Black Hole Season
By: Penumbra (Penumbra23@hotmail.com)
Rating: PG
Category:MSR/S
'Orison' post-ep
Summary: Mulder muddles through the aftermath of 'Orison'.
__________________
'Black holes are where God divided by zero.'
-Steven Wright
__________________

Nearly eight years of monster-mashing and here you have two people who
can still barely look each other in the eye and say 'you're it for me,
you're the one'. Love is slow but death is tracer-fast, a missile below
the waterline. Love is bled out in its bath like an Aztec virgin
bringing up the sun. One more dance with the devil.

Here, see if you can take this. Smash her head into a mirror. She's got
such a serious little head. She thinks about stuff like Level 4 hot
agents and red shift and strontium 90. Hit her again. Can you take it?
One more straw on the camel.
__________________

I am the edge.

I saw that tagged on a box car once, ripping past a railroad crossing.
Nebraska evening, the sky bruised and sagging with snow, and the train
rocked past, one of those freight trains a couple of miles long and full
of sorghum or sugar beets. Maybe Scully and I could grow sugar beets,
when we finally throw in the towel and move to Home.

'I am the edge', it said, flashing through the headlights. Scully was
beside me, perhaps she saw it too. We were both glazing over, locked in
train-hypnosis, unaware of the endlessly shifting future, of what it may
hold.

That is me, I thought, an edge, a corner; an obstacle things have to
navigate or come up against. Everything knocks into me and leaves their
greasy fingerprints. I am an edge and I'd rather be in the middle.

Scully is another fringe-dweller, pushed to an extremity. We live on the
edge - we're edgy. We've been kissing each other too, lately, but that's
getting off the subject.

Like the world snake sloughing its fragile skin, I rendered her pajamas
to ash in my basement incinerator. And as per her request, I poked the
snake to see if it was dead.

She cut her hands on the broken mirror.

The train comes through like a knife through the land, and I am the
edge. We were two for two with Donnie Pfaster, and this time Scully
closed the case. Homer invented blank verse when he could not think of a
rhyme for 'orange'; improvisation should always be an option.

__________________

There was an interesting blurb on Czechoslovakian crop circles in this
month's SETI newsletter, but he could not focus on the words. He
pictured Scully in riot gear, unlimbering a rifle. He once saw her jam a
Leatherman into some guy's trachea. She was tough and capable in her job
and he had no right to wish she was in a less dangerous line of work.
This must be why the Bureau frowned on one becoming too attached to
one's partner.

In the other room she yelped in her sleep and Mulder lurched nervously.
He was definitely not going to be getting his beauty rest tonight. He
tried to relax in the leather armchair. Scully had showered the
requisite two or three times of the rape victim, then bundled herself
into his freshly changed bed with her hair still wet. As he closed the
door she pulled the covers over her head.

Her Smith pricked the air and she got a few grains of gunpowder embedded
in the side of her hand. She was bleeding from her left nostril again.
Blast concussion hurts worse than zombie bites - they'll probably both
be deaf for a week. He thinks that he is out of shock, that Scully saw
something worse in Pfaster than would have come to light in a court of
law. That he won't allow Scully to stigmatize herself.

He tilted his head, listening to her fighting Pfaster in her sleep. He
got up and put his head in the bedroom door. She shifted under the
comforter.

"Scully, it's me," he said in an even tone.

She went still, then sat up in the middle of the bed.

"Dreaming," he said from the door.

She held out her hand to him, raking her hair back into shape. There
were tear streaks under her eyes; he thumbed them away.

"I'm not crying," she croaked, her denial somewhat marred by the
punctuation of a sniff.

"Sshh...just in your sleep." He felt huge and oafish, looming over her,
yet she submitted trustingly to his touch. Her pajamas looked about
three sizes too big. "At least you can sleep," he said.

"I don't have to let this thing affect me, Mulder," she said sternly.

"Of course it's going to affect you," he whispered. "I know it's
certainly affecting me."

Scully lay back into the pillows and sighed. "Was it bad for you too?"
she asked.

"I can't believe you have to ask that."

She searched herself. "I don't. I don't," she said.
__________________

He offers, shyly, to rub her back, and to his surprise she acquiesces,
rolling over, her cheek on her folded arms.

Under his hand her back is selectively ribby and softly curved - new
tactile grist for his Scully erotikon. He has never had such license to
touch her; the small of her back holds him rapt.

He lets her come to him as he would have tamed the beast-woman, a slow,
cerebral wooing. Scully can be brittle and insular, but she knows him
better than anyone else on earth. He touches her, and finally remembers
to breathe.
__________________

The second time was to win an argument, a few weeks after the first time
on New Year's Eve. Mulder had to admire how effectively it shut him up.
They were in a crowded fern bar and the last thing he expected, while he
was holding forth on something called demiurges, was for Scully to get
up and grab his shoulder and press her warm and sulky mouth to his. It
was a fleeting, electric kiss; they both sighed whilst pretending it
hadn't happened. Mulder completely forgot about demiurges, small evil
beings of the underworld, and stared hazily out the window while Scully
went to pay the bill.
___________________

Evolution is an incremental process.

One evening they are standing on the sidewalk outside a jumping night
club, waiting for a cab after an encounter with another of Mulder's
'informants', a schizoid millennarian with a jar of ectoplasm.

"I wish I had gotten that jar," Mulder confides to her as they wait. He
shifts rhythmically from foot to foot. Inside the joint, Louie and the
Horndogs are swanking through 'Blue Moon'. The doors are open and he's
had a beer and so has Scully, and he has a self-destructive urge to ask
her to dance.

