Part 3. The Floating Hill

[penumbra23]

3. The Floating Hill

"Fuck," Scully mouthed uncharacteristically, standing before the widening rings of a puddle with her front teeth in her lip for a long 'f'. Her hand was arrested in the air, mid-clutch.

Mulder crouched at the edge of the puddle, looking up at her with some delight. His fingers shattered the rainbows in the oily ektachrome surface. The slippery plastic phone bumped ahead of his fingers, and he was distracted by the bare tops of her feet, emerging from her square winter heels, a vulnerable fan of small bones shifting visibly in one.

"I suppose that was the coroner's office," she said.

"Come on, we might be able to save this," he said, arising and slinging filthy water out of the phone. His heart was light with joy, and he looked too long into her eyes before turning and heading into the dumpster corral.

They breezed in the postern entrance of her apartment building, shoving through a fire door and thus into the obscenely bright hallway, Scully's keys striking a hectic chord in her hand.

Mulder tossed the wet phone and sighed nervously down her neck as she manipulated the heavy lock of her front door. He stared at the cinnabar edge of her hair as it whisked across her inky coat collar. "Well, this doesn't bode well for tomorrow - I mean, neither of us having a phone. We'll have to send carrier pigeons or flash mirrors or something. Blow a conch shell," he said.

She opened the door and stood back to let him through. "Get a phone tomorrow and call the guys with the number," she said crisply. "I'll do the same."

The apartment was dark, but they'd forgotten the lamp he'd turned on in the bedroom, and its light fanned into the tiny hall.

"Dry white rice, STAT," Mulder said, going for the kitchen, popping the batteries out of Scully's cell. He set the phone in the bottom of a cereal bowl and tore the twist tie off the proffered bag.

Scully was in the living room checking her messages, but the machine was still empty.

Mulder rained rice over the bowl until the phone disappeared, gentle as an airplane in a layer of cloud. He flourished his finger in the top of the pile, like the world-famous chef he would never be. "All we can do now wait and hope," he said, then looked around and realized he was alone.

Scully's coat was tossed over the back of the couch, and water ran in the bathroom. Greenly glowed the digital clock on the stove, flaring poisonous numerals that he couldn't seem to read. He stood waiting for the landline to ring, holding his breath, but the phone was silent. It would be just his luck if those idiots at the Alexandria P.D. called his mother to identify the body.

He knelt down and unlaced his scorched sneaker. A coat hangar fell from the bathroom door. He stood up, one shoe on, running over his options. This was definitely one of those moments he'd look back on with nostalgia. Would he wish he'd done things differently? It was strangely evident that he would live on now, if only out of rampant curiosity or innate bad luck, or because he realized he owed it to Scully to keep soldiering on, no matter how flat the landscape around him was painted.

"Mulder," Scully said from her room. He stamped on the heel of his remaining shoe, prying it off. His mouth was cottony, because he was a major pussy about stuff like this. He dropped his leather jacket onto a kitchen chair. At the kitchen sink he slurped up a palmful of water, discovering that his hands smelled of motor oil.

Scrubbing in with dish soap, a mist pressing at his ears, he considered the tone of her summons. She had some thirty different shades of pronunciation for his name, but he could not specifically pinpoint this one.

He stood in the dark kitchen currying his hair with his wet fingers, then shook out his hands. He went down the tiny hall nerveless, possessed by an atheistic prayer. When they said 'breaking character', it must feel something like this, shrugging off the old fleece of himself and standing there with his hand on the door frame, blinking in the sudden light.

She stood at her bureau tossing her badge onto a neatly aligned dayplanner. "Damn it, Mulder," she said mildly, and put her shoulders back, reaching into the small of her back to unclip her holster.

He opened his mouth to protest, but fell short. "So, let's talk about it, Scully," he said, swinging his arms and socking his fist into the baseball mitt of his left hand.

Scully pulled a set of dark pajamas from a drawer. "...A misfit?" she asked, her eyes on his face as she passed him.

"Only by association," he said lightly, quickly. The bathroom door clicked shut.

Alone again, he sank onto her bed, falling back into the pillows with his hands over his face. All in one huge fun-filled day he'd autopsied an alien and killed a man and been called a dupe in a major conspiracy, and, far and away the most nerve-wracking of all, he'd kissed Scully for the very first time.

