Taller Than Other Waves, a x-files fanfic

Title: Taller Than Other Waves

Author: amyhit

Spoilers: Well… bits and pieces. Spotlight on Orison though.

Rating: R

Disclaimer: Yes, and I also own Pepsi and Microsoft... No.

Summary: She read Salem's Lot at ten years old, was brave enough to kiss her partner by thirty-five.

Author's Notes: This was another fic that sprang out of basically nothing. I was writing towards the last lines, which are not mine and belong to Pablo Neruda, as does the title. See the Reader's Fact Sheet at the end

The last thing he tells her before she sleeps.

The last thing he tells her before she sleeps is that the limited weight of a White Dwarf is 1.4 times that of the sun. He wants to believe she'll dream of partnering stars spinning each other forever into the realms of the unknown; a pair-bonded two burning the glassy firmament.

Mulder knows her dreams are wicked, unfair things – what's worse, she dreams herself wicked in them, now, after Pfaster. Because of this and because he is afraid too and because he is only just learning how to love, he touches her forehead before he lifts her from his couch. He wants to anoint her, exalt her.

He's seen her exalted for years now.

He holds her in his arms and stands turned towards his lonely apartment window, very still. With her old soul she deserves to be held in ancient light, he thinks. To be lit by a journey's end. In his arms she is too small, too light, a body made for the sea. He has realized of late that he has a habit of praying – for her and too her – has done it for years but never considered them prayers, only his desperate yearnings. Mashing guilty images of hands moving, of sharp little female teeth together with a few sparse words.

Safe, Truth, Peace, Scully, Love– oh, love.

So he prays for her, feels the blood moving though her in his arms. "Fifteen inches a second," she would tell him, "in the arteries. Slower in the veins." She would tell him were she awake. It is night and she is not awake.

Very far, Mulder.

She comes over while it is still light out. Even in the hall she recognizes the gloaming begin. Mulder's apartment accommodates dusk in the oddest ways, absorbing the light into moody corners and cups and dust until everything reminds her of him – him and his Peter Pan shadow of mystery. Of misery, she thinks but that isn't fair. She's seen him score a three-pointer at the buzzer, seen him imitate Mr. Potato Head, seen him smile at the sky. He has a head for sorrow but a heart for– there's a catch in her here –everything.

When Scully arrives the tenant in the suite before Mulder's is daring to play Supertramp with the speakers set down on the hardwood. Still, she thinks of Padgett and considers that sometimes a standard THC loving hooligan is the best neighbor you can hope for. Now it's night and there is wine, fragrant and stagnating on the table where his feet are. She came over and it got dark and now there is wine. It is the simplicity of the thing that keeps her wary, keeps her savoring the dry taste, half-sweet the way they've always kept things.

She came over and they broke the cork in the Shiraz trying to open it. They broke down into a few cautious giggles next when Mulder succeeded in pushing the remains of the cork into the bottle not out of it. They broke their voices – jaggedly, hungrily – speaking very little about things that mattered very little to either of them. (They broke each other's hearts she thinks, but that began long ago and was very melodramatic.) And after a time she said, "Mulder, that poster– the Andromeda Galaxy?" He nodded. She stretched back on the couch, back, into the conversation. "An elliptical galaxy."

"No way Scully, Andromeda's a spiral."

She licked her lip at him skeptically. He threatened to look it up. "Figures you'd have an astronomy text laying in wait."

"Astronomy, Astrology, Astral Projection— you name it."

"I know, right beside that cassette tape marked, 'Asterisks and Exclamation Points', right?"

"I maintain I thought it was a video guide on making keyboard emoticons."

"Un huh," she said, very dryly. To his credit she still couldn't make him blush. They sat in silence, reverting to form:

"It's the closest galaxy to our own I imagine you know," Mulder said. He was stretching his long arm to top up her wine. She nodded, shivering at the slight tremor of the bottle's lip against the rim, and thought she'd better not drink anymore. "I guess I keep that poster up there to remind me about distance."

"How big the universe is," she threw out, "or how inconsequential everything within it is?"

