Chronology: 6th season, pre-“Biogenesis”

If typical relationships evolve according to Darwinian biology, than what’s to say that atypical relationships wouldn’t adhere to the principles of punctuated equilibrium?

* * * * * * *

I am sitting in your bed, naked, and you are lying naked beside me. The only significant difference between our states of being is that I am awake.

Wore you out again, did I, Mulder?

You are snoring with a volume that could wake the dead. Not to mention that you’ve sprawled across most of this ridiculous waterbed, your gangly arms and legs preventing me from achieving a comfortable sleeping position. I don’t blame you. After all, it’s not often that we actually sleep together after engaging in raucous, raunchy sex. Usually we just fuck, get dressed, fix our hair, and resume the chase. I don’t know if your invitation tonight was an olive branch or just a sign that we haven’t been regular enough for your tastes.

I crumple back against the pillow like a deflated balloon, my back encountering the obstruction of your outstretched arm, bony and proprietary as it lays splayed against the sheets. In your sleep, you make a grunt of distaste; so sorry to have disturbed you, Your Majesty, but your fuck-on-command mistress is experiencing discomfort.

Why did we do this? What twisted redemption did we hope to find in the hollowness of meaningless thrusts and orgasms that occur only as byproducts of our fear and frustration, the two emotions coupling as furiously as the bodies they reside in?

I could blame it on you, and I probably do most of the time. But tonight, as you lie so unsuspecting, I am going to steal some of your preciously hoarded guilt. Self-flagellation becomes you, Mulder, but there’s such a thing as overkill. Besides, I’ve always had a secretly-fed masochistic complex of my own.

I should have quelled your impulse the moment we returned to my apartment after seeing the charred remains of the Syndicate, looking like some kind of Mayan remnant sect seeking salvation in mass sacrifice. I knew you would have to stay at my apartment, seeing as how yours was being invaded by the CDC, but I had planned for you to sleep on my couch. Pardon my presumption, but at that point I could’ve shot you again for your disgusting arrogance. It was not in my mind that we would be lying in one another’s sweat later that night.

I was more than a little surprised, then, when you reached for me after I closed the door, while I was shucking my trenchcoat. You ripped my hands from the buttons and held them while you kissed me with the fervor usually saved televangelists converting millions via cathode ray tubes. I responded in kind, and we eventually reached the couch after creating our own version of the Armani runway in a heap on my floor. Tongues and hands played out the carefully composed symphony of seduction with a haphazard ferocity, their notes too often sharp for a true melody. When you finally thrust into me, it didn’t take very long for me to quiver like a reverberating string, manipulated by an expert musician, plucked and finessed by a well-schooled hand.

When I came back to Earth, you had picked up my remote control and were channel-surfing between ESPN and Comedy Central. Callous disregard, thy name is Mulder. I don’t need sweet nothings and sappy declarations of love – in fact, they make me nauseous – but some acknowledgement would have been nice. We had, after all, just done The Deed, acting on six years of joking flirtation and repressed attraction. If you had even looked at me, instead of focusing empty eyes on the glow of SportsCenter, I would have found some reassurance.

My optimism blinded me to your desperation; I haven’t made that mistake since then.

My hand curls around the fabric of the pillowcase; tiny, grasping fingers that, a few hours ago, were digging into your back in simultaneous coercion and release, now looking alarmingly childlike in the filtered half-light of the moon through your blinds.

You turn slightly in restless sleep, as rambunctious in bed now as you were earlier. Well, maybe not quite that active.

Speaking of which, Mulder, my own International (Galactic? Universal?) Man of Mystery, what was tonight about? I suspect you meant your email to be intriguingly alluring, but I found your use of the phrase “Dress to impress” to be humorously out-of-character. And who are _you_ trying to impress, Agent Mulder?

I seriously contemplated not showing up at your apartment, but I figured the resultant hurt you’d feel would affect our work. Nothing like a bit of pragmatism to force a girl into a romantic night out, eh?