Freshly astonished, he drew his hands down over his nose. His head was curiously light and free of pain. The kiss was too fresh a miracle to examine directly, and he blinked it away.

He'd sat in this room for an hour in the dark, gone to badger earth, and it was infinitely different with the lights on, and Scully home. The comforts of her bed could not really be put into words, and he was sinking firmly into its treacherous clays, like a menhir into Cotswold marl.

The bathroom door's latch tripped in the mortise and he sat up sleepily, arms around his knees, ready to repair to the couch if that should be the tenor of the evening.

Scully came in briskly in her slate-gray pajamas, tossing her trousers overhand onto a chair, her eyes wary and her hairline damp. They traded a straightforward look and she stood at the edge of the bed, unfastening her wristwatch. "You look like it's all catching up with you," she observed, sitting down with her back to him and setting the watch on the nightstand. She picked up the alarm clock and shook it twice.

Mulder picked at a speck of mud on his jeans. "Scully, just for the record, if I could take this all back to the beginning, so that we never met, I would," he said.

Scully worked her way around until she was sitting cross-legged, facing him. "Are you really sure you'd give this up?" she asked. "It's been one hell of a ride."

"There's one reason I would," he said.

There was a prickling silence, and he tried to keep his eyes off the fluttering of pulse in her jugular notch. "Mulder," she said, her voice rough at the edges. "Maybe you wish you'd never met me, but I don't wish it even now, even as dire as things have become. Nothing could ever make me wish that." Her tongue swiped a crescent across her upper lip. "Mulder, I think that you have alexithymia, the inability to express your pain and unresolved grief," she said. "And it worries me."

"Sometimes I do talk about things with you," he said. "And I could say the exact same thing back." Scully never admitted her fears until everything had gone completely to hell.

"Maybe I talk about it with my therapist," she said.

"Maybe you do," he said, not letting her off the hook.

"Mulder, it worries me deeply to see how badly you're coping with all this."

"How exactly would you have me to cope with this?" he asked. "Don't you think it's impossible? Don't you think it's as hard as the holes of hell?"

Scully tipped her head, looking away.

"It's not about me, anyway," he said. "It's all beyond me. Because it's all out here where you are."

Scully looked up with tears in her eyes. "Mulder, you know as well as I do that as close as we are, the feelings of one automatically affect the other."

"The last thing I want is for you to feel what I feel. Nobody should ever have to feel this way."

She plucked at the quilt near his sock, a hard look in her eyes. "It just accumulates, Mulder: Dr. Goldstein, and the Senate hearings, and you and Roche, and sitting in that air force base with Pendrell's blood on my shirt, and it turning out that goddamned Eddie Van Blundht is a better listener than you. And so then I find myself trying to explain the reasoning behind it all to my brother, and I can't even explain it to myself!"

Mulder felt his face get warm. He looked down and watched with dislocation as she uncurled his fingers from his leg.

"And all I know at this moment is that despite everything, I want you here and I'm glad you're here, because tonight will be tomorrow if you go." She peered into his hand as if consulting a faded chart. "What amazes me is how I can love something and hate it so much at the same time," she said wistfully, following the stitched upholstery lines in his palm.

He wanted to believe she was talking about the X-Files, but wasn't entirely confident she didn't mean him. "I - I think that the best things always have something a bit painful at the bottom," he said, his childhood stammer rising.

She lifted his hand and held it against her face, her chilly-warm cheek making his breath catch. Her eyelids lowered heavily. Ungoverned, his thumb strayed across the cupid's bow at the top of her lips. Her grouty scowl was compounded by that non-existent beauty mark, as if small, bad faeries had pinched her lips and nose and chin from clay.

He wanted to press his lolloping heart deeper into his chest, afraid that its noise would crack the spell. Her fingers felt at the bones in the back of his hand, and very gently he traced the coping line of her nose, her breath shallow against his fingertips.

She opened her eyes and the deadly flourishes of her brows converged with her shadowy pupils. From his cupped hand she watched him, grief deep in her eyes. They'd kept each other in the dark a lot of the time and they'd hurt each other and they'd both been untrue, but oddly each incident only etched their dedication deeper; the rough spots grinding at the fixed point to which they always returned.

