Title: Alchemy
Author: tree
E-mail address: nullipara@gmail.com
Distribution: direct to gossamer; anywhere else would be joyous, please 
let me know so i can visit
Spoiler: Pilot, Deep Throat, Squeeze
Rating: PG-13
Category: VA
Keywords: M/S UST, Mulder Angst, Post-ep for Squeeze
Summary: Alchemy (noun) figurative: a process by which paradoxical 
results are achieved or incompatible elements combined with no obvious 
rational explanation

***

The quality of silence late at night is different from other silences
he's known.  It is crisper, larger; all hush and echo.  Sound travels
more readily, satellite images are clearer.  He imagines telepathy
might also be easier at night, possibly psychokinesis.  Anything
requiring clarity, really, and distance.  But the stillness has an
underwater feeling, too, the press of liquid and held breath.

Mulder moves away from the window, past the soft light of the fish
tank.  The room is lit by its blue glow and the streetlights outside.
Arms folded across his chest, the bump of his heart is an odd
experience, half heard, half felt.  He thinks the sound of his blood
moving would be like the ocean.  If only his body was a shell he could
press his ear against Ð the vibrations a little bit hollow, somehow
inside out.

"I'm not a part of any agenda.  You've got to trust me."  Her voice
echoes in his head sometimes like that.  Maybe memory is a sort of
telepathy.  Maybe he's just crazy.  She said that to him once, but she
was laughing at the time.  He liked it.

He likes her.  And he doesn't want to.

Dana Scully is a conundrum.  She refuses to remain within any of the 
definitions he's applied to her.  She keeps connoting.  Hell, she's 
rewriting them.  His dictionary can't keep up.

The television is switched off but he's staring at it.  In the 
refracted light from outside he can see his legs reflected 
indistinctly.  For a moment he watches himself move in that other 
surface as though under a thin skein of water.  He wants to be that 
other self, the one made of light on the screen.  To be full of 
purpose and focussed again.

And he is.  Pushing a hand through his hair, he is.

It's just the way she argues with him privately but defends him 
publicly.  That asshole Tom Colton who obviously wanted more from her 
than just help with a case.  He'll probably be an AD in a few years 
but she'll still be worth two of him.  More.

He's pacing now, measured treads.  The floor is cool under his bare 
feet.  Of their own accord, his legs set up a rhythm from the door to 
the desk, from the desk to the door.

The way she saved him in Idaho.  When was the last time anybody saved 
him from anything?  He had been too muddled from the drugs in his 
system to take it in at the time, but looking back he is awed by her 
loyalty, her audacity.  For him.  He cannot reconcile it.

And their first case. How she came to him in fear and trusted him to 
tell her the truth.  Her own honesty is frightening.  He does not 
think about the way she looked in her underwear.

But now he's saved her too, so they're even.

Still, the sight of her tonight, hair mussed, shirt unbuttoned, 
panting with exertion; he can't get it out of his head.  He hadn't 
known how erotic courage could be.  He hadn't thought about her being 
beautiful.

That stops him short, mid-step.  He sits, instead.  The air feels as 
though it's lapping at his skin.

Earlier, after Tooms had been taken into custody, he'd tried to 
apologise for breaking down her door.  She had eyed him for a moment 
in that way she has, that way he's fast coming to enjoy, and then 
smiled.

"Mulder, you have my permission to break down my door any time I'm 
being attacked by a liver-eating mutant."  She'd paused for a moment 
and then added, "Or any sort of mutant, for that matter."

"So you allow for the possibility of future mutants, Scully?" Why does 
he like teasing her so much?

It was hours ago now and he's still sitting on his sofa thinking about 
her.  She will have the chain on the door and her firearm on the 
bedside table.  She had refused his suggestions to stay with someone 
for the night, simply asking him wearily, "And how would I explain 
this, Mulder?"  He'd even offered to stay with her instead.  In 
response she'd all but pushed him out the door.

"The chain is fine.  I'm armed, it'll do for one night." Her tone was 
firm.  He hadn't really wanted to stay anyway.

He switches on the television, but leaves it muted.  The flickering 
light casts deeper blue shadows on the walls, he could almost be 
swimming.  Perhaps this is what it's like to be a fish.

Rubbing absently at his belly, he takes a deep breath and exhales, 
repeats himself.  At odd moments his hand remembers the warm softness 
of her back above her cotton underwear.  If he closes his eyes, his 
memory supplies the stunning vision of Scully in her bathroom: eyes 
wide, breathing arrhythmic, skin flushed.

