#but there absolutely was reserve and restraint and just this context. Until suddenly we didn’t need it anymore! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

melforbes · 7 years

Note

Restrained

post Founder’s Mutation

Her hands are tied behind her back, the tethers invisible but tight, her wrists aching against their everlasting pull. Though she rarely sleeps on her stomach - he noticed that too, furrowed his brow as she shifted positions in bed, wondered what other habits she’d picked up of late - she lies chest-down now, her cheek hot against the starched pillow, her lungs heavy upon the mattress. He’s still awake, so of course, he knows she’s still awake.

Once upon a time - he used to always begin his stories like that, once upon a time, two agents named Mulder and Scully scurried out to the far reaches of the planet and learned that, in the end, it doesn’t matter what we see but with whom we see it - they shared a bed like this. Not in the romantic way, no, but in the incidental and apologetic way that two non-lovers subdued daily by mutual but silent attraction would. Once upon a time, they checked into a Motel 6 and found, well, damn it, there’s one room left, only a queen-size open. Though she knew better than to believe in the law of averages, she still mused the statistical improbability, the way that the theorems of the world should at least have allowed for one or two cancellations that night; last week, she read a theory on how the world is all Matrix - she still knows where that DVD is in their home, wedged up between Contact and Interstellar on the shelf - and just a computer simulation, and if that’s true, then the mathematical modeling that binds everyone together should have given them another option. They could have driven to another hotel even though it was past midnight, or they could have crashed on the local sheriff’s couch, or they could have slept in the car while parked alongside two RVs and a truck in a starkly-lit Walmart lot. Instead, Mulder looked to her, then agreed to one room, and the way her heart had stopped at the prospect made her wonder if morals could ever be absolute; if pain and terror could be so exciting, then why are the body’s warning signs? Why are the things that terrify us so indulgent?

But she digressed and came into bed with him and silenced her scientific mind while he stayed above the sheets. He slept in sweats and a tee shirt while she wore all-too-proper pajamas, a night suit as he’d once called them. Then, she slid onto her side and stared toward the motel room’s window, one blocked off by a shabby curtain that let flickers of parking lot light in, and she waited for something she couldn’t identify.

“You’re still awake,” he said after minutes, hours, days, she couldn’t tell.

“You are too,” she gave softly, hesitantly.

“Of course I am,” he said. “I don’t sleep.”

Uncomfortably, she lay there, her body tense in a workday kind of way: shoulders up, eyes wide open and stinging with tiredness, stomach empty, legs aching. Back then, her restraints were looser around her wrists, and sometimes, they threatened to fall beyond her fingers, so regularly, she tightened them. Occam’s Razor, she used to explain to herself; it was far more likely that she was simply unsexed and bored with her personal life than that she was silently but genuinely in love with him, so she kept her professional rigidity, left her mask of scientific indifference on.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a long pause.

Though she too was sorry, she knew their reasonings wouldn’t align, so she kept quiet. In the morning, they didn’t discuss how he curled up against her back at some point in the night, and they didn’t make a big deal about how she stared a second too long after walking in on him while he was in the shower. Most of all, they never talked about what they would do if such a thing happened again.

And it did happen again, though new context forced previous awkwardness away. Instead of wasting money on two required hotel rooms, they were forced into one when they would’ve used only one anyway; with his hands strong around her hips, his mouth warm and wet against her skin, she found those nights similar to any other night of that time, the room situation disregarded. For a while, she only stayed in hotels during medical conferences in far-off places, so she reserved one room with one bed, the practice easy and simple and everyday. Nowadays, they’re back to two rooms, one bed each, and as they did once upon a time, they both retreat to their own rooms at night, only now she wears his old shirts to bed while she doubts he wears anything at all.

Tonight, she asked for two rooms, and, what do you know, they’re booked. After all, this motel’s tiny, and up here in the Adirondacks during on-season, kitschy cabin-style places that are cheap and have enough parking for a boat rack sell out quickly. Though there are eight units total, seven were full upon their arrival, only one left to boot. The next closest establishment is at least twenty miles away, and here in lake-and-land country, the roads are dark and narrow, begging a driver to lose control. In terms of probability, it seems the world wants her to lose control in some way or another. This time, she accepted the one room while he stared on blankly.

“You’re still awake,” he says, and she feels the restraints grow tighter.

“I am,” she says blandly.

“I can feel you thinking.”

“That’s an absurd thing to say.”

Her eyes close. She pictures a time not so long ago, a morning in their house back when they’d hung white summery curtains in their bedroom; she imagines how he would nuzzle up against her collarbone and ask what was on that exquisite mind of hers.

