From: Emma Baker Date: Tue Dec 17 00:26:42 1996 Hidely hey. This vignette came out of an instant-message conversation with Alicia (XENAwpAM) tonight on AOL . This is my first published piece of fanfic and it's all coming to me very fast, so be merciful! Feedback of any form is *much* appreciated, to emmalanna@aol.com Please feel free to forward to a.t.x.c. and to archive anywhere it's wanted. DISCLAIMER: Don't own 'em, sorry. Someone else does (namely Fox Television/1013). Not that it matters really, since the characters aren't namechecked herein nor described in any specific terms. I also don't own T.S. Eliot - though I wish I did - so apologies for the vague allusion to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." CATEGORIES: V RATING: G SPOILERS: Inspired by "Paper Hearts" but nothing that would spoil anything for anyone. Set in the vague present. Friendship only, sorry, but still with poignancy. SUMMARY: Scully has a dream which causes her to reassess her life situation and relationship with Mulder. TEN SECONDS (or, PINEAPPLE JUICE) By Emma Baker Ten seconds. Scientists claim that our dreams during REM sleep can be compacted into less than a minute each; dozens of dreams, one after another, preceded by hours of blank, voided sleep. But her dreams could never be reduced to such minute percentages of a night's sleep. Where other people had visions of light and hope and exotic scapes of pulsing light and epiphany, her dreams resembled something more like a sitcom, with characters entering and exiting. Seldom humor, just conversation. Her dreamscape was not one of valleys and babbling brooks, but a plywood set whereupon her subconscious thoughts were acted. If she had nightmares, she never knew them - those were not the fragments floating around her mind in the haziness of morning. Her dreams were the stage where she could experience all those events she had been denied, or denied herself. Nothing risque or out of her realm of experience. An alternate universe, if you will. Six hours ago she had burrowed down in her bed. This was the first chilly night they'd had all year. She loved the cold, and took great delight in turning down the thermostat and pulling out her heavy blankets to be pulled upon her bed, donning her flannel pajamas and setting her chai spice tea on the corner of her bedside table. Her life had enough trauma and precariousness to suit twelve people, but none of it mattered when she could wrap herself into cushioned softness. But after lying there in that blissful cocoon for nearly a half hour, sleep wouldn't come. She had warmed herself up into an insomatic oblivion, and - to be honest - she was bored out of her mind. She composed imaginary letters to her long lost college friends, made a mental "to do" list, then started reworking their last case again, just to make certain she'd tied up all those loose ends and not overlooked anything which would have proved herself right for a change. Still, awake. She stumbled out of bed and poured a glass of pineapple juice, hoping its chill would have the opposite of its intended effect and lull her to sleep. But after she'd taken that first long draught, her mind screamed, "acid, Dana! Definitely not good for the digestion this late at night." Still, it was half-drunk already... what would be the harm? And now back to bed, and fortunately, sleep washed over her and down her stomach along with the juice. Citric acid swished around in her stomach then floated upwards, enveloping itself in the folds of her brain. Six hours. 360 minutes later. She was in the midst of one of those short vignette dreams which always seemed to have a full plot - beginning, middle, end - when her stomach grumbled. This manifested itself in the dream as a rumbling of the walls. A thunderstorm? She walked down the street... and the dream segued into another, seamlessly and hardly before she knew it. Funny how in her dreams she lived in a different world where there was a whole world which was hers - yet only in that universe. The dream-street she traversed led to her dream-house, but only in these ten seconds. She walked, hardly making a sound, toward who knew what, only that she knew she was on the right path. A man shared that path, about twenty yards ahead of her. He was so very familiar to her, even though the coat in which he wrapped himself left little of his skin for her to see. She saw the quest he was on spread out before them, like a cartographer's antique atlas carved in gold leaf on the cement. His light steps betrayed his haste - a stranger would hardly see the frantic fear in his eyes any more than she could. But her eyes seemed to see straight through his skull and she saw the world through those retinas. She picked up her speed and even though he continued to stroll she could not gain on his pace. Somehow she felt as if he was on his own path and that whatever she might do would never bring her into his dimension. She knew that there would be moments, further down the street, where he would be driven on his own and she would be unable to reach him, though not for lack of trying. These were the times of that other world. And she knew that there would be other times when they would walk in tandem, hearts beating toward the same goal. Why couldn't they merge? She knew that sometimes she would have to stay apart - the participant/observer - but those were her darkest hours, knowing she had the resources to help but would always be separated from him by pavement. She knew that she had to find a way to merge the two, but also knew there was no way she could without tearing away those pavement barriers. And then she woke, not with a bang but a whimper. Even though it was "about that time" to get up, she lay in bed in that curious state between sleeping and awake. Where she could lie for hours and just think without having the faintest interest in the outside world. Where her dream was the reality. And, thinking about that reality, she became nervous and edgy. Would she always be forced to live behind a wall when he was intent on his own quest? She knew that she had as great a stake in the search as did he - even more so, as it had literally touched her personally. But although those moments were few and far between, they were growing in frequency and she became frightened of being left behind again - of being ditched. And in her somnambulance she knew her only choice was confrontation. To tell him of her fears and to break him out of that singlemindedness that always left her in the wake. Profundity out of sitcom dreams. The contrast did not escape her. She dressed quickly and peeled out of the apartment. Her foots hit the pavement - not the pavement of the night before but of this universe. And the proverbial weight left her shoulders, for she knew that now he would have to realise that the quest -win or lose- was theirs together.