From: "Morgan" <morganstuart@mindspring.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 07:17:14 -0500
Subject: Warmth by Morgan Stuart
Source: direct

Title: Warmth
Author: Morgan Stuart (morganstuart@mindspring.com)
Disclaimers: No copyright infringement is intended.
Keywords: S, TLG
Terms: Post-Col, Character Deaths, A/U
Rating: R (adult situations) 
Spoilers: General knowledge of all eight seasons through "Empedocles,"
specific mention of "Unusual Suspects" and "Three of a Kind."
Summary: It's eleven years in the future, eight since "the cataclysm,"
and only three of the characters we know have survived.
 
 
 
"The soul perishes not of dark
But of cold.
The soul in deep distress
Seeks not light but warmth,
Not counsel but understanding."
-Author Unknown
 
Strange, what dreams haunted her now. She had lost her child--her
second daughter, not even as old as her first had been when she, too,
had died--and the baby's father, her partner, and her other partner,
the one she always thought of as the new one, no matter how many years
had passed, and the Assistant Director who had overseen them both, and
family and friends in numbers too staggering and too complete to
comprehend even now, and yet her nightmare included none of these
irreparable losses. 
 
She woke suddenly, with the image still in her mind. The men were
Aboveground, both of them, murdered. Bright red blood drenched light
golden hair, tangling the strands as it thickened, and also smeared
past open, grey-blue eyes as they stared up in stoic calm at the
wounded sky. 
 
She shuddered, and two bodies instinctively drew her closer. It was
just a dream, not reality. She felt a large hand move on her shoulder,
a breath against her neck, and the rise and fall of another chest
beneath her cheek. 
 
How strange, she thought, would it be for Mulder or Doggett or Skinner
to walk in and see her now, spooned against one man, pillowed upon
another. But the thought did not disturb her somehow. Deep, deep
Belowground, this small circle of flesh and breath and need was as
vital as food and air and water. The years and the cataclysm had
changed all of the survivors, and dwindled her world to include only
two. 
 
On the day the infection took the surface like so much flashfire, an
unintended but deadly repercussion of a colonization not yet fully
realized, only the most slender thread of fate had sent Frohike out
with Mulder and little Melissa for a day of work--and, undoubtedly,
play--and left Scully with Langly and Byers deep beneath the Lone
Gunmen Headquarters, heads buried in research. At first the three
survivors were united in denial and shock; she was not so far gone
that she couldn't appreciate that the men's world was stripped of a
constant just as hers had been. Frohike may not have been the most
normal or sane of men, but he had been a part of their lives, of their
whole, just as Mulder and little Melissa had been of hers. Rudderless,
drifting in disbelief, it took some time to realize that they had lost
more than three people, that they were an island spared in an almost
planetary flood. 
 
Eight years and hundreds of miles later, their combined intellects
purchased a survival of sorts for the three, as they protected
themselves from the virulent plagues of an injured planet and the very
real threat posed by roving bands of the walking wounded who had
escaped the first wave of death. The years were hard on each of them; 
she knew she had aged, and she could see it in the other two faces. 
Langly's face bore a pattern of wrinkles from the hours he spent
pouring over electronics: generators for power and computers for the
ongoing search for information and, perhaps, contact with individuals
who were similarly buried and biding time. Every so often she or Byers
would float the idea of braving the Aboveground long enough to
navigate the ruins of some local town; surely, somewhere, some
abandoned store had a pair of prescription glasses never claimed by an
owner, glasses that would do more good than harm for Langly's eyes.
But the danger always seemed too grave to risk anything more than
Byers' limited few minutes to patrol and check external systems--even
Langly agreed--and thus his shattered lenses were not replaced. So he
narrowed his eyes and labored over enlarged fonts and small equipment
that refused to come into focus. When the headaches were bad, he
availed himself of the alcohol Byers somehow had scavenged for him.
When the headaches were worse, Byers forced him to lie down and the
older man, exhausted himself, became Langly's eyes and fingers,
reading the screen or describing the wires and following his friend's
directions. 
 
Byers used the precious moments to sink into an almost trancelike
rest, not second-guessing Langly or offering commentary, but
appreciating the moment's respite from thought, from life-or-death
decision making and its opposite, monotonous, thankless labor. He wore
his hair slightly longer, his beard somewhat thicker, to protect
against the frigid climate to which they'd migrated in a combination
of retreat and quest. The grey at his chin and temples grew every
year, and on the days when he labored over the generators and fought
the elements, he tended to return with a hesitant limp. She knew he
had agonies not as evident but every bit as real as Langly's, and she
gave him the space to unwind as much as he was able, and an ear ready
to hear his personal complaints, even though he never shared them. 
 
