From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 18:42:01 -0600 Subject: The Mapmaker\'s Children by shadesofyou Source: direct Reply To: shadesofyou@lovemail.com Title- The Mapmaker's Children Author- shadesofyou E-mail- shadesofyou@lovemail.com Classification- A, UST. Rating- PG Spoilers- Anything from The Pilot until Closure. And I messed around with the timeline a little. Summary- The Laws of Gravity are temporarily out of order. Disclaimer- Everything in The X-Files Universe is the property of Chris Carter and Fox Ten Thirteen Productions. xxxxx The sky is red behind the curtains, too red, and there is still the feel of Kansas dust driven into her nose and her mouth and her eyes. Gritty and dry. Once a long time ago, on his first day fatherless, his fingers hot with fever when they had curled around her wrist. You are a child of the sea, he had whispered. Paper lips. She remembers the way they fluttered together, trembling winged and delicate. The New Mexico plains baking outside the car window. "What do you mean?" She was driving. The kind of weariness that heightens the senses. There was the coppery scent of blood and gasoline and tar. Her soap. "Your father owned the oceans Scully and they pull you the way gravity pulls the rest of us. You miss the water; the expanse of it stretched out for you to sail. You miss who you are." She remembers this now with her head under the silver taps, cool cool liquid in her hair, down the back of her shirt, ice porcelain against parched skin. She remembers the way he had watched her. Gravity, he said to her and her name was nearly lost beneath the roar of the engine. Gravity, Scully. His eyes slate gray oceans, ones she could walk upon if she chose to. xxxxx She wonders what it would be like to be him, The Believer, knowing of things that are unfathomable, children's dreams, and the reasons why dogs bare their teeth to thin air. That is it then, the reason that he can change the rules of her world. That way he has, the feeling of holding a kite and having the sky swing in your hands. It is something she has inherited from him, this wondering. She was very young when she met him and his impression is printed into her smallest details. The way she secretly lusts for the salty tang of sunflower seeds; in the same way he raises a sole eyebrow when he is intrigued. Pieces of one another. He is the kite and she is gravity, fingers tight around the string, waiting for her feet to leave ground. Just waiting. xxxxx Fox Mulder is a million exotic theories, hot with adrenaline and something else, flickering at her as she drives. She has not seen him like this in a very long time, all nerves and jagged bones. When he is like this it is imperative for her feet to stand firmly on level ground. His woman of Truth. She sometimes resents this, his infinite number of lives, his rashness, his Clint Eastwood mentality, she had once referred to it as, and never would again. Hey Scully, you told me you thought Clint was hot, didn't ya? Those grins she is sure he saves for the sole purpose of antagonising her. Vampires. That is the agenda today. She is thirty-five years old and is spending her days with this man boy in the still Kansas heat, chasing vampires. He rambles in that way he does late at night, calling her up on the phone and assuring her it can't wait until morning when she pretends to be angry. The vampire can by some accounts be killed with a silver bullet, he tells her. Laying his thoughts down for her to watch spin and weave. Small intricate facts he has had stored for years for precisely such a moment. xxxxx He had been crazy, this wild eyed man who had thrown his head back and screamed to the sky as the rain fell in a thick wall. She had never met anyone like him before. He was dangerously reckless, angry, so bold that he daunted even her, best shot of her class at Quantico, a Naval Captain's daughter. There were more sides to him, of course, and trained investigator that she was, she found them. That he still cried for his sister, twisted in the blankets and the past. That he was the way he was so he would not transform into that frightened little boy, tangled in motel room sheets so many years later. Learned that he enjoyed good music and bad movies and that he always wanted the window seat on an airplane, to watch, as if he could not bear to think he could ever miss a moment of anything. He had been barely out of his twenties, this young untamed creature. And when this got to be too much for him; the world bruising his wings, he had curled in her palm and trusted in her not to drop him. xxxxx She never did drop him, although she wanted to. He could be paranoid and self centred and arrogant. But he had followed her to Antarctica and he had broken into The Pentagon for her. He had once told her she was his other half and he had held her in his arms and let her tears seep beneath his