Mulder frowned, smudging a drop of wine across the table with his thumb. When he looked up their gazes crossed each other's and she felt a strangeness in her chest. Like a flower opening in time lapse. She looked away embarrassed by their thoughts and gulped breath. Her throat hurt suddenly but not for any reason of health. Well, mental health maybe. She swallowed again, this time with a mouthful of Shiraz. "It's 2.4 million light years away, if I remember correctly."

"Just down the block, hey Scully?" She gave him a decent eyebrowing. Not far. Of course it wasn't far but…

But the wine had made her romantic and coupled with Supertramp beseeching that she 'give a little bit' from the floorboards down the hall she felt compelled to disagree with science vehemently. She thought of Mulder and herself marauding off into the realms of the odd, a well dressed Tarzan and Jane. They doctored each other's coffee and sent distrustful glares at the flight attendants who wheedled by during long flights while their partner was mid-slumber. She and Mulder who were close the way relating numbers could be close, soldiering stoic and manipulated, side-by-side in their infinite procession. And she thought of how she missed him often when she knew he was asleep before her in the next room, or when she knew he wouldn't sleep in his dark next room, or when he was there awake and sleepy in her own room and she couldn't find it in her to just touch his knuckles with the mounts of her fingers and not let him leave.

Sometimes close by the sum of one's values was just not close enough.

"It's very far, Mulder," she said. Swigging her wine in defiance, she was daring him to break her down. Mulder's eyes flicked over her glass, which she hadn't realized was nearly empty again. He took a swallow of his own, lingering to inhale the tart burgundy scent, then to watch the liquid swirl. Everything he does is out of order, she thought dizzily.

"Ah, but now we're talking about attitude," he said.

"In what definition?"

"Do I need to get out my dictionary for this debate?"

She tried to hold onto an expression of immovability but it was hard when her cheeks were flushed. "Attitude has several denotative uses, Mulder. It can be used to describe the physical location of one body in regard to another or— or the emotional slant one holds on a matter. Aircraft personnel use 'attitude' to indicate the inclination of a craft's axes within a frame of reference." God she wanted to press him face first into the couch for grinning at her like that.

"Any one of those definitions could apply to a question of spatial relations."

"Except that– "

"Including– " he held up a hand to delay her objection " –including the emotional, so long as we're the ones posing the questions." She closed her mouth, her argument gone. "What I meant to say, what I guess I see in that poster up there isn't the inconsequentiality of a known quantity within the infinite. It's a question about the nature of space."

"Space," she said tonelessly.

"Sure. Space and distance are often thought to be synonymous but they're not."

With a huff she looked away. "Are you sure it's not semantics we're discussing, Mulder?"

He brought her eyes back to him gently by relieving her of her empty glass. "Space is inevitable but distance is an attitude, Scully. It's an attitude between thing one and thing two. We see it as insurmountable now but it may not be."

Again she looked away from him, towards the window. It's out there, she thought, Andromeda, and she felt herself prickle for him, felt the distinctly sexual wick of heat between her legs. He always made this happen to her so quickly, so thoroughly she almost resented him for it. As though he had overturned a lantern inside of her and spilled the heated oil, left her feeling dashed.

"Thing one and thing two," she husked. "Dr. Seuss, Mulder… really?" She sat beside him on his bachelor's couch and found she could not look at him, could not look at anything but the wine in his glass, still swirling from the motion of his wrist.

She warns herself twice over the course of the evening.

She warns herself twice over the course of the evening – once when they touch glasses and cheers to nothing and she realizes she feels at peace here, again when her shoes come off, falling loud as clopping horses feet onto his dusty floor – she cannot, she will not fall asleep here again. Kissing on New Years aside she is still Dana Scully and she will eat 'lite' cream cheese and continue to perfect that marcel in her hair each morning and she will not fall asleep on her partner's couch for the second time in as many weeks damn it. She will not.