"Yeah, it would go nicely with your monkey's paw and that guaranteed
authentic Mars rock," she teases him.

He looks at her, his eyes crinkling with condensed happiness. "I don't
have a monkey's paw, Scully," he says, feigning scorn.

She scrapes one of her obnoxious shoes over concrete, sending a
salacious shiver to his soul. "Oh don't you," she says meaningfully.

She is openly flirting now, he thinks; she looks up at him through her
heavy lashes, her hands in her pockets, swinging her foot.

She's just bored, waiting for a cab, he reasons. Scully reaches forward
with her seriously sexy shoe and steps on his foot, as if to ensure his
full attention. Mulder muses that if nothing else, she is probably
going to drive him to a garden-variety shoe fetish.

"No, but I'm not without my charms," he tells her, grinning.

She tips her head back, wryly amused. They stand toe to toe, their hands
in their coat pockets, eyeing each other in challenge. Prickly Scully -
she gives love a run for its money with her fuck-me clothes and her
fuck-you demeanor. Yet at times she makes him feel that he is finally
getting something right in his life.

"Want to dance, Mulder?" she asks, with an inscrutable look.

"I thought you'd never ask." But they don't dance, they just stand there
on the sidewalk and hold onto each other, the city weltering around
them. He drops his head to her shoulder and she turns her face to his
and he feels the heat of her breath. They go into some kind of stasis
then, noses touching, eyes closed, breathing shallowly. She clasps the
back of his neck. They are oblivious to pedestrians and sirens and the
bouncer smoking in the doorway, and their cab has to honk to get their
attention.

And Mulder sits shellshocked beside her in the cab and can't believe he
didn't kiss her.
___________________

After a respectable respite they find themselves holding hands one
afternoon under the table at a briefing (pure insanity), and it ends in
a breathy, jostling moment in a descending elevator, with Scully
thieving a kiss while paradoxically disengaging his hands from her
person. They hit the parking garage and Mulder is abruptly alone, left
rumpled and hyperventilating, and feeling the world has dropped from
under his feet.
__________________

This is now, his life with Scully, her tympanic pulse, the crush of her
hair as he massages her scalp. And what if that dank sexual predation
tempers her feelings for him? What if she identifies sexual deviance in
him as well? Talk about ruining bondage for life, not to mention
bathtubs.
__________________

Scully rolled over and he moved back politely, still propped up on his
elbow. She started to tell him what Pfaster had done, how he had choked
her, hit her, thrown her against the wall. She spoke in her familiar
measured tone, touching Mulder's hand to some of the spots, her throat,
her wrists; eradicating violence with his touch.

He pressed his anger down, mentally removing himself from the image of
Pfaster holding her face down on the floor. He felt sickened when Scully
put his hand over her mouth. He had been the one who put out the lighted
candles in the bathroom. He had already called Scully's mom and arranged
to have her help him clean up the apartment tomorrow. He would do the
heavy stuff but he didn't feel right about going through Scully's things
in the bedroom. He didn't want Scully to see her apartment again until
it was back in some semblance of order. He had been shocked by the
wreckage of the place, by the amount of fight in her.
__________________

Scully went fetal in the night, and he was heartened by the way she came
back to the sound of his voice, shaking weakly under his hand.

"Damn it, Mulder," she muttered.

"I know," he said. They listened to each other breathe.

"You're still here?" she asked.

"No, I's' just checking on you. I'm ridin' the couch."

"Don't go," she said.
__________________

The absence of loneliness is a presence in itself, and he luxuriates in
her proximity. If she is Scout then he must be her secret friend, the
basement-dwelling paranoiac. "This is how it is on Earth," she says at
one point, addled with sleep. Her live weight arm is flung across his.
"Sleep, Earth Girl," he whispers to the ceiling.
__________________

We both jumped awake when the Sunday paper hit the front door. She arose
and ghosted to the window in full Morning After mode. Obviously she
wished I'd disappear into a portable hole instead of wallowing in her
bed in all my macho glory.

In the chilly living room I was hunched on the couch rubbing my head
when she came awkwardly to the doorway.

"Mulder, I must have been in shock last night," she said faintly.

I kept my head down.

"That, or post-traumatic stress is the only fathomable reason I would
have requested you stay with me - I don't need protecting, Mulder, I
don't require a champion, I don't need anything right now but to go home
and restore my equanimity."

I've never known anyone who speaks as Scully does; she recites from an
endless formal script in her head. She sounds like someone who has read
a little too much Jane Austen and not enough Hunter S. Thompson. It is a
truth universally acknowledged that any colloquialisms she may emit are
tendered merely for humorous effect.

Such antiquated speech is by nature pedantic and long-winded;
fortunately, I am versed in a novel yet effective method of shutting
someone up.

"What are you doing?" She asks warily. I wrap her up tight and simply
let us float for a moment, one of my bare feet cupping the top of hers.

"I think you should climb back in bed before your feet get any colder,"
is all I say.

I make coffee and fetch in the paper and we turn on the lamps in the
winter light. And the newspaper drifts in sheaves as we sit in bed
together reading and she doesn't even want the sports section but we vie
for the forum and she starts the crossword puzzle and I finish up a
corner of it and I spill coffee on the classifieds, and I tilt her chin
and kiss her briefly and she smiles because the world hasn't ended but
it moves, oh, it moves.
__________________

scripsit January MM