flesh. He had sung Shaft and he had kissed her forehead in a hallway when she was dying and he was so alive. Leather jacket, hair in his eyes, he had been a rebel with a cause. At some point she began to wonder who was really carrying who. xxxxx Seattle is Atlantis at this time of year, swollen rivers, pregnant with water. Rain kissing the exposed skin of her legs as she walks. Hurry hurry, he says, race me, and his eyes dance so that she must, gripping his arm so as not to fall, streaming slick pavement, rushing air in her ears. It is less of a race and more of something done just to be together. Collapsing inside the field office door at the same instant, hot with adrenaline and the distant reminder of youth. This is what he does to her, erodes her control, and erodes her control until she is a clear pearl. She would never place an insect in her mouth for anyone else or sing Joy to the World for them. She would never eat at The Headless Women's Pub or journey to The Arctic. She would never hold another man's hand and run madly towards shelter. xxxxx Out with the vampires and in with the werewolves, is what she is thinking, and not finding it remotely amusing. These things do not exist, she tells him. Hard scientific facts he shoots down with the mystical, with the unknown. He is grinning that grin and humming to the tune of The Wolfman and surely if she killed him no jury would ever convict her. "The condition that causes excessive hair growth in this amount is called Congenital Generalised Hypertrichosis, Mulder. It is extremely rare but certainly not unheard of. Persons with this phenotype have served in circuses for centuries as 'dog men'. It is nothing to throw around lightly. Although it is rare, it is an autosomal dominant pattern that can run through entire families. There is no X-File here Mulder. None. Just a disease." "There is a victim Scully. An unknown assailant described under a paranormal slant. An X-File. This is an unexplained case." "One that the local PD could solve themselves. This man is not an intelligent murderer. He's messy, leaves partial prints on the windowsills. It's only a matter of time before he gets himself caught." "And why can't we be the ones to see justice in action for once?" He looks down and steals a bite of her cheesecake, their knees knocking awkwardly under the table. Seattle clouds whisper behind him at the windowpane and telephone wires are furiously shivering with the encroaching storm. "This isn't the kind of justice you want or need," she says. She knows what he is searching for because she is searching for it as well, and although he will not look at her, she knows he knows this. She takes a bite herself, tangling with his fork, chocolate mousse on her tongue. She remembers long ago read medical journals, that CGH is a manifestation of a genetic atavism, the reappearance of ancestral phenotype. That is why a sole whale in thousands upon thousands upon thousands is born with hind limbs. Characteristics that are never lost during evolution, the war cry of the lion, and man's eternal thirst for truth. xxxxx A man who keeps a diary, pays Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes uneventful- - His busy hand forgets the pen, then Most books, indeed, are records less of fullness than of emptiness. -William Allingham She had read it once, a long time ago, and she had always remembered it. She does not agree because she knows that one morning she awoke to find him the one constant in her life, this person with graceful piano playing fingers that gently press her softest keys. She had never kept a journal before she met him, as if before him there had been a great void. When she met him, she became a writer. She wrote page upon page, sitting in countless dingy motel rooms, cross-legged on the bed. In Saint Paul, in The Ivory Coast, in Oregon, in New York, in Oklahoma. Flying thoughts, trapped with ink to paper in looping cursive. It is the one loss of control she allows herself, those frenzied writing sessions, where she pours herself into liquid and seeps into the lines. One day, he had read a small portion of it and his eyelashes had been soaked wet with her emotion. She thinks that she will maybe let him read all of it someday, if he wants to. xxxxx She has the dream again where she is wearing a black dress, scooped low and slippery under the disco ball. Her great grandmother's necklace, this large jewelled sapphire that has been given to her on this very night in the Scully women family tradition. It is her High School Prom, the same dress only it had been blinding white, untouched. The Black Dress is something that must glitter, for everyone is watching her in awe, stopped, as the light swirls and the floor spins. Focused solely on her. There is Mulder in the centre of the gymnasium and he is wearing a bow tie like Marcus had and she knows that it isn't real now, actually