Title: The Ordinary Unbounded 
Author: Mary Parker
Rating: tame
Spoilers: sort of Signs & Wonders
Disclaimer: Not mine!  Never were!  Always will be Chris'!
Summary: Two people in love, but they can't really seem to get around to 
telling each other, unless they're heavily doped up.  Will it ever come
together for them?
A/N: Yeah, so I'm obsessed with their postmodern love affair.  

Mulder didn't like these hick town assignments anymore, 
all small-minded people who were crazy instead of 
thoughtful. He went for a run along a road lined with 
mangy flowers. He loped along the graveled shoulder 
until his knees reminded him he wasn't so young anymore 
and he had to stop, bent over to catch his breath. He 
nearly put his face in a big flower and had to blow it 
away from his sweaty face. Queen Anne's Lace, he 
recognized. Always Sam's favourite, because of the 
tender story his mother told about them. The fairies knit 
them out of lace, she had said to an infant Sam, all 
brown curls and big eyes, and the red blossom in the 
middle is where the fairy sits when she's done. Scully's 
face reminded him of the flower: pale and fine and her 
lips budding the colour of autumn.

A car went past in the dimming evening and Mulder 
flinched from the lights. He remembered the moment 
he'd realized Scully was in love with him: loyal Scully 
who had followed him to the ends of the earth and through 
the dark maze of his mind. The touch of her consciousness 
in his catatonic brain had been like the dawn he'd thought 
would never come. She had come to him fierce from the 
battle with the strange doctors and Diana, alight with 
fury and concern and an immense tenderness that staggered 
him. His overclocked brain took too long to process it as 
she bent over him with her gentle hands and her sunburned 
face. Love.

It was the supernova of his life, the endall revelation.

Mulder was flattened by Scully's composure. How long had 
she been loving him this way? She handled him the way 
she handled her gun: her small cool hands took him apart 
and put him back together with her accustomed precision. 
Even the tender touches, when she brushed his hair from 
his forehead or squeezed his hand briefly in the car, 
even then she maintained an air of clinical indifference. 
She wore her doctor face to excuse her distance, she went 
to a Buddhist shrine to demonstrate her detachment.

And inside her all this time the unbounded universe of her 
love. The gravity of her curved him to her position in 
space-time, the essential point of her. Scully was his 
grand unifying theory. She held him together. Sometimes she 
held him in her impartial embrace and he felt on the verge 
of telling her again that he loved her. He wanted to tell 
her every time he opened his clumsy mouth. His words were 
not refined enough and the crucible of his heart did 
nothing to reforge them into something fine and right for her.

He wondered if it had been a hallucination, the catatonic 
vision of her love.

He straightened wearily, goaded his feet into action, and 
twisted his ankle neatly on a patch of gravel. "Shit," he 
said under his breath, though no one was around. He prodded 
the spur of his ankle bone with his fingers as if it would 
tell him something, but his body refused to reveal its 
mysteries except to Scully's hands. Headlights flashed 
behind him, limning his skin with light, and the car crunched 
to a halt on the shoulder of the road. He turned, perplexed, 
to see Scully's quiet face floating above the steering wheel.

"You'd been gone a while." She leaned out the window to look 
at him. "Thought you might need a ride."

"Thanks." He limped to the passenger's side and ran the chair 
back on its runners so that he could almost stretch his legs.

"Did you hurt yourself, Mulder?" She surveyed the road with 
a practiced eye and put the car in drive.

"Bit," he said. He wanted to curl up in the profound hollow 
of her collarbone. He wanted to trace the parallel creases 
of her slender neck. Instead he fiddled with the radio, and 
she said nothing.

At the hotel she parked neatly between the lines of the slot 
outside their rooms. "Come on," she said, locking the car. 
"I'll check you out."

"I'm all sweaty." He stood bashful in front of her, knowing 
his grey t-shirt was damp in patches and his shorts were thin 
and clingy.

"Like I give a damn, Mulder." She motioned and he followed 
her meekly and flopped down on the cheap nylon garden of her 
bed. She untied his sneaker gently and peeled off his sock, 
a little grey around the edges, he saw. He'd never figured 
out bleach. He let his head hang off the opposite edge of 
her bed, his arms spread-eagled as she pressed here and 
there on his ankle. He stared at the ghostly drape of 
tomorrow's suit with her shoes jumbled under it. Scully was 
all hospital corners and tidy containers except for her 
habit of shedding her shoes and leaving them anywhere. He 
didn't blame her. Just looking at the pillars of the clunky 
heels made his arches ache. He tried not to flinch when she 
put the pads of her fingertips against a sore spot.

"Just twisted it," she pronounced finally, after what seemed 
like an eternity of exploration, though his expanded sense of 
time could have been due to his inversion. "You should be 
fine in the morning. Take some ibuprofen, though."

"Thanks," he said, and rolled over onto his stomach. She 
squeezed his ankle briefly as if she were distracted and 
released him.

"Go shower," she said. "I think there's a bad movie on later, 
if you want to watch it after we go over the case."

"Absolutely," he said, overeager and trying to sound cool. 
"Nothing I love more than an awful movie edited to run in a 
tv time slot."

She flashed him an abbreviated smile, and he touched her 
shoulder on his way out, because he could not tell her he 
loved her.