From: "James Chong and Co." Date: 9 Aug 1998 09:30:36 -0800 Subject: NEW: Salvage (1/1) by Michael Aulfrey (G) Salvage by Michael Aulfrey Author's Note: This is a little post-movie piece, written after watching The End for the third time and maybe this time getting all the nuances ... Not a post-episode story, mind you, but rather a speculation as to something that we probably won't get shown (or at least, you lucky devils in the US won't get shown) when the hours have counted down to zero and it's November again .. :) There's no MSR. Archivists' Notes: G rating. Maybe angst. Probably UST. Spoilers: The End, The Movie . . . The Series in general . . . :) Summary: After the fire, after the ice, some necessary healing. Copyright!warning: Uncle Chris owns all the rights to the X-Files and the characters. You all know the routine by now, but I fully acknowledge once more that this is a work of fiction, a labour of love, and not something for which I would dare suggest I should (or could) get paid for ... enjoy, everyone! (And send me comments at m_aulfrey@hotmail.com ... please? :) ) SALVAGE Ah, the wheel is turning, spinning round and round And the house is crumbling, but the stairways stand --Peter Gabriel It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak, and another to hear. --H. D. Thoreau It would be bad. Of course, not nearly as bad as the first two days after it happened. That was less a collection of memories and more a collection of emotions. Loss, of course, like his guts had been cored out. That had stayed with him from the moment he stumbled through the door and beheld the deformed, pitiful metal shapes, emergency sprinklers dripping silent tears. The enormity of the destruction and the loss broke over his mind, tripped the overload switches. He could only stand there and stare as Scully moved against him and gripped his arms with strength that distantly felt like bruising. But soon the other emotions drifted in like flotsam from the wrecked ship that was his heart. Despair. Anger. Oh, my, such anger. Barely less than the ballooning loss. He'd looked for Spender, afterwards. Somebody upstairs wasn't stupid. A quick leave of absence, a temporary reassignment, and the kid was out of his reach in the critical time. He was back a couple of weeks later, but the worst of the anger had burnt itself out by then, and the facts conspired against revenge. Still, he hadn't seen much of the angular face and flat, muddy eyes around since then. Grief. Hard to remember when that part had come. It had come, though. Just not at J-Ed. Somewhere, in spite of the shock, there had been a kid who hadn't broken when Johnny Wexler and three of his buddies beat the crap out of him on Rhode Island one eleven-year-old's summer gone. He started at the thought; practically nothing of that time had survived this long in his memory. He had stood there, taken one punch after the next, a gout of blood arcing on one, right eye closing on another, Call your mommy, kid!, until at last his legs trembled like marionettes and collapsed under him with the dizziness and the pain. There they left him. It took him a good ten minutes to get to his knees after that. Only then, there in the dirt, under a sky like an unblinking, cruel blue eye, did he cry. Nor did he break in the shattered remains of the basement. Not as he stepped from the elevator to the ground floor, seeing the faces out of the corners of his eyes, staring at him, whispering among themselves. Not as he walked down to the garage, got in the car. Not when Scully, trailing in his wake like a benign shadow, had gotten into the passenger's side and left the door a little way open. He had glanced at the door. Then at her, blue eyes mirrors to his pain. Saying nothing. Only half-turned in the seat, gazes locked with him. Even then, he had held up. Until she broke him. "I'm sorry." And the loss and despair overcame him, rising over him in a dark wave from the impact point in his stomach, and he succumbed, crumpling slowly, head falling against the wheel, tears like molten mercury on his cheeks. Through the haze, he barely remembered her silently, delicately taking the keys from the ignition, and taking him home. They had gone back, sixteen sleepless hours later, to try and salvage what remained. Of course, the Bureau had already reassigned them, so they had less than an hour. They had only found yellow tape over the door, the locks changed. Nobody seemed to have the new keys. Then there was no more time, for two long months. He slid a fingertip across the black plastic of the nameplate on the door. His finger came away dark with dust, but left the reflection of bone-white letters sharper in its wake. FOX MULDER, SPECIAL AGENT. For a time, he had considered denying the second part. A short time. The reality was that the decision had been made many times already: by his father, drowning in blood, last breath begging an absolution he could not give; by his sister, both in the dreams that shrieked in his head every night, and the wrung-out, half-broken expression of the woman dragged back into hell by his presence. Yet he stood there, staring at the plate. There was a part of him that observed the ritual-intensity of this moment, that spoke to him in velvet, musical whispers. He could, until the moment he opened this door, still