From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: 5 Sep 2003 03:46:03 -0000
Subject: What Happens to the Dreamers (1 of 4) by Buckingham
Source: direct

Reply To: buckingham15@diviy.pair.com



Title: What Happens to the Dreamers
Author: Buckingham
E-mail: buckingham15@yahoo.com
Classification: S, M/S
Spoilers: everything up through Season 8 is fair game
Timeline:  I'd say the events of this story start in
early 2000, after SUZ/Closure, but to be honest with
you, CC played around with him timeline so much, my
head is still spinning.  I may be a little confused;
so goes the story.
Summary: If only you believe in miracles ...
Disclaimer:  I don't own Mulder, Scully, or anyone
else you might recognize by name.  They are the lawful
property of CC, 1013, and FOX.

For e., who asked for this story.

- x -

We've been apart too long, too painfully separated.
How can you bear to dream,
to give up watching?  I think you must be dreaming,
your face is full of mild expectancy.

I need to wake you, to remind you that there isn't a
future.
That's why we're free.  And now some weakness in me
has been cured forever, so I'm not compelled
to close my eyes, to go back, to rectify --

                   --- Louise Gluck, 'Night Song'

- x -

She is thinking about miracles herself -- how fickle
they are, how flimsy and coy they seem -- so when
Jefferson Starship taunts her from the car radio, she
starts to wonder if it might be some kind of
conspiracy.

Mulder once told her, long ago, in that lost,
unfamiliar time when they both still thought she'd
walk away someday, that the song reminded him of their
partnership.  He didn't mention the sexual current
running all through the lyrics, but she could tell
from his smart, foxy grin that he was aware she knew
more than just the chorus.  From then on, on a
thousand different occasions, he'd lay it on her  
spoken in the dusky warmth of their office, hissed in
beat-up rental cars, whispered in bright hallways so
nosy members of a local PD wouldn't overhear, shouted
in muggy airport waiting rooms and across sticky diner
booths with his mouth full.

"If only you believe like I believe, baby, we'd get
by," he'd whine, always amused at heart.  "If only you
believe in miracles, so would I..."

She was annoyed when he started it, feeling like he
was making her the butt of some private joke, but the
longer it went on, the longer she was subjected to his
own personal form of karaoke, the more endearing it
became, until finally it seemed almost charming, full
of affection and honesty.  So many things about Mulder
seem to go that way, irritation giving way to
tenderness.

He pretends now that he doesn't hear the song, that it
has no significance.  There is so much these days that
he deems in bad taste, so much that he worries over.
He clutches the steering wheel like an overeager
Driver's Ed student, watching the road like he doesn't
know where he's going and might miss a turn off.  He
bounces a leg restlessly, chews on his lip.

She sighs and leans her head against the window.
When they get to the office, he'll bring her a cup of
the cinnamon tea she likes from the coffee shop on E
Street, slide it onto her desk gingerly like some kind
of burnt offering, like she's some wild, angry
creature that must be tamed, like she's some fragile,
shell-shocked child who can't tolerate sudden
movements.  He'll lower the lights and speak in a
hushed, mellow tone, as if she has a headache, though
she knows that Mulder worries it's actually her heart.
 He is terrified of a pounding, bitter heartache.

Snap out of it, she wants to scream. Leave it alone.
It's not my heart that's broken, Mulder.  It's my
reproductive system and no amount of sweet tea or
quiet consideration will change that.  Stop with the
watery, anxious eyes and hyper-sensitive doting
routine.  Stop all this relentless, shameful pity.

At the wheel, his head jerks back, like he's been
sucker-punched, and she wonders if he's somehow
reading her thoughts again.  Outside, the sun performs
its own miracle, rising up over the city for one more
day.

- x -

In the photo, Mulder was a god, all wisdom and might,
choking her with his beauty.

It was just a trick of light and shadow, she knew, the
strange angle that it was shot from, up-close so his
face was washed pure and smooth in the golden glare,
as if the mist that had surrounded them on that beach
in Maine had bleed through to stain the film, leave
Mulder blazing.  She remembered standing on the silver
rocks beside him, over him really, the disposable
camera shaking in her hand when she shivered.  There
was thick, slimy seaweed beneath her bare feet and
salt stinging her chapped lips, but Mulder took up the
entire frame, solitary and lovely, just off-center so
he seemed to be moving even in that flat,
one-dimensional world, spinning out a glow.  Cool,
watery sunlight, ancient as time, circled him, bounced
off his white t-shirt, and fell like a halo around his
dark head.  There was just a hint of tender blue sky,
seeping in around the edges, as if Mulder had called
it there himself, decided it should be so.

They had just broken a cycle of death, caused by
either voodoo curses or clever arsenic poisoning
depending on who was asked, but Mulder still barely
smiled, just quirking his mouth slightly like he was
fighting it off, like he held the power within himself
to do so.  There were his sleepy, kind eyes, though,
that made him look calm, almost sage.  He looked as if
he could blight out war and famine, tear down the
heavens and build them anew, dole out life and death
like the corner grocer passed out fruit and
vegetables.

He was shimmering like the sea, burning like a faraway
star, as devastating as an earthquake.

She couldn't keep the photo in a frame or an album.
She liked to hold it in her hands, trace its lines and
curves, so she tucked it away in the top drawer of her
beside table, smudged with her greasy fingerprints,
curling near the edges like leaves.   So many times,
she wanted to crawl inside it, live in that radiant,
controlled world with him, because whenever she looked
at the picture, she saw it: Mulder as God, Mulder as
pure spirit, Mulder as the all-knowing, all-powerful
center of a universe.

He'd challenged death, hers and his own, over and over
again like some bad video game, teetering on that
slippery edge between here and gone too many times,
always going back for more.  In her bruised heart, she
knew that he'd done what a team of doctors and her
mother's prayers could not -- he saved her from the
disease that invaded her body. He'd brought her back
from the cold, bitter ends of the earth too,
frostbitten and awed.  He'd banished monsters, with
their human eyes and black, nightmare hearts. He'd
faced down the devil and all his chain-smoking,
soul-stealing magic tricks without blinking.  He'd
lived in her dreams, read minds, surfed on speeding
trains, brought down rains of frogs and fire, absorbed
bullets and blades, looked at her and recognized her
old soul, fiery like his own, and charmed her.  He'd
shown her a thousand secret, sacred glories of the
earth and heavens without really trying.