At the time he'd been terrified, but now his hand and his memory 
conspire against him.  This is how she'd look, something in him 
whispers, coaxing.  Supplying sensory information to fill the gaps. 
Above him, underneath him, soft and warm and strong.  Her laughter, 
then, his name in her voice, all the meaning she can already fill into 
those two syllables.

His name coming out of her mouth with her pale skin flushed pink and 
her shirt unbuttoned and the soft swell of her hips in his hands.

Christ, what is he doing?  He lurches up from the sofa to the kitchen 
and gulps down some water, willing away his erection.

"No."  His voice is rough and startlingly in the quiet.  It staggers 
drunkenly into the air, breaking things.

He rolls the cool glass against his forehead.  Takes a few more deep 
breaths, concentrating on the twin actions of inhale, exhale.  No.

He remembers why he does not trust her.  Should not.  Will not. 
Suddenly he's angry.  At her guilelessness, her logic, her graceless 
suits.  He's angry that he notices her mouth, and the way his office 
feels different when she's in it.  The way he feels different.  Most 
of all he's angry at the way she listens to him.  How dare she listen 
to him?  How dare she not just dismiss him like so many others have 
for so long?  How dare she make him feel this real?

Rubbing his temples, Mulder wanders back into his living room, his 
feet confident in the near-dark.

It's late and he's tired and he is self-aware enough to know that it's 
not Scully he's angry with.  The knowledge doesn't make him feel any 
better.

If he believes in the theory that there are five stages of grief, then 
he is assuredly at stage two.  He has moved past shock and denial with 
remarkable speed.  The idea of bargaining seems a long way off.  So 
he's trapped in anger.  Oh, Samantha.

The physiological indicators of fear, anger and desire are remarkably 
similar.  It's no wonder he's riding these strange emotional waves.

Tonight he'd been frightened.  The images of what he'd find at 
Scully's apartment if he wasn't in time choked him through the long 
ride to get to her, the breath backing up in his lungs like he was 
drowning.  He doesn't want to care so much.  Just enough.  Just enough 
and no more.

But she's alive, he reminds himself.  His head rolls along the back of 
the sofa to his right.  Backlit in blue, the fish meander slowly 
around the tank.  She's alive.

The phone rings, pulling him from the underwater world he inhabits. 
For a moment, he just looks at it.  It keeps ringing so he picks it 
up.

"Mulder."  His voice is slightly hoarse and he clears his throat.

"Mulder, did I wake you?"

Everything he's felt tonight rushes through him in a startling rainbow 
of emotion at her voice: fear, desire, anger.  He pushes it down.

"No, Scully, I was just Ð " he searches the room for something 
concrete to name.  "Just watching TV."

"Oh."

He waits then for her to go on, to tell him why she's calling in the 
middle of the night.  It can't be because she's thinking about him the 
way he's thinking about her.  Can it?  No.

"Is something wrong?"  He wants to know.

Her response is hasty.  "No, no, nothing's wrong.  It's just that I 
realised that Ð what I mean is, I didn't have a chance to say thank 
you.  I didn't thank you."

And there it is.  For one stunning breath he hates her with the full 
force of his being.  It is lightning hitting a pool of water, all 
flash and steam.  Then it's gone, leaving a dull burn which might be 
tenderness in its wake.  Her generosity will be his undoing.

"Self-preservation, Scully.  I just don't want to have to break in a 
new partner."

Her small huff of a laugh causes the corners of his mouth to curl. 
There's nothing else he can think to say.  So he stands in his living 
room breathing into the mouthpiece, listening to her breathing on the 
other end, in tandem.  He can almost see the little oxygen bubbles 
floating up into the air.

Finally, she says, "I should let you go.  It's late."  Her voice is 
soft and he feels it in that aching place in his chest.  "Goodnight, 
Mulder."

"Don't let the bedbugs bite."

The fish undulate softly behind glass.

"It seems like you were acting very territorial," she had said.

"Of course I was," he had responded.

Not the case, he thinks now.  You.  You're mine.  They gave you to me 
and I'm not giving you back.  I don't quite know what to do with you, 
but I'm not giving you back.

*

In the morning, he finds an envelope on his desk with his name in her 
hand.  When did he learn to recognise her voice on the telephone, her 
writing?  Slitting the envelope, he drops the contents into his palm. 
A dull copper key and a folded note.  Curling his fingers around the 
key, he reads:

Mulder,

So you don't have to break it down next time.

Scully

After reading it twice, he refolds it and pushes it into his pocket. 
His fingers clench around the key until they cannot feel the 
difference between it and the flesh of his palm.  When he opens his 
hand, the shape of the metal is embedded into his skin.  He will still 
feel it long after the imprint is gone.

***

feedback will make me squeal.  no, 
really.