But then the hooligan next door finally turns the music down and Mulder flicks all the lights out. It was a silent movie he was watching when she arrived but he mutes it by force of habit as they continue to talk and then… and then her shoes are off and Mulder's couch smells nicely of Mulder and by the time sleep hits her he's been aware of her stealthy exhaustion creeping vine-like over her for much longer than she has.

He speaks to her for a while of mass and of gravity. Steady forces these, and he knows she lets them serve as comfort. He watches her sleep and finds he thinks it must be like the sea, her night mind. Rocky waters mostly though and he frowns. He knows her father used to leave her all the time – come back with skin toughened by salt and the rest toughened by other men's crass natures. And Mulder knows too that a child's mind can follow a loved one even farther out to sea than there is a sea to follow. He imagines her dreams (Pfaster aside) are of elusive white whales and peg-legged men who leave, and that sometimes she isn't sure if it's the whale she hates or the man. He'd like to give her a sturdy boat to brave the rough waters. To lie curled with her in the small bottom amongst the oars and netting.

He finds it charming, remarkable that when she speaks to him her eyes are wide and blue with wakefulness but in her voice he hears the timbre drop and knows (it's her dearest tell) she'll soon be out in a glance. His dainty narcoleptic. A dainty narcoleptic. Pronouns are another kind of distance he cannot navigate, and he thinks too much.

He wants to kiss her sleeping; wants equally to kiss her into waking and has reason to hope, recently, that he might just get his chance some off-hand moment. In the mean time she calms him too, like a swallow of warm milk or the tea that still reminds him of Oxford and fog below the streetlights. By the time she's out the movie's almost ended and they've been pouring over the particulars of the Chandrasekar limit, the Oort belt, and red shift for a good two thirds of it anyway.

When the horror with Pfaster went down for the second time she came to stay with him. After the first night he kicked himself profusely and spent an hour taking down the mirrors off his ceiling…the ones he didn't remember putting there. They didn't mention it but she conceded to take the bed the second night and he knew. If he'd been thrown into a mirror he wouldn't want to wake up to his own reflection either. Hell, he didn't want to wake up to his own reflection half the time anyway. Besides the damn things kept making him think of that scene from Bride of Chuckie. Tonight though he figures he's probably safe in assuming she won't mind sleeping in his bed provided he keeps his hands to himself. And by that he means he'll be sleeping on the couch. Oh, she'll wake up embarrassed of course but only a little. She can hide her face behind his biggest coffee cup until she finds her equanimity again. That and her blazer, which he suspects has been eaten by some couch dwelling Alf creature.

As he prepares to lift her he continues to speak of Quasars and Neutron Stars. These mavericks of the sky, sulking and swathed in distance and yet she believes in them. The Hubble is up there whispering their light back as truth. Beside him she is not afraid of couch dwelling creatures and presses her roman little nose into the cushions. Her breathing, he notices, trembles but deepens.

Though she tries to do it other ways, she is always angry.

She drops asleep with Nosferatu on the TV. She hadn't bothered pointing out to Mulder the illogic of muting a silent movie. By the way Mulder is able to ignore the vampire's infamous magnetism she guesses he's seen the film at least twice before anyway. She on the other hand, falls into the rumbling volume of his voice, turns her face towards the screen and is out. She blames this television susceptibility on Melissa – her sister making her stay up all those nights when their parents had left the older siblings in charge.

"I'm the sitter and I say you have to stay up and watch TV with me." Melissa was always kneeing up onto the bed where Dana was reading. The younger girl with brushed teeth and braided hair shook her head and turned resolutely back to the start of a fresh chapter. "Come on DK, there's probably stuff with sex in it at this hour and no mom around to change the channel before they show anything!"

"I have to finish this. Watch television yourself." But by this point Melissa had crossed her arms and gotten Scully-stubborn.