In the end, he was the only one that she could ask to
help her with creation.

- x -

"I can feel it, Scully," he says, jumping up
bullet-fast from his creaky leather sofa.  "There's
something fishy here.  Something we're missing."

She watches him pace the floor in front of the coffee
table like an overeager lawyer in some bad courtroom
drama, and it annoys her.  He's twitchy and rumpled,
raring to go, but she only feels worn out.  She
remembers that she put fresh sheets on her bed this
morning, and that is all she can think about: all that
clean, cool cotton waiting at home for her.

"Maybe Garth Healy is lying.  Maybe he knows a little
something about black magic that he's not sharing."

"Have you even considered the possibility that there's
no magic involved here at all?" she asks, moving out
of the slump she's fallen into on his couch. "That it
just is what it is?"  She yawns but doesn t bother to
cover her mouth.  She tries to remember where she left
her shoes.

"Scully.  Please."  He smiles dismissively, plowing
ahead.  "I dug up some interesting stuff on that
discord and darkness hex.  It's in a folder somewhere
on my hard drive."

When he's in these manic, charged moods, Mulder is
almost too familiar to her.  He's the man she first
met, years ago in that dingy basement, when she
thought all the answers could be found in
laboratories, science text books, with her feet
planted firmly this world.  He's wishing on stars,
dropping coins in fountains, blowing out birthday
candles, hoping and believing, while she lectures him
that none of it means anything, has any validity.  She
knows how this game works.

Mulder heads for the kitchen, walking backwards.
"I'll go make some coffee.  Take a look at that stuff
and tell me what you think."

"Mulder, the case is officially closed and it's almost
midnight.  Can t this wait until--"

"I forget what I called the file but you should be
able to find it."

He winks like some sleazy barfly, confident and
lacking any self-awareness.  She watches him trot into
the kitchen and fights the urge to bang her head
against the wall.

She should just get up and leave.  He wouldn't hold it
against her, she thinks. Because, really, he's happy
to get away from her when she's tired and cranky and
impossible to please. But it's not like she's doing
him a favor; this is what she gets paid for after all.
 She can hear cups clattering in the kitchen, water
rushing from the faucet, Mulder cursing himself, and
she decides to give in.  It's easier to deal with him
when he's like this anyway -- relentless, inspired,
inconsiderate.

His computer is the same disorganized treasure chest
that his office is, that his jam-packed hall closet
is.  It annoys her that he is always able to find
whatever it is he's looking for, that in the mess, he
can always find the gems.  She wishes sometimes that
she understood the way his mind worked, why he has a
file full of Yankees  box scores and interviews with
Latrell Sprewell in the same folder that holds
research on mermaids and prehistoric sea creatures.
He'd probably explain some complicated, faulty line of
logic that would seem all too obvious to her after the
fact.  Mulder has always been a step ahead of her.

She's too tired to try to read his mind now, though,
so she's ready to give up when all she comes across
are Mulder's ramblings on Yetis, a map of the
Galapagos Islands, and obviously doctored pictures of
what is supposed to be a jackalope.   There's one last
place to look, a folder within a folder within a
folder, and she tells herself she'll check this one
last place and if she can't find Mulder's research,
she's leaving.  She'll be able to feel like she gave
it an honest effort then, like she's earned a good
night's sleep.  The folder is titled 'possibilities,'
which certainly seems generic enough but with Mulder,
the most innocent of words can hide the sinister, the
divine, the sublime, the outrageous.  She opens the
folder, accepting that crapshoot.

Not for the first time since she's met Mulder, she
cannot believe what she's seeing.

His apartment is the gloomy, secret world it always
is, with its dim mood lighting and drafty windows, but
the computer screen glows like neon, crass and
presumptuous.  It's as if she is unable to understand
the language, to recognize the symbols that represent
words, sentences, thoughts.  She thinks maybe she
needs her glasses since it all seems a jumbled mess,
everything running together.  She wonders if the
monitor is shaking, and reaches out to steady it with
her hand.  How else to explain it, she thinks.  She
couldn't possibly be reading what she thinks she's
reading.

Application forms to several clinical trials.
Research reports downloaded from renowned fertility
clinics.  E-mail correspondence with an expert in
obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology from
Harvard Med and a reproductive endocrinologist at
Johns Hopkins, detailing her own case history, though
Mulder had the good taste to leave her name out of it.
 A budget, looking fairly formal and serious,
attempting to account for the cost of further
treatments, hospital stays.  Articles on various
fertility rituals -- belly dancing in ancient Egypt,
the moon's significance in Wiccan fertility rites.

He never imagined that she'd find them, she thinks, or
he wouldn't have let her at his hard drive.  Maybe he
forgot they were even there, the whole situation
seeming like so much of a lost cause that even Mulder,
king of the impossible and improbable, had to let it
go.  He must have buried it so deep in his hard drive
that he'd never have to look at it again, be reminded
of what failure looked like, even from afar.

She smells coffee, that rich French roast Mulder likes
so much, and knows that he is behind her, knows that
he is immediately aware of what she's found.  The
floor creaks beneath him like a sigh, and she closes
her eyes, hopes the screen will be blank when she
opens them, hopes the room will somehow transform
itself into her bedroom and she'll be alone, dreaming.

"I'm sorry," is all he can manage, in a weak, sad
voice that makes him sound as though he's calling up
from under the sea, sputtering through murky water,
gulping desperately for air.  "Scully.  I'm sorry.  I
didn't mean to..."

She turns and looks at him, astonished.  He has their
coffee mugs in his hands, and there is steam rising
from them, but it looks like it's pouring off of him,
like he's giving off a vapor-trail of guilt and
regret.  Her eyes are blurry, though, with just a few
renegade tears, as if that's all she can muster up
after seven years of missing time and dead sisters,
hospital rooms and lost children, starlight and silent
love.

He opens his mouth, his lips trembling around words
that never achieve sound, so he gives up, standing
mute.  It doesn't matter since she is past hearing
him.  She shakes her head, trying to make the thoughts
come together.  The computer, their very own Pandora's
box, calls her back and she clicks through the files
one more time, making sure she understands, that she's
gotten it right.  Mulder touches her, his hands like
lead on her shoulders, and she can't help flinching,
jerking to the front of the chair and banging her
elbows on his desk.

"Scully.  I was only trying--"

But she holds up her hand, unable to look at him, to
see the guilty, shamed look she knows she'll find in
his eyes, desperate for him to shut up and leave her
alone.