knows she is dreaming. She walks towards him anyway. His name on her eighteen-year-old lips. Mulder. Mulder. And her hand splayed over his chest. Mulder, she whispers. The music slips, twirls, shatters. He takes her hand and lifts it until they are palm against palm. He is burning, this screaming flame, and he blinks at her. "Scully, your dress" he says. Tonelessly. And that is the moment before she awakens, when she realises her dress is not black, but drenched with blood. She wonders how he will interpret this when he reads of it. xxxxx Life with him is something that can not be quantified, not even with the words she furiously scrawls in the velvet night. Life with Mulder is blinding. It is the one word she can think of. Blinding. Her faith is brought to its knees; her smooth features are narrowed, angled. She becomes Scully. He makes her Scully the way the moon pulls at the ocean. She has been Dana, but he calls her Scully and she answers to this different name. xxxxx "Scully?" "Yes?" "I guess this is what happens when I go somewhere without my Tonto, huh?" He is halfway sitting up on the hospital table, his pupils obsidian black and as wide as a cat's. His right cheek and chest scratched with what she must admit look like claws. A werewolf, Scully, he had told her the moment she arrived in the room, breathless, frantic. That was before the drugs, when his voice had been raspy and as brittle as fine china. "You could never be The Lone Ranger partner. Everyone would recognise you because of your nose." She smiles sweetly as he pouts, trying to calm the panic that still grips the flesh of her forearms, raising the gossamer hairs there. Her hand flutters. She presses it to his forehead, searing skin. If she were to count the number of times she had been in this position, the hospital scent driven into her pores, his sweat soaked palm weak against hers. If she were to count the sheer number. "Can we go now?" "We can go soon." He blinks at her, speech slurred and quiet. "I'm sick of being sick." "Don't get maudlin, Mulder" she answers, but her throat closes. There have been so many new scars this year. They have cut into his brain matter and then left him like a forgotten toy, sewn back together, Raggedy Ann style. The wounds of the crucifixion around his head. They have martyred him and broken him and shoved his pieces into the general order they were before. "Go now?" Sleepy and impatient. She is carefully neutral. "Soon. Close your eyes and I'll take care of it." She does not like what drugs do to him, that confusion. He is always so sure of himself, so terribly infuriatingly brilliant. She tells herself that it is just another day spent in the hospital, another day where they have both escaped death. She tells herself not to think that he has been shot at, stabbed, beaten up, locked in burning buildings and placed in a Russian Gulag. One day, his number is going to be called and it will be her feet slamming down these hallways once again, her hand on his cold flesh, face slack and baby smooth, the way it is when he is asleep. It will be her life and he will be gone from it, a song that you can never forget hearing, but one that the title escapes you. The perfect song you can never find again. xxxxx The newscast calls for rain again. She wonders in the car if it ever stops raining here or if the angry grey swirling of the heavens are permanent fixtures. xxxxx He is not a werewolf, but a man. Justice holds her torch high and like she knew he would, he looks away. The plane ride back to Washington is quiet and his breath fogs the window that he leans against. White puffs. She asks for some water for him to swallow his pills and he makes a face at her, reminding her of the one day he had stuck his tongue out at Skinner's back. "You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train" he says later. Eyes slitted. She moves his head from the window to her shoulder. He smells of gunpowder and cheap shampoo. "Gordon Lightfoot?" "Hmm. My father used to listen to him sometimes. He'd be sitting in his study, doing paperwork. Late. He had nicer cursive that I do, I remember and his hands would be stained with black ink. I could see it when he gave me a hug goodnight." She barely lets her chest rise. "My father" she tells him. "Had weathered hands, large and lined, like a. . ." "Like a map." "Yeah" she agrees, "Like a map." "That's what they were, you know. Mapmakers. They set us on this path" She thinks of hands coarse with seawater, Moby Dick by the fireplace. "They wouldn't have wanted this for us Mulder. Don't think that they would have chosen this path for us if they had of known." "And how do you know Scully? How do you know that?" She waits, mind tumbling wildly. When she speaks, she is certain, and she feels his lips on her neck, trembling. "Because" she murmurs, "They were our fathers." xxxxx His father had died in