From: sarah the great Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 18:50:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: "The Strangest Thing" by Ansel Stewart From Ansel. This was really going to be a funny story, then lots of bad stuff went down over here and it got depressing as hell, but that's not my fault. Disclaimer-Gee, I wish I was witty and rich and famous and secure enough to tell you that I owned all the etceteras in this little attempt at immortality, but I'm not, and until L.A. falls into the sea, I doubt I ever will be, so they continually belong to the rest of the world, but not to me. Summary-There's been a lot of strife in the basement, a fact which abruptly loses all touch with reality. Rating-Erg. PG-13 (shut up, Nat!), why not? Spoilers-Too lazy to go back and check. Probably none. Classification-MSR, A (I really hate acronyms) So, enough. The story. The Strangest Thing by Ansel Stewart. She could barely move through her anger at him. They had spent five days, one utterly silent week, in that tiny cold basement office, each with a will stronger than the other's, staring with petulant resolution at their respective computer screens, both refusing to acknowledge that they had once spoken and laughed between those same desks and filing cabinets. But she had remained strong, turning away compassion every time reconciliation seemed so inevitably close, every time she realized she had abandoned work for thinking about him, so close across the room, so stubborn, wishing he would talk so she wouldn't have to. All their lives, they had each made a religion of silence, of carefully veiled responses to any question that cut too close. The only ones they had ever betrayed that code for were each other, and now they both threw themselves into the quiet furiously, using all their skills to draw out the wordless battle of wills for as long as possible. She heard him rustling at his desk and pretended not to. He sighed loudly and began to tap his foot. This was her closest sign of victory, that he was resorting to try and annoy her out of silence, rather than simply wait it out. She obstinately continued her work, struggling to forget that she had ever met a man named Fox Mulder, that he had ever hurt her. She knew him so well, miles better than she had ever known herself, and she thought sometimes that was the real curse. The knowledge of everything Mulder was killed her as slowly as this stupid fight. But it's not stupid, she told herself angrily. You told him there was nothing Canada, that Chad Davidson was a schizophrenic conman just playing to his obsessions and he went anyway, nearly getting himself killed in the bargain! And all just to prove you wrong. He's doing this to spite you, so don't go forgiving him until he crawls. She blew out an irritated sigh herself without realizing it. She was tired of Mulder and tired of his five-year-old stubbornness. She knew that he had wanted to apologize since one damn tense meeting with Skinner the third day in. She had seen the regret in his eyes but had also seen the pride twitching in his jaw, and knew that he would never voluntarily find the words, would lock his Oxford-educated mind away from any chance of the right phrases moving sluggishly from his brain to his mouth. Suddenly, his chair squealed back as he abruptly stood. Her head jerked up instinctually, but she didn't turn, half-hoping that he would just walk out the door, maybe to the deli for a sandwich, or just knocking off early, although the latter was pretty damn unlikely. He stopped right beside her desk, looking down at her studiously bent head, and when he reached out his hand, at first she thought he meant to touch her, and realized for the first time that she had missed his voice, sure, that was natural, but she had missed his carefully protective hands, too, the vague touches she never acknowledged but always catalogued. Instead, he stuck, of all things, a sticky note in the dead center of her computer screen, then turned and strode back to his desk, sitting again and pulling out a case file like there was nothing wrong. She skated the yellow rectangle a look out of the corner of her eye, knowing that she should pull it off without reading it and throw it away. But it was his first attempt at communication in a week and she resigned herself to being weak enough for an emotion like curiosity. She took the post-it down and read the short message written in her partner's quick handwriting. Goddamn it, I'm sorry! She stared at the note for about a minute, wanting to laugh, and already seeing the Job look that would capture his features if she did. The bastard was too stubborn and proud to just say it, so he decided to deliver the angry message via stationary. Carefully folding the note, she tucked it into her suit pocket and turned to look straight at him for the first time in a week. He almost pulled off the impression of nonchalance. He was tilted back in his chair, casually skimming through a case file, his long legs stretched out, resting his feet on the cracked open bottom drawer. He gave no suggestion that he was anything but alone in the office, and had been alone for as long as memory. She wasn't fooled by the charade, because she saw the red blush staining his face. "You know, Mulder . . ." she said with an almost bored drawl, noting his surprised flicker with satisfaction, "you really are a stupendous asshole." His exhalation was explosive, full of self-hatred and humiliation. "God, I shouldn't have given you that note." "No?" she asked lightly. "When did you come to that astute decision?" He smiled. Ruefully, sure, but it was a smile nonetheless. "About two seconds after I stood up." They paused, but there was no longer any threat of falling back into that encompassing silence. They had broken the angry pact, had spoken and even gotten close to a joke, and retreating now would hurt them far more than the first gap. "Did you mean it?" she asked with seeming carelessness, but her eyes were sharp and recording as she watched his response. He kept his face angled away from her, nodding reluctantly. "Yeah." "Then say it." His head snapped up, his face angry and confused. "What?" he asked incredulously. She replied calmly, her eyes still on his face. "Say it." He stood again, anger gone kinetic in his tall frame. He tried to speak, but just stuttered over furious sputterings. "Say-wha-why in the-Jesus!" He glared at her as she took in his performance with implacable indifference. "What the hell do you mean, 'say it'?" he asked fiercely. She rolled her eyes. "Gee, Mulder, it didn't seem like such a complicated suggestion to me." He threw his hands into the air. "Why should I say it? What does it matter? You know it, don't you? Why do you want me to embarrass me like that?" Now she stood, arms braced on her desk, her own anger flaring at him. "Because you can't, can you? You can't ever say any- thing that matters out loud, because you're a fucking coward." He gaped at her with genuine disbelief. "How the hell can you say that, Scully? I risk my life more than Evel Kinevil, and you call me a coward?!" She scoffed. "Oh, yeah, you risk your life, big strong man, you kiss death daily, but never for anything important!" "The truth-" he began, but she cut him off. "Yeah, yeah, the fucking truth, which is a really good excuse for a man who's too scared to just say he wants to die. You never say anything that matters, Mulder, it's all cryptic little riddles and thinly veiled innuendoes, and none of it means a thing! So I want you to say something real. The truth, even," she smiled coldly at the irony. "I want you to say something that you mean, not just write it on a post-it note. Say you're sorry, Mulder. Or say that you're suicidal, which would at least explain why your whole life is like you're running towards a cliff and ignoring the big neon warning signs that are screaming at you to stay away. Admit something, Mulder, that's all I ask. Just admit it, to prove that you're human. Please." His anger had gone cold and calculating, his eyes harsh and totally conscious. "Okay, Scully," he said in a low voice of mean humor. "I'll admit something to you. And it's your fault, so just remember that later, when you hate me." She was afraid, the one emotion she had never expected to have with her partner. A part of her wanted to cry out like a kid- Wait, wait, I didn't mean it! I take it back, don't tell me, please, I didn't mean it! But however stubborn Mulder was, Scully was threefold, and she just swallowed hard and leveled her eyes. He carefully circled his desk and walked across the room, stopping two feet from her. His eyes were black and she vaguely noted that the same arrogance that had kept him silent for a week would force him to go through with whatever it was he was going to say, no matter what the costs. "I love you," he said plainly. "And it's all your fault." With that, he leaned forward, gave her a chaste peck on the forehead, and turned back to his desk, re-absorbing himself in the case file he had abandoned, leaving her standing totally motionless, with a perfect expression of shock on her face, her world cracked down the middle. Mulder loves me? she thought, but the thought of it almost made her laugh. Mulder didn't love her. They were partners, and he was too brilliant to fall in love with her. Besides, even if he did, that would mean she would have to love him, and she didn't want to love him. A week of Mulder's self-centered, illogical, dangerous lifestyle was enough to exhaust her; how could she deal with thirty or forty more years without even breaks for the evenings and weekends? I'd be dead before our fifth anniversary, she thought, slowly sitting back down. She thought that she should probably get back to work and ignore Mulder with his rotten little lies, but even as she focused on the dimly glowing computer screen, she could hear every page turn and rustle from her partner's direction. Four o'clock ticked away, and the moment the second hand swooped into five, Mulder stood again, this time gathering his jacket and overcoat, preparing to leave on time for the first time since she had known him. He didn't say a word to her as he made his way to the door, but just as he was pulling it open, she stopped him. "Wait, Mulder!" He turned cooly. "Yeah?" She suddenly realized she didn't know what she wanted to say. "Um . . . I was just . . ." Ingrained politeness went out with exasperation. "Why are you such a bastard all the time?" He scowled. "That's what's wrong with our relationship, Scully, not the lies or meaningless words, but the fact that when I tell you I love you, you call me a bastard." "You are a bastard!" she yelled. "A stupid, lying, lousy, bastard! You don't love me!" "What?" he asked, his eyes shocked and disbelieving. She shook her head frantically. "You don't! I know you don't!" "How?" he demanded, incredulity replaced by anger. "You think you have the monopoly on Fox Mulder's thoughts and feelings? That you saw through me in seconds and know everything I've felt since?" "No! You don't love me because if you did that would mean that I would have to love you and I don't, goddamn it, I don't!" His face slacked with a physical pain, and for a moment she was desperately sorry. She was overcome with an encompassing regret that she had hurt him, and at the same time almost brought to her knees by a monumental urge to go to him and take the hurt from him. "You . . . you don't love me?" he whispered, with such despair in his eyes. She wanted to say yes, even if it wasn't true, but she couldn't lie to him. "No, Mulder. I don't love you." She saw him collapse in on himself, wracked into speechlessness as he fell against the desk. But she didn't go to him. He looked up at her, his face clean in shock and pain. "Why not?" he asked hoarsely. "Why not?" she repeated. This was incredible. "You're the only man in the world who would ask 'why not' when a woman says she doesn't love you! God, Mulder! You're not the center of the universe, and you're not much of a catch either! You're self-centered, rude, totally devoid of social graces, obsessed with your work, constantly running off to try and get yourself killed without telling me, like you did two weeks ago, and every time I introduce a topic of conversation that's outside the realm of the X-Files, you brush it off like dandruff. Which you have, coincidentally." With a bemused look on his face that would have been comical in any other situation, he raised a hand to his hair. She shook her head with annoyed resignation. "Why do you think you're in love with me anyway? You don't even have an emotional attachment to your fish, how to you think you can handle a whole person?" The destroyed look on his face clawed at her, but she struggled to ignore it. He took in harsh breaths, and when he turned his face up to her again, she saw his eyes bright and wet. He spoke, his voice small and broken, "I-I don't know why I'm in love with you. I didn't want to be. I lost Sam and then I lost my parents, and nothing mattered for a long time. I didn't believe in love, because it ruined everything I ever knew. My parents' love for Sam killed their love for me, and for each other. And I thought for all this time that I was above it, that it couldn't touch me if I didn't want it to. But then I saw you one day . . ." There was something new and beautiful on his face as he looked at her. "It was just a normal, stupid day, but I looked up, and saw you, and realized that sometimes love is more than sadness. And it was all a lie after that, and I couldn't get rid of it." He wiped a hand across his eyes violently, holding out the tears to her as proof. "Do you see this?" he asked desperately. "I feel like I've spent my entire life on the verge of tears. My eyes always want to water, my voice always wants to tremble. I feel the world behind me every moment, and it makes me want to spend each second weeping. I have nothing in me anymore. Everything went wrong, and all I can see now is you." He stepped forward, pleading at her. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this, Scully, can't you see? I was supposed to be a professor somewhere, visiting my little sister on the weekends and playing with her kids, sending my parents one present to one house on all the holidays, coming home and kissing my wife on the cheek and watching football in the winter and baseball in the summer and maybe even sleeping the night through. Something went wrong a long time ago and destroyed it all, and God help me, sometimes I'm glad. Actually glad that a disaster put me on the road to this hole of an office. Because in that perfect, intentioned life I never would have met you. And I would always be missing something, because you've gotten inside of me and I can't get you out. I can't even want to." He watched her, smiling a small, sad smile. "So, Dr. Scully, do you have an explanation for that? Because I sure as hell don't." She wondered if she had ever realized what he knew. That all the good in the world was disguised by all the bad. She had spent her life smiling while others fell, proving to everyone who asked and everyone who didn't that she could make it, even when she didn't want to. She had thought herself right and moral, but suddenly, in the closing silence that took control of them, she wasn't so sure anymore. "You . . . you do love me," she said. He nodded without a word. She shook her head, wishing she could deny it. She raised her eyes to him. He was beautiful. "I don't want to love you." It was true. Love kills. Slowly, secretly. It takes you apart from the inside, lays you bare for anything that wishes to hurt you. It gives you a whole other life to live and fear for. And no one is ever allowed to be that happy for too long. The view from Scully's eyes was clear now. She could see, for the first time, that nothing is ever designed to make sense. And that everyone dies a thousand times. "It's the strangest thing," she said to Mulder. I don't want to love you." She shook her head, smiling in vague confusion. "But I do. How does that happen?" He moved forward, took her in his arms, and stared down at her. "Life makes it happen. Because life is more than sadness, too." For everything. And nothing. For love and life and all the other terrors. She realized that it didn't matter, because the world existed in his eyes. "I do believe, "That not everything is gonna be the way you think it oughta be. "It seems like everytime I try to make it right it all comes down on me. "Please say honestly "You won't give up on me. "I shall believe." -Sheryl Crow.