It is strange to be so caught off-guard, she thinks.
This is the Mulder she knows so well.  He is always
the boy caught with a hand in the cookie jar, poking
around where he's not supposed to, crossing lines and
pushing boundaries.  He is always that persistent
little engine that refuses to not believe, chugging up
the hill no matter how steep or slippery the slope, no
matter how bad the crash up ahead might be.  This may
be who he is, down at heart, but it still feels like a
betrayal, a knife twisting in her heart and carving
out all the tender, hopeful spaces.

He spent whole nights thinking of her as some charity
case, as a science project, something broken and
damaged that he could fix.  She never imagined he'd
ever see her as any of those things, never wanted him
to feel obligated to her by pity or guilt.  She tried
to believe that it was something deeper, something
more pure, that made him say yes.  If she had known
that he only saw her as some personal X-File, a wrong
he'd set into motion that he could finally right, she
never would have asked.

"Scully, don't go like this," he says, when she is on
her knees recovering her shoes from beneath his sofa.
"We can talk about this, damn it."

She finds her car keys next and is out the door, into
that bright hallway where he tried to kiss her into
submission a lifetime ago.  She thinks that she knows
the very spot where they stood and sidesteps it
because she expects him to charge after her, try
again.  When she looks back over her shoulder, he is
slumped in his doorway, immobile.  His savage, dark
eyes make him look like he s in shock.

"I'm sorry, Scully," he calls after her again but the
elevator is stealing her away, and she's not even sure
she knows what he means.

- x -

"I wouldn t want this to come between us," he told
her, and she thought she knew what he meant then, what
was at stake.  She knew how easy it would be for them
to be undone by what she was asking, but she was
blinded with this sudden want, this screaming,
taunting need.  There was no way she could admit to
herself that the whole thing would never work.   She
tried to think of it as a neat, tidy arrangement but
the truth was that they'd set no boundaries, made no
concrete plans beyond the procedure itself, didn't
even broach the legal aspects of the situation, what a
birth certificate might say.

She hadn't allowed herself to wonder if Mulder would
be there in the delivery room with her, letting her
crush his fingers when the pain tore through her body,
whispering ineffective words of encouragement, wiping
the sweat from her face and looking pale and squeamish
like a thousand other fathers-to-be.   He didn't say
if he expected visitation rights, if he wanted this
child to call him daddy or Uncle Fox or just plain
Mulder.  She didn't know if he daydreamed about the
possible quirks of genetics like she did, picturing
lovely little girls with red hair and mossy eyes,
chubby little boys with thick dark hair and cool icy
eyes.  She didn't know if he thought about names while
waiting in line at the bank like she did, if the sound
of babies on the street made his heart twist with a
hopeful ache as they always seemed to do to her.

She had asked him to do this for her, to take the one
leap of faith that didn't come naturally to even
Mulder, and still there was so much left unsaid, so
much she had been afraid to ask or tell him.   It was
an old habit, a silly, familiar dance that always left
room for doubt.  For years she d loved him across
distances, keeping it all to herself like she was
hoarding buried treasure.  She hadn't been able to
tell him, in those bleak, apocalyptic days, that her
cancer was winning, that she was starting to give in.
She couldn't tell him because she knew it meant that
their entire world would change.  She didn't tell him
about the loneliness at the heart of her, the way it
bit at her and made her vulnerable to dark, dangerous
men who weren't him.

There was no way to tell him when, barely knowing him
a year, she fell in love with his wild, fierce mind,
its fearlessness, its cleverness, compassion.  She
didn't tell him that even though she was someone
well-versed in anatomy, in the way the human body
looked and worked on the inside, she couldn't bear to
think of it solely as a brain, with the same gray
matter, neurons and synapses as everyone else's.  It
wasn't just part of some mechanical, automatic nervous
system.  It was stunning, lovely, its own everyday
miracle.  She fell hard but couldn't let him know.

And Mulder was speechless so much of the time himself.
 He hadn't told her what had been done to her body all
those years ago, what she had lost.  He hadn't been
able to find a way to tell her until it was too late,
until she was already angry, already devastated and
mourning.  He never told her when he started to think
about kissing her, about leaning in for a
socially-acceptable New Year's kiss that was as sweet
and nervous as the peck she'd gotten from Davy
Cranford at his thirteenth birthday party.  He hadn't
confessed that he had started to see her as a woman,
not just a competent sidekick, a friend to bandage his
wounds and laugh at his dirty jokes.  And he hadn't
ever explained about his own dark, dangerous other,
that lost woman who seemed to have had his heart and
trust twisted deeply between her claws.

Trust no one, someone told him once, and he was fond
of repeating it, but she didn't think that he ever
really practiced what he preached.  He gave his trust
away free and easy, anytime foggy figures told him
what he wanted to hear or his sister's name was
mentioned.  Except, of course, when it came to her.
Then there was always something to hide, some tiny bit
of the truth he couldn't trust her with.

That's what will always come between them, she thinks.
 Things left unsaid.  Truths untold.  Now she is
beginning to wonder whether they'll ever be able to
speak to one another simply and honestly. She wonders
if she'll ever be able to explain what she meant when
she asked him to father her child.  She wonders if any
of it really matters anymore.

- x -

He calls in the middle of the night.  She has only
left him a couple of hours ago, but still she feels a
shaking inside her, like there's something wrong with
her blood.

"Skinner is sending us to Connecticut," he tells her.
"Groton, to be exact.  Near "

"New London.  The Coast Guard Academy, right?"

"Right.  Next town over."

"What's in Groton?" she asks.  She is proud that her
voice sounds normal, competent and interested in what
he has to say.  She sounds remarkably like Agent
Scully.

"Three unexplained deaths.  In each case the victim
was last seen in one location and then their bodies
were found clear across town."

"What's the big deal about that?"

"There's only a five or so minute interval between the
time they were last seen alive and when their bodies
were found but in each case, the murder scene is clear
across town.  A fifteen minute drive at least.  It's
physically impossible," he says.  "At least according
to the local PD."

"Well, then that certainly sounds like our kind of
work."

"Indeed," he says.  "Our flight leaves at ten-thirty
tomorrow morning.  Meet in the office? Around
seven-thirty?"

"That's fine."

She hears him breathing into the phone, rough and
desperate like an obscene caller.  She is waiting for
him to say good night.  Somehow she can't hang up
until he does.

