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X-Files/Moose & Squirrel Season 4 - 5 'Gethsemane'/'Redux' Mulder POV unbetaed PWP
Rated: NC-17 for unsanctioned partner-mackin'
Written for the help_haiti earthquake relief fanfic auction of January, 2010 - first posted June 23, 2010 for xf_is_love
For the generous and infinitely patient cygnet7
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'Standing on the corner with the low-down blues,
A great big hole in the bottom of my shoes
Honey, let me be your salty dog.'
- Salty Dog Blues, Traditional
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1. Iceman
"I guess I should have dropped by the store on my way underground," Mulder said, holding the refrigerator door open far too long. A vestige of Yukon snow-glare sucked every object in front of him into shadow edged in periwinkle, then popped them back to convexity.
Scully was in the kitchen chair at the head of the table, fingers deep in her instep, her mind somewhere else. The last thing she'd needed right now was for him to go into his own kamikaze deathroll, caught up in her freefall like it was happening to him. But it was happening to him, which was why he'd wanted her to troop off into the Canadian wilderness as if she were still hardy enough to tolerate sub-zero high altitudes, because he quite desperately needed to believe that she was.
Mulder rotated a glass bottle of disgusting sedimenty apple juice. "I wish you could make it look like I've been frozen in ice for a million years," he said, head drooping against his arm.
"Caveman Mulder," she said. "You'd have a rocky little couch."
He tried to work up a smile. In his imagination he was only asleep inside the block of ice, awaiting the thaw; she could use him for a coffee table.
Scully arose and sighed, a smile in her eyes. She leaned under his arm to snag a carton of free-range eggs.
"I was put to death by the Troglodytes for insurrection," Mulder said, following her to the counter with the dregs of a plastic quart of milk. "It was my monosyllable against theirs. But I'm going to miss those walk-through mammoth ribs."
Scully spritzed her omelet pan with cooking spray. "I'm not sure what being dead buys you, Mulder, besides autonomy. Elbow room. An even shorter couch to crash on." She pointed at the bread box.
Mulder rattled around in the silverware drawer. "They'll have their hoax and we'll have ours," he said patiently, popping an English muffin apart with a fork.
She cracked four eggs brown as creek stones into a soup bowl and whisked them together with a dash of milk. Mulder ratcheted the pepper grinder above her whirling fork until Scully's elbow winged upward and touched his wrist. A tinny broadcast cooking show leapt into Mulder's head, featuring chefs Mulder and Scully tossing together simple apartment fare while holding inopportune conversations on surreal topics, breaking off frequently for mattress warehouse commercials.
"Mulder, would you rather do the right thing or get what you want?" Scully asked, roiling the liquid eggs in the pan.
"Do the right thing," Mulder said immediately. It was better to be productive than happy. He'd long suspected that there were two types of people in the world: those who did the right thing, and those who went after what they wanted; unfortunately both he and Scully were firmly in the first camp. "Where did that come from?" he asked, heading back to the refrigerator.
"I don't know," she said. He discovered a hard old piece of parmesan knotted up in a plastic produce bag; not the right kind of cheese at all, but better than nothing.
He turned around and caught her watching him. The refrigerator door sucked shut behind him.
"It's just that since the first day I met you, everything's been so upside down, and sometimes simply discerning the right thing is hugely difficult," she said, waiting while he grated cheese into the eggs. She picked up the spatula and folded the omelet.
"Speaking of doing the right thing, I really should get out of town while I have a head start," he said.
"Yet here you are," Scully said, lolling her head just enough to meet his eyes.
Mulder shrugged carelessly and ate a granular crumb of parmesan off the counter. He was continuously aware of how thoroughly his present was hobbled up with his past. After all, he'd obsessed for twenty years over one hopeless case. Scully knew that his hunger for information was the very essence of him, but maybe she didn't realize how much he enjoyed learning from her.
"You know why I can't just disappear right now," he said, warming his hand on the toaster.
This fell on stony ground. Scully shook the pan, her hair obscuring her eye. Mulder was disconcerted by the necessity of this moment in their story, the need to discuss what was happening. What he needed was a magic circle, a line nothing could cross; he would gladly put one around her, even if it kept him out.