She reached over and rasped at his sideburn, felt at the side of his face. "You don't remotely understand how remarkable you are. You deserve so much and yet you seem determined to end up with nothing."

Of course it was the X-Files that she both loved and hated. She loved him, she didn't hate him, despite his many inadequacies. She'd stuck by him far longer than any other woman he'd known.

He settled back into the pillows, the headboard creaking behind him. "Let's overthink this for a minute," he said, piling up a couple of pillows for her. Scully crawled over and eased down beside him with a shaky sigh. His arm was behind her neck, under her hair. She thought about it a moment, and then her weight settled against him.

"Not nothing, he whispered, affected, holding her close. She was a blissful armful, warm and condensed, and he kissed the compass points of her forehead, inhaling the humid sweetness of her hairline. She made it so very difficult to be selfish. He did not really know what he wanted any more, except for her. He didn't understand how he'd let any of this happen, or even at what point it had all fallen apart.

"I keep telling myself that we've been in bad spots before, and that we've always found a way out," she said into his neck, holding onto him tight. "And that we're not the type to panic."

A car with a squealing power-steering belt sped up the hill and past.

"If this doesn't constitute panic on our parts, I don't know what does," Mulder pointed out, rubbing the back of her shoulder. He could no longer afford the luxury of immersing himself in negative capabilities without hope of a positive answer; he could not really hope that Skinner would manage to fix this, or that the netherworld struggle over Scully's fate would err on the side of good.

"We're survivors," he said reassuringly, although he did not believe that any longer, and the empty assertion fell, lumpen, between them. He wanted to lay there and hold her until the tactile weight of her body was compressed into his memory like a primrose in a dictionary, perfectly preserved, a faint and permanent stain forming in the surrounding tissue.

"I've never quite known how you would classify us, Mulder."

"We're everything," he said, letting his head fall back, eyes on the pale window. "We're eternal, like Styrofoam. We're alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Anywhere two cops are beating up a guy, that's us. We're the sun, the moon, the earth, the sky. We're everything that's unwanted and ill-conceived. We're the answer and we also bring to mind many questions."

Scully gave a snuffly laugh that ended with her face pressed damply into his shirt. He smiled too, trying to isolate the particularity of the experience. His eyes were hot. He massaged his way down her arm and she relaxed into him with a malleability he'd never felt in her before. He found her chilly toes curled like sectional fruit against his leg and squeezed them, nuzzling the smooth spot between her eyebrows and imagining the hot feeling in the chamber of her nasopharynx, right there between her eyes in Howler country. He had an image of himself holding her in x-ray relief, or stained and glowing under UV light, a woman, electric green.

He happened to have his eyes closed and she shifted and he heard the crackle of her tongue as it slid into the hollow of his ear, abrasive as a dusty needle settling onto a phonograph. He let out a huge pant of surprise at the surge of feeling, then tried to cover it up by tightening his arms around her.

She sank back into the pillows with a small sound of pain, half underneath him, looking up with her shadow-ringed eyes, tongue wetting her lips. "We have totally panicked, haven't we?" she asked.

Actually, a last-ditch interlude sounded just like them. "You know, truth be told, the fact that something's a bad idea has never stopped us before," he said.

"I just want to...obliterate everything," Scully said, closing her eyes. "I know you think you have too much respect for me as a colleague, whatever. And I don't think it would be possible to find a less ideal time or situation, even if we'd attempted to plan it."

He ducked his head, denying it all, and let the tips of his hair riffle her cheek. The fact that she had come to eclipse the paranormal as his locus, a purposeless turn of events, left him more frightened now than he'd ever felt in his life. Oddly, the most potent unexplained phenomena he had ever experienced was this simple connection with her.

"You know what's weird, Scully - I keep getting this twinge - like I'm remembering this from somewhere else, not necessarily the future."

"Nostalgia used to be treated as an illness," she said distantly, stroking his head.

"Oh yeah?" he asked, barely listening, watching the light roll along the filament of gold as the hollow above her clavicle sank and filled, his scalp prickling pleasurably as her fingers moved through his hair.