"Scully, listen.  I want you to know--"

"Mulder, it's late."  She rubs at her eyes, at the
ache behind them.  "It's too late for the sorts of
things you're thinking about saying."

"Too late for tonight or too late indefinitely?"

She would like to forget it all, to go back to the
life she had four hours ago.  She wants to never speak
of what she saw.  They have bulldozed past worse
things in their time together, hurdled heavier,
clumsier obstacles.  But she can't forget what he's
done.  She can't forget her hurt.  She can't pretend
that he doesn't love her in a way that he can't
control.

"I don't know," she finally confesses.

He sniffs heavily into the phone.  She knows that he
is in the dark, brooding in his cave of an apartment,
torturing himself in ways that Spender couldn't even
fathom.  She slides uncomfortably against her sheets.
She can feel Mulder s crushed heart across miles.  The
moon outside her window is curled and sickly.

"Okay.  Right," Mulder says.  She hears the creak of
leather, of weight being shifted.  "Good night,
Scully."

As soon as she drops the phone, she wants to get him
back on the line, to ask him why.  She is too alone,
feeling this way about him.  She hugs her pillow and
imagines Mulder s voice.

- x -

The first thing Mulder ever taught her was how to get
free soda from the machine on the fourth floor at
Hoover.  He had an elaborate system of button tapping
and machine jiggling that without fail produced a cold
can of Coke, or Diet Coke when he performed the trick
for her, without so much as a nickel.  But she was a
good little agent, always feeling a little bit guilty
about bilking Uncle Sam out of eighty-five cents. She
only used the lesson if her blood sugar was
particularly low and her change purse was empty, or if
it had been a bad week and she was feeling bitter
about the Bureau, about the government, about the
entire concept of justice.

Once, in the ballroom of a nearly deserted Marriot
somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, he taught her how
to fox trot.  Snow piled up in dense drifts outside
and the wind howled like some ancient beast, but
inside there were logs burning and she only stepped on
his feet three times, stumbled over her own twice.
She hadn't thought to ask him at the time where he'd
learned himself -- it was too surreal, too strange to
be pressed against the warm black material of his
sweater, tripping light all around them -- but she
wondered about it later, lying on stiff, yellowed sheets
trying to sleep, when her body still remembered the
way that they moved together.

One slow afternoon in the basement, he taught her how
to read tarot cards, and at first she thought he was
making the whole thing up just to tease her.  The
cards that she chose were bright and cartoonish,
harmless when she looked at them closely, but Mulder
claimed that they spoke of her tightly closed mind,
the fact that she was always pained when she couldn't
provide answers to questions being asked.  He didn't
even smirk when he explained the final card, with its
picture of a glaring sun, which instructed her to say
what she felt because the only way she could achieve
personal growth was through self-expression.  She
actually thought about sticking her tongue out when he
was finished, but she held it together, only offered
up a dubious scowl, and picked the cards up so she
could do a reading for him.  She started to believe in
the possibility of tarot when she was able to tell
Mulder that he'd been too generous with those in need
in the past, almost dangerously so, and that because
his emotions were unfocused he needed to be more
discreet.  Mulder actually did stick his tongue out at
her when she tapped his final card, the Emperor, and
told him that he needed to play by the rules and only
through logic, reason, and common sense would he
achieve success.  That kept her smiling until they
packed up and headed home for the night.

He also taught her a couple of yoga positions when he
thought she was too stressed, too knotted up with
tension and anger.  He taught her a good short-cut to
his apartment from hers that took her past the bakery
with the cinnamon twists she liked.  He tried to teach
her a decent jump shot in a Y gym once, but her short
little legs were against them from the start.  He did
manage to teach her how to hit a baseball, how to send
one flying into orbit in a sky stained with stars.
She thought she could have lived without him teaching
her the fine art of making mustard, pepperoni, and
potato chip sandwiches but that didn't seem to temper
his enthusiasm.  And the fact that she was now an
expert in George Romero films was all due to Mulder s
tutelage, though she wasn't sure when that knowledge
would come in handy.

But somehow, she can never imagine him teaching a
lesson in how to tie shoes, how to read books where
Dick and Jane and Spot see all the action, that
sticking a damp finger into an outlet is a bad idea,
that no good can come from drinking the mysterious,
tempting contents of the bottles under the sink.  She
can't see him sitting in a bright, tastefully
wall-papered den, explaining the multiplication tables
or long division.  There is something so childlike in
Mulder, in his reckless curiosity and glorious sense
of wonder, but she doesn't know if he has the patience
for children refusing to take their baths, running
shamelessly naked through the house, changing diapers
and cleaning spit-up, peas and carrots thrown on
kitchen walls.

She can't imagine that he'd ever want any of that.

Yet, in all of the hazy, half-formed fantasies she's
had about motherhood, about her normal life with a
sweet little baby and a tidy house, Mulder is the
daddy, the man who carries sleeping children from the
car to their bed, who gives piggy-back rides around
the corner to the candy store, who checks under the
bed for Boogey men and snarling monsters, who smoothes
the sheets down at bedtime and tells fantastic stories
of fairies and elves.  Mulder holds hands when needles
prick arms, when knees are dabbed with peroxide and
covered with band aids.  Mulder plays Hungry, Hungry
Hippos and watches Scooby Doo.  He offers warm ginger
ale for tummy aches and performs shadow puppet shows
in the dark.

She knows what these daydreams are saying.  Mulder is
always the one who makes it happen.

- x -

Continued in WHttD by Buckingham (2 of 4)

continued from WHttD by Buckingham (1 of 4)
buckingham15@yahoo.com

- x -

Early afternoon and the bar is another world, light
years away from the smoky, sexy place it will be
tonight. The door is propped open toward the water, so
there is sunlight and cold sea air shimmering through
the room, bleaching the dark wood paneling and erasing
the initials and crooked hearts scratched along the
wall near the bathroom.

At the end of the bar, two men in flannel shirts eat
sandwiches and sip beer from bottles, like kids in a
grade school cafeteria with milk.  A gray haired woman
beside the door reads the newspaper and taps a pen
against her glass of club soda so its wilted leaf of a
lime sloshes along the edge.  She is discussing
politics with one of the bartenders, complaining about
taxes and the unemployment rate.  There are a couple
of college kids playing pool but they are quiet and
serious about their game, with their faded school
t-shirts and backwards baseball caps.  Near the back
door, a pretty young waitress leans against the bar,
surrounded by bright blue matchbooks.  She is
organizing them on a black plastic tray, and she seems
like she's concentrating unusually hard, like she's
working on an art project, a banner for the big
homecoming game, a poster to get herself elected to
the Student Council, her long blonde ponytail swinging
as wholesome and peppy as a cheerleader's.