"Anyway Dana, you can't even read that 'King' guy yet. And even if you can, Mom won't be happy if I tell her you were reading her adult books now come on and watch TV with me." So Dana would watch television with her sister and finish the book later anyway so she could sneak it back onto the adult bookshelf before dawn…

…and now beneath Mulder's voice she hears the siren's song of REM sleep and she falls hard-out as though on cue. She thinks maybe Mulder's hand is near hers on the couch but doesn't move to investigate. It's a comfort anyway believing he's there, letting his presence crest over her, large and pelagic. She closes her eyes and feels fierce in the face of her nightmares. She read Salem's Lot at ten years old, was brave enough to kiss her partner by thirty-five. Already she tastes gunpowder in her mouth and she thinks, I can handle this, I can handle this.

Of the few men who've carried her to bed Mulder is the only one whose strong arms don't wake her during the journey. She'd like to think that didn't unnerve her. She knows it's about the kind of trust your body gives without your approval. She wishes she knew – has never known – how to simply allow a thing to happen. In any event it is strange later when she is dreaming of running, of tearing at living flesh with her refined hands; finally, of her own face coming towards her and she doesn't realize it's a mirror until she hits, HARD… and then she wakes gasping in her partner's bed.

In his bed. She is in his bed.

She has fallen from her mattress at home sometimes, her feet caught up in the covers and her shoulder blades squirming on the floor for long seconds after her conscious mind has told her to stop, stop, it was just a dream. She's come awake only once, mercifully, with an imagined Smith and Wesson kicking in her hands, dreaming the barrel hot enough to burn her. Mulder's house is full of second-hand furniture with first-hand character. He keeps his toothbrush cup at the kitchen sink. There is a tenderness she feels towards this space that makes her ashamed for bringing these dark dreams in. For not being able to crawl up under his chin where he sleeps on his couch and whisper her hate into his chest in clear human speech.

In her dreams, though she tries to do it other ways, she is always angry, and Pfaster dies at her hands every time.

He was a martyr once.

It has become recurring now that she wakes herself snarling at Pfaster. Lately anyway it's Pfaster and Mulder doesn't need to know there were others before him. As a child she dreamed that eels bit her, or dogs. After Tooms she dreamed that men were trying to bite her and it was strange, to feel that again. Always these rage sounds coming out of her long after the event. At first she grappled with insomnia, then with sleep that came as sightless and smothering as a tomb. It was weeks before the dreams manifest and she grew wary, waiting for them. Waiting the way she might have waited for thunder tailing a flash, or bruises belying the violence done a cadaver.

This time, though, she's in Mulder's bed and he's in the doorway. His gaze is away from her by a degree allowing her privacy. With the hallway light a low wattage behind him his form is odd and curious as dark matter. MACHOS and WIMPS, she thinks and would laugh over him if she weren't still so petrified. She studies the blanket that lies smoothly over her and draws her knees up beneath it. "Was I tossing in my sleep or… did I say anything?"

He shifts and coughs softly. "Nah."

Which means the only reason Mulder is standing there alert is because he was watching her already anyway. He shifts again. She wonders if he thought her dreams were peaceful before that animal sound tore her awake. She can feel it still: the fleer of her lips. Her mouth feels torn. That's it Dana, good, take stock. Look around, reorient, and calm down. Mulder's blinds are hunter green. The streetlights drifting up from below can barely slip through the sheaths so it's very dark, and the sound of the fish-tank is aquatic and far off.

She is scared. God, she's so scared.

Of the trunks of cars, Skyland Mountain, of fluke-men, of toxic ergots and that goddamn El Chupacabra; of blood on her pillow, blood on her philtrum, of nebulous galaxies flickering out as though they were only bug-lights on a run down porch. And she is scared of their own personal nebulous lives, hers and Mulder's. She's afraid of Pfaster, of Padget, of Edward Jerse who have each put their hands on her in places and in ways Mulder has not, and she's afraid of these men who have made her think so fiercely of her gun.

…Ed's hands between her legs and it was snowing outside and her pantyhose were much wetter than she was…

…Imagine that, said Padget for the second time; there were coffee grounds at the bottom of her mug, a chip in the rim she couldn't stop tonguing and a burnt smell that might have been the bulb or the coffee but felt in her chest more like madness than heat…

…Pfaster knotting the fabric in her mouth while she could smell the shampoo of his last victim on his hands…

And breathing shallow through a gag or trying not to gag and thinking, 'if I had to I could–,' thinking, 'I will not let him–,' refusing to wait for Mulder to come and save her. Refusing sometimes to be saved.

