Strange Fruit (1/1)
by Punk Maneuverability
Posted:  7. June 2000

Distribution:  Please do not archive or forward without author's
permission.  Okay for 2000 Spookys (21k).

Disclaimer:  We all belong to Fox here.

Rating:  PG
Classification:  S, MSR
Keywords:  Mulder/Scully Romance

Summary:  A story about pomegranates and kisses and Mulder.

Punk Notes:  Damn, will you look at that.  I wrote an MSR, and no
angst either.  I wonder what this means....

Without Sabine, this story would be without end, as in endless:
unfinished.  Thank you for all your help.  YV said wonderful and
helpful things, as did Cathy and Dawn.  Also there is a small Joycean
nod in this story.  As Chris would say, it's an homage.

Feedback goes here:  punkm@teleport.com

.. Strange Fruit
   by Punk Maneuverability .

She was reminded of a joke.

How do you eat a pomegranate?

Wobbly and orange-red, they were piled up like cannonballs selling for
two dollars apiece.  Persephone's accidental ticket to the underworld,
spring stolen away by the dark god who lived underground, all
available under the clean bright lights of the produce section.

In high school, there had been a boy who brought half a pomegranate
to lunch every day.  She could remember its strange fleshy innards,
the bright red seeds against the inedible yellow.  Such a strange
fruit, all that flesh and you only ate the seeds.

He had kissed her once.  She remembered that too.  It had been the
last day of school, that aimless open marvelous day where all you had
to do was clean out your locker and throw away old lunch bags and find
enough change to buy a soda on the way home.  The halls were
covered with discarded French quizzes, old math worksheets and
crumpled notes that said: "I called Eli and he says Jeremy likes you"
and "I'm cutting bio -- wanna come?"

Scully's notes had said things like that too.  She had been frivolous
and silly.  She was capable of those things still.  Few people saw
that in her now, though Mulder sometimes did.  He knew there were days
she wanted to turn around and skip work, go to the zoo instead, stay
outside in the sun instead of squinting in the dark of the basement.
Sometimes he would look at her and almost say "let's go," but she
always turned away before he did.

The kiss had been red and bitter and juicy and sweet just like the
pomegranate seeds that always stained his lips a dark red for hours
after lunch.  It was a half-day, and she had never really noticed his
locker was just next to hers, but as she tossed homework assignments
and old lab reports to the floor, she noticed him doing the same right
beside her.  She could tell by the pile of purpled ditto paper that he
had been in first-year German as well.  It felt so good to toss the
sheets of irregular verbs.  Next year she would need to know how to
conjugate fliegen, but today, and for the rest of the summer, she
would exist without that knowledge, free from umlauts and shifty
vowels, free from any tense but the present.  She must have smiled
then, because the boy next to her had grinned.

Scully picked up a pomegranate from the display, put it in the basket
she carried in one hand.  She had come to the store for yogurt, for
lunch tomorrow.  There were cookies in her basket, and a magazine,
but those were unplanned indulgences, things she had not known she
needed until she passed them.  The pomegranate too fell into that
category, unknown but needed.  It rolled against the magazine, kissing
the glossy face of Gloria Steinem.

She had no time to shop during the week so she always scheduled her
grocery shopping for the weekends.  Still, occasionally she found
herself running out of shampoo or cranberry juice, and she would have
to make a special trip to the store.  She would make up excuses: She
was tired, she didn't really need toilet paper, she would go without
coffee in the morning.  But her lies were unconvincing.

Sometimes the trips surprised her.  A favorite song would come on the
radio during the drive over or the older couple standing by the
oranges would remind her of her grandmother and grandfather.  Small
things.  She told herself she hated going to the store at night.  She
didn't.  There was a certain peace to a late-night grocery store,
humans doing human things, checking their lists, buying lunchmeat,
moving through their world.  It was peaceful, unhurried, and held a
sense of trust she could find nowhere else, a simplicity.

She put her groceries on the passenger seat of her car.  In the white
bag, the pomegranate's redness was still visible; pressed up against
the thin plastic it was almost obscene, a lusty red breast, jiggling
each time she stopped the car at a traffic light.  She wanted to reach
over and nudge it away from the plastic, stop it from staring at her.
She pulled it from the bag and let it ride free, sitting on the seat.