turn away. Try and find a life of quiet desperation somewhere, pass the torch on to others, try and find a little of what must surely be coming to him by now, for all the blood he had given. He knew, now. More knowledge than any human being could want. But as in Genesis, with knowledge came choice. They - the men he hunted -- were not gods. Objectively, he might still potentially live out a long and full life, if he wanted it, before fullness of time and their project rolled round. If he turned and walked away from the door. Enticing. Very much so. But, he realised, no longer an option. Maybe to someone else in his position, but not to him. An organism in symbiosis with another could not make a decision freely of its own volition. As he was. He slapped his left hand out at the bands of plastic over his door. The old adhesive gave way easily and drifted in long yellow banners to the floor. He rummaged in his pocket as they settled there uneasily, like a nest of jaundiced vipers. Found the key by the bite of its teeth on his fingertip, plucked it and inserted it into the lock. Skinner's gift to him. He turned the key, felt the shudder of the tumblers as they woke, surprised at sudden use. Turned the knob, and pushed the door open. The first thing that struck him was the smell; oddly, it wasn't that much different from how he remembered it before the fire. A curious, sharp kind of stench in the room, like bitter herbal tea. Then his eyes began to process what he was staring at, and he felt the wrench, deep down, and the despair rise from its grave. Maybe the bitterness was there to welcome him. The fire had left little in its wake. The walls, the papers were blackened. That he could expect, deal with. But the heat of the blaze had even warped the metal cabinets. He glanced across, with a sudden flare of hope: but there, too, the slide screen had burned away to a few tattered scraps of material hanging like dead men from the roller. His desk had not been spared, either. Where the fire had not ashed its surface, the varnish had cracked and peeled like skin under a dying sun. Two of the bookshelves had collapsed. He caught a glimpse of white plastic towards the back of the office: the sole clear spot on the photocopier, the copyplate of which had cracked. There were patches on the ceiling and the walls, crudely daubed with white paint that did not even blot out the underlying burn marks. They secured the structural integrity of the building, of course. But had ceased at that stage, doing the bare essentials to ensure the destruction did not affect the rest of the Bureau. He thought about closing the door behind him, but decided not to; if they hadn't unlocked the door in all this time, chances were against the electricity being back on. He glanced upwards and realised the question was moot: the lightbulb sockets were hollow, staring eyes. The thoughts slid away, leaving only the emotions again. For a moment, all he could do was stare around him in despair. All was destruction. His life, a ruin resulting from his worst-feared fate: death by fire. Here stand I, part of him observed. He turned a full circle. Couldn't even think where to begin. He had almost closed his eyes against the lingering feeling of death and the horror of it when a speck of white caught his eye. An edge of paper, sticking out from just under the desk, spared from the inferno. He moved across the room, crouched down, pulled at it. Soot had blown over it, streaking it with black water smudges. It came out with a slow, grainy hiss. It was a small, hand-stapled sheaf of paper, unbound, pulled off the original through photocopying. He brushed at some of the heavier soot at the top of the first page, clearing the title heading. Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation. He felt a thin smile crease his face. His years of work, in ashes, but somehow this, Scully's senior thesis, had survived the destruction. It had a much less distinguished vintage to it than other documents which had been consumed. From his recollection, though, some ideas in it were wilder than some of the cases they'd worked on. All of it expressed in that formal, reserved voice she kept for writing things like that. She would still be seeing her doctor. The OPC meeting had been on the previous day. As a precaution, they had her back at Georgetown Medical Centre to run some final tests. A pang of guilt struck; after all that had happened, she at least deserved to be here when he started trying to get things back on track. In fact, he had almost mentioned it yesterday afternoon, after the hearing, but something inside had held the words back. She might have joined him along the way on this journey, but he had begun it alone. Maybe that was why he couldn't do without her. When it came down to it, she was as open to extreme possibilities as he was; she just needed a lot more solid causal connections than he did. She was his conscience, something he hadn't felt he needed when he began, but did. He straightened, and laid the thesis on the desk, then glanced around. His own face, charred, stared back at him from below one of the collapsed bookshelves. Serial Killers and the Occult, his monograph: the ridiculous portrait they'd done for the book's dustjacket. It, like the rest of the book, was half-burnt away, the