April, the cruellest month. There had been the first flowers struggling through the sidewalk. Concrete jungles wet with late year snow. Blood woven into his shirt. He had arrived in the circle of her arms with his skin the colour of ash. He did not cry and at first he was furious more than anything, she thought. For the entire year, he had been muted, quiet destruction behind dull irises. Insular. He both loved and hated his father more than anyone in the world, and all he had been left with was questions and raw anger. The day Bill Mulder was killed, he had told her once, was the first time he had given his son a hug in fifteen years. Her father was a red haired man who she would wait for weeks on end for him to return. He would come home with the waves still sounding in his ears and he would kiss his wife and spin his children around and around and around. They were very different men, but if she thought about it, they had borne very similar children. Both of them sailing a ship called Faith. xxxxx Home. This time of year in D.C. is frantic; Christmas lights at every window, snowdrifts, black with car exhaust, last minute shopping and Santa Claus begging in the streets. The bustle of people, the tinny songs in the supermarket, Jingle Bell Rock played through static filled speakers. When she is buying a present for Matthew in the toy store she is privy to the other children, agile and fine boned and grinning wildly. At times like that, when the normal world filters through, she is sure her life must not be real. Not spacecrafts and werewolves and serial killers. She tries to remember when she began to hate Christmas. Mulder loves it, despite the fact that he does nothing to mark the day. He is Fox Mantle on Christmas Eve, that man who had worn the baseball jersey and whispered into the strands of her hair and stayed there with his gentle hands splayed hot over her hips. This year she spends more time with him than the last, leaving her family before the presents have even been opened and promising her return under her brother's deadly gaze. "I bring gifts." He is sleepy, Mulder in the morning, a force to be reckoned with. He laughs at her large black snow boots, having never seen them before and she tells him he had better watch out for the steel toes. "And why in the hell is it so cold in here?" He is sheepish. "My check bounced." "For your heating bill?" They unwrap presents sitting on the edge of his bed, bundled in blankets still warm from his body. He has bought her a baseball jersey in her size that also says Mantle on it, and she has bought him a map. His shoulders stilling against hers, he draws a small breath. "Where are we goin' Scully?" Her heart sounds frantically. It had been an impulse buy, lost amidst stacks and stacks of discount books. The large pile the woman in front of her had carelessly bumped into, books faltering and then tumbling, the flutter of pages akin to wings. Frankenstein, Dante's inferno, The Iliad. A map. A map. She takes it back from him and unfolds it over the covers, the tips of her fingers glacial, a throbbing somewhere in her chest. This is out of character, something that he would do; but not her. Never her. And yet here she is, smoothing her way past Italy and Russia and the Atlantic Ocean. He is very quiet when she manages to look at him, arms akimbo and propped on his knees. She takes his hand and lays it over her rapid- fire heartbeat. "Here" she says. xxxxx The City of Lights. They go for a walk together on her second visit, when the sun is sinking below the skyline. Strings of red and green and gold playing with his chestnut hair and tangling it with a blend of colours. Snow on his lashes. He has put her map up in his bedroom wall beside the dresser and he shows this to her and kisses her cheek and looks like he would like to do more. "I never thought I would say that a city is beautiful, but this is, you know that?" "Face it Scully, you're a city girl." "I am not." "Are too." She refuses to play this game, listening to her feet crunch on the snow instead. The winter air is clear and distinct, limpid with the lights. They do not speak at all anymore, comfortable in silence, as only the very close can be. Before midnight, back at his apartment where the heat has been restored and his nose is red from the cold, he tells her Christmas should be a time to be with family, and she just looks at him and nods. xxxxx They have been fighting. There are two ways that they do this. With dead air and refraining from making eye contact or with words thrown and aimed to kill. Today, it had been the latter. Stupid reasons, she knows. She is beaten, her faith tested to the core, and he is coiled with grief. She should have let him get angry, let him smash every glass in his cabinet and have the pieces scatter. She should have given him an output for that furor, as he has always given her. She didn't. She