From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: 12 Apr 2001 12:59:22 -0000
Subject: FALTER by Innisfree
Source: direct

Reply To: milagro73@excite.com


TITLE: Falter
AUTHOR: Innisfree
E-MAIL: milagro73@excite.com
CLASSIFICATION:  MSR, A
SUMMARY: "Things aren't right with us." This is a bit 
dark and the gloves are off, but hang in there.
RATING: R (language)
SPOILERS: Three Words.
ARCHIVE: Yes -- just e-mail me.
DISCLAIMERS: They're not mine and I'm making no 
money. I think we all know who they belong to, unless 
somebody out there spent the 90s living under a rock. 
If you have nothing better to do than go after the 
fans, just remember that karma can be very unkind.
__________________________________________


In the dead of night, her car rolls up to the curb in 
front of 42 Hegel Place and slows to a stop. He 
shoots only the most cursory of looks in her 
direction before he pops open the passenger door and 
slides out, one formerly dead foot following the 
other. He is leaning down to offer her of his newly 
chilly goodbyes when the sound of the engine cutting 
off stops him cold.

"Scully?"

She pulls the key from the ignition and pulls herself 
from the vehicle with whatever remaining grace she 
can muster in the last trimester of her pregnancy. 
The driver's side door slams and its echo moves 
across a sleepy street.

"Scully, what are you doing? I thought we agreed that 
I can handle myself in my own apartment without you 
looking over my shoulder every five minutes."

There is neither warmth nor humor in the tone of his 
voice. A passerby might think he sounds angry or 
annoyed, but to her, he simply sounds... empty.  Her 
hands come up to rest on the top of the car, but she 
is not resting. She looks like she is steadying 
herself, or perhaps holding herself back.

"We? WE didn't agree on anything, Mulder. WE haven't 
agreed on much since you've been back. And WE are 
going upstairs now."

He looks at her, confused by this sudden 
assertiveness. She has done nothing but tiptoe around 
him since he woke to find her crying over him in the 
hospital less than two weeks ago. He is having 
trouble finding his bearings in this new breakable 
world where he has risen from the dead. This world 
where his suddenly fragile partner looks at him as if 
he is the most fragile thing of all.

"I can't tell you what to do, Scully," he says 
tiredly. "Never could."

"Never stopped you from trying before."

"Well, all I'm interested in doing right now is going 
to bed and dreaming about what kind of damage I'm 
going to do to Doggett's face the next time I see 
him. Give him something to go along with that little 
gash he picked up getting Absalom killed."

He holds her gaze just long enough to see the way her 
face falls again, anger fading away into sadness. 
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders why his 
own anger doesn't fade like that anymore. 

***

"Just take the bed for Christ's sake, Scully. I slept 
on this couch for seven years. I can sleep on it 
tonight."

Leather meets leather as he tosses his jacket on the 
arm of the couch and sits down to pull off his boots. 
Looking down at his feet, he listens for the sound of 
her moving into the bedroom. All he hears is the 
gurgle of a fish tank where one less fish darts 
around in the water's green glow.

"You're not gonna fit on this couch, Scully. So if 
you're planning on staying the night, you'd better 
take the bed."

He lifts his head to find her standing perfectly 
still by the television. She appears to him like a 
statue, every muscle that is visible in the dim light 
rigid and still. There is a glint in her eye, but he 
can't be sure if it's just a reflection, or if it's 
something more.

"They almost killed you tonight." 

Her voice is controlled and steady, so low that it 
would be a whisper if she dropped it down a notch and 
a rumble if she lifted it one. The trembling she 
feels in her stomach at the thought of him dying 
again infuses her words with just the barest hint of 
fear.

"Don't start this, Scully."

She ignores him, continuing to speak as if he had 
said nothing at all. She has finally found purpose, 
and she will not be deterred.