And even though the jukebox is silent, Scully can
barely hear the soft murmur of conversation, of polite
small talk and happy afternoon greetings.  There is a
pleasant hush over the room, like a musty,
well-stocked library. It seems warm and cozy, a safe
haven from drunken brawls, desperate one-night stands,
screaming, sobbing late night phone calls to
ex-lovers.

The bartender is a quiet guy named Mitch, and he
stands in front of a row of brightly colored glass
bottles -- blue-green, red, brown, yellow.  They make
Scully think of the beach, of collecting slivers of
smooth glass from the shoreline. She'd wash them clean
in the surf, then take them home to her scarred wooden
jewelry box, which was empty otherwise since she
didn t get her ears pierced until she was almost
thirteen and the only pieces of jewelry that she owned
were her cross and a Mickey Mouse watch, both of which
she never took off.  Strange to remember that now, she
thinks.  Strange to think of childhood in such an
adult place.

Mitch lifts his dirty blue Mets cap and wipes at the
sweat on his forehead.  His eyes are dark and sleepy,
and there is a gentleness about him, the same thing
she sees in Mulder sometimes, something that makes
them seem fragile and precious.  He's been moving
cases of liquor in the store room all afternoon and
the extra twenty or so pounds that he carries at his
gut hasn't made it easy work.  His denim shirt is damp
under the arms and he's still slightly winded,
breathing hard like he's run across the beach and
back.

Mulder, on the other hand, looks cool and comfortable,
one foot resting on the bar rail, his suit fresh and
unwrinkled.  She is the only one who sees the way the
corners of his mouth sag, the way his eyes go blank
and lose all focus every so often, like he's
daydreaming or sleepwalking or become some sort of
well-dressed, mumbly zombie. He watches Mitch
carefully, and she wonders if he senses a kindred
spirit, a far-off pain he can sympathize with.

"Darcy was kind of a regular," Mitch says.  "We got to
know each other pretty well over the years.  She was a
nice girl.  Kept to herself mostly.  She'd come in
here maybe a couple of nights a week and have a few
beers.  Just unwind, nothing too wild.  She wasn't
like the other girls who're in here most of the time."
 He sighs, cocking his head, stuck on a memory.  "She
didn't try as hard or something, you know?  Not as
much make-up.  Her hair wasn't all done up.  Her
clothes "  He looks quickly at Scully, then leans
across the bar toward Mulder, like he wants to tell
him a secret.  "They weren't as slutty as the others'.
 The things these girls come in here wearing
sometimes?  Woo-iee!  Let's just say they don't leave
a hell of a lot to the imagination."

Mulder offers up a pale smile as a means of
encouragement, but Scully can only look down at her
small pad, where her notes are a jumbled mess,
reminiscent of the doodles that filled the back of her
trig notebook in high school. She's not even sure that
she's written down anything of worth, if she would
recognize pertinent information if Mitch were able to
provide it.  The sloppy, scrunched writing could all
be jibberish, buzz words and empty phrases, since her
head is somewhere on the beach, collecting sea glass
and swooning over the sun.

She clears her throat and straightens her spine,
trying to get focused.  "Can you tell us about the
last time you saw Darcy?" she asks Mitch, keeping her
voice low and gentle, sounding like her mother,
concerned and careful.

Mitch pulls at his cap, rearranging it low so his eyes
are hidden.  She wonders if he's trying to block
something out of his sight, trying not to see what he
knows is there, is never going away.  Trying not to
see the bright slice of sky that fills the open
doorway, the blue stretch of eternity that goes on
forever in every direction.

Mulder shifts his weight next to her, the sleeve his
jacket brushing against her bare wrist, and she thinks
of his computer, how its blaring white held its own
kind of endlessness, a painful kind of infinity.

"Well, it was almost three so I announced last call
like I usually do," Mitch says.  "The place cleared
out kind of quick that night so it was just Darcy and
a couple of other folks still here.  She told me she
needed to use the bathroom and then she d be gone."

"When did you realize that something was wrong?"
Mulder asks, in his own soft, careful voice.  He
sounds like no one but himself.

"We started cleaning up and everything like usual and
not five minutes later, this friend of mine Richie
comes charging in from the parking lot.  He'd just
heard on his police scanner that another body had been
found on the steps of Town Hall."  Mitch rubs at the
back of his neck, roughly, like a mosquito bite is
bothering him, like a bee has pricked at his skin.  He
chomps down on his lip, beaver-like, and there is
a wetness in his eyes that makes Scully look away,
turn back to her notepad and scratch small x's along
the page to distract herself.

Beside her, Mulder doesn't move, doesn't speak.  She
wonders if he's even breathing and wants to stop and
take his pulse, make sure he's in this world with her.

"I know this is difficult, Mitch," she says finally.
"But we re only trying to help.  We want to help."

He nods, sniffing deeply.

"We all ran out to the parking lot to listen in and
soon there's lots of gossip going around, people
speculating.  Some guy driving by says he heard from a
cop friend that it was Darcy they found.  Now I knew
that was crazy because she'd just been here, in the
john, and Town Hall is almost fifteen minutes away.
So I send Jackie, one of our waitresses into the
ladies' room to check it out."  He plays with one of
the blue matchbooks, flips the cover and scrapes a
finger along the tips.  "And Darcy was gone.  The
bathroom was empty, just like that."

Mulder is nodding now, lips pursed the way they always
do when he's thinking hard.  "What do you think
happened, Mitch?" he asks, and Scully feels like
banging her head against the cool wood of the bar.

"I don't fucking know!" Mitch shouts and his agony
colors his face, makes him look even more breakable.
"She couldn't have left without someone seeing her and
it was only a couple of minutes between when she went
in there and when we heard the news.  The whole thing
is fucking impossible.  But it was Darcy.  It was
Darcy laying there with her throat slit.  Just tossed
there like a sack of garbage."

He wipes at his eyes quickly.  In the store room,
glasses are knocked around, a pan clatters to the
floor, someone yells "Shit!  We're outta Grey Goose
again!" and a door slams.  The guys having lunch at
the end of the bar argue good-naturedly over whose
turn it is to pay.  Life, Scully thinks, always goes
on.