stands at his door the next day and fixes the crooked 42. His key burns a hole in her pocket and through her slacks, but she does not reach for it, swallowing. The door swings open before she has knocked. "Saw your shadow" he murmurs in explanation. She waits. "I'm sorry," he says. "I am too." "I miss my mom." "I know." "I don't like feeling this way. I don't like fighting with you. Who in the hell else would ever put up with me?" "Nobody, I'm sure." He shoves his hands in his pockets and moves away from the door. "I should have called her. She wanted me to call her, but I was angry at her too, and I didn't." "She would have died anyway." Scully is purposefully blunt, because that is what he needs. Tears pooling and he blinks them away, shakes his head and she sees that he has swept the shards of glass from his floor, but missed a few. They shimmer in the half dark, under the milky moon like slivers of the moon themselves. They sit on the sofa. He curls his knees up, toes wiggling at her. She grabs the closest foot to her and the bottom is rough, a traveller's foot. Everywhere he has been is written here. If she were a forward woman, she would like to kiss his feet and feel that texture beneath her lips. xxxxx Once, she had killed a man. The sun had been looming and rayless that day and the night was charged. Blood absorbing into her flesh and his thumb on her wrist, a touch as soft as a sparrow's and as heavy as the muddled stars. Let me help you, he said and she let him. There were dishes in the sink when they left her death-permeated existence. Clear dishes and stagnant water and she had the foolish urge to wash them before she left, to clean up, to take back what Donnie Pfaster had taken from her. And Mulder had let her do that as well. The water was hot, hot, hot. Scalding, and he fixed the temperature and slicked their hands together with soap. Bubbles. One caught in the air and drifted aimlessly, eventually alighting upon his shoulder. A benediction, she would think later. xxxxx Venus is the most symmetrical of the planets, he tells her, having an eccentricity of less than one per cent. His bed again. They are on their stomachs and their legs brush. There is a large window and from here they can navigate the constellations, and they do. Past the Milky Way and Ursa Major. "Isn't there a star named after the Fox?" "Yeah. Velpecula." "And where is that?" "Between 12 Vul and 17 Vul and half a degree to the South." "And where is that?" Repeating it and he smiles tiredly. "I have no idea." He laces his fingers beneath his chin and flickers damp lashes shut. Sometime before she has arrived he has had a shower and he is sweet and clean smelling. She lowers her face to the soft comforter and watches him. "I'd like to stay for as long as you'll let me Mulder." His jaw clenches nearly imperceptibly with some flitting emotion. They are both such closed off people, not wanting to admit even a singular weakness. But his face is stained with tears now and his skin is pale and fragile and paper-thin when she runs her pinky down his cheek. He lets her do this, opens one liquid eye and follows her with it. "You could never be a star" he whispers, "You'd be the entire galaxy." xxxxx Therefore, even the lover of myth is in a sense a philosopher, for myth is composed of wonders. -Aristotle xxxxx They are travelling again the next week. Missouri, The Show Me State and Mulder makes the obvious jokes which she patents with an eye roll. Another dingy room, closed military green blinds. Three days of steak houses and grills. She writes in her journal of food. She craves nothing exotic, a ripe orange or a fresh bowl of strawberries, her fingers sticky with the juice. They have been home very infrequently within the past year, living out of suitcases and unfamiliar closets, children of the highway. He has not been as quixotic as he has been in the past, no two A.M. telephone calls. No 'get your things Scully, I'll tell you where we're going on the way there', but she has been in D.C. rarely as of late. In Missouri the altitude is different, higher. Late, when her hand is cramped from writing, she hears the gentle rumble of his television through the wall. He is wearing a pair of black satin boxers with smiling green aliens all over them when she steps inside. "I thought they were grey," she says dryly. "If they were grey they wouldn't glow in the dark." She has nothing to say to this. Mulder's bed is a mass of the case's files and he is everywhere, electric, dancing feet. A black and white movie plays behind him, the colours of the room neutral and leaden. He is vibrant here, golden skinned. "You have a theory Mulder?" "Don't I always?" Pauses, his tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip and he looks at the carpet. "I don't have one today, though. I think you're right, Scully. I don't think this has anything to do with alien