by jordan
Mulder drove most of the long flat highway from Dallas to Houston, a four hour trip that was faster, many said, than driving to the airport, waiting for a plane, taking the thirty minute shuttle, debarking, and then driving from Houston Intercontinental down the 59 to the heart of the city. He was grateful for the time to think while Scully dozed quietly in her seat, jostling gently against her seat belt restraint now and again.
Scully. He gave her an affectionate look, but behind his eyes, he wondered about her. Were her breasts fuller, her lips softer; was the look in her eye more secret and tender? There was something different about her lately, though he couldn't put his finger on it. (Well, he wanted to, but she wouldn't let him.) Old joke, cheap shot. He grinned through the windshield, watching the open road ahead of him. But the grin faded as he stared into the distance thoughtfully. He pinched his lower lip with his thumb absently, his other hand hanging over the steering wheel.
He was tired, but not sleepy. He'd run out of pain killers yesterday, and the bullet wound from Winslow had begun to throb a little, like a stitch after running. And speaking of stitches, those from the knife wound repair over his ribs had begun to itch like crazy.
The long drive, with the prick of pain to keep him alert, was exactly the kind of thing Fox Mulder loved most in the world. Time to think. Alone but not alone. His adorable little sidekick was cuddled up on the seat beside him. Cherry on the cake: she was asleep and not giving him a hard time.
The things Dana Scully didn't know about her partner would fill a galaxy or two. For instance, did she know that when he put his hand on her, he could feel her? His mental image of it was like a line graph, or an EKG readout. Sometimes the line spiked, sometimes it ran along smoothly, sometimes it jittered up and down. Occasionally it dipped. He could touch her anywere, the briefest brush against her arm, and know when she dipped, wen she rose, when it would only take one more smartass word from him before she would come down on him like a ton of lead bricks.
If there was a color to the sensation, then it would currently be blue. She had cooled to him lately, cooled to life in general. She was in there somewhere, hiding, her eyes watchful and a little sad. He was not sure that coaxing her out of hiding was such a good idea just now. There were things that only time could heal.
Their relationship had run a predictable course. When they had first met, there was the rush of novelty, of each of them finding something magic and exciting in the other, and she had formed a crush on him that was a little embarrassing.
He wasn't that hard up for women that he had to put the make on his own partner. If he wanted them, they were there. If they didn't bore him, if he wasn't worried that each time he screwed some girl she was going to turn into Phoebe and reach down and yank his balls out through his throat. It was just that as the years went by, he found himself wanting them less and less. Big tits, long legs, nice ass, and he'd look, and the old trouser mouse would stir a little, but beyond that, nothing.
Scully used to trot after him like a puppy, and he loved it, but when she gave him that soulful, I adore you look, he had cringed. Like Groucho Marx, he had grave suspicions about any club nondiscriminating enough to have him as a member.
Then time and the tide of events had slowly, inexorably shifted. Her strength had been gradually forged into something well beyond his, and from those unsteady beginnings she had emerged with the heart of a lion. Her freckles had faded, and her pony tail had given way to a chic cut. The little sister had grown up, the way Samantha never would, right under big brother's nose. And had her feelings changed towards him, too?
He remembered waking in a hospital bed, not once or twice, but half a dozen times, with Scully at his side, touching him somehow so he could feel the deep resources of faith and strength within her, and the first thing he would see when he woke up was her blue, blue eyes gazing at him with love and concern. But these days he just saw the concern. In Winslow she had fussed over him, arguing with the nurse, not like an agitated lover, but like an anxious mother with a sick child. And there had been that air of distraction about her; she was never really THERE.
This past year she no longer laughed at his jokes, or hurried to catch up with him when he strode off towards a windmill to do battle. She fell behind more and more, and he felt such a terrible ache at the image of her fading into the distance that now he reached over and put his hand on her arm, very lightly, to make sure she was still there with him.
Still there. Not even a stir.