"I've been doing a lot of waiting for the past six 
months, Mulder. Waiting for you to come back. Waiting 
for some clue how to find you. Waiting for the pain 
to go away when I buried you. And for two weeks, I've 
been waiting for you to talk to me. Waiting for you 
to ask me." Her voice takes on a sharp edge. "I'm all 
done with waiting."

He sighs and tosses a boot away in the direction of 
his desk.

"What do you want me to say, Scully? Why don't you 
tell me, and then I'll say it, and we can both go to 
sleep. It's three in the fucking morning."

Every time he speaks, he is certain that he sees her 
head jerk back ever so slightly. As if she has been 
hit. But every time her head jerks back, it seems to 
come a little farther forward on the return. This 
time her whole body moves forward, and he finds her 
sitting next to him on his couch. And this time, he 
is the one who jerks back, reclaiming some of the 
previous distance between their two bodies.

She decides she'll try the sensitive approach one 
more time before she lets him have it. "I want you to 
tell me what you're really feeling," she says kindly. 
"I want you to know that you can tell me what 
happened to you... if you want to. I want you to stop 
talking to me like I'm some stranger who picked you 
up in the ICU."

The hard look on his face tells her that the 
sensitive approach has failed yet again. So be it, 
she thinks. She's not going to let him walk away from 
it this time. 

"But since you're not going to do any of those 
things, I want you to listen."

"Dammit, Scully..."

"Listen." Her voice slices into him as sharply as 
anything they used to cut him on that ship that still 
haunts him in dreams. "Listen to me now," she says 
more softly, "and then I'll leave if you want me to."

She is choosing her words carefully, trying to tamp 
down on the anger that rises up in her to suggest 
other words. Words like "leave and never come back." 
Words like "let you get yourself killed any time you 
want to." She stops them before they leave her mouth 
not only because they are cruel, but because she 
knows that she could never keep the promises implied 
in such threats. 

His only response is silence, and she takes it as a 
sign that she can continue without further resistance 
from him.

"Just listen..." The words fall out of her mouth in a 
whisper as she exhales, dying away as such words do 
when a particular argument is over and the only thing 
left to add is some small closing punctuation. 

He looks at her, tilting his head slightly. She 
thinks that his face would have once looked amused, 
or irritated, or intrigued if she had demanded 
silence from him. But she never did. Not this way. 
And now, as he waits for her to speak, she finds a 
face so blank that she briefly considers checking his 
pulse. 

She takes a deep breath. They never talked like this 
before. They never really needed to. Or maybe they 
did, and it has only become clear to her now.

"Things aren't right with us."

She pauses, waiting for him to argue with her, to 
tell her that she's imagining things. She is not 
really shocked when he says nothing, but she is 
disappointed nonetheless. The man she knew would have 
sooner worn a pink tutu to work than pass up an 
argument. If she can just draw him into this 
conversation, no matter how hostile he becomes, she 
thinks she'll have some hope of making things right 
between them again.

"I don't know why, but I can imagine why. I think 
that you're angry with me. I'm not even sure you know 
it, but I think you are."

He shifts uncomfortably against the leather backing 
of the couch and fixes her with a glare that seems to 
bore right into her.

"If I were angry, I'd know it. And you'd know it. 
Believe me."

"Fine. Are you?"

"You're asking me if I'm angry."

"If you know, then you know. So are you?"

"Maybe," he tells her with a challenge in his voice. 
A pause. "Yes," he taunts before he thinks better of 
it. "I don't know!" he finishes with irritation as he 
pulls his knees up to his chest.

She lifts her hand to push an errant strand of hair 
behind her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she 
thinks she sees his hand lift half an inch from where 
it rests on the back of the couch. A phantom 
unconscious gesture that mimics her own and recalls 
all the times that he performed the same act. Before.

"Well, I know. I hear it in your voice. You're angry 
that I didn't find you. That I didn't save you from 
what happened. I wasn't even the one to pull you from 
the ground. You think I looked but I didn't look hard 
enough. You come home, and I have a partner and a 
baby on the way, and you think my life went right 
along without you in it. Like your disappearance was 
just some unpleasant blip on my radar."