inferno getting onto about page three-eighty before boredom set in. He picked it up, laid it alongside her thesis. The comparison was somewhat comical. Her paper, largely unscathed, compared to his face looking like Kal-Torak from a David Eddings novel. On the other hand, the events of the past fourteen days he had survived barely with a mark on him. She had been through the entrance hall to hell, at least physically. The emotional trauma was more difficult to gauge, but he remembered her eyes, rimming with hot tears outside his apartment, and knew more had been added to that by everything that had happened. It brought Diana back to his mind. There was an ache there. But distant, not urgent, and as much exacerbated by the hurt it had done to Scully as any hurt inside himself. Scully didn't say anything about it. She never did. But he had caught her out while she was still in the hospital. Not the first time. She'd only changed the subject. And next time, feigned a head pain. He figured it out when she'd actually looked away, to the window, by some gestalten click at her mood and his memories, where he put the pieces together in one, sorrowful rush. He understood. Something kept him from talking about it, then. There hadn't been the opportunity, later. Diana. The Praise investigation. There had been that initial thrill of having her back by his side again, and for a few hours it felt like the old times, back at the end of his tenure in VCU, when she had read his thoughts by day, read his body's desires by night. He picked up the remains of a file, tossed it onto the table. Old times, indeed. Until he identified the strange wistfulness inside himself when she took his hand as simple curiosity about might have been rather than the longing for it, and realised they had walked different roads. Another time, another place . . . perhaps if he'd stayed in VCU . . . but he no longer needed the constant salve to his ego of her agreement. VCU had been hard. He was just a kid then, few friends, fewer intimates, cursed with The Gift, nicknamed Spooky. Harebrained ideas were few and far between there. Diana's belief had seemed enough. But not now. Scully's scepticism seemed to draw on something deeper inside him. It had taken a time of osmosis, the better part of a year, perhaps, but he eventually figured out that she didn't think less of him because of his ideas. And that her friendship didn't depend upon the number of serial killers he reeled in, or the reputation he had. With Diana . . . they had Been because she agreed with his ideas. With Scully, it was in spite of the fact that she almost always didn't. No. His future was with the woman who had made his quest her own. Another spark of light off white paper caught his eye. He leaned down, found a newspaper photograph of a sad, half-maddened face. A chill went through him. Strange that both Scully's thesis and this man's photograph should survive. He remembered he hadn't stuck the pin in particularly deep. It might have been the heatwaves which blew it off the bulletin board before it, too, was consumed. As it was, nothing of the article remained; the fire had retreated only from burning Duane Barry's picture. That time still rated as one of the worst in his memory. Samantha's abduction didn't generate as much hurt; fading memory or his own psyche had blocked it out. And after that, it wasn't so much memory as dream. Even his most recent search for Scully hadn't come close. There were occasional nightmares, new arrivals on the scene of his intermittent sleep: dreams that the seventy hours allotted expired; others where he journeyed into the biting Antarctic cold and found only a black, smoking crater. But those nightmares paled in comparison and frequency compared to the ones where he grew old and died looking for Scully after her abduction, or found her, nose long since ceased bleeding from the lack of a heartbeat to pump it. Visions of him identifying her only from wisps of her red hair and blue, dead eyes, the rest of her body half-dissected and then cast aside like a meat byproduct. At least, with a tight time window and a place to find, he hadn't had the luxury of waiting. Or dreaming. In the three months she was gone, though, there had been nothing he could do except wait. And have nightmares of Samantha compounded upon nightmares of her. Yet she had been returned. And had borne up, conquered the fear, even come to terms with it. She was one of the bravest women he'd ever met. She had risked her life, for him. Risked her career, many times; did so simply by coming to work with him each morning. He offered her nothing, and she gave everything. She'd been pressed into service like some modern-day Simon of Cyrene, but had not left him since. And despite her explanation of the interest lying here among the files that now lay as dust, part of him couldn't for the life of him understand why. So much for being the best profiler in the Bureau. He smiled, slowly. Then spotted the slide projector. Cursed. The lens had cracked. Strangely, though, the slide magazine was largely untouched. He emptied it out, scattering soot-encrusted slides over the desktop. Warped, for the most part. He plucked one at random, holding it up to the light to try and see what damage had been done. It turned out to be more than made the slide