"Can you tell us anything else about Darcy?" she asks.
 "Family that she has in the area?  Friends?"

"I don t know of any family.  She had a boyfriend for
a couple years but the guy moved back to Jersey last
September when things didn't work out."

She writes these notes down, though she knows that
it's all in the police report on the incident, a
background check on the victim.  These things should
mean something, Scully thinks.  There should be
reasons for what has been done.  This woman's life
should amount to more than biographical data, parking
lot gossip, sad recollections in a bar room.

Scully wants to know who this woman was, not just what
she did or where she drank her beer.  She wants to
know who loved her and who she loved.  She wants to
believe that Darcy Phillips mattered.

"That's the worst thing," Mitch sighs.  "If her body
hadn't turned up where it did, for everyone to see, it
could have been a couple of weeks before anyone knew
Darcy was dead or even missing.  She gives piano
lessons and the kids are out of school for spring
break so she was free for the week.  And if she didn't
come in here for a while, that wouldn't have been too
strange.  I wouldn't have thought much of it."

Mulder grunts and tips his head back, contemplating
the ceiling tiles.  She remembers him at his mother's
grave, leaning back to look at the pale gold afternoon
sun, the ground still cold and frozen under his feet.
Later, sitting on the hood of his car in the motel
parking lot, stargazing like a lovesick astronomer,
whispering secrets and apologies to his sister.  Later
still, laying a pillow away in Scully's motel room,
holding her hand and falling asleep.

"That's pretty terrible, don't you think?" Mitch asks,
trembling.  "I got the feeling a lot of the time that
I was the only person she really talked to around here
and I wouldn't have even known she was gone.  I
wouldn't have noticed.  That's a fucking sad thing, I
think."

Scully closes her eyes and concentrates on the
throbbing behind them, the intense feeling there.  She
feels Mulder move closer to her, and she opens her
eyes.  Mitch is watching, looking at them like he
believes they save the world and right all wrongs on a
daily basis.

"Do you get any of this?" he asks. "Do you understand
how this could happen?"

Mulder grimaces.  "I don't have any answers right now,
but we deal with cases like this all the time.  We'll
find out what happened to Darcy."

Mitch nods, looking grateful.  "Good.  Whoever did
this should burn in Hell.  At least rot in a fucking
jail cell for the rest of his God damned life."  He
takes his baseball cap off and lays it on the bar.
"Darcy was a good woman.  She didn't deserve to leave
the world like that."

When Mulder and Mitch shake hands, Scully looks away.
She can't bring herself to touch this sad, simple man.
 He is coming apart behind the bar and she doesn't
want to be in the same room any longer.  She steps
outside into the blue, blue void and squints in the
sunlight.

Somehow it has become late afternoon.

- x -

Two weeks after the last test came back negative,
Mulder had an autopsy for her to do.

She stood at the stainless steel sinks afterwards,
scrubbing her hands red and raw and feeling like the
world was moving around her.   She was used to the
grim reality of autopsies, the way they could
sometimes seem like an invasion of privacy, a final
indignity, as she poked around until all the secrets a
body could hold were coaxed from it.  She'd hardened
herself since that day in Med School when she cut into
her first cadaver and learned its hidden language.
She could put it all away at the end of the day, go
back to the land of living and forget.

There were times, though, when she would feel warm
blood seeping through the latex, someone else's pain
and humiliation touching her own skin.  She would
relive someone else's last minutes, shake with a
stranger's fear, burn with someone else's love.  Then,
all the industrial strength antibacterial soap and
steaming water couldn't wash it away, Mulder and his
loony enthusiasm for whatever paranormal treasure he
was chasing couldn't drive away that distant ache.

He stood in the doorway to the medical examiner's
office, looking hopeless and ashamed.  It was a look
he'd been wearing often, ever since he'd stood in her
apartment and talked up miracles.

"Find anything?"

That was right.  She had a job to do, even if she
could feel her shoulders shaking, even if she felt the
chill working its way inside her.

"She was asphyxiated, just as we originally thought,"
she told him.  "Tox screen is clean but I collected
several fibers and a dirt sample from her nails which
could prove useful."

Mulder sighed, impatient.  "But without a suspect, it
probably won't do us any real good, right?" His hands
went to his hips and he cocked his head, like a pouty
catalog model.  "Anything else?"

She kept her back to him, knowing what would come.  He
was as easy to figure out these days as the paperback
mysteries she read on flights.

"She was pregnant."  She waited a minute, listening to
the air conditioning clang, cold air bursting into the
room again. "About twelve weeks I'd estimate."

She waited again, and all he gave her was silence, a
nervous feeling in her stomach.  When she turned to
look at him, his eyes were closed and his face was
slack, like he was sleeping as he stood there.  She
wondered if he was thinking about the same things she
had, imagining what she would look like, feel like,
act like twelve weeks into a pregnancy, how they might
be conducting firsthand research on the topic if
things had gone differently.  She wondered if he was
mourning this lost child, another woman losing her
chance at motherhood, another dream turning to dust.

"Do you think that's significant to the crime?" Mulder
finally asked, in a soft, achy voice.

"I have no idea."

She met his miserable gaze and sighed.  He looked
exactly like she felt and that annoyed her, made her
feel even more vulnerable.

"I'm sorry, Scully," he said quietly, whispering as if
he was in a confessional, within the cool, blessed
walls of a church.

She frowned and started to gather her things.  "This
is my job, Mulder," she told him, sounding like a
school marm.

He nodded slowly, his watery, red eyes tracking her
every move.  She trusted that he would follow her when
she left the building.

- x  

The sun melts ingloriously behind the dingy warehouses
that line the pier, leaving the sky bloody, all red
and orange.  The air is wet with fish and gasoline and
it reminds her of her father, of docks from her
childhood and quick goodbyes.

She felt it earlier, when they passed a sign for the
naval installation in Groton, but she thinks of him
even more now, thinks of her family and the greedy,
gray sea.  She remembers that for long stretches of
time her mother was, for all practical purposes, a
single parent, helping to build models of volcanoes
and the circulatory system for school science fairs,
cooking meals and doing laundry, chaufering to ball
games and dance classes, kissing scraped elbows
better, making hot chocolate to ease broken hearts,
teaching them to drive and yelling over missed
curfews.  Her father was always off in some exotic
port-of-call, some strange, tempting place that seemed
as distant and make-believe to his children as the
faraway spots on the underside of their shiny blue
globe.