“What’s keeping you up?” he asks with bored interest. Way out here in the country, they don’t put TVs in motel rooms because, apparently, technology takes away from the experience; for now, she’s his only entertainment, that irony hardly lost on her.

She takes a deep breath, feels the press of her lungs against the top-sheet beneath her. Cloth barriers cover their skin. He smells like himself again.

And what is keeping her up? Was it the way he offered to sleep on the floor as though they’d never shared a bed before, as though such a thing would never be commonplace again? Or was it how lonely she’d felt after their last case together, after thoughts of their son returned to the front of her mind? Or was it the way she now stayed awake until the small hours of the morning, her bed too big and her apartment too quiet, her heart rate quickening when she wondered if, now that they’re back at the Bureau, he would start calling her at two am just to ask her opinion on an arbitrary extraterrestrial matter again? Was it how he could take his medications in front of her without second-guessing himself? Or was it the serendipity of the evening, how the one room left at the motel meant her craving to sleep next to him would finally, finally, be nourished?

Occam’s razor, she thinks.

“I read this theory on humanity,” she explains, “about how we’re all in some big computer simulation. It makes sense in certain ways. After all, the world can be reduced to series of patterns if we really need it to be. However, it doesn’t account for the inaccuracies, the places where our theorems aren’t fully held.”

“Huh,” he says.

Huh. In her imagining, he kisses where her neck meets her jaw and says tell me more.

“I don’t know,” she continues. This room is small and creaky, the wood cheap and painted a muddy brown, the one window shielded by ungodly curtains. Side by side, their suitcases sit close to the door, her 360-degree wheels and his hell-and-back duffel a modest distance apart. Absentmindedly, she wonders which one is hardier, more applicable to the kind of travel they do: the expensive and ergonomic bag or the bag that’s been to worse places but survived nonetheless. “There are some things that seem mathematically unpredictable to me.”

“Like what?”

Softly, her wrists relax. She turns onto her side so that she can face him, but suddenly, she stares down at his chest, at the shirt she washed so many times that it got holes in the sleeves; a man so close to her in bed is an indulgence she’s foregone since she left him. With late-night scruff and eyes renewed with light, he looks younger somehow.

“Like…” she furrows her brow and looks down as she searches for an example. “Like meeting you that first time. Statistically improbable. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

Giving that half-smile he used to shoot her from across the console of a cheap rental car, he shifts in bed, asks, “And why do you think that was an anomaly?”

“Well,” she continues, “there were plenty of other agents around my age with scientific backgrounds at that time, and in the end, they wanted logic to derail your findings, not science. Science is the language of change; logic is the language of control. We both know which of those they wanted more.”

He nods against his pillow. In the darkness, his face is a greyscale, all age-lines and soft eyes and timelessness, a sense that he’s always been looking at her in this way. As her restraints loosen, she reaches her arms forward, folds them in front of her chest.

“What if your assignment was part of the math of it all?” he asks, and she remembers how he told her he failed his one statistics course in college. “What if that is the most logical thing that could have happened? What if anything other than that would have been statistically improbable?”

“Fate?” she asks with a dry laugh. “You’re really bringing fate into this?”

“Well, if you put it that way-”

“The second law of thermodynamics,” she states. “The disorder in a system tends to stay the same. It’s more likely that things will go wrong than that they’ll go right.”

“So meeting me was cosmically right.”

I don’t know, she thinks, but his words set her wrists free, so she reaches toward him, places a single hand on his chest.

“Newton’s third law,” she says quietly; through his shirt, she can feel his pulse quicken.

“Scully,” he warns but simultaneously begs.

“We haven’t share a bed in-”

He mumbles a number of days that she pretends not to hear, not to already know.

“If it’s all fake, just some number-cruncher putting in values,” he says, trying to sound casual as he places his hand over hers, “then why did this happen?”

Defining that indeterminate why, she says, “God creates man.”

He huffs. “You and that God of yours.”

“There was no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn.”

“We’re not at an inn, and they had room for us here.”

"There’s only eight units, and it’s on-season,” she explains. “Statistically speaking, this was likely to happen.”

“Two probabilities walk into a bar,” he quips.

“Occam’s razor,” she supplies.

“The simplest explanation is often the correct one.”

“Yes,” she says, then leans forward to kiss him.

#and it's all because i haven't written in a month #but that's fine! everything's fine!#i'm fairly sure this is one of the most preposterous and horribly done things i've ever written #messages #my writing

91 notes · View notes