I shouldn’t have gone. Whether or not you meant this to be an actual overture to some kind of commitment or as a cruel manipulation, I have yet to decide. But either way it will affect our working relationship in the kind of way I was trying to avoid by coming.

You, Mulder, are a living, breathing, catch-22, and I say that with equal parts awe and frustration. Damn you for taking me out to a four-star restaurant and discussing work. Damn you for those same proprietary gestures you’ve always shown, for not realizing that they now held undertones previously ignored.

Damn you for leading me into your apartment like some kind of Danielle Steele heroine in need of care and dependence. Damn you for peeling off my clothes with the reverence of a priest at the Blessed Sacrament, and for proceeding to worship me as if my body and blood would provide your salvation.

I thought I had it figured out. I thought that we operated in two distinctly different modes: Mulder and Scully, the ideal partners, and Mulder and Scully, the desperate lovers. “Lovers” is a bit of a misnomer. Fuckers? Now you’ve blurred the line again, and I don’t know what to think. I can’t tell work from friendship from sex.

That sounds so twisted.

But I am so confused.

The chill of your apartment comes as a surprise only to my toes – the rest of my body had been deprived of blankets much earlier – as I rise from the bed, walking over the window and creating a fractal moonbeam with my index finger and the blinds. I wonder if the moon sees us, how she would judge us. I wonder if she would consult her celestial cohorts to determine our status as star-crossed, or if she would instead mistake us for renegade Shakespearean heroes stuck in a setting where melodrama just doesn’t have the same effect.

The bed squishes.

These are insane thoughts, the midnight ramblings of a woman gone mad.

Your voice, roughened by the dual drugs of sex and sleep, is expelled in drowsy puffs. “Scuh-lee…” you plead for my return. When I don’t return, the bed squishes again, and I can feel your barely-open eyes on me.

“Someday, Scully,” you whisper, your normally crisp elocution dulled by recent – perhaps ongoing – slumber, “someday, we’ll quit the Bureau.”

Yeah, Mulder, the day you voluntarily leave the FBI is the day I grow another head.

My quiet, disbelieving snort has not halted your – confession?

“We’ll get married, Scully, and move… to Mexico…” You pause here, gathering your thoughts – or else falling back asleep.

“We could adopt, and you… you could be a doctor there…” I can practically hear the smile in your failing voice as you attach the final clause to this impossibly happy ending. “We could just screw the X-Files, fuck the truth…”

Mulder, the day you “fuck the truth” is the day my new head splits open to reveal a Grecian war goddess, fully armored, who takes residence on top of the Washington Monument with the rest of her divine family.

You start to say something else, something about telling Cancerman exactly where he can shove his Morleys, but exhaustion makes you incoherent and you lapse into the deep, languid breathing of sleep once more.

I haven’t looked at you yet, afraid that the water in my eyes might spill over if I actually see any hints of tenderness on your part. God, tears feel so foreign, they make my eyes itch.

Or maybe the itching is causing my eyes to water, and I’m just imagining that I was touched.

Or maybe I’m rationalizing because I don’t know what to do with this.

I don’t know how much time passes before I return to sit on the bed, running my fingers gently through your hair, combing out the imperfections and smoothing out the bark-colored strands.

There are times, Mulder, when I am convinced that I could love you.

If we lived apart from our jobs, with children to call our own, working in a time-honored profession that people appreciated – I think I might call it a probability.

If you were well-behaved, perhaps even an inevitability.

But it is not as simple as you described, much as we might desire it to be so.

You won’t remember what you said in the morning, and I will not remind you of it. Fear will guide us both once more as we return to a world we are both desperate to escape.

Maybe someday, we will find that release.

Maybe tonight was a start.

* * * * * * *

“You drown in deeper oceans, inventing new religions.
They smile and stab my back, I lie and have to laugh.”
- Goo Goo Dolls, “All Eyes On Me”