Of course she didn't feel much like laughing after the discovery and death of her little daughter, and didn't have the energy to run after him after all those months being crushed under the dreadful weight of her own mortality, was only just getting her physical strength back after the episode with her cancer just before Christmas. He could understand those things perfectly well. But did she not do these things simply because she was tired, or was it because she didn't want to anymore? Had they missed so many opportunities to deepen their connection, had he turned away from her inviting look so many times that now she was simply losing interest?
What if that was it? The thing he dreaded most in the world was the loss of Scully. That was the reason he never made a move on her, for fear of letting her close enough to see whatever that was inside him that had made him so...rejectable...all his life.
Mulder stared at the countryside dulling into darkness, seeing into the past. He remembered trying to get his father to come to a baseball game, a science fair, a teacher's meeting. It wasn't that Bill Mulder hated him. He simply didn't care one way or the other. Of his own accord, he would never so much as turn his head to look at his son. It was that utter indifference to his existence that had haunted Mulder all of his life.
Now was he fading from Scully's sight as well?
When love dies, it just dies, he thought. He could only play the sympathy card so many times before her responses grew automatic; was she already just going through the motions? Would that explain her distraction in Winslow?
He shook his head sharply. Knock it off, Dark Side. Scully stands alone but for you; she needs you. Her father is gone before her, her daughter and all the children she ever hoped to have are gone. Like him, she was marooned in the present moment, unable to reach into the past or into the future.
Stranded on a desert island together; now there was a fantasy worth pursuing. Gave that whole "I wouldn't have sex with you if you were the last man on earth" thing a whole new slant. God willing someday something will happen beyond our control, to snatch this decision from us and force us into a confrontation, and then I'll get into her pants, dammit, and put a smile on that sad little face.
Scully stirred, dreaming. Mulder looked down at her tenderly and then did a double take when she groaned softly in her throat. "Nooo..."
The word said no but the groan said Fuck me. Mulder almost swerved off the road. It was the most sexual, erotic sound he'd ever heard her make, and his lesser brain registered it and began to think for itself, standing at attention in case by some miracle it was called upon to perform.
One sound and blue steel. Shit! No woman ought to have that kind of power over a man. He tried to concentrate on the cars around him, their positions relative to his. But his visions were fragmented and vivid: his tongue meeting hers in a kiss, the sight of her naked breasts, the room spinning as he rolled over her in a bed.
Then the chill of aftermath. She was the Queen of the Second Guess, and however she interpreted a sexual encounter, he could not imagine a way it could come out happily ever after. Sex was not a game for Mulder. It was more like a religious experience. If she stopped loving him once he gave his soul to her--and why should she not, once he revealed all his inadequacies to her?-- then he would die. Really die, by his own hand. What point would there be in living without her?
Phoebe had nearly killed him, and then the last time they were together the only reason she came on to him was because she wanted to feel the flex of her own power. Even she end up preferring some old married man to him.
Mulder loved hard, and sometimes that was hard on who he loved. The last thing Scully needed was another burden like that. Not an obsessive, needy, depressed pervert like him.
Looking at her, he beseeched her silently, Make that sound again; let me hear it again, oh baby, just one more time.
But Scully was silent. The miles slipped by underneath them. And slowly a different kind of thinking began to take over. This kind was solitary in a different way, and he could never untangle the crooked pathways it took to explain to anyone else how he got where he was going. He just got there, helped by the hum of the engine, the vibration of the car, the slipstream of time they were caught up in, and Scully breathing quietly by his side.
A scene: he was twenty one years old, thin, intense, standing in front of a stout dark haired woman who was leaning heavily on a cane. It was at Oxford, and the air had that particular smell that was England, something to do with being able to smell the sea on both sides, a wide open smell. The woman was a famous folklorist, a visiting lecturer, and he had stopped her after a lecture to ask her to clarify some points.
"The thing you're trying to define is called the concept of limited good," she was telling him. "Many cultures, ancient and modern, subscribe to this idea. They believe that because there is only so much good to go around in the world, then when something good happens to one person, a bad thing must happen to another."
Mulder had said, "Does it work both ways, then? Is there only so much evil in the world?"