He finds it unnerving to hear her giving voice to his 
thoughts... the thoughts he has been unwilling or 
unable to admit thinking. They are his thoughts, 
goddammit. HIS. And yet nothing is his anymore. He is 
still naked, still splayed out in some chair where 
anyone can come and take whatever they want from him. 
On the ship, they took his flesh and his dignity. 
Now, she takes his thoughts.

"You said it. I didn't."

"But you thought it, Mulder."

"Was there some inaccuracy in what you just said? 
Sounded like a fairly good summary of recent events 
to me."

She bites her lip to keep from crying or yelling, 
she's not sure which. She doesn't know if she can do 
this. She isn't sure what to do with his anger, and 
she has no idea what to do with her own. He isn't the 
only one who feels betrayed by a partner and a 
friend. 

"Almost everything I said was true," she says 
deliberately. Her tone is cautious and restrained, 
but neither of them can miss the edge that runs with 
it. "I didn't save you, or find you, or pull you from 
the ground. I have had a partner. I am going to have 
a baby. But you misunderstand the context of all of 
these things. I told you that I'm not sure you can 
ever know what it was like for me these past months. 
Well," she offers with a conciliatory note in her 
voice, "I guess it's rather hard for you to try if I 
don't tell you how it felt."

"Who are you and what have you done with my partner?" 
His words cause the edges of her mouth to pull 
outward and form an awkward, involuntary smile. It 
fades as quickly as it came when she realizes that 
there is no laughter in his voice. 

"I had a lot of time to think about all the things I 
never said to you. I can't tell you how many times I 
begged God to let me see you again just so that I 
wouldn't have to carry those words around inside me 
for the rest of my life. This would appear to be the 
moment where I fulfill my part of that bargain. It's 
the new and improved me.'

Mulder snorts loudly in response.

"Don't like it? Tough. I'm sick of being fine. I've 
been anything but fine since the moment I got the 
call from the Gunmen telling me you were gone. Do you 
know where I was when I got that call, Mulder?"

"I don't know. Interviewing donors with higher sperm 
motility than I had?"

A moment ago, she wasn't sure that she could do this. 
Now she thinks she can do this but doubts she'll be 
able to get through it without hitting him. 

"Maybe being tortured and left for dead gives you the 
right to act like an asshole, Mulder. But you're 
going to feel like an asshole shortly."

She has piqued his interest. He leans forward and 
musters a small sneer that might have been a smile if 
he didn't hate himself so much for talking to her 
this way. 

"I've felt like an asshole since I was twelve. So I 
wouldn't expect too much."

"You think I went back to the fertility clinic to try 
again, huh? That makes perfect sense, Mulder. I can 
see why you would immediately jump to the conclusion 
that the first thing I did after finding out my 
partner had been abducted by aliens was run off to 
try in vitro fertilization again with some anonymous 
donor. I can see why you would assume that I was just 
buttering you up when I told you that you were the 
only man whose child I could imagine carrying. 
Perfectly understandable."

She is secretly pleased to see that she was right. A 
look of uncertainty appears on Mulder's face. His 
sneer has fled the stage and been replaced by a 
lopsided frown of confusion.

"What do you mean? You mean you went back to the 
fertility clinic before I left for Bellefleur?"

"Yes, that's what I meant, Mulder." 

She rolls her eyes, sarcasm still dripping from her 
words as they register on his face. 

"It's your baby, Mulder," she says pointedly. In her 
mind, she adds the word "dumbass" to the end of her 
announcement. Might have been appropriate to say it, 
she thinks, since he is presently looking at her with 
a dumb look worthy of their new president's worst day 
in front of a camera.

"It's our baby, Mulder. I guess you were right about 
not giving up on a miracle."