"Even as recently as the Civil War, severe homesickness put soldiers in the hospital," Scully said, pulling in a deep breath, her smooth hand on his scruffy chops, lifting his face.

Her expression was strange, as if she were in some Lethean trance, processing the startling experience of his tender, unerring erection pressing against her hip as her mind went on faking conversation. The lacquered glint in her eye was the ingress to all those nightmarish realms in which he'd made desperate, imaginary love to her, waking each time alone, in an incurable anguish of loss.

He felt that he was slipping his hand into an underwater creature's hair, tipping her chin to meet the oxygen at the surface of the pool.

He was careful of her nose, as if the slightest bump would burst it open. Their mouths sank warmly together, simultaneous, exact. The extraordinary damp pop of their lips parting brought him sharply to the fact that he was kissing Scully in her bed. She scrunched more static into his hair and opened her mouth. He found her soft tongue, saliva and anemone suckers sticking and slipping between them, and each shift of her jaw reminding him that it was her, Dana Scully, and he could not stop kissing her, over and over, thinking about the look in her eyes when she'd told him she was being intentionally killed. He'd wanted to do something to her then, grab her and fuck her or break his fist in a wall, walk out and never look back.

His hand slipped under her flexuous back, molding her closer, and she whimpered into his mouth. She was bruised from the Smithsonian stairwell, she was tired and injured and very ill, yet the sound forced such a thrill through him that a fierce heat sprang up under his arms. He mumbled remorsefully without unsealing his lips from hers, and Scully only pressed closer, her arms locked around his neck.

Very tenderly he worked his fingers between the buttons of her pajama top and jostled the heavy shifting tissue of her bare breast, and then he was jerking with his teeth at the satin, trying to get his face against her. She reached under his chin and popped the tight top button and he buried his face in the rolling and mythy improbability of topless Scully. Her breasts were hotter than body temperature, and she squeezed them together for him, his hands over hers. In the crease beneath each his tongue found a trace of fine, expensive sweat, which scattergunned across his neurons like a shaken kaleidoscope.

He grew too hot and sat up, gasping for air. A crazed smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. He crossed his hands at the hem of his sweater, sloughing off a couple of crackling layers. Scully stared at his bare chest with her breath hitching, and then she sat up and touched him, her hands feathering behind his neck and her tongue emerging between her teeth as their mouths came together. His hands settled around her hips, finding bare skin and rumpled silk, the moveable bones of her pelvis.

He couldn't bear to see the tattoo; nor did he want to accidently stroke its needly snap. He'd seen a snapshot of it in the police file, just a pale bit of skin with the circle of snake, her skin still inflamed and smeared and the colors vivid but muted, like a newspaper under ice. Outrageous to imagine the bloody subcutaneous drum of the tattoo needle in her orchid-white back. Tattoos to the Mulders and the Kuipers meant the camps.

Drunk or not, the design she picked was important because everything they did was a signal between them, one cartouche closer to cracking the code. And this symbol codified into something very like 'Fuck you, Mulder'.

"What is it?" she asked now, pulling away and looking at him with her eyebrows arching and falling, but there were too many inarticulate links between them, and all the things unsaid remained unsaid as he pressed her hair back from her temples.

He let go of her slowly and dropped back into the pillows. "One would have thought I could kiss and overthink at the same time," he observed.

"It's been a long day," she said, her eyes bright.

"A long week."

"A long year," she said, although it was not even close to Christmas.

He'd been nervous as hell in the hospital, afraid he was going to say 'screwed, blued and tattooed', or whatever antagonism leapt to mind. He'd entered her room lugging her suitcase and laptop from the Adams Inn, and found her sitting in a visitor chair in her hospital gown, a pillow in her lap, watching Jeopardy! and drinking black cherry cola from a can. She looked up with displeasure as he struggled in.

He'd ground to a halt midway through his routine of fidgeting and sarcasm, the blurting of a couple of Jeopardy! answers in question form, and a dense internal struggle. I'll take one-night stand with a psycho for a hundred. He'd gnawed his lip and somehow found the courage to touch her shoulder. Her scapula surfaced beneath the washed-thin cotton, displacing his fingers. She glared defensively up, the depression in her eyes knifing into him. Moved, he'd wanted to touch the brittle scrape on her cheek, but she would have really hated that.

