From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 01:13:27 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Physicochemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather (The  Cosmic Love Remix) by tree
Source: direct

Reply To: nullipara@gmail.com

Title: Physicochemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather (The 
Cosmic Love Remix)
Author: tree
Distribution: This work is licenced under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Licence.

Rating: G
Category: V
Spoilers: Syzygy
Keywords: Post-episode
Summary: so I stayed in the darkness with you

This story is a remix of wendelah1's story 'Like Heaven to Touch',
written for http://xf_is_love.livejournal.com.

Many thanks to idella for encouraging and insightful beta.


*


They drove away from Comity in a tense, edgy silence. Miles of flat, 
monotonous fields rolled past them under a spindly moon.  Darkness 
pressed up dense and black against the windows, and Mulder was 
reminded of Detective White's cat scratching at her door to get in.

>> "I was hoping you could help me solve the mystery of the horny 
beast." <<

He winced at the memory. At the time it had seemed funny. Now he was
just glad Scully hadn't witnessed that particular display of wit.

She was taut in the car beside him, as though at any moment she might 
strike out. Even in the dim light from the dash, her profile seemed 
sharp enough to cut.  She was speeding, edging them over 70, close to 
reckless. Both hands gripped the wheel like she wanted to strangle 
it.

Maybe she just wanted to strangle him.

It was somewhere between midnight and dawn and Mulder was foggy and 
numb with tiredness. A spot under his sternum felt sore, as though 
he'dbeen punched. He couldn't remember if he had. Pressing the spot 
experimentally, he found it was tender.  

He thought there was probably a metaphor in there somewhere. 

All of his anger and frustration had dissipated and left him feeling 
unaccountably lonely; Scully had become a stranger to him on this 
case, someone he didn't recognize. He missed his partner and he 
wanted her back. 

Shifting slightly, he turned his head to look at her. "Why are you so 
angry with me, Scully?"

"I'm not." She said it like a slap, quick as a reflex. As though she 
didn't know it was a lie, or didn't want it to be one. After a moment 
she glanced at him, seeming genuinely perplexed. "I don't know."

"Do you think you could maybe slow down a little?"

She nodded without looking at him again and the white lines of the 
road began to blur by with slightly less speed. Soon he realized she 
was actually braking, and the car gradually rolled to a stop. The 
headlights lit a shallow curve of road and some straggly weeds before 
Scully cut the engine. 

"I suppose you believe I'm acting under the influence of that so-
called cosmic convergence," she said to the steering wheel.

"I think we've both been unduly influenced by the phenomenon ever 
since we arrived in Comity." He placed a gentle emphasis on 'both'.

She sighed. "Mulder, it's absurd."

"Why? Why is it so hard for you to accept the possibility that we may 
have been -- may continue to be -- influenced by forces outside 
ourselves?"

"Because I refuse to give credence to the spurious notion that a 
given alignment of planets has the power to affect a person's 
behavior."

"So you don't follow your horoscope, Scully?"

Mulder couldn't read the look she gave him in the darkness but he was 
sure it was some flavor of exasperation. Instead of replying she 
opened her door and stepped out onto the verge. The sudden flash of 
the interior light was blinding. When the door shut he was left 
blinking through silent explosions on the inside of his eyelids. By 
the time he could see again, Scully had moved around to the front of 
the car and was leaning against the hood looking up at the sky.

He got out to join her and found the night air pleasantly cool after 
the heat of the car. Loose gravel at the side of the road crunched a 
little as he walked, in time with the metallic ticks of the cooling 
engine. The hood was warm as he settled himself against it next to 
Scully and looked up. So far from any city, the stars were almost 
shockingly visible. They had been this bright, this close, on 
Skyland Mountain, he remembered, and had to look away.

"My father taught me the constellations when I was a little girl." 
Scully said quietly. "I think that's one of the reasons I decided to 
study physics."

In the darkness her face appeared luminous, as though she were 
reflecting light like the moon. Mulder wondered if that made him the 
sun and wasn?t sure he liked the comparison. "So what's a nice 
physicist like you doing in a place like this?"

She turned to him with another look he couldn't read. "I can't be 
anything other than what I am, Mulder." She said it almost 
apologetically.

He frowned and turned to face her fully. "I'm not asking you to be, 
Scully. I don't want that." At her raised eyebrow, he shrugged. 
"Okay, maybe sometimes I want that. Just every now and then."

She chuffed a breath of laughter and he felt an unexpected rush of 
pleasure. 

"You want me to agree with you that a rare planetary convergence 
resulted in the focal point of an enormous amount of cosmic energy 
being a pair of teenaged girls in a small town."

"Unless you have another compelling explanation for everything that 
happened back there."

"Mulder, you can't seriously believe that."

"Well, what do you call what we just experienced?"

She put her hands on her hips. "Mass psychosis?"

"And the simultaneous gun discharges?"

"Some kind of localized atmospheric disturbance, maybe."

He threw his arms up in frustration. "Come on, Scully! What happened 
to the girl who rewrote Einstein?"

"That was purely theoretical, Mulder."

A wave of exhaustion seemed to pass over him then. He walked a few 
steps from the car and looked across the flat expanse in all 
directions around them. How long had it been since they left Comity? 
They'd seen no one else on the road in all this time. The night and 
the distance suddenly seemed interminable and Mulder was overcome 
with a desire to simply lie down and go to sleep.

Behind him Scully shifted on the gravel. When she spoke, her tone 
was conciliatory.

"Will you please just listen to me for a minute?"

He turned around, nodded.

She looked down briefly and tucked some hair behind her ear. "In a 
cosmological sense, the way we understand and measure time is 
essentially arbitrary. Our concept of time is related to the earth's 
rotation both on its axis and around the sun. To us time is fixed 
and unchanging, but scientifically we know that time isn't fixed. 
That's what the theory of relativity describes."

"But you once told me that time is a universal invariant."

"You were shouting about missing time, Mulder," she said dryly. 
"Even in quantum theory time doesn't just go missing."

"So time isn't what we think it is. What does that have to do with 
what happened in Comity?"

Scully stepped closer to him, her expression earnest and intent. 
"Even if I were to posit hypothetically that the gravitational 
forces of stellar bodies could be brought to bear somehow at an 
individual level, the theory that these girls were the focus of 
grand cosmic power because it was their birthday is still untenable." 
She held up a hand as he opened his mouth to interrupt. "What about 
all the other people with the same birthday, Mulder? What about 
people in other time zones? Why haven't there been reports of this 
kind of phenomena anywhere else? Midnight in Comity is 9pm in San 
Diego, so it should still be happening there. Do you see what I'm 
saying? Even within those hypothetical parameters, it's still 
outside the realm of logic because time doesn't obey our clocks."

Mulder ran his hands through his hair and scrubbed at his face. It 
was either too late or too early to be having this conversation. The 
temperature was dropping and he wished he hadn't left his jacket in 
the car. His throat ached and he wondered if he was coming down with 
something.

"Not everything is logical, Scully," he said finally. "Haven't your 
own actions and feelings on this case told you that?"

This time it was Scully who turned away. 

"Mulder, I get so tired of feeling as though I have to fight for 
every inch with you, like we're in a tug of war. I offer you my 
conclusions based on my understanding of the evidence at hand, but 
it never seems to be enough. Sometimes it seems as though you're 
willing to believe anyone *but* me."

A hollow space seemed to open in his chest. Did she really think 
that?

"Scully, no," he said softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. 
When she turned to face him, he shook his head and pulled her toward 
him, trying to infuse her with his denial. 

He remembered something else he'd said to Detective White, about 
Scully being rigid in a wonderful way. She braced him, buttressed 
him. Whole bridges of his theory were strung and balanced on her 
resistance.

In the sudden surge of this understanding, he pulled her into his 
arms, trying to make her feel it bodily with him.  She was stiff in 
his embrace but he spoke urgently, needing her to know. "Scully, I 
need you to be my structural integrity. It's not about believing or 
disbelieving you. You are--" he broke off, trying to find the right 
word "--fundamental. It's just that sometimes I want to know you're 
on my side whatever the evidence says."

She leaned back and regarded him seriously, her eyes wide and dark. 
"Mulder I am always on your side. Don't you know that?"

And he did, he realized. Of course he did. How had he forgotten?

Feeling buoyant now, he pulled her in tighter and hugged her. After a 
moment her arms slipped around his waist. Her light, shallow 
breathing slowly evened out and deepened until she was relaxed 
against him. He wasn't drunk, had only been just slightly buzzed, 
but he felt intoxicated now holding her.

Without thinking, he leaned back and pressed a kiss to her temple. 
She looked up at him with a half smile and a question in her eyes. 
In answer, he leaned down and kissed her softly on the mouth.

Her lips were warm and slightly chapped. For just a moment she kissed 
him back.

Did the butterfly effect work in reverse, he wondered. A man kisses 
his partner outside Comity, a moth flying across their path lives to 
flap its wings in Houston, the monsoon arrives early in Calcutta. 
Torrential rain. The end of days.

He pressed his face into her hair and didn't care. Didn't care.

"Mulder, what are we doing?" Scully whispered against his chest.

"I don't know," he whispered back. "Do you want to stop?"

She was silent for a little while, as though she were thinking it 
over, giving his question the same serious regard as she gave to 
everything else. His ballast, his counterweight.

"No," she said finally. "No, I don't want to stop."



*


Notes:

The title comes from The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. I 
encountered it in an excerpt in Lapham's Quarterly and liked the 
sound of it. (It was in the Means of Communication issue, if you're 
curious.) It seemed to have an appropriately X-File-ish air. In
case it's not obvious, the remix title and the summary are from
Cosmic Love by Florence + the Machine.


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