Title: Parabola Author: Sarah S. Rating: PG, maybe PG-13 (in the Nabokovian sense: lots of pretty language but nothing too overt) Category: Angst Summary: Poetic insight into the thoughts and dreams of Mulder, and his precarious but beautiful relationship with Scully. Spoilers: Absolutely none. This is my first attempt at Fan Fiction, if this piece can even be called that. It's a prose poem influenced heavily by the exquisitely maintained relationship between Mulder and Scully, the Foo Fighters' song "Walking After You," and my appreciation for geometry and physics. If anybody has any criticism about this thing, please feel free to let me know at her_kind@hotmail.com Even though I don't mention their names at all in this piece, all things X-Files are property of Chris Carter and 1013 Productions. Lines from "Walking After You" Copyright 1996 by D. Grohl. Parabola by Sarah S. "Tonight I'm tangled in my blanket of clouds, dreaming aloud Things just won't do without you, matter of fact I'm on your back..." --Foo Fighters, "Walking After You" He wishes he could pull on that tiny arch in her back, such a delicate parabola. He knows that secret place, that geometrically beautiful endless curve. He's used to having to coax her to move; he pushes in on that place. The rest of her tiny body begins to go along with his suggestion. He understands it so well. Lying awake at night, restlessly ecstatic, he imagines uncovering that secret spot, the tiny hiding place where she is vulnerable to him. He wants to kiss her there in the small of her back, warm his lips with her light skin and tell her he knows her there more than anywhere. Instead he gently presses his hand to that delicate arc through blouses, jackets, overcoats: layers and layers of protection from that painful outside, that truth in his touch. So he guides her again and again, or tries to. One foot after another she moves as he moves her. He follows one step behind--sure to be out of sync with the clicks of her thick shoes-he won't let her catch on to this beautiful vulnerability, this penultimate union of physics and geometry in the small of her back. He figures the equation again and again, knowing the exact amount of force needed to push in there, to pull her just tight enough so that she responds. He strikes a chord in her, pushing her forward, letting his fingers slowly fall. His eyes close, he breathes in deep. He sees her lying on her stomach, his fingers slowly pushing away the shirt from her delicate waist. And there, the soft skin of her back is tender and taut; her body is rising and falling with each terrified breath. Her round lips form a small pink bow as her blue eyes look at him half-frightened, half-relieved he's found her in that place. Slowly his mouth would trace its way along her strong spine--that solid axis upon which she turns. He presses his cheek there, rests his head against her back, looking up at her fiery strands. Her mouth opens a bit for expiration as he smiles to her, rubs his skin to that small place, that small of her back. He balances this delicate equation endlessly as he pushes her forward in hallways, offices, through doorways, elevators: his eyes close and for one gloriously triumphant moment he has known that slope of her. Sooner than he can handle, his eyes must come open, and before the two of them lie one dark pathway after another. The only steady thing in that severe void is her and her ever-bending spine--a malleable axis that has withstood the heaviest of strains. As they move ever forward, he sees himself curled up next to that safe place on her back, feeling the very crux of her, that vertical arch stretched out from her pink neck. He wants to cry there. He wants to kiss her on the small of her back, tell her this is how he knows her, how he understands her strength. This tiny back has endured death, disease, myriad darknesses and remains hidden to all but those that have clung to her or tried in vain to pull her down. He sees the shadows hovering above her, in corners, pulling at her body. He can do nothing but trust in her strength as he runs and falls close behind her. To keep up with her would be to defy this balanced equation. To turn her over onto her back, to notice that shining solar plexus running parallel to the exact midpoint of her spine, to see the brightness in that center of gravity would make her greater than and less than but never parallel to his own fight with the inevitable energies of those hovering shadows. He does not know how to walk any other way but behind her, ahead of her, five degrees away and in between her acuteness and his own obtuseness. He only knows never to meet her there in that shining center in her belly. Never to turn her over as a new variable in a new equation. He only knows the smooth curve of her back and what a small place it is for him to hide in and cry to. He knows these things, but, even with this, he cannot help but dream of the other side of the equation. Beyond those tensely strong parallel lines in which he lives with her, he sees a hazy future--a space he cannot yet measure. A degree of a glance here, a covert touch and the endless, endlessly perfect plane of her strength and his dreams. He dreams of turning her around, of turning her onto her back. He knows, though, that he would do nothing if he could see her from this angle. He would do nothing but smile then cry, with his soft face to her belly. He can see the angles between himself and her feet, legs, straight back. He watches the floor running not precisely perpendicular to her, pushing her up just enough to hold her there. Then his eyes trace her strides and postures, postulates and theories, her thick, rare tears and those redeeming slight smiles. Were he to ask her what she sees there in her back, she would tell him an itch, an ache, a mark, a scar, but never would she see the home he has made in this shallow dip. She would never see. He knows that instead of seeing, she would cry or laugh silently at him in her tensely insistent anxiety of being reduced to anything. But he fears will never know her. He will wake each morning, stale and aching, and deep in his bones he will hear a faint plea to stop. He will wince then, and rush to her ankles, knees, hips, back and pull her up, back, down, forward. In every angle he will see her want to cry and break. In every angle he will only push so far before he lets go. He will only see as he sees now: how she sheds her coils to find the lightness she has always wanted. How she is an unending plane of infinite strengths shrouded only by his fear of her fearlessness. He sees the shining center of her glinting through every angle of pressure. Slowly she has uncovered herself and radiated past his sharp corners and dramatic angles. He sees her like this: forever curving in new parabolic pathways. Sloughed off, he will find himself. And feel. Toppled and punched, as always. But never punched enough to keep him from the ferocity of her spine. He will hide there, in the root of it--below her neck, below her solar plexus: parallel to her belly he will hide. He finds himself there: the finite variable looking across parallel lines to find its counterpart: infinite and flexible. Equal to its other only in those parallel lines. Still, he dreams of her in that space, as he seeks endlessly the triumph in the strength of her ever-arching back, as he follows her forever, and never, never warm enough though he convinces himself that it burns.