"What were they of?" he asks quietly.

"Nothing. It was just for a moment," she says, "nothing tangible. I'm fine." She waits for him to leave or pry. He stays stationary in the lit doorway, both of them waiting for her to calm. He does not speak, does not try to admonish the cobwebs of her horror or even shoulder them. There was a time - not yet distant - when he would have, would have tried and hurt them both. He was determined once that he should be a martyr and never did understand the difference between a wound and the way it was healing. He watches her from across the room. He is such a wild package of bones and mostly water.

His hands twitch. They want to grasp, to hold on, and her gaze goes to them, knowing the feeling in her bones. He seems wary of this, of her bundled small amongst his covers with the movement of her hands and legs so unpredictable between the sheets. But the thrill that's in her spine is already changing. Her heart is clocking NASCAR engine speeds and it has always been an easy transition for her, from fear to arousal. Her mind trips now along definitions of epinephrine, euphoria, even Stockholm – too dazed, she's too dazed. For the thousandth time she wants him to use those teeming impulses he keeps such a tight lid on to make her shake apart. For Mulder she could make an entirely different kind of animalistic sound she's sure he would love. And him standing way over there with no idea.

Oh Mulder, she thinks. She knows sometimes she'll ride him hard on that couch of his instead, and sleep on him like a benevolent succubus, and that'll be good too. So it's while she's weighing and balancing the benefits of a fine heavy thread count to habituated leather upholstery that he comes to her – not any time in the future but now. Now. His shape looms darker as he nears.

Oh Mulder, oh Mulder, she thinks, breathing like a child caught behind a door in a game of hide and seek… or a child reading a scary book… or a child watching a sexy movie, scared of that too but in a different way.

At first when he touches her in darkness it is with only his mouth, his breath fanning heavier than his lips. It is a rasping kiss, daring and careful and barely a kiss. If this weren't her, if it weren't him, then she wouldn't be breathing wet and hot into his mouth; then she wouldn't be wet and hot and breathing oh, oh, oh into his mouth. She thinks at first he's kissing her to draw out the stubborn anger lingering around her lips. It's so him. Classic Mulder MO like sucking the poison out of a snake's bite…a terrifying, unexplained snake's bite. She lets him do this much; sobs once into his mouth and is done with it. Mulder licks her day old lipstick and kisses her without his hands. He keeps them off her. His stiff beautiful desire is held far from her as well, in a way that suggests - beyond restraint - belief: that this thing between them is not only inevitable but inerrable, wanted singularly, ad eundem. Both of their mouths are a little chapped and as she opens hers to press back there is an almost sting like a seal breaking. It has been a long winter.

This is inevitably going to happen, Mulder.

I know, Scully, I know. Soon.

This, oh– Mulder, this is really going to happen.

Yes, Scully, oh yes. Soonsoonsoon—

And she thinks he says it aloud, Soon, but she swallows the sound so she can only know it by taste. She is Andromeda, brave woman with the sea in her mouth, still chaste.

The noise she makes, so deliciously off key.

Eventually it is she who breaks their battle with distance. She breaks the one with sound too, though with all the rushing in his head he didn't realize they were silent, and she didn't realize she wasn't. The noise she makes is very quiet and so deliciously off key he can't help thinking Townsend would have killed to be able to emulate it. Then her hand is grabbing his shoulder, her fingers crawling down his back and she is spreading her legs for him almost wide. He can smell hotel soap on her, odd and clean - arousal too.