She looked down at him now with great tenderness. She seemed to listen, looking around the room. She was unfamiliar but fascinating with her mouth swollen and her eyes half-closed, a laugh caught somewhere in her chest; somehow more vividly herself than ever.

She reached down and briskly rubbed his erection, her eyes aperturing. Her hand found its way down inside his jeans. He'd always been hard-pressed to imagine Scully with her hand on some guy's cock, but she squeezed him tightly, watching his eyes for the right moment, and then plucked at him with an enthralling tickly touch. Her fingers were cool and he was very, very hot.

"Kiss me because I love you," he said urgently, and he did not know what he was saying, his voice down at the other end of a cardboard shipping tube, trumpet-muted and not quite his.

She made a breathy sound, shifting quickly from amusement to sympathy at his delayed look of horror. Her knee ground across his lap as she eased onto him, her lips crushed to the pulse in his neck.

Untrue, untrue.

At long last he closed his hands around her flexed and fighting-trim Special Agent ass, and she grappled his bare shoulders as their mouths came together. She made a sound in her throat, her familiar argumentative whine, normally housing his name.

He rolled her over, mid-kiss, because he had to feel her underneath him. Their breathing was suspended loudly in the air at a distance above them, as though the sound belonged to other people. Her inner thighs stretched nicely under his weight. He pressed helplessly against her, her eyes flickering back in her head. He thrust his face into the collar of her pajama top, sucking on her throat and the chain around it, her fingers on his nape, her heels pressing him closer. When he judged he'd mashed the last chthonic terror from her head, he unfastened his mouth and pulled slowly and reluctantly out of her arms.

" - What - " Scully asked anxiously, on her back in the trashed bed, her knees wavering open and shut. She did not seem to trust him to follow through. She was hazy-eyed with want, plateauing and flushed, her pajama top a mess of undone buttons and spit.

"Nothing, I'm just going to kill the light." Mulder put his hand inside one of her knees and stilled its movement. His hand went slowly down her thigh, the silk catching slightly on his fingers. He watched the light on her face as his hand travelled. He leaned down and bit softly at the padded cleft over her pelvic bone. He could smell her, and he pressed his tongue flat and wet against the seam of her pajamas. She was jumpy, her thighs trembling against his ears, her weighty hand on the back of his head. Mulder, overwrought, groaned against her, and even through her clothes he could feel her rough pubis sliding loosely over a liquified base.

He lifted his face and their eyes met, and she smiled, her unhappy smile, her mouth sharp at the edges.

Mulder fell over heavily onto his side and they were drawn together into the gravitational hollow between, her face securely between his hands. He studied her with amazement and her mouth flattened with the effort of holding in tears. She grasped one of his hands and pulled it down against her lower belly, wincing and massaging her fingers roughly over his.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I want you so bad I'm cramping," she whispered against the edge of his mouth.

"Oh, Scully," he said breathlessly. They stared at each other, and she licked the corner of her mouth. Then a slow derisive blink, a signal, and she jerked firmly at the button on his jeans and his hands slid slowly down inside her pajamas until his watch caught in the waistband.

She gripped him in her hand and their wrists tangled and her mouth was all over his as his thumb flicked through the stiff hair and pressed at her engorged labia, opening her, his cock forcing past his hand, pushing into her, and she could barely open her legs enough, hobbled up in her pajamas, but then he was locked into the hot squeezy slip of her, his teeth gritting, and she squeal-moaned with her teeth in his lip, and nothing would ever be the same again.

The moment overrode the larger picture and the broadness of the future, overrode everything but the compulsive pressure of sex. Their balance went out and he popped slickly from her compression and into the cold air. The light stabbed into his eyes. Mulder lay on his back and let his chest heave as hard as it needed to.

"Lights, pants," he instructed himself aloud, and wallowed like a sea lion to the edge of the bed.

He listed across the room, the disk of his balance severely aslant, switched off the lamp and stripped off his jeans in the dark, nearly falling over the chair. He heard Scully's throaty chortle and realized, too late, that he should have waited until he'd seen her naked, but the light was making him feel epileptic, and the darkness was an intense relief.

"Mulder," she said, orienting him.