abduction. I think that a person is taking these women." She ducks her head to see him better. "The one time you tell me I'm right and I can't even enjoy it." He grins, a lashing glimpse of his teeth. "You shouldn't have come back yet" she continues, mouth dry. "Bullshit. You came back the day after Ahab died." "It was different." "No. It wasn't." She wills her temper not to flare. He has that look on his face, the one he gets before kicking a door down with Leading Man abandon. And below that, terror at what could be behind that door. And below that, below that. . . "Mulder, I didn't come over here to do this." "What did you come over here for?" She blinks, turns on heel. His fingers on her elbow, flaming. A car backfiring down the street and the noises of a strange city. And familiar familiar hands. She knows every line of his palm without looking, lifelines, every nuance and curve of the skin there. "Don't go," he says, very very softly, so that she does not even feel his breath on her neck, can not be sure it was not imagined. She pauses, as if she could ever not forgive him, as if she could ever walk away after seven years of hot glances and laughter and fingers tangling together while doing paperwork. She nods. Those hands on her waist, and she does not understand what he is doing until she hears the music from the movie. Leading man indeed. A tango, and she can not tango, but she follows him, her lungs sharp with pain, blankly watching the stars at the windowpane. Slow and his skin spicy and honeyed. Mulder and Scully, spinning, spinning the world. He releases her at the other end of the room, her back against the wall, his eyes all smoke and lit with a sheen from the streetlamps. "Well" he says. "We'll Americanise you yet." "What?" "Baseball and a tango, Scully. Someday, I'll get you to play basketball with me." "A tango isn't American Mulder." Her voice is quiet, hoarse. She is thirsty. "Who says that I'm not American anyway?" "I do. You're Old World, Scully. Anyone who doesn't know how to play baseball and doesn't know what it's like at the game, the smell of hot-dogs and relish and popcorn. The way it feels to skid onto home base. Well, you're missing out." "It's a good thing that you're here then." "I guess so." He flattens his back against the wall beside her, their shoulders touching. Pushes her softly and she pushes him back, finds herself. xxxxx On the night the world had been ending and the long hour was lowering, he had kissed her. It was a new sensation and his impression was very faint, a susurration of lips, flesh against flesh. A hint of coffee and toothpaste and Mulder. He kissed her as if she were porcelain and she had expected him to be quick, rough, hands in her hair and hands everywhere, for that was the kind of man he was. Undaunted, valorous. But he was only a trace of warmth and he was chaste and he was the most gentle he had ever been with anyone. In Missouri, she says goodnight to him and leaves to lie alone in her bed. In Missouri she studies the disjunctions in the ceiling and wishes he would kiss her that way again. xxxxx The sky is unravelling. Mortality beneath her palms. The pigeons in the rafters, thousands of feathers and the gaping awning of the doorway. Mulder, she hisses. The smoggy early morning and the metallic scent and the woman with the glassy eyes. Breath, she pleads and says his name again, Mulder call an ambulance. Mulder. He is motionless standing above her and the sky, the sky. "Mulder!" The clink of his cell phone against his Sig, his sight void as he kneels. An ambulance, he says. His words are flat and drowsy, the tilt of his cheek highlighting his collarbone. He sits down beside her to the grain of the wood and the dust is on his black suit, stark, a rough glitter glitter within the parameters of fate. The woman's pulse grows fainter and there are church bells down the street. "Each that we lose takes part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides." The window blazes with blue stumbling light and there is his echo, Emily Dickinson and her own jagged breathing. This woman is going to die. The bells are ringing and she is going to die, no matter what she does or what Mulder does, sitting here with that mien of weakness biting into his features. Too late. Too late. He is too painful to watch and she turns her attention back to the woman. Pressing her palms to the chest, forcing air. "You should let her go Scully." You, she wants to say, you hypocrite. You could never let anyone go. He has gazed into the orb of the universe and told her he was free and she had believed it, but to let go. No, he is incapable of that. Samantha is ingrained into his very pores and this woman is all she could have been. Anger deflates. Scully's hands slide to the floor, splinters there. Their killer lies behind Mulder, sprawled with the liquid metal of her own kill shot. This is life