He grew dreamy watching her shoulder blade shift beneath her T-shirt, the plastic butter lid buckling in his hand. The shirt bothered him because it wasn't familiar and it certainly wasn't the sort of thing she'd normally wear around him. For one thing, it was sky blue. In it her breasts were heartbreaking, like a glimpse of Shangri-La through the clouds as his fighter went down.
"What we need to do is change everything, Scully," he said, buttering the English muffins and tossing them on a plate.
"And how do we go about that?" she asked, dividing the omelet unequally and flumping the larger portion onto his plate.
Mulder was beyond ravenous and he stood there at the counter and slapped his fork sideways through the omelet and snarfed down the first fluffy, perfumy bite. Like a miracle, his faint ganglion throb of a headache subsided.
He carried his plate to the table with a muffin clamped in his teeth, and unclipped his holster and laid it beside the bowl of apples.
They settled across from each other. Scully carefully chewed her peppery eggs. Without warning she was up again, pouring cloudy apple juice into her blue Mexican glasses, and pushing one across to him.
"Oh hey," Mulder said nervously. "I usually drink my whiskey from an old fruit jar."
"So, how do we change everything, Mulder?" she asked again, shaking a drop of juice from her finger as she sank back into her chair.
"Well, we're not happy and everything's going wrong; we need to flip our lives over and try going the other way," he said between bites, holding his hands up and making the itsy bitsy spider sign. "Like an ant on a mobius strip."
Scully looked faintly entertained. She pulled her knee up and put her arm around it, and slowly swiped black currant jelly across an English muffin. Frequently she knocked the breath out of him just hitting the right angle, her academic eyes surely the most striking any woman had ever possessed. She had a strange little nose, and that mouth like a slutty marble Madonna carved by a tipsy Italian. Her transformation of the past few years had been something close to magic.
It dawned on him that were he dead right now he would have missed eating breakfast with Scully at one in the morning, noting the mysterious fashion in which the battered place on her cheek enhanced her loveliness. For a moment he was startled to find himself there, cornmeal between his finger and thumb, as though he'd just now hurtled forward from somewhere long in the past to discover himself profoundly changed.
Now that they were face to face he glimpsed the secret that she clamped like a carpenter's nail between the lips. She shifted under the overhead light, and a reflective patch shivered in the depths of her eye, like a manifestation of the cells that spelled ruin. She had no idea that he'd ferreted the results of her latest blood test out of Zuckerman over the phone, how a groundswell had risen under his feet at the slimy, radiation-hot metastasis. He'd thought of the word with a gun in his hand, unable to find a purchase on syllables that slithered away as they were spoken aloud.
Her eyes flickered over him. "What makes you think we wouldn't screw that up too, Mulder?" she asked him.
"You're probably right," he said, smirking wretchedly. He assumed that she wasn't holding back information to hurt him, that she simply judged him too fragile after the incident in Quonochontaug. Then again, the sort of hard truth she'd laid on him in the Sethburg warehouse refuted all that.
She tapped her fork languidly in her eggs, lashes down, trying to disguise the fact that she had no appetite. "I saw my brother today," she said. "He asked me where you were through all of this. I know that you've never met him, but I think my mother's already poisoned him against you."
"That doesn't sound like your mom."
"Maybe not intentionally poisoned. But nobody will ever be good enough for me, that's for damned sure." She snapped at a bite of eggs.
"Even just people you work with?"
"I think it's obvious even to Bill that it's a little more than that. His wife is pregnant, by the way, so he's now the top authority on anything familial."
"If he thinks that I don't watch out for you, that I don't want what's best for you - "
Scully unfolded her leg and sat up straight. "Mulder, my family resents that I have my own course, that I haven't followed all the neatly-laid paths that have been there in front of me since childhood."
"Well, at least you still have a family to resent you," Mulder said, sighing tensely.
She looked at him across the table, cinching in all the things that would threaten to diminish her. "Yes, I feel very lucky."
"Do you mind so much, if your brother hates me?" Mulder asked her.