"He's protecting us," her mother would say, whenever
one of them would ask what their father was doing.
"He's helping to make sure that the world is a safe
place for all of us."

It was always the sea that took him from her, that
holds him apart from her even now, but she still sees
the beauty in it.  She watches the fishermen off on
the horizon now, emptying traps and pulling up lines.
They will be on their way home now, to hot dinners and
sleepy children.  They will sleep in their own beds
tonight, while Scully tosses and turns on scratchy
motel sheets.

Mulder is watching the sky, oblivious.  He closes his
eyes and breathes in sea air, like he's on some
recuperative holiday, like he has some respiratory
problem  and there's something purer about the oxygen
here, with its briney, salty kiss.

"That was rough," he says, stuffing his hands into his
pockets.  The rain coat blows around him and he looks
like he's about to take flight.  "That bartender is
sad and confused.  Angry too.  Not a great
combination.  Believe me, I've been there."   He kicks
at a piling like a sulky child.  "And the poor son of
a bitch is a Mets fan too.  Not a whole lot to be
happy in that life, I'd say."

He shakes his head, sighing up at the blushing sky.

With the sun dying above, Mulder looks like he's
burning alive, his skin licked by golden flames, and
his eyes, with their wounded, defeated shadows, show
the contents of his mind.  He is thinking of all the
women who couldn't be saved: his mother, who trusted
pills and gas and a long, cold sleep more than her own
son, his forever young sister, lost to starlight,
Darcy Phillips and girls just her like whose names he's
forgotten over the years, dying too early and too
easy, with no one around to care or notice, and of
course Scully, with a ticking time bomb in the back of
her neck, an unsatisfied biological clock, missing
months of her life, and a loneliness that makes her
seem so sad and strong.  Mulder carries the weight of
all of them inside him, like Atlas shouldering his
bone-crushing world.

She wants to ignore him now but cannot because it
would be like turning away from wildfire, a landslide,
looking away from the dark, dangerous spin of a
tornado.  So she studies him carefully instead;
he is almost unbearably still, which always worries
her.  When he's fidgety or antsy, squirming with
delight or impatience, anger or excitement, she knows
that he is all right.  Then he is puzzling something
out, doing his usual mental acrobatics, pushing ahead.

Quiet and calm, he's practically a stranger, and she
is afraid for him, being pushed by the wind off the
water, squinting in response to the sun.  He is
stunning, though, vulnerable and desperate, and even
after last night, she wants to save him.  She wants to
take away his pain, send the angry sun away, clean up
the streaky red sky for him.

There is a rusty nail sticking out of the railing
along the pier in front of her, and she kicks at it.
The neat metallic ping catches Mulder's attention so
he leaves the sky alone and looks at her.

"I used to be a Mets fan," she tells him, quietly, and
when she looks up at him, she feels almost shy,
holding a hand over her eyes to shield herself from
the glare.

Mulder's mouth gapes open and his eyes assume a
sleepy, confused squint.  "Excuse me?" he croaks, and
she can't remember the last time she had him so
flabbergasted.  He always seems to know what to expect
from her, or what not to expect at the very least.
She rarely catches him utterly clueless.

"When I was a kid.  It was only for a handful of
years."

He smiles lazily.  "You're gonna have to give me more
than that, Scully."

She looks away, toward the sea, where a seagull
dive-bombs into the water and then reemerges with a
splash and squawk.  It is strangely liberating to
share a bit of her past with him, something like this
that is safe and insignificant.  She wets her lips,
presses her nails into the soft wood of the railing.

"My father was a big Orioles fan.  He and Bill both
actually," she says.  "And in 1969 when they went to
the World Series against the Mets, they were both so
cocky about the whole thing.  It was a foregone
conclusion that the Orioles would win.  The Mets
didn't even belong on the same field as the big, bad
Orioles, according to Dad and Bill."

She thinks of her father in his big green easy chair,
watching games on television, yelling at umpires.
Bill at his feet, with a bowl of corn chips, his
Orioles cap on backwards because he thought it was
good luck.

"I was only five or so at the time but that just
bugged me," she says, feeling nostalgic.  "There was
just so much gracelessness in that kind of attitude.
Underestimating your opponent like that."  She shakes
her head.  "The Mets were underdogs with no chance in
Hell of winning and I just sort of adopted them.  I
made my mother take me to buy a Mets cap."

Mulder's head is cocked, like he's afraid to miss a
single word.  The corners of his mouth twitch, as if
he's about to smile but is trying to hold back.  He
looks school-boy excited, she thinks.  So dangerously
amused.  And grateful too, though she doesn't want to
think about that too carefully.

"Bill gave me the hardest time about it.  Called me a
traitor and some other not so nice things.  My father
didn't say much but I don't think he understood any of
it.  I think he thought I was just trying to be
contrary.  Rebellious or something.   She shakes her
head, smiling. "Needless to say, I felt pretty
vindicated when the Mets pulled off the upset.  Bill
didn't speak to me for a week after that, as if I was
somehow responsible for the Mets winning."

Mulder allows himself a real smile.  "You said you
'used to' be a Mets fan," he says.  "Why'd you stop
rooting for them?"

"I didn't stop rooting for them as much as I lost
interest in baseball."

She doesn't tell him that ever since that night in the
park with him, stars exploding above them, she's been
checking box scores, following pennant races, watching
'Baseball Tonight' enough to have developed a crush on
Peter Gammons.  Mulder nods, twists his mouth tight.
She can tell is contemplating something intensely.  He
rubs his chin as he concentrates, looking dangerously
thoughtful.

"This actually explains a lot," he tells her.  "Your
lack of enthusiasm for the Yankees all these years.
You've been jealous, Scully!"

She smiles again herself, feeling relaxed finally.
She knows how to play this game with him.  It's right
and it's easy and she doesn't have to think twice.

"Please, Mulder.  Everyone knows that rooting for the
Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.  There's no fun
in that.  It has nothing to do any other team."

"Don't mistake the Mets for the Detroit Tigers,
Scully.  They've got plenty of money of their own.
It's not the Yankees' fault that the Mets don't spend
as wisely."

She sighs, feigning exasperation.  "Mulder, I hardly
think of the Mets at all these days."  He smirks, full
of arrogance and skepticism, and she wants to tease
him right back, make him twist in the wind.  "Well,
sometimes I do think about Mike Piazza, but that's
usually late at night and doesn't have a whole lot to
do with baseball..."