and this is death, merging. She lets go. Time returns. There is the screaming of the ambulance and their arms fumbling together as they stand up, a mutual front, Mulder and Scully against the world. The bells have finished their chime. xxxxx If tolling bell I ask the cause. "A soul has gone to God," I'm answered in a lonesome tone; Is heaven then so sad? That bells should joyful ring to tell A soul has gone to heaven, Would seem to me the proper way A good news should be given. -Emily Dickinson TIME AND ETERNITY xxxxx She dies, of course. This is my life, is the only thing that Scully writes in her journal, and watches the letters until her irises grow hot and the room blurs. This is my life. xxxxx The Potomac is dipped in sunset, bronze, tinted with purple, red in the north. She has often wished that he could see the colour red, but today she supposes she sees enough for both of them. Red blood against starched white cotton. It is a mass of blacks and whites to him and that is just as well, she supposes. Her apartment is stale from disuse and she opens the windows, the blinds, the curtains swirling and spilling around each other. Calls her mother to let her know she is home safely, walks to the gym and exercises until her muscles are torn and aching and the sweat trickles cool down the small of her back where his touch always finds her, guides her. Cuts her leg shaving and watches the lethal red slide and twist its way down the drain. Sits there on the edge of the tub, the fine down hair of her forearms raising, raising. Just an occupational hazard, she thinks. To have to feel this way. xxxxx Come over, he tells her and because she could never refuse him, she does. Fear is a thready pulse and her pantyhose clinging to her legs. She follows his voice to his room and finds him there folding freshly laundered clothes, putting them into drawers. "I thought this was an emergency." He stops. "I never said that." "Enough with the cloak and dagger routine, then. Mulder, you told me to come over here right away. What did you do that for if you didn't need me?" "I wanted to see you." Her feet fall stationary, leaden high heels. "Well" she accuses, harsher than she intends, "You scared me." "I'm sorry" he says mildly, but she knows that he is. Flickers her gaze to his rumpled bed. He grins, toothy, for a flash of a moment. "We spend way too much time in my bedroom for two people who don't do anything else together besides tango and watch too many repeats of old movies." Her lips curve and she conceals it by turning her head, agreeing silently. "Scully." "Yes?" "You should never have to kill a man." The smile fades. "This is my job, Mulder. It's my life." "I know. I'm just sorry. . ." "Sorry that you didn't kill him instead? What difference would that make, which one of us. . ." "I'm just sorry, Scully. I wouldn't choose this for you." She comes closer. His eyes chase her every move. Apt eyes, very green. Behind him, there is the map, China on his shoulder. "I chose this for me" she says and jabs a finger to her chest. "Me." "You shouldn't have had to let her go." Her chest goes hollow, sepulchral and resonating with the woman's last word before unconsciousness. God. That same sliver of God that lies at her throat, golden and delicate. God, the woman had said, and glanced upon the Other World, that world of brightness and things unknown to the human race. "No" she assents, "But I had to. We had to. Her family. . .had to." He is still there when she searches to find him again, just leaning there against the places of their sphere. It is very hushed, the flutter of his feet on carpet and she even thinks that she hears him blink, dark long lashes that she knows tickle her skin, make her laugh. "To think." A trace of wonder and something sacred. "To think," he says, "That one day I won't be here. You won't. Dust on the wind. Just gone." She swallows. "Not gone." "You believe that Scully?" She reaches out to touch his chest, to feel the solid blood and bone. Warm and soft and hers. "I do." In Missouri, she had been adrift, far away. At home, she closes her nails around the fabric of his shirt, tightening, wanting nails. He captures her hand within his own. xxxxx In Missouri, she had wanted him to kiss her and at home, he does. Pressed up against their map with the oceans pooling at their feet, he kisses her. xxxxx Finis. Author's Notes: This was a challenge from The X-Files Quill and Scroll Society. http://xfqass.tripod.com The elements that I was to use were as follows: (I fudged a little on some of them, I know.) -A string of Christmas lights -A slow sexy tango to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway;" with Mulder wearing nothing but black satin boxers with glow-in- the-dark aliens all over them -Mulder and/or Scully in formal dress -A Sapphire Necklace -A fresh bowl of strawberries -A huge stack of books about to fall over