Attitude, he thinks, and also that it is right they affect each other this way, steadily in darkness. She moves again and again against the mattress – his mattress – showing him how much she wants him, trying to keep herself from showing him. Her restraint is lovely; he's always thought so. Always wanted to break that restraint though too. It's the same way he's fantasized about messing up her hair. He's as immature as a child to a point and he wants to faze her. Then to straighten her skirt afterwards, brush her hair to a gleam before making her come come come around all over again. Only now it's two hours before dawn in his celibate bed with the clean, clean sheets and he realizes he can actually do this. Seven years and two hours before dawn and he can have this, will have this with logical, supercilious Special Agent Crypto Zoologist M.D. and Covert Tattoo Bearer Extraordinaire, Dana Katherine Scully. Eroticism on a Sunday and he's working up a sweat. Her church would be so pleased.

He thinks he must be insane when he finds he's begun moving away from her again. It's some kind of passive sadomasochism, surely. Theirs is a tricky extraction in the dark with limbs reluctant to relinquish each other but she's letting him go. All sinning aside they were never going to do this tonight. His heart beats, soon, soon. Now is not the time for this long fought alchemy. The hunger will keep. In truth the romance of the evening has lulled him into the false sense of a Rubicon crossed, which he knows she's feeling too, and it isn't them. It will be this way between them on any bank of any river, however dark the waters. On foreign soil or their sturdy own.

Her eyes are scrying glasses, staying visible in the dark as he backs away enchanted; until he is at the door and he can no longer smell that body smell, until he's in the brightened hall and hears the bedsprings shift, until his hand grazes the light switch. Before he flicks it off he surveys himself: her breath seems to still be warm and messy in his hair and he is trembling like a petit mal sufferer, though there's nothing 'bad' about this.

He sits on his couch in the dark bouncing his leg. This is the true meaning of wired. Beyond the, 'I-worshipped-Timothy-Leery-in-university-and-tried-some-things-in-the-hopes-of-expanding-my-mind,' standard of wired with which he is familiar. He flicks sunflower seeds at the lip of a cup, hearing each one miss. All the lamps are off but he'll never sleep. The house is silent, all dark matter and potential.

This, she thinks, is the Universe.

Mulder stays awake the rest of the night. He wants to wake her with the dawn. He wants it obsessively, with the innocence of a child; to jump onto the corner of the bed and see her bounce, then wake. He makes coffee, eats a package of soup noodles and flavoring dry, rips the arms off another sweat-shirt, and falls asleep at last just before she wakes mid-morning.

She finds him on the couch with loose threads stuck all over him. She drinks some coffee in a juice cup and leaves the cup in front of him with her lipstick on it. Before she goes she bids him adieu, touching his thigh on the inside, high up and intimate. If she pushed a little harder she could feel his pulse here through his sweats.

This, she thinks, is the Universe. This brilliant man, the Cat in the Hat to her Goldfish. Him inviting chaos and her beginning to let it in, and her sleeping in his apartment, and them out there on the event horizon, the point of no return, believing in each other and sometimes, sometimes aliens. They've been searching so long for this place. A place of tenderness and truth.

They go there where nothing is waiting.

They find everything waiting there.

Fin

Fun and less-fun facts:

White Dwarfs- burnt out stars.

The Oort Belt- the mass of asteroids and rubble that exists beyond Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

Red Shift- in layman's terms, the universe is expanding.

Quasars- quasi stellar objects. Extremely distant space bodies of unknown composition.

'That scene from Bride of Chuckie'- ridiculous smutty doll sex followed by nasty doll bodies cut to ribbons while inflagrante.

The Chandrasekar Limit – the law stating the maximum mass a burnt out star can obtain. On it's own a star will not exceeded this limit but if another star is close enough the two can become companions and leech matter from each other until the Chandrasekar limit is surpassed, at which point there are some pretty impressive fireworks.

MACHOS and WIMPS- massive astrophysical compact halo objects and weakly interacting massive particles. Yeah, it's complicated.

Neutron stars- a small, extremely dense star composed mostly of neutrons, or the remains of a supernova explosion.

Ad eundem- ranking the same.

Andromeda- Myth dictates she was chained to a rock at sea, a sacrifice to the sea monster, but was saved by Perseus and became his wife. Yes, it would've been a better reference if she'd saved herself or at least helped but that rarely happens in Greco-roman mythology.