She fidgets with her hands, looking at them with 
forced fascination as her fingers play with one 
another. She is waiting to hear something that will 
convince her telling him this news was not an 
enormous error in judgment.

"How can you be sure?" he asks carefully. 

Not quite the tears of joy for which she had been 
hoping. Vampires he takes on faith. Normal human 
reproduction needs to be tediously picked apart with 
the fine-toothed comb of a skeptic. 

"It was a fairly easy process of elimination, Mulder. 
You are the only man I was sleeping with at the 
time." 

From the way he has been acting with her, she isn't 
even certain that he remembers how close they had 
become in the months prior to his disappearance. She 
remembers. She even thinks she knows the night this 
baby was conceived. God help the poor child. She is 
fairly sure his little life began in Los Angeles.

He does remember. He has pushed the memories away in 
the two weeks since he returned to find her 
inexplicably pregnant, but they come flooding back to 
him now. Visual memories of their bodies wrapped 
together in every position he had ever imagined and a 
few he had never known. Tactile memories of soft 
skin, and damp skin, and skin that was so warm to the 
touch he had thought it might burn him. Auditory 
memories of her voice calling his name, sometimes 
passionately, sometimes softly, sometimes with what 
sounded like love. For years, he had thought that if 
he could only have one night in Scully's arms, one 
night inside her body, he could die happy and 
fulfilled. How could he have known that no number of 
nights with her would be enough to send him to his 
grave content?

"I remember, Scully," he sighs. "I remember. But like 
I said, how can you sure? Maybe they didn't even have 
to take you. You went along with CGB Spender without 
even a hint of a threat and you lost most of a night. 
He could have done anything to you."

She feels the tears beginning to well in her eyes. As 
easily as she cries in these days where hormones and 
resurrected lovers rear their heads, she is fairly 
sure she could have kept herself together if he had 
not raised the specter of a dead man who said he only 
wanted to do something good for the world before he 
died. For months, she has wondered about those 
missing hours. Wondered about waking up in a strange 
bed with satin pajamas and no memory of the night 
before. The truth is, she doesn't know that something 
wasn't done to her during that missing time. The only 
thing she knows with absolute medical certainty is 
that Fox Mulder is the father of the child she is 
carrying. And at some point, that detail became the 
only one that mattered to her.

"This child is yours, Mulder. I believe it was 
conceived naturally. I understand there is always a 
possibility that it was not. But I am the biological 
mother of this baby, and you are the biological 
father." 

He is surprised to hear the coldness in her voice as 
she tells him one more time that he is about to have 
a son or daughter. He can't blame her. Cold is the 
word that best describes how he has been treating 
her. He has been so cold because cold is all he could 
feel. Perhaps it is a side effect of three months 
buried in hard ground beneath the unseasonable 
Raleigh snow. He had been thinking that this chill 
inside him was simply something he would have to live 
with. But hearing that same chill in her voice makes 
him desperate to be warm again.

"Scully... I'm happy for you..."

"I already heard that speech, Mulder. If you'd leave 
off those last two words, I might actually feel happy 
for myself."

He bows his head. Guilty. He knows he should be happy 
not just for her, but for both of them. He finds it 
hard to be happy for anyone when he has no idea what 
any of this means. No idea where he stands with her. 
No idea what kind of life he has returned to find in 
this place that seems familiar and strange all at 
once.

"I'm just confused, Scully. I don't know what to make 
of everything that's happened. I feel like I did when 
I walked into the theater to see Aliens an hour after 
it started. I recognized Sigourney Weaver, and I 
recognized that universe they were in, but I had no 
idea what the hell was going on. Last time I saw her 
she'd been cuddled up with a cat in a deep sleep 
chamber. Suddenly she's running around with Michael 
Biehn and a kid."

In spite of her best efforts to quash it, a laugh 
catches Scully off guard and escapes her. Mulder 
looks over at her, a small smile lighting up his 
face. She thinks it might be the first real smile 
she's seen on him since he waved to her from a jetway 
leading to a plane bound for Oregon.