The boy had been cute, with light brown hair and a nice smile.
Melissa would have howled at him had he been waiting at a corner to
cross the street when she drove past in the family station wagon.
Melissa did things like that.  Scully mostly scrunched down in the
passenger seat, unsure if she wanted to be associated with this
howling, catcalling sister of hers.  A sister that just wasn't afraid.

The boy had half a pomegranate balanced on the middle shelf of his
locker.  It swayed like a boat each time he reached past it to
retrieve a pencil or a stray dime.  More papers fluttered to his feet,
chemistry, English, a sketch of what could only be the band
instructor--a tuba sprouting from his ear, each of his fingers a
perfect flute, two fermatas for eyes, his mouth an oval whole note,
treble clefs dotting his tie like twisty spots of ink.

She found an English paper she had shoved into the very back of her
locker.  The locker was only a foot and a half deep, but she had
pushed that paper back there, as far as it would go, to hide the C cut
into its front pages, to hide it from herself, to hide that she hadn't
understood the assignment, hadn't understood what it wanted from her.
She gave, but what she had given wasn't good enough.

She tore this paper in half down the middle of the C and then both
pieces went into the trash can behind her.  The hallway was loud,
filled with the chatter of eager sophomores--near-juniors, really--and
no one heard the rip her essay made as she pulled it apart.

She thought maybe the boy heard, but he said nothing.  He was spitting
pomegranate seeds into the trash.  She knew you sucked off the pulp
and didn't eat the seed, and it struck her again how ridiculous this
fruit was--all that effort put into picking out the seeds from the
pulp, and then you could only eat their jelly-like skin.  So much work
went into so little pleasure.

She was staring, she knew she was, it was mostly the question of what
kind of boy would put that much time into finding the sweetness inside
such a funny fruit.  It made her wonder who ate the first pomegranate,
who had decided to cut it open, hunt around in the yellowy foam of its
insides and extract the seeds.  Someone must have done it wrong at the
beginning.  Someone had tried to eat the yellow part and spit out the
seeds.

Melissa would be the one to try strange fruits.  She would pick them
apart and test each piece, waiting to see how it tasted, if she had
found the right part, if it was edible or poisonous.

Sometimes she worried Melissa would get herself into trouble, and so
she acted extra cautious herself, as if her own care would protect her
reckless sister.  She looked both ways before crossing the street, she
didn't smile too long at strangers, she didn't stay out too late, and
she didn't eat strange fruit, not even if she knew how, not even then.

Scully couldn't carry her purse, her keys, the grocery bag and the
pomegranate to her apartment - she didn't have that many hands.
Slipping the fruit back into the bag, she locked her car and crossed
the street to her building.  The front door never opened on the first
try but she knew just how to bump it with her hip to get it to open on
the second.  In her apartment, she put the plastic bag down on the
kitchen counter and the pomegranate immediately rolled out, coming to
a stop before it could reach the edge and fall to the floor.

She put her yogurt away, enough for the rest of the week, a sure sign
that Mulder would take her out to lunch tomorrow or maybe even fly
her out of the state.  She would return and find her refrigerator the
site of an advanced biological experiment.  The lettuce would be near
spoken language, the milk almost capable of using crude tools.  This
was part of her life and she had resigned herself to it.  Her cheeses
had achieved marvelous colors of mold and she'd learned that after a
certain point all leftovers begin to look the same through cloudy
Tupperware lids.  At this point there was really nothing her food
could do that would surprise her.

Except the pomegranate.  It sat on the counter and asked if she
remembered.

Her locker was almost empty, summer was almost officially there.  She
would go to the pool, she knew this already.  She would rush home and
put on her bathing suit and beg Melissa to go with her.  When she was
with Melissa no one noticed her, and maybe this was okay.  Melissa
mostly ignored her too, but not entirely.  Melissa kept a good eye on
the ones she loved, she didn't let them get hurt.

There was a small ball on the floor of her locker.  Maybe from a
leftover physics project.  It bounced from her fingers when she
reached for it, bounced to the floor and against the foot of the boy
next to her.  She was sure she would know his name if she saw it on
his papers, if he whispered it to her.  It was something simple, it
fit him, she could almost remember.

He handed the ball to her and she tucked it into her backpack.  She
threw away an entire handful of hall passes.  There had been a month
when, every day, she would find an excuse to leave health, and she
would walk down the hall and around the corner and past the gym
where the band practiced.  She would linger there, getting a drink of
water and peering out the corner of her eye until she spotted the sax
player in the second row.  She had wasted too many hours thinking of
him, but she was helpless in that dreamlike way where you can't run.
Of course, she had not wanted to run.  But that had passed, and now,
as the papers on the floor shifted and she saw again the sketch of the
band conductor, she knew this boy was in that class as well.

He was pulling out a paperclip chain from his locker.  It could have
been a mile long.  It appeared never to end.  The tips of his fingers
were dyed slightly red.  He played the drums, she thought.  She might
have remembered drumsticks in those hands.

The bell rang, a remnant from just the day before when, at this time,
she would have been hurrying to get her shoes tied after gym, hurrying
to get her hair looking like it had before she'd spent 45 minutes
playing volleyball.  She thought of herself in two years, would she
still be scurrying around, slave to a bell?  She envisioned college to
be a place where everyone was in charge of themselves, no bells, no
hall passes, no one frowning at you if you had to use the restroom
during the fall of the Roman Empire.  She couldn't wait for that kind
of freedom, that chance to prove herself.

She knew she was smiling this time.  The boy had his pomegranate
turned inside out, the yellow flesh splitting and cracked, exposing
more red seeds within.  She thought she must be mistaken about him
having a pomegranate for lunch every day, he would be sick of them.
Maybe she had only noticed him when he had been eating a pomegranate.

His locker was empty.  He took the pomegranate from the shelf, shut
the door then leaned against it.  He was only slightly taller than
her, she thought that if she stood on tiptoe just a bit, she could
kiss him.  He offered her the fruit, and she thought back to
Persephone and her mistake of eating the seeds.

The punchline was that the way to eat a pomegranate was in the bath.
Scully thought of this while she knelt next to the tub, watching it
fill with hot water.  It really was too late for a bath, ten o'clock
on a Tuesday night.  Most likely she would have to take a shower again
in the morning.  Her hair didn't tolerate being slept on and tomorrow
it would look like it hadn't been washed in a week.

She let the tub fill anyway.  Two autopsies in one day always made her
feel old, tired.  The early morning car ride to Quantico, the long
traffic puzzle back.  She could not imagine a life where all she did
was cut people open and then sew them back together.  But now the tub
was filled, and she closed the bathroom door to keep the steam inside
and the draft out and slid into the water.

Someone had started the kiss.  There was even a chance it had been
her.  It was the last day of school and she was free from everything
except softball practice and backyard barbecues.  And he offered her
the pomegranate and she pried out three of its soft juicy seeds.

They were tart, and she blamed the inner seed as if it had somehow
leaked bitterness into the jelly, because anything that red and shiny
should be as sweet as sugar water, as perfect as homemade strawberry
jam.  Instead it was a little unpleasant.  She spit out the pith and
put another seed in her mouth.  Leaning against her own now empty and
closed locker, she decided the seed was both sweet and sour and it was
impossible to just take the sweet.

She and the boy seemed to be leaning closer together, as if someone
had picked up the school and bent it between them, causing them to
slip towards each other against their lockers.  She spit out the last
seed and glanced down at the papers near his feet.  She was not going
to do this until she remembered his name, until she had it there on
the tip of her tongue in case she needed to use it.

There was a chemistry lab just under his right foot.  He had gotten
110 out of 100.  He must have done the extra credit question.  His
name was just as she thought it should be.  She leaned in a little
further and kissed him and he tasted like pomegranates.

Scully toweled herself off as the water drained from the tub.  She'd
washed her hair first and it was nearly dry by the time the water had
grown cold.  This shorter cut had a tendency to curl when left on its
own and she almost laughed at her reflection in the steamy mirror.
Tousled was the word and it rarely applied to her, though it most
certainly did now.  Tousled like the women trying to sell her bras in
the Victoria's Secret catalogues, tousled too like the women selling
Playmate videos and phone sex during late-night movies on cable.
There was a distinction there, between underwear sales and
pornography, or at least she hoped there was.

She put on her white terry cloth robe and went down the hall to check
if the front door was locked.  She found herself doing this at odd
times.  She hadn't yet unlocked and relocked the door, simply the
sight of the deadbolt in its locked position was enough to reassure
her, but part of her was afraid of the day she reached out to touch
the lock and do just that.  She was not obsessive, she told herself
each time she glanced at the door, she was just checking.

Mulder was standing in her kitchen holding the pomegranate in one
hand, his thumb smoothing over its skin in a small sweeping motion.
She checked the door, locked.

He was still in his suit, trim and fashionable, and next to him Scully
felt swallowed by her robe.  It seemed to add fifty pounds to her and
if she needed to run it would simply be impossible.  Her hands barely
cleared the cuffs and the robe itself almost wrapped around her twice.

Nervously tightening the belt around her waist, she cocked her head at
Mulder, reluctant to break the silence of her night apartment.

Mulder looked back at her, still holding the fruit.  She assumed he
knew what it was.  Mulder knew things like that, like the Latin name
for the common squid and the history behind eating pancakes for
Shrove Tuesday.  Obscure and wonderful things.  It was who he was.

She took the pomegranate from him and cut it in half.  And it reminded
her of that joke again because Mulder took off his jacket and he was
wearing a white dress shirt, and she thought that eating pomegranates
in the bathtub with Mulder would be a very reckless thing to do, so
she drew him over to the sink and he knew because he rolled his
sleeves to his elbows and she tried to push up the sleeves of her robe
and it worked to an extent, and she gave him half of the pomegranate
and they both leaned over the sink and started to pick at the fruit,
their heads close, their arms brushing as they moved.

And someone kissed her and at first all she could taste was
pomegranates, the bitterness that overshadowed the sweet that you
could never quite reach, even if you ate a hundred seeds.  And then it
was Mulder and he was kissing her, two fingers pressed against her
cheek and she wondered if she wouldn't have red fingerprints there
tomorrow, Mulder's whorls and loops pressed into her skin, dyed there
in a tattoo of possession.  And that was why you ate pomegranates in
the bathtub, to prevent red fingerprints on white dress shirts, there
at the shoulder where her hand rested, her thumb streaking red
crescent moons into the cotton.

She knew he'd never be able to wear that shirt again because passion
didn't wash out, it made tiny fingerprints instead, just the tips of
her fingers as she went up on her toes, she was too short for kissing
in the kitchen barefoot, too short to be kissing Mulder who was too
tall to be kissed, but Mulder's other hand was behind her almost
lifting her up, supporting her, leaving red fingerprints on her robe.
They would match like the coastlines of two continents once pressed
together, one piece, one country, but then split, each retaining the
memory of the other, the places where they once connected.

This would be easier sitting down or even lying down and she suddenly
remembered the sheets on her bed were clean, but that would be very
dangerous and the kitchen was safe for the moment while she licked
Mulder's ear and tried to remember how that had happened, when she
had decided to do that.  She found her hand wrapped around his neck
and her fingers tucked into the back of his collar.  Was this a total
loss?  Stained red from the pomegranate, had they given up on
propriety and all those excuses that started out But-- But-- But-- and
all the seven years between them that consisted of days and hours not
clutching each other in her kitchen and sometimes yelling instead and
slamming doors and throwing things, not this which was breathless and
human and honest, and she was getting a cramp in her foot from being
up on tip-toe just to reach his neck.

Sinking back down she looked up at him, at her fingerprints on his
shirt, at his smile, which was stained red, curved with delight.
Mulder, who had come out of nowhere and now stood in her kitchen seven
years later.  She wanted to say something, to ask a question, to have
him make her a promise she knew he'd never break.  Something like "I
will always tell you if I use the last stamp" or "I will never borrow
your car and change the preset stations on the radio."  She wanted a
promise from him, or maybe another kiss, but she was too short for
unplanned kisses in the kitchen.  She wanted to say something.  She
said, "Mulder--"

And he kissed her.  Took his name from her lips and replaced it with
her own name, the Scully he had always called her, replaced it with
his tongue and a little of his breath and a mumble that sounded like,
"Yes."

"Mulder," she said again, just to say his name, to put him in this
context of just-kissed and waiting to be kissed-again.  Usually they
talked so much about everything, cases, theories, tox screens,
airplanes, lunch.  And now nothing, no talk, no plans, just his white
shirt under her hands, the wool of his pants, the short hair of his
sideburns.  Again she wanted some promise from him, something that she
could depend on no matter what happened.

She wanted to say, "Promise me."  She said, "Mulder."

And he smiled, and kissed her, and said into her ear, "Yes, I said,
yes."

******

Thanks - Lock the door on your way out
Punk M
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