The two had proven more adaptable, more skilled than she could ever
imagine, and she knew she owed her life to them. She tried to return
the favor by using her own knowledge as best she could: what was
edible, what was necessary, how to sterilize and treat and prevent and
heal. The three had stayed in that symbiosis for years, connected and
yet distinct and apart. 

Then came the day that Langly, in disgust at some malfunction that
might have been trivial or life-threatening--Scully never seemed to
know which was which with him--offered a loud, bawdy, and completely
unexpected joke. She laughed without thinking, and then hesitated at
the unfamiliar sound. Langly, too, seemed surprised at her giggle, but
grinned widely as he returned to his work. He did not try it again
soon, but she later realized that he watched her, and planned and
plotted for the next time he could get her to react with something as
spontaneous and true. He won smiles and chuckles over the months. 
Then, one day, after she stretched and sighed in almost tearful
fatigue, she turned and embraced him and nearly fell asleep standing
up, her face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and, with
the same unselfconsciousness with which he did everything else, he
followed his instinct and just sang to her, forgotten songs by dead
musicians--who once had been underground in their own way--in an
off-tune tenor. That night she took him to her bed. 

Byers joined them much later. At first, the revelation about Scully
and Langly did little but make the soft-spoken man even more quiet, a
painful combination of shy embarrassment and discreet respect that was
as difficult to receive as it was to offer. The initial awkwardness
settled into a rhythm, one that kept their joined lives together while
leaving Byers adrift in a way they had not intended but could not
remedy. Then, one day, a couple of years later, Byers returned from a
routine patrol Aboveground, flushed and disoriented, aware only that
something was terribly wrong. After a restless nap he locked himself
in the small storage room where he slept and, when they came to check
on him, begged them to abandon him; he was ill, he knew it, with one
of many terrible diseases that fed on the survivors, and he would not
infect them or contaminate their home further. They needed to
relocate, he urged, and leave him behind.

They pleaded with him and, when his voice gave out, they broke down
his door. As the hours and days progressed, Scully believed he would
die. His fever refused to break, even when they doused him with their
precious water, and his conscious moments were few. Finally, when
chills racked his body and no amount of blankets could keep him warm,
Langly carried him to their bed. They curled around him, knowing they
might be embracing a dying man and their own deaths as well, but they
willingly shared their heat and their hope with him. 

He did not die, and neither did they. The fever left him with strange,
small gaps in his memory--faces with no names, names with no
faces--but they all knew it could have been far worse. His humiliation
at waking almost nude in between the lovers eventually faded as he was
persuaded of the earnestness of their invitation to remain in the one
spot where no drafts chilled the air and sank into his bones. For not
the first time in Byers' life, the entire world and its system of
rules and certainties changed in the course of a day. Both Langly and
Scully were adamant, still shaken by how close they had come to losing
him, and so the recuperating Byers made their bed his own.

When they touched her, a combination of urgent passion and gentle
worship from men as different as night and day, life was real. The two
did not touch each other, except in inadvertent moments while
exploring Scully, but she expected that, too, would change over time.
But even better than the lovemaking with one, or the other, or both,
was the closeness of sleep sandwiched between the two men.

It wasn't love--at least, it wasn't the grand passion. Scully knew
Byers had known the real thing, and continued to adore and mourn his
mysterious Susanne Modeski in his heart of hearts. She knew Langly had
never had such a relationship and believed he never would. She also
knew she once had touched something in between, something neither
grand nor invisible, but elusive and aching, and the dead man and his
daughter would live in her forever.

It was comfort, and respect--respect for men she had failed to take
seriously for far too long, for men who had risked their lives for her
even as she had mocked them, for friends closer than brothers who had
offered her sanctuary when her world ended one afternoon--and the
truest compassion she had ever experienced. It was their one weapon
against the cataclysm and the aliens and traitors who had caused it,
against the death that had robbed them of loved ones and the years
that were stealing their strength. It was the honesty of Langly's
chest against her back, of Byers' chest beneath her cheek. Not the
grand passion, but a viable strain of love nonetheless.

The dream was only a memory now. Langly's large hand had grown still 
on her shoulder, and Byers sighed softly beneath her. Their work could 
wait a few minutes longer, she decided. She drifted back to sleep, 
grateful for their warmth.

The End