"I see," she says quietly, the smile slowly 
disappearing. "And now you're walking in on me 
running around with Doggett and a new line of 
maternity wear."

"Something like that."

"Agent Doggett was picked to lead the taskforce 
investigating your disappearance. Skinner and I were 
interviewed, catalogued, and generally treated like 
suspects. Doggett had half the world convinced that 
you had staged the whole thing and were really 
running around the Hoover building stealing files."

"I don't know why I'm surprised. Someone could put a 
bullet in my head in front of the Director himself 
and they'd find a way to make it my fault." 

Mulder rises and ambles over to his fish tank, lifts 
the lid and offers a late night flake snack to the 
fish who managed to survive his absence. He thinks 
they deserve a little bonus for hanging in there for 
him. He thinks the discovery of an empty fish tank to 
mirror the emptiness inside him might have pushed him 
right over the edge.

"I wasn't surprised by that. On the other hand, the 
things Agent Doggett told me about you came as a 
complete surprise."

Mulder looks over toward the couch to find Scully 
looking back at him, expectantly.

"He told you about my condition."

"That's a nice way of putting it, Mulder," she says 
as if she is giving him the most insincere 
compliment. "He told me you knew you were dying for a 
year. Which was... as you know... news to me."

Mulder looks back at the fish. Watches them as they 
swim up to the surface to wrap little lips around big 
flakes and then dart away with their prizes. Fish are 
like zombies, he thinks. They eat, drink, and make 
love before they die. If they're dying, they don't 
know. They just continue swimming around in their 
gallon of water, carrying out their fish activities 
until one day, the other fish find them floating at 
the top of the tank. Would she understand what he 
means if he told her that last year he was trying to 
be a fish?

"I'm sorry about that, Scully." He shrugs his 
shoulders rather lamely. He can think of nothing else 
to say.

"Uh-huh. Well, it would seem that one way or another 
I was destined to stand next to your coffin this 
year."

He walks back toward her and sits again, closer to 
her this time than before. He no longer feels the 
need to be surrounded by the corner where the back of 
the couch meets the arm. He thinks he has spent 
enough time apart from her to last him for quite a 
while.

"At least this version of Choose Your Own Funeral has 
you around at the end to apologize." The accusation 
that lies within her words is unmistakable. 

"There was nothing to be done about it. I didn't want 
to spend the last year of my life feeling sad and 
watching you wait for me to die."

Tentatively, he reaches his hand out to touch her arm 
where it rests on her stomach, stroking it softly. It 
is another apology, and it is a peace offering. No 
wonder he is shocked when the arm he is caressing 
lifts off the couch and makes hard contact with his 
shoulder.

"You! You, you, you! You fucking coward, Mulder! What 
about me? How do you think I would have felt? How do 
you think I did feel hearing from Special Agent John 
Doggett what I should have heard from you?"

Her hand, now a fist, continues to pound against his 
shoulder. She is not hurting him. He has recently 
redefined his notion of pain. In some strange way 
which seems to fit the two of them perfectly, she is 
connecting with him. He wants to feel something and 
this is something. He feels her, and what he feels is 
real.

"How could you lie to me, Mulder? How could you agree 
to father a child you knew... you KNEW you would 
never see? How could you tell me you loved me, and 
let me love you, and never tell me you were dying?!"

The fist beats against his shoulder with a 
discernible rhythm now, but it loses force with every 
stroke. She is tiring. The anger is flowing out of 
her and away. He is somewhat surprised to find that 
it does not take up new residence inside him even 
though it seems directed at him. It passes through 
him, and like her, he lets it go.

"You were dead, Mulder," she whimpers, any clear 
train of thought disappearing in the darkness as her 
hand stops moving and latches onto his shoulder like 
a death grip. "You were so cold... what they did to 
you... I was too late... I lost you, and I lost 
Jeremiah... they put you in the ground... I wanted to 
die, Mulder. I wanted to die."