"Scully." Calling to her in the dark was their bedrock push and pull, the endless competitive symbiosis of their lives together.

"Mulder."

He loved the sound of his name when she said it, the mouthing of pure anchor and form. His hand closed around the curved rail of the footboard, and she crawled forward and frisked her fingers down his side.

Light floated from the open bathroom door, limning her bare shoulder. Her smudged eyes glowed in the whites. She was on the edge of the bed on her knees, stripped and linen-white, a triangular snippet of thatch at the base of her flat belly. He hunched in feasance, mouth dreamy on her skin, fingers spread. As he went lower the first hallucinatory whiff of snatch was unlikely and dreamlike, the most female part of her, distinctly obscure; the way of insanity or bewilderment of the mind. The sump of excitement, the faint stink of chemo, and her clitoris slippery-hard, a triumph under his tongue.

After a moment she pulled him off by the hair. He climbed onto the bed. Scully ran her hands slowly upward against the grain of his thighs, and then she was in his lap, holding his shoulders steady. Her skin brushed and slipped against his, dusty, satiny, exuding heat, her belly against his like chamois on a chrome fender.

He licked at the tip of her tongue, little flickering licks, pretending it was her pudenda, and Scully cried out in his mouth, her hand kneading his hair.

"Part of me wants to drag this out forever, and part of me doesn't," he whispered to her.

"Yes," she whispered back, her face against his. When she squeezed him rhythmically in her hand, it was all he could do to remember to breathe.

He slid his hand between them and in his ferment he was almost too hard to maneuver to right angles. As the old book said she was wet as lotus petal and rough as a cow's tongue, and there was no magic like it anywhere else in the world.

She put her arms around his neck and sighed, as if it had all come right.

The loose skin of his cock caught against the grippy places inside of her, pulling explicitly. White flashed briefly beneath her eyelids, and he held her steady, engaged in her mare's trap, her head falling back.

They toppled over and he was on top of her. His cock was loose at the base and he got centered behind it and pushed, the hard scimitar curve working up into her body. She groaned orgasmically, her hands reaching up the bed at nothing. He braced his hands and pushed compulsively into her, working his hips luxuriously.

He said her name, like a confession.

Mulder was on his knees, hands in the pliant arch of her back, everything coming down around his ears but his concentration stubbornly on her, as music comes down a wire. She gasped in pain, and he drew back and tried an easier angle.

She had the intent look of a cocaine rush, the prefrontal cortex shut off, a wet tear-track running from the outer corner of each eye. Mulder seized his lip in his teeth and moved slowly within her and her hair shifted on the sheets like seaweed in the current.

It occurred to him to smile, and she smiled back, her end-of-the-world smile. He felt his throat seize up, and the bottled-up agony within him throve. She gave a hard little pant of pleasure, her heels prodding his back muscles, and the hair ruffled on the back of his neck.

His licked his fingers and vibrated them against her and his hips worked, stroking fast, and he rubbed hard and the bed was squeaking rapidly and he slowed down as he felt the emotion inside her getting more powerful.

She groaned low in her throat, her muscles bearing down upon him. She turned her face into the pillow and wept. He stiffened up inside her until he was agonizingly hard, trying not to jab her but driven out of his mind by the sound of Scully panting and moaning. The strobe-flashes began in his head, of the house in Quonochontaug, a hot red coastal sunset of sadness and his endless search for Samantha getting Scully killed, and Scully was saying his name with her arms tight around him as another life opened up inside of him and he rolled through the portal, naked and falling, out of the blue and into the black.

He landed on the bed and opened his eyes to dusty-golden lamplight. He was in a cottage in a forest, apple leaves fluttering outside the open window. A scarab's chirp came into his orbit and became a mumbled 'm', a buzzing scarab on a string, and then Scully's mineral eyes wide above him, the traitor who took it all back.

"Mulder," she said, concerned, pushing her hair behind her ear. "Mulder, can you hear me?"

He smiled up from the floating waterlily of bed, and the bucolia dissolved. A current turned him slightly, and he watched the sunlight falling through her hair.

"Jesus, Mulder, you scared me," she said, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

It was the way the sunlight shot through the messy scrap of hair as she turned her head - a color hot as the sun. A glow around her. There was a sucked spot on her neck, on her breast. He felt like an archaeologist pulling back the vines on a jungle temple.