Scully drew in a fighting breath. Then she met his eyes, considering the absurdity of it all. She shook her head, half-smiling. His convictions deepened into the pleasant certainty of infinite uncertainty, as if he had given up and was tumbling backward off a cliff.
"Scully, all I know is that the more I figure out what's going on, the more obvious it becomes to me that I have no idea what's going on."
"That sounds like the secret to life," said Scully. "If you'd known that when you were twenty, what would you have done with your life?"
"I guess the point is, no one is ever ready to believe that when they're twenty. Finding out that you can't know, that you'll never know, that everyone is lonely, that all anyone knows is the barrier of the self - at that age it would drive you mad."
"It's driving you a little mad, even now, isn't it?" Scully asked gently. "The fact of the matter is, everything is turned completely around, Mulder; you just don't see it yet," she said.
"You mean, if Kritschgau's right."
"It's just..." She rolled her head irritably. Mulder laid his fork gently across his plate. "Mulder, ninety-eight percent of all the creatures that have lived on this planet are now extinct. Lately, sometimes I feel that there's no meaning to anything, that everything is a betrayal and a falsehood, and what is the reason for all this if I'm just going to pointlessly self-destruct - and if that fact doesn't send some comminuted fracture through the whole fabric of creation?"
Mulder shook his head uselessly.
"...And I know it sounds nihilistic, and I know it doesn't sound like me. I am aware that somatic anxieties go hand in hand with illness of this type. But it doesn't stop me from feeling it."
"I've been in the same place," Mulder said softly. He'd been a teenager with parents who didn't speak. He was a man with a mortal wound. A phrase from university was stuck in his head: The world is too much with us.
Scully had tears in her eyes. She picked up her paper napkin and laid it straight. "But I don't feel it when we talk," she said.
This would lay up in his heart like a bird in the hay. He saw the unfairness now in the manner he'd always managed to steer around her reality and have her as an abstraction.
"Maybe that's the answer," he said. In the early days of her cancer he'd given her little inspirational pep-talks, then he'd stopped. He'd stopped trying to keep her courage up, at whatever cost to himself, and he'd stopped letting her in, and he'd stopped pretty much everything but the blind dog-paddle of forward motion.
"What are you saying?" she asked.
"You said yourself once how important the power of suggestion is in illness. That you learned that in med school."
She was nodding. "The importance of optimism in recovery. Even when that hope is past all common sense."
"There's nothing meaningless in hope."
"You're still thinking of this, of me, as just another case to be solved."
He wanted to get away and he knew that she wanted him to leave and there was that feeling of holding the wrong ends of two magnets together, that rounded, slippery static place where nothing is resolved. That pushing, and that scritchy pull.
"This is how I have to approach it. You don't think I'm giving up, do you?" he asked.
"Of course not," she said.
Mulder was on his feet, brushing at the front of his sweater. "Hey, you know what - I've got to see some guys about a squirrel," he said. He carried his dishes to the sink.
"But - it's so late," Scully said. "...A squirrel?" she asked, twisting around in her chair.
Mulder seized her fork and ate a cold clump of eggs off her plate, his hand on her shoulder. "I'll be right back," he said, falsely soothing.
"But you don't have a car, do you?" Scully looked up at him with her eyebrows swooped, antagonized, together.
Mulder had left his car in Alexandria, his keys locked in his apartment, his I.D. in a dead man's pocket.
"Dead men don't drive cars. It's just up at Truxton Park; I was gonna walk. Is it all right if I stay here tonight?"
"I want to go with you, Mulder," Scully said, feeling for her shoes under the table.
"I think you should get some rest," he said. "I won't be long. Just throw me Quee-quee's old blanket."
"I'm not even tired, Mulder," she said firmly, arising.
As she put on her coat he was aware that for him she would divert, as he had always hoped and feared, to a renegade path. He took a diametric pleasure in forcing the reversal of her thinking; much as he found it perversely thrilling when she was covered in mud or soaking wet or in any situation that played fast and loose with her deliberate boundaries.
Mulder had the distinct sense of living through history, through one of the most profound times in his life, one that he would certainly look back on as a major era, his years with Scully. She was the epic poem through which he labored, swashing about with a sword.
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Part 2: Bad Radio