Exhausted, her head falls against the shoulder her 
hand had been assaulting. 

"Sssshhhhh... Scully, it's alright. I'm here. 
Ssssshhhh. I'm alive." He whispers the words against 
her ear as he feels a wetness soaking through his 
shirt where her eyes are resting. He had forgotten 
what it felt like to give comfort just as surely as 
he had forgotten what it felt like to receive it.

"And then two weeks... two weeks alive, and you're 
running off like you have some kind of death wish," 
she says brokenly as she lifts her head from his 
shoulder to look him straight in the eye. "Well, I'm 
not burying you again, Mulder," she tells him in a 
choked voice that fights to make its point without 
breaking. "I'm not standing by your coffin to collect 
another flag. The next time they bury you, they can 
bury me right next to you."

"Don't say that, Scully."

"I will say it," she tells him with faint fire in her 
sad eyes. "It's true. You think about that the next 
time you want to play games with fate the way you did 
tonight. My role as grieving widow was a one-time 
performance with no return engagements."

She was right. He will never really know what she has 
been through in these horrible months, just as she 
will never truly know what he went through, separated 
from her, body and spirit broken into pieces only to 
be reassembled around a Lazarus heart. But he 
understands much more than he did. 

He understands that she is not the same woman he left 
behind in the supposed safety of D.C. while he chased 
after lights in the night sky. In her own way, she 
too has been broken down and rebuilt into something 
that is simultaneously stronger and more vulnerable. 
The woman he last saw six months ago had always been 
afraid of needing him too much. This woman seems to 
have learned that fear alone does not stop need. This 
woman seems to have lost her interest in pretending. 
It's almost overwhelming to return and find that she 
needs him as much as he once admitted to needing her. 
As much as he needs her now. 

"You weren't really a widow, Scully," he tells her 
with a soft lilt in his voice, letting his hand brush 
her hair behind her ear as it had ached to do 
earlier.

"Please," she sniffs. "I had everything but the ring 
and the tax returns. I felt like one. Everyone 
treated me like one."

"Always a widow, never a bride, Scully?" he asks her, 
his voice filled with the gentle humor she missed 
terribly during this long cold season.

A fist connects with his shoulder once again. He 
yelps for effect, but she knows that they have 
finally brought each other back to the borders of a 
world once so familiar. A world where he makes 
affectionate jokes at her expense and she pretends to 
be offended... pretends that she doesn't love being 
the only one he cares about enough to tease.

"I'm sorry, Scully. For everything. For both of us. 
We didn't deserve this, you and I."

She traces a finger down the side of his face where 
fading red scars still mark him. It moves slowly, 
carefully, lingering briefly over the cleft in his 
chin she has always loved before it rises to trace 
the fullness of his lips.

"No. But this. Here. Now. This we deserve, Mulder."

She presses her lips to his, cautiously at first, 
then confidently when she feels him moving beneath 
her. She runs her tongue lightly over the outside of 
his mouth before slipping it inside to take the 
smallest taste of what she has missed. 

It is an act of worship, but to him it feels like the 
touch of someone who is afraid the slightest pressure 
will cause him to shatter and disappear. He feels her 
begin to pull away and crushes her to him with a kiss 
that is forceful. Possessive. Defiant. A kiss that 
says she belongs to him, and he belongs to her. And 
let no man tear asunder.

She is breathless when he finally breaks the lock he 
has on her mouth, and he is more than a little 
pleased that he can, in fact, still take her breath 
away. Not at all bad for a forty-something guy only 
recently returned to the land of the living.

"Better be careful there, stud. I'm breathing for two 
now." 

She smiles at him. A full smile that hides nothing, 
that is not even conscious of itself. A smile that is 
joy in its purest visible form. And he laughs. A real 
laugh, one that sounds through his whole body and 
emerges unguarded. This is happiness, he thinks. 
Whatever we can know of it.

