as Mulder must
see her, female and naked and edged with bruises. The
mirror shows welts splashed across her back like angry
modern art, a crisscross of lashings as she turns on
the water and steps into the tub to the soundtrack of
Mulder's abrupt intake of breath. She has not
undressed in front of a man since she was twenty-eight
years old, and then it meant something else entirely.
---
In their atomic relationship she is the proton, heavy
and centered, and he the flitting electron. He spins
now in his probabilistic orbit, gathering a clean
towel, a candle at her request, another glass of
water.
---
Here they are in Mulder's dingy bathroom, not touching
but close enough that they could. Mulder's sitting on
the toilet seat, back-lit by the candle on the edge of
the sink, head in his hands. The only sound is a soft
splash as Scully shifts her legs, and the gurgle of
her hand swirling through water.
---
Head shaking from side to side, hair clinging damply
to her neck. "He came back. We didn't know where he
was and he came back."
---
"You were scared of me." Small words, whispered into
her dripping knees.
"No.. no. Never, Scully."
A long moment, then, "You should've been. I was."
---
Mulder's fingers graze her bony shoulder, the first
bare touch since Antarctica and a viscid alien womb.
"It's gotta be getting cold in there."
---
He stands to leave with the last swirl of water down
the drain but she whispers, eyes closed, for him to
stay. He edges his hip on the sink as she stands,
wrinkled and waterlogged, and hands her the towel.
---
It's a long shot but she asks anyway. After an absent
moment he declares there should be one in the
apartment and starts rummaging through the bedroom
closet. By the time she has the boxers and t-shirt
back on he emerges triumphant, hairdryer in hand.
"Fourth box from the bottom. I knew it was
somewhere."
She plugs it in and wonders who left it behind.
---
She falls asleep wrapped in the Indian blanket, feet
tucked under Mulder's thigh and face pressed sideways
into the back of the couch. All she feels is the
weight of Mulder's hand coming to rest against her
hipbone and then she's gone.
---
The particles once thought elementary are not; they
contain a sub-universe of quarks with flippant names:
up, down, strange, charmed, top and bottom, a chorus
of scientific whimsy. A proton is made of two ups and
a down, prevented by the strong force from flying out
of the nucleus in a frenzy of electromagnetic
repulsion. The top quark was discovered most
recently, and is sometimes called truth.
---
It ends with a donut, powered sugar drifting softly to
her feet. Her cheekbone has blossomed into a medley
of purples, the kind that will earn her domestic
violence jokes at the grocery store and this is
morning at Mulder's apartment. Second-day donuts and
milk she watched him sniff surreptitiously before
pouring. No Earl Grey or sliced cantaloupe but she
smiles shyly and reaches to point out a smudge on
his chin. He catches her hand and flips it over,
murmuring, "Life line, love line, I forget the rest."
- - e n d - -