She had given him a strange smile, her old brown eyes really looking at him, really seeing him, in a way few people ever had. "Unfortunately, my boy, there seems to be no limit to the evil in this world. And yet most of us in most cultures seem to always be redeemed in the end, so I suppose there's hope for us after all."
Mulder tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. Every bit of that memory faded, visual and aural, like a picture melting, to reveal a single word under all the facade: redeemed.
Now it would play like a song over and over in his head until he had it just where it belonged.
Then an elegant leap in thinking, a flight into unimaginable space: Pawn tickets are redeemed, aren't they?
Issies. Redeemed, redeeming, redeemer.
Flash to a slow drive down a bad street, six or seven years ago, diverted by construction, and all right, dammit, lost, he had meandered into a red light district. Whores prowling the road, eyeing him. What idiot ever thought that sex made a man triumphant over a woman? His testicles cringed upwards into his body as he tried to avoid direct contact with their knowing eyes. He had slowed for a light, forced to stop for it. Staring straight ahead told them he wasn't interested. But some persistent little chick had pecked at his window, and he turned his gaze towards her. She was no more than thirteen years old, all made up in garish colors, and she flicked her tongue out at him with about as much erotic impact as a snake flicking its tongue to taste the smells in the air.
He had been shocked, and his thoughts were: here is the face of evil unformed, the place holder, the vacancy, but certainly it will come, sooner or later, into the features of this child, and make her bitter and stupid with greed for drugs or money or whatever substitute for love she finds, and what I am looking at now is the place reserved for evil.
Then the light changed and he had roared away with relief and a sense of escape.
Redeem, redeeming, redeemable.
Good and evil. God, Scully, after all we've been through, all the evil that's come to us, the crush of the wheel of Fortuna, as they believed in the Middle Ages, that giant wheel of fate that goes around--and comes around--don't we deserve some kind of good in our lives? Maybe not me, but you. Certainly you, with your steadfast heart and faith in God and compassion and basic human decency. Am I dragging you off to another adventure that will end in one or both of us in a hospital, the other in that bedside chair, waiting? Do you deserve that?
He slowed now as he saw a sign for a speed zone ahead. It was almost full dark, and the vast flat horizon had a lonely, empty feel to it. He passed a large car dealership, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, lit like Wrigley Field at night. Beyond that, a small white house with a psychic's crystal ball painted on a sign by the driveway: FORTUNES TOLD HERE, and underneath that a second, smaller sign, written in black felt tip pen, FRESH YARD EGGS two dollars a doz.
He looked down at Scully and was surprised to see her awake, blinking up at him. Unaccountably embarrassed, he said, "What's a yard egg?"
Short naps left her more irritable than refreshed. "How the hell would I know?"
He scanned the road desperately for any sign of a cafe, a convenience store. Any place that sold coffee. But when he looked back at her, she had closed her eyes again, her cheek pillowed against her hand. Whew! That was close. In the mood he was in, he could do without a session with grumpy!Scully.
"Mulder?"
He jumped. "What?"
She sniffed and shifted around under her jacket, stretching cramped muscles. "Where are we?"
"About a hundred miles north of Houston. Still about an hour and a half to go."
"Mm. Want me to drive?"
"No, I'm okay."
The night settled around them, sparked by the passing lights of fellow travellers. It was a comfortable, cosy feeling, as when children wake in the night and shuffle around briefly under the covers, then are still again.
Mulder said, "Whatcha thinkin' about, Scully?"
She murmured something he didn't catch, and then said, "I was thinking about a story someone told me once about sleeping in the back seat of a car when you're a kid."
"Most of my best back seat time was spent when I was a teenager." He wiggled his eyebrows at her, and she gave him her pained smile.
"What were YOU thinking about?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Nothing, really."
"Do you mind if I go back to sleep?"
"No, it's okay." A rush of long familiar warmth surged through him; there was something so intimate in her sleepy voice, so trusting. He reached over and brushed his fingertips over her hair, feeling for her, and it was there, the same warmth that went through his body like a healing balm.
"Sleep," he said softly.
She did.
Redeemed, redeemable, redemption.