"I'm fine, really," he said, summoning lucidity. "It's just shock, maybe a touch of Dostoevsky Syndrome, plus a couple of days without an orgasm."

"Sort of a triple whammy," said Scully, vaguely mollified. She lay down on her side and watched him, her chin on her hand. "I was afraid I was going to regret it, but maybe not," she said.

"It was not exactly regrettable," he said, gazing at the ceiling, drawing the tips of his fingers around on his chest.

She put her hand on his stomach and rubbed the trail of hair below his belly button. "I must say, Mulder; there were times when I despaired of ever seeing you naked."

He rolled onto his side and looked at her. Scully's hand rotated naturally onto his hip. They snuggled up and he pressed her hair back. "The FBI always gets their man," he said confidingly into her ear.

"...A floating hill, Mulder?" she asked him, and he imagined a cloud formed upside down, drifting across the smoky horizon of his vision.

"Yeah, and it's all the more appealing when you say it with your hand on my gluteus maximus. We'll fly it to Washington - the government needs it."

Scully pulled back and lay with her eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"Scully?" he asked, concerned. She shook her head, just barely.

He tried to climb off the bed without jouncing her. He found a ziplock bag of ice cubes in the freezer in the kitchen. His penis was still stickily drying, and the cold freezer air felt wonderful on his hot chest.

He carefully constructed a washcloth of ice cubes for the bridge of her nose. "Mulder, you can't prevent a nosebleed with ice," she said, but humored him by applying it.

"Gee, I must have missed that in med school," he said. Actually, it wasn't doctors who made the worst patients, it was forensic pathologists. He drew his fingers down her body, getting lost in it, then pulled the sheets from under her legs and covered her up. The bed was wrecked, the fitted sheet coming off one corner, Scully's pajama top cast over the foot rail. He pulled the sheet down a bit and leaned close and licked her damp areola, one slow, erotic stroke. Then he fixed the bottom sheet and turned off the bedside lamp and lay down beside her. "So, what exactly did Eddie Van Blundht say to you?" he asked.

"He said 'We never really talk.'" Scully said from under the washcloth.

Mulder's laugh squeaked. There they were in the dark together, finally laughing about Eddie Van Blundht. "I would never say that!" he said.

"I know!" Scully said helplessly.

Mulder wondered aloud what her reply had been.

She folded up the washcloth and tried to find the nightstand in the dark. Ice thumped onto the floor. "Basically he got me drunk and I started telling these terrible stories from high school." She pulled the blanket from under his feet and drew it up over them both.

"Remind me never to get you drunk," Mulder said. He gathered her close and snuzzled a circle around her ear, munching at her hair like a cow in a hayfield. "What else did he say?"

"Well, I said that I couldn't believe I was telling you these embarrassing stories, and Eddie Van Blundht said that he couldn't believe I'd never told him before, with this sort of wistful look in his eye."

Mulder found this too sad to respond to.

Scully pressed up against him, moleskin belly and damp thigh, a leg across his. Her mouth wandered along his jaw. "Mulder, do you really wish things were different?'" she asked, weariness slushing her 's's.

"No, I couldn't give you up for a second," he said.

She pulled in a deep, slow breath. Her body was getting heavy and her face was against his collarbone, ice melting forgotten into the sheet beside her, his fingers tracing slowly in the saddle of her back. If they hadn't met they'd both be fine right now, instead of a ruined, hopeless pair in the dead end of their own devising.

A demon of the air reached down and pressed upon his breastbone, the white window rolling sideways. He was falling asleep, despite his best intentions, her hand flexing sleepily against his chest. Maybe it was better to have bombed through a few years of the hypermost in a collaboration smoldering like the live coal in a brown dwarf, the end coming at them like plague, like experimental craft; like a koan, uninterpretable until the last string of logic snaps and the truth pops forth like a parable.
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June 23, 2010

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'Life is always up or down,
or yes, or no.
But there is one person who is always a yes.
Though with the usual human complexities.
Lord, give me a few more years
to enjoy such confusion.'

- Mary Oliver
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Early Upsidaisium theme and strategy diagram, which, as you can see, much evolved: