what_wings_dare | 🅧 Please explain to me the scientific nature of 'the whammy'

He wants to know more. Particularly now, when anything would be better than remembering himself; they can talk about Scully, about whatever she became, and how she's adapted, and his own form will fade into the background. He'll forget the shiver of beach grass whenever he turns his head.

(Will he learn a lesson from this discomfort? Probably not as much of one as Scully'd prefer.)

But he can't bring himself to ask for the details, not when it's so clear she's still uncomfortable with the experience. There's no case here, no pressure to deliver information to anyone - only his best friend and a misery she wants to keep private. Mulder brings the mug back up to his mouth. "Well, if you want company this month..."

It gets a smile out of here, though a rather weary one.

"Actually, I find it's easier if you try to act as normally as possible."

Though working with an extra twenty feet gets a little tricky. Mostly she struggles with doors: getting through before they fall shut on her.

She watches him quietly for a moment, before her gaze falls to her cup. Taking a deep breath she leans forward abruptly, setting the tea down; she picks up her futuristic palm pilot and scrolls through things until she hands it over to him, with what looks like an x-ray image of a four-armed snake person on it, a scan she'd managed to take of herself this past month.

He looks at it, then up at her, and then back down at the image. More than anything else, he's struck by how many vertebrae she has - even more than he is by the extra set of arms. (It's hard to imagine Scully complaining about having an extra set of hands, especially now that she's back to labwork.) She's long and lean, and filled with more ribs than he's ever seen in a person before.

When he hands the palm pilot back to her, something in his face has softened. Part of him really is tempted to ask questions, all the prying details she hasn't shared. What he actually does is reach out and rest a hand on one of her bare feet - the closest part of her in reach. "Pretty impressive."

It feels like giving something up, showing him this; but once it's done it doesn't bother her as much as she expected it to. If nothing else, it levels the playing field, a little.

It was only a matter of time. Maybe it's for the best to get it out of the way early.

She manages a glimpse of a smile for him. His palm feels like sun-warm driftwood; unusual but not unpleasant, not even wholly unfamiliar. You get used to picking out the things that are the same. The eyes, the voice, the way he moves.

"Still short, by naga standards."

A laugh escapes Mulder, itself short. "Just how long do they get? Forty feet?"

It wouldn't be her, he wants to say, if she were above-average in size. She probably wears it well, all those links of muscle and bone. Somehow, the idea of rippling scale and muscle doesn't sit nearly as poorly with him as leaves and bark - but that, he thinks, is probably because it isn't him. It's easy to see Scully inside a body with four arms and no legs, because he know it's her already. He can see the woman inside the monster, even without the outside details to help.

"Nearly, I think," she muses. "Admittedly I've only gotten a good look at one other one. I think it's proportional, she's about your height."

It's strange to talk about it. Scully is about as comfortable as she's going to get, she thinks, with her other body, but the fact of the change still bothers her. The very idea of something being done to her; her body changed against her will for someone else's aims, it never sits well with her. The physicality bothers her less and less, but on principle she still thinks: it's not her.

She's not sure-- and she doesn't want to ask-- what he thinks about the fact that it's a snake. Her tattoo is something of an open secret, but she's never shown him; there have been enough moments when he could have seen it, in the course of one decontamination or another, some injury, some half-remembered moment. There might be pictures in the crime scene materials from Philadelphia. But there are too many good reasons not to talk about all that.

So she just sighs.

"You'll get to see eventually, I'm sure."

"I think that's up to you." She's right that he probably will get to see, probably when that week comes around - but if she really hated the idea, he'd try to stay away.

It might be the tea or the company, quiet conversation or the fact that they're touching, but his mood is evening out again. Everything still feels off, he's still sitting in a form that bothers him more than he could have possibly imagined, but he can live with it. Sitting here with Scully, it's all survivable.

(As for the relationship this form has to her tattoo...well, that's a question for when she seems a little more comfortable talking about it.)

She's sure the touching helps, but not so sure it's a question of synchrony; the irony of being here so long alone is, Mulder has long been the person who offers tactile support and affection, and here where it's a literal physical need she's had to learn to let herself relax around someone else. She's had lovers who touched her less than her partner, at least outside the context of sex.

His tacit offer to stay out of her way is endearing, but the truth is when she's a snake she wants nothing more than to curl up around a warm, willing body and doze off in the sun, but that's a whole other can of worms to try to explain. She reaches to brush his grassy hair off his forehead.

"You should try to get a little more sleep."

He's shaking his head as soon as she finishes the sentence. Trying to sleep sounds like a death sentence right about now. If it works, it'll be fitful at best, and if it doesn't, he'll be alone in one place with all his thoughts - and right now, he can't think of much worse. "It's nearly morning. I'm fine."

Compared to some of his forty-eight-hours-without-sleep adventures, this is fine. Probably. Completely normal.

"I can entertain myself if you're tired." Since it's just occurred to him that being woken by someone else's night terrors probably wasn't her idea of a good time.

Fine and normal are two wholly different questions in their lives, especially when it comes to Mulder's sleep schedule, which is frankly usually neither.

"I'd feel better if you'd try," she says, instead of trying to force it. She stretches, and lets the motion tip her over to rest on a discarded pile of blanket. She's absolutely serious about taking the couch for the rest of the night, such as it is; maybe if he tucks himself into the bedroom to stay out of her way he'll pass out accidentally, which would be all the better.

Mulder watches her shift and stretch out, knowing that this is a ploy to get him into the other room - and knowing, too, that it's going to work. She doesn't run the way he does, endlessly to the point of exhaustion (and sometimes beyond). He can't ask her to sit up with him until the sun rises.

"Why don't you sleep, Scully," he says. When he stands, there's a slight creak, like a tree in strong wind. The mugs, he leaves on the coffee table, but when he passes her, he pauses, running a hand lightly along her hair. "Don't worry about me."

Of course she's going to worry about him. When does she not?

Scully has always been good at dropping off to sleep in odd moments and strange places; she offers a drowsy smile up at him. With the shock wearing off, the outlandish appearance doesn't register as much. He's just Mulder, in every way that matters; the faint, beachy scent of dry grass and wild roses isn't what she thinks of as him but it's familiar and soothing nonetheless.

She means to wish him good night, sort of, but all she manages is a vague hum as she curls onto her side to doze off.

Mulder turns out the light, and a mild pang of guilt hits him. She's out here on her couch, despite the fact that there's a perfectly good bed one room over - but she's not so deep a sleeper that he can pick her up and carry her back to it. Not tonight, at least.

Which is to say, he doesn't sleep. He walks into her bedroom, looks at it like he's studying a crime scene, and tries not to think about the way the bedclothes smell like her when he sits down on one side of the mattress. It's not going to work. There's something stirring in him, so deep that he can't tell if it's a product of his mind or the transformation or both.

He moves as quietly as he can, back into the kitchen, and then to Scully, and then the door. When she wakes, there's a beach rose at her fingertips and an empty bedroom a few paces away, the front door shut but unlocked.

She should, perhaps, have expected this. Had only just resisted making a joke about tying him down, and clearly she should have just done it.

As soon as she sees the flower she knows, but she checks the apartment anyway; it's small, it's quick. And then, with no idea of where he might have run off to, she turns her attention to her palm pilot.

Now that she knows what she's looking for, turning up his account is easy enough, so wherever he is, his phone is buzzing.

You cannot just leave like that.

Scully, I'm okay.

Good.

You still can't.

Then I'll leave a note next time.

For God's sake, Mulder.

Where are you?

[ Six months. Six months. She'd thought he disappeared. She thought he wasn't really here at all. She's gonna kick his ass. ]

Scully, it's okay. I'm not going to leave.

[ Can he make this promise? Does it matter? ]

A park in the Emerald district.

I'm coming.

[ Mulder she will put a fucking tracking device in you, don't test her. She's fairly sure she could find a way. ]

In the wooded part.

She'll find him sitting on the ground, in the center of a tangle of rose bushes. They'd started growing on their own, and then he'd pushed them onward, trying to figure out the capabilities that seem to spring from his knotted hands.

His fingers have grow longer, less human, as he's worked. He hasn't noticed.

The last time Scully came down here, dripping with love-lies-bleeding and bittersweet, coughing up flower petals signifying solitude, she'd been thinking of him and trying not to think of him. Now she's searching.

Mulder is usually easy to find in a crowd; he's tall, he dresses like a fed, he carries himself with the unconscious confidence of his station in life, a fact she takes advantage of often, drafting behind him or letting him follow close behind to part the throngs on her behalf. It takes much longer this time; the paths are winding and, as she discovers, he's half-hidden among the thorny branches, looking like he's going to take root right there.

"Mulder," she calls, once she spots him. Is it just the morning light making him look-- she doesn't want to say more monstrous, but perhaps that's the only way to put it. Less himself than in the soft lamplight of her living room. Like when he loses himself on a particularly bad case.

He glances up at his name, but slowly, as if he's only half in this world beyond the rose bushes. And maybe he is - his thoughts are far away, even with his palm pilot buzzing occasionally. The magic of what's happened to him has caught him, given him a way to live in this changed form without wanting to break it down into compost. He's transfixed.

"Scully." She's angry at him, and he knows it. He can't really blame her. "I couldn't stay in there."

The great thing about angry is that it's fundamentally the more energetic fraternal twin of scared.

"You should have woken me up," she argues, as steadily as she can manage. There's a paper back clenched in one hand, a convenient prop to focus on. She holds it up.

"I got us coffee." But he's going to have to slither out of the woodwork to get it.

"I can only drink so much herbal tea." Being bundled off to bed, a wayward child in her home, a third time was in the cards, and he couldn't stand it. Leaving her proof of his existence and finding an outlet for the overwhelming desire to do something had seemed fairer for them both.

Apparently, it wasn't.

When he stands, he's thinner somehow, the branches behind him more full. They're growing the tender green leaves of early springtime. One long leg steps over the ring of roses he's created, and then the other, and he's standing before Scully. "But coffee sounds okay."

[ n a m e ; ]	Dana Katherine Scully
[ c a n o n ; ]	The X-Files
[ g a m e ; ]	spicy times in noctiumrp

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