Title: Relativistic Gravitation and Celestial Mechanics
Author: LM (lymansmight@yahoo.com)
Codes: Mulder/Scully
Summary: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.- Einstein
Notes: Word to LE for the beta, and a note that this is, in some ways, a long delayed response to her “Don’t Know Much About Gravity.” Also, I was responsible for some angsty MSR atrocities nearly a decade ago, and I like to think this is a first shot at penance.
The title was the area of study of one Alessandro Caporali while he was at the Max Planck Institute Fuer Physik und Astrophysik, Munich. Laura and I palmed it because we liked it. Word up, Alessandro.
**
The first time was in Toledo.
Mulder followed her past his room to hers, and when she looked up at him, curious, he pinned her against the door and only let her up to search for her keycard.
Later, he whispered something in her ear about needing to do this before she was gone, which was almost enough for her to push him off.
But there were eyes, and hands, and a few stolen moments that weren’t lonely.
If he slept that night, which he doesn’t always, he woke before her, and there were bagels on her nightstand. He was slouched with their case file on her chair.
“Hey,” he said as she rolled out of bed and into a hotel bathrobe.
His smile was too soft for lectures like when and when not to mention terminal cancer, so she only smiled back.
The second time was in Alabama in a room with a coin-operated TV, and the third was in Rhode Island. Then the fourth blurred into the fifth until this was what they did, on the road, when a case refused to break.
But the first, she remembers, was in Toledo.
***
They passed a season that way, casually studying each other between motel sheets, renting two rooms and rarely using both. It was easy and unquestioned and she never expected anything more of him than that he turn the light out when he left.
One night, outside their motel in rural Pennsylvania, he pointed to the sky. “You know,” he said, his voice low. “If you made a triangle out of three stars, the angles would add up to less than 180 degrees.”
“Mulder,” she laughed. “When did you start stealing lines from Byers?”
She looked up at the sky as she turned toward him, preparing to outwit him at non-euclidean geometry, but he kissed her before she could speak.
For a few minutes, she played with the fringe of his scarf and talked physics like her heart wasn’t pounding, but that was the first time he’d ever kissed her just to kiss her, and that was the night that things began to change.
***
Scully felt the shift in the extra touches at her back, the slight lingering after closing time each night, and the drop in his voice when he said her name.
She felt it when she found something small, her toothpaste missing its cap, that meant Mulder was in her room the night before.
She felt it in her sudden need to have his shoes scattered at the foot of her bed and his sunflower seeds spilled across her coffee table.
**
Tonight, they are somewhere in Indiana, and there is corn, and there are bodies, and any minute, Mulder will be at her door.
She curls on the bed with her laptop and enters random thoughts of what will be a field report, but the keyboard clicks are scattered and distracted as she waits for his knock.
She’s grown tired of this thing that only exists in small, far away towns.
She taps her fingers restlessly, her world slowing as she waits for him. She tells herself that it isn’t love; Einstein knew that clocks seem to slow as gravity increases, and as she puts the computer aside and begins to pace, she knows it too.
She exhales a slow breath. It isn’t love; it’s physics. Physics, she can understand.
But physics can’t explain how she memorized every inch of his body on the first touch. There is no law to map the sheer size of this, no chart to show him that it could fill Washington and all of Virginia, if they would only let it out of middle American motel rooms.
She knocks on his door sometime after eleven. He answers and what almost tumbles out as, “I’m accidentally in love with you,” quickly becomes “I couldn’t sleep.”
He pulls her inside.
Tonight, for the first time, she doesn’t slip back to her room before three.
But this is still Indiana.
**
For weeks, they are caught in long glances across the office, trying to get bearings, trying to know what to do next.
**
One night, she arrives at his apartment door with a pizza, a folder of autopsy results, and all the courage she can muster.
He brings beer from the kitchen.
An hour later, empty box and bottles on his floor and papers spread across the table, she turns toward him, pointedly, raises her eyebrow, and says nothing more than, “Mulder.”
But there is something in her voice or in her eyes because he is flustered. For a minute, she is charmed by the hint of a blush on his cheeks. Then she is pinned between him and a couch that smells like him, and she no longer has the wherewithal to be charmed.
They pile their suits onto the remnants of beer and grease as though they have the salaries to buy new ones. He runs his hands over her skin slowly, deliberately, as though this is the first time.
**
When she thinks of Mulder’s breath on her neck, her mind runs to the unemotional safety of science.
Newton thought that gravity was a force between bodies, the simple sum of their mutual pull. Einstein knew better, knew that gravity is the distortion of space, where matter rolls around curves toward matter.
Gravity is nothing more than the distortion of space.
Scully repeats it silently, like a mantra, trying to create a diversion as she pushes her feelings back into the pen of rational thought.
But what Einstein knew leaves her unsteady. He knew that science is as open-ended as love. That bodies don’t pull on each other; they fall into the space around each other and find themselves trapped.
She wonders if she is circling Mulder like a drain.
**
By February, it is too cold to sleep alone
She doesn’t ask for a key to his apartment. She doesn’t even ask for a drawer.
But she can’t escape the fear that they are just walking the line of deniability, making sure there is room to turn back. That whatever improbable, unseen force has pulled them together might as easily disappear.
“How do we undo this?” she asks one night, curled against him in a tangle of sheets.
Mulder’s hands, which were lazily moving over her stomach, stop. “Do you want to?”
She thinks a minute before she pushes her back against his chest and says, “No. But I think it’s a valid question.”
He tightens his grip. “I don’t think there’s a valid answer.”
There are a few quiet moments while she struggles with that, but it is enough of an answer for Mulder. His grip loosens and his breathing slows.
She lies in silence and wonders where along the way she was supposed to prepare for Mulder and the desperate way she needs him. Her heartbeats tap out hows and whys and whens.
She tugs on his arm. “Mulder?”
“Hmm?”
“Talk to me about aliens.”
He laughs and sleepily asks, “What?”
“You heard me.”
Lying here, listening to his gentle insanity, this isn’t tenuous or dangerous or crazy. Her overeducated mind stops, for a moment, overreaching.
To a child gravity is nothing more than what holds her to this bed, and to her, Mulder is as simple and dependable as that.
**
In the morning, he wrestles her as she tries to leave the bed for the shower. Two arms around her waist, he sleepily mumbles, “No.” She smiles, hits the snooze button, and wriggles until she faces him.
When she was twenty-one, she’d been brave enough to rewrite Einstein. Now, burrowed into Mulder’s neck, she finds herself doing it again.
Because Einstein might have known about planets and the gentle curves of spacetime, but Newton, accidentally, knew the forces between people.
The tug of Mulder’s arms against her is enough proof that she isn’t falling toward him, orbiting the dent he’s made in her life. He isn’t oblivious to her wayward orbit. Something in each of them has caught the other in a forgotten, simpler gravity.
The alarm sounds again, and he still refuses to let her go. He reaches behind her and unplugs the clock, saying, “This is what weekends are for.”
Somewhere, out there, things are relativistic and probabilistic and Newton is wrong. Out there, Scully can lose herself in the maddening complexity and ask questions without answers.
But here, right here, in the spaces between people, Newton is close enough.
Here, questions have answers, and maybe Mulder is hers.
(end)