From: JohnieRed Date: 8 Aug 1998 14:02:22 GMT Subject: Red in the Sclera by Johnie This was orginally an exclusive on Lynn's post-ep site. But here it is for all you people who wrote to me looking for it. Red in the Sclera by Johnie Disclaimer: Oh, please! Rating: PG (I know. I know. Me writing PG! What's wrong? Has the planet tilted on it's axis? Is the sun suddenly rotating around the earth? Save us Copernicus!) Spoilers: Patient X and Red and Black Category: VA, post-ep Summary: Mulder's thoughts while Scully is undergoing her brain drain. Comments: to JohnieRed@aol.com Special thanks to Lynn who gave me the idea by constantly tempting me with that post-ep site of hers. I see your delicate fingers reach across the seemingly endless expanse of black leather between us. Your fingers skitter nervously against the cushion, beseeching me to take hold of them. I reach my hand out reluctantly and you grasp my fingers as though they were the handle of a car door, steadying you against a sharp turn. I listen to the fear and amazement in your voice as you recount the horror you believe you experienced on the bridge. The burning bodies. The men with no faces. Once I would have been relieved to hear you acknowledge and give voice to the ordeals which... But I am not. I do not want to hear the fear, the false, needless fear in your voice. The government planted fear. I believed for all those years because I wanted to believe. Because I needed to believe. I used my beliefs to supplant the terrible, unacknowledgable truth of what really took place, what really happened to my sister. The truth that I couldn't face. You never believed. You didn't need to. And I don't want to see you believing now out of fear. Because they have made you so afraid, broken you so that you will believe anything, anything but the awful truth. I listen to the soothing sound of the therapist's voice reassuring you. I briefly wonder if I would have been able to reassure patients if I had ever chosen to practice. Or would they have sensed the false desperate convictions in me? I feel your fingers tighten around mine. I know you aren't even aware of my presence. You're holding the therapist's hand too, so I can't even console myself by thinking you need me here anymore than I want to be here. I would give anything to not be here, in this room right now. And I know if you were fully conscious you wouldn't want me here either. You've protected me repeatedly during our years together, from myself, from our enemies, and even from you. Even while you were dying you tried to protect me. You wanted to take the blame for my actions. But you never want my protection. You never even want to admit you might need it. And you don't ever want me to think I should give it. You are coming out of the hypnotic state. I quickly pull my hand away from yours, back across the divide of black leather. I shift back to my end of couch; it might as well be the other side of the continent. I have never felt closer to or further away from you. I feel that in pulling away from the small curl of your fingers, I have broken a tenuous tether, a life-line between us. I am relieved anyway. My palm quickly grows cold. You open your eyes. "Have you been here the whole time?" you ask me. I nod. And perhaps, I can't help thinking, that has been the problem all along. END