worth keeping. He tossed the slide in the general direction of the garbage pail. For a second the despair crept up on him, but after a second he breathed deeply: there was nothing else to be done. He picked up another, peered closely at it. A shadow fell across him, the light from the open door obscured. He looked up. She smiled, and knocked on the door, theatrically. "Scully?" He involuntarily looked down at the slide he was holding, guiltily, then back at her. "You know, you were doing that when I first met you," she said, taking a couple of steps into the room. "What?" He glanced around. "Making reasons for my employment?" "Looking at slides." He grinned shamefacedly. "Well, for some reason the video recorder's broken. I had to resort to more primitive media to get my kicks." She smiled weakly, the smile slowly fading as she took her first look around the office. "Have you salvaged anything useful here?" "I can't bring myself to look in the top drawer, if that's what you mean." Her smile returned, much to his relief. He dropped the slide to the table along with the others, and leaned back against the table. He peered closer at her. Her cheek and nose still had an angry red glow to them. "What did the doctor have to say?" She shrugged as she threaded her way between piles of ashed paper and broken plaster. "Nothing more than I expected, that I'm fine. The swelling should go down in a few more days." She drew up next to him, tried for a second to brush away some of the ash from one part of the table's edge, dusted her hands off as she gave up and half-sat on the table. She folded her arms and looked around again, and this time he didn't try to take the sting off the saddened expression that rippled across her face. "You didn't tell me you were planning to come back here so soon." "Yeah, I'm sorry. I . . ." He gestured helplessly. She inclined her head. "You what?" "I just . . . needed to." Her gaze held his for long moments before nodding and turning to look again at the room. He watched as her eyes came to rest on the metal cabinets, obsidian from the smoke damage. "There doesn't look like there's much left." "No," he said. He glanced behind him, hoping for a moment, but little was left of the poster above his chair. Only a corner of blue sky, browned at the edge. He turned back to find her looking at him. "You don't sound as worried about it as I thought you'd be." He took a long, long look around the room before he answered her. "I don't think I am." "I don't understand." "What did we lose here, Scully? Lots of paper. Okay, maybe there are things that those papers mean, but when it comes down to it, it was all just paper with marks on it." Her surprise was visible to him even in the dimness of the room. He pointed to the two metal cabinets. "All we had there were a number of unsolved cases. Basically, a pile of catchup work. And every few months, they'd send us down a fresh one. Right?" She nodded cautiously. "But I'm still not following you, Mulder." He thought about it for a second. "Why did you first come to work with me, Scully?" "I was ordered to, at the beginning. But then. . ." "You could have requested a reassignment. Why didn't you?" He saw it begin to dawn on her. "Because there was nothing else I could have done, once I understood the kind of investigation you were running down here." He nodded. "X-File. X, meaning unknown. Unknown, meaning an answer to which we have not phrased a question yet." She understood. He could see that she did, but he felt the concept gathering momentum in his heart, building force like exhilaration. "I've always wanted the truth. You've always wanted the facts. But what's common to both of us is that we have to ask questions to get it. That's what the X-Files are. Not a pack of serial killers. Not the Flukeman. They're the questions that we need to ask." She nodded, slowly. "You were more concerned with reassignment." He felt his heart leap. She understood. "Because they denied you the chance to ask the questions." He smiled, nodding. Then sobered. The next part would be more difficult for him. He looked at her carefully. "I didn't understand that until you told me that you were planning to quit, that no other work like this could hold any interest for you. Even then, it didn't crystallise until . . ." He stopped, abruptly. He hadn't meant it to go that far. He looked away. He felt her hand touch his, and he stared down at it for a second, their hands smeared black from the ash, wondering at how it filled his heart with such simplicity of emotion. Then back at her. She smiled. "Someday . . ." He tried to find words, found the ones that he'd planned just said the same thing. He nodded. She took her hand away, and pushed off the desk, moving slowly across the room towards the filing cabinets. "Actually, Mulder, there is something else that I want, now that we've got the chance." "What?" "A desk." Her smile was turned up rakishly at one of the corners. He grinned. "Actually, I happen to know where there's one going cheap." He thumped his hand against the table. "All yours, if you want it." She shook her head, and he knew then that it was all right, that it would be all right. "Come on," she said. "We've got work to do." END OF PART 1/1 (Comments, flames, indifference to m_aulfrey@hotmail.com ... please, guys? ) :)