"So. Mulder."

She takes a firm tone, doing her best to appear 
serious even as her hands slide beneath his sweater 
just above his belt and undermine her own charade.

"Hmmmmm?" 

He finds himself distracted by her beauty. Mesmerized 
by the moonlight that seems to dance all over her 
body.

"I told you that if you listened, I'd leave if you 
wanted me to."

Her words snap him back to full attention. She is not 
really serious, he knows. Her eyes reach out to him 
playfully even as she holds her face in a grim mask. 
But he feels serious in this moment. He feels --- he 
realizes with amazement --- so many things suddenly, 
where an hour ago he would have been relieved to feel 
anything, one thing, ever again.

"I don't want you to leave, Scully," he tells her 
quietly. "Not tonight."

She looks at him quizzically, uncertain whether she 
is understanding the meaning of his words.

"But some other time... you'll want me to leave." She 
is not sure why she phrases her question as a 
statement. Perhaps because a question carries the 
sound of hope. She is afraid to hope for too much.

"I don't think I could ever want you to leave, 
Scully. But I know that we still have things to work 
out. It's been a long time. We have to get used to 
each other again. And maybe we'll both need space for 
that."

Her worn-out heart falls a few inches inside her. His 
words, while true, remind her that their new world is 
not a perfect one. It is actually much like the old 
one. Full of misunderstandings, and wounded pride, 
and so much fear. But that old world was also once 
filled with love, and trust, and laughter, and a 
faith that two imperfect people make something more 
perfect together. And the thought that new worlds can 
be like old worlds fills her with hope to make her 
heart rise again.

"There'll be time for all of that," she tells him. 
"But not tonight."

"Not tonight," he repeats in a whisper as he brushes 
his lips against her cheek.

"Now tell me you're not planning on sleeping on this 
couch, Mulder."

He grins and takes her hand.

"I am getting kind of old to be sleeping on this 
couch. Probably wake up in the morning with a back as 
stiff as a rod." 

Her hand in his, she tries with some difficulty to 
stand and bring him up with her. Her balance falters, 
and he rises easily at just that moment, his hand 
shooting out instinctively to brace itself against 
the small of her back. He restores some tiny bit of 
grace to the moment without making her feel that she 
is anything less than grace in motion. Falter. 
Recover. Falter. Recover. It has always been their 
way.

"Well, as you so tactfully pointed out, I can't fit 
on it very well at the moment. So if I'm staying," 
she breathes against him, long fingers traveling 
suggestively across his chest, "I guess we'll both 
have to make due with your bed."

They walk toward a room that once held only boxes of 
memories and things forgotten and now spills light 
out through its doorframe. Hand in hand. No hurry. No 
rush.

"This might be tough, Scully," he laughs. "I may have 
reverted to being the cover hog from hell. Been a 
while since I've shared a bed with someone."

She stops at the threshold just at the edge of the 
soft light and stares up at him, tears threatening in 
her eyes again before she bows her head and lays it 
against his broad chest.

"It's been a while for me too, Mulder. But then I 
never really got used to sleeping alone."

Her arms wrap around him and she brings him as close 
to her as he can be with an unborn child sheltered 
between them.

"I think we'll remember, Scully. Things are 
different. I know." 

He holds her and offers a silent prayer to her God, 
the God in whom he swears he does not believe. It is 
an unusual prayer, so like the proud man who makes 
it. A prayer not of asking, but of gruff thanks for 
having turned away from reading the box scores long 
enough to watch over her, and this new life, while he 
was gone.

"But I think," he whispers as he moves them beyond 
the threshold and into the light. "Some things... 
some things remain the same."


END



Author's Notes: I'll refrain from commenting on Three 
Words. I hope this story speaks for me. Five more 
episodes, Chris. Five more episodes. Let's cowboy up 
over there, how about it?