He blinks, not believing what he's heard, then
grimaces, the same way he does when he's got a bad
case of indigestion.  "You're killing me here,
Scully."  He shakes his head, muttering under his
breath, "Mike Piazza, oh brother."

She smiles, feeling a blush warm her cheeks.  For the
first time since she met him in the office this
morning, she thinks that maybe they can get through
this.  Maybe they can put it all behind them and go on
like before.  She believes it when she looks at
Mulder, with his dreamy smile and amused eyes, and
feels only the slightest twinge of hurt, in a place so
deep inside that she s learned to ignore it over the
years.

"I like this story," Mulder tells her.  "I like it a
lot."

"Why?"

"Well, everyone knows that the only way the Mets won
that World Series was by virtue of a miracle, so now I
know that once upon a time, maybe only for a few weeks
in October, you were a girl who believed in miracles."

He looks away from her, out across the water instead,
where the last boat is slowly trudging toward shore.
Something in her rattles around, like a brick worked
loose, but she tries to ignore the heavy feeling in
her chest.  She hadn't expected him to be so honest,
she thinks.  She hadn't wanted him to be so honest
really.  Now there is no way to ignore it, ignore him
and his savage devotion.

"Is that what all this was about, Mulder?" she asks
quietly.  He looks over at her, confused.  "You trying
to broker a miracle for me?"

Mulder closes his eyes, looking honeyed and desperate
in the fading light.

"All it was, all it ever is, is me trying to make you
happy," he says, in a voice as rough as sandpaper.
"Trying to give you back what's been taken from you."

She feels dizzy, and tries to tell herself that it's
just the sun, beating down too hard on her thin skin.
She can't make herself meet his eyes.

"That's not your responsibility, Mulder.   You can't
fix everything for me."

He grunts next to her, as if he's in pain.

"You've made that perfectly clear, Scully," he hisses.
She is taken aback by the venom in his voice, the rage
in his dark eyes.  "So you know what?  Maybe it was
about me too."

Her head is throbbing now and she doesn't want to keep
her eyes open.  The sea in front of them is clear,
empty and calm.  Something about it makes her shiver.

"We should go check in with Detective Cartlin," she
says blandly.

She turns and leaves Mulder standing on the pier,
watching the water.  Back in the rental car, she rubs
her temples and tries to forget about baseball.

- x  

That night, his apartment was full of light, burning
bright like starshine.  The bulb in the lamp beside
his couch had blown out, making a soft pop when she
came through his door, and the only spare he had lying
around was a hundred watt that threw bitter, snowy
light over the room like avalanche, as if to tell
Scully that she wasn't going to get off easy, that she
couldn't hide away in the usual midnight gloom of
Mulder's apartment, couldn't pretend that the daylight
wouldn t bring a new world with it.  She was reminded
of exactly what it was she was doing.

So she asked him in the same way that she took cough
syrup when she was child, one quick, naseuous gulp, in
an eyes-closed gasp.  Ripping the band-aid clean off,
no hesitation, no tears afterward.

He wasn't stunned, not in the way she'd prepared for
anyway.  He squinted hard while she spoke, like he was
trying to see something off on a far horizon, and
nodded at appropriate intervals, which made her think
that maybe he'd seen the whole coming, roaring towards
him like a train wreck.

"I'll let you be alone now," she said when she was
done, standing up quickly, feeling the blood rushing
to her head, wobbling on her fancy black heels.  He
followed her to the door but didn't say anything.
He'd been quiet the entire time -- no questions, no
objections, no 'What the fuck are you thinking,
Scully?'s.

She stayed home from work the next day, keeping
herself busy balancing her checkbook, doing a load of
laundry, watching a couple of episodes of "The Brady
Bunch," so when Mulder showed up at her apartment that
evening, unannounced, she was stunned.  She tried not
to think about why he was doing this for her, what it
all meant.  She tried not to think about what was in
it for him.

Only after the invitro failed did she realize that the
whole thing never would have worked.  She'd tried to
only think concretely of the procedure, conception.
She hadn't allowed herself to realize that it never
could have been done without everything between them
changing, shifting like teutonic plates in an
earthquake.  They could have crashed and burned, she
thought, but they'd been saved.

The very thing that tore at her heart and made Mulder
mope around with guilt had saved them.

- x -


continued in WHttD  by Buckingham (3 of 4)

continued from WHttD by Buckingham (2 of 4)
buckingham15@yahoo.com

- x -

The house smells like cinnamon, burnt coffee, warm,
sticky cat food.  Mulder flips through a stack of
opened mail on the kitchen table, and she looks at the
dirty plates piled in the sink.  From in front of the
stove, she can see the living room, with its beat up
piano and stacks and stacks of sheet music.

In the bathroom, Scully finds a mess of lipsticks,
pots of eye shadow and blush, make-up sponges and
perfume bottles littering the counter.  She remembers
what Mitch had said about Darcy being different from
his other customers, but it seems like a lot of
cosmetics for someone without intention.  She feels
guilty for even thinking it, for pawing around in
Darcy's private things -- the junk drawer in her
kitchen with its crushed bendy straws, odd assortment
of screws, chewed-on pencils, coupons for Tampax, an
old brass key, an extension cord, a spool of blood red
thread.  There is an unopened box of condoms in the
bedside table and a photo album with pressed flowers
and old greeting cards stuffed inside tangled in the
sheets of her bed. Outside the bathroom,  there is a
pair of wrinkled, worn panties on the floor, and in
the kitchen there's an answering machine that, even
though Darcy has been gone from her home for five
days, still blinks with a dotted zero.

Scully feels sick, dizzy from heat or exhaustion.

The woman in this house expected to come home, she
thinks.  Darcy thought she'd have time to wash the
dishes, pay her bills, put away the laundry and feed
some elusive yellow-haired cat.  She never imagined
that strangers would poke around her bathroom, see her
medicine cabinet turned upside down on the counter,
the roll of toilet paper sitting on the back of the
tank instead of resting neatly in its wall holder.
She never thought all the chores she never got around
to would leave an impression of who she was, that
Mulder and Scully, not knowing anything about her
beyond her name and address and the way she made a
sad, rumpled bartender feel, would judge her on it,
would try to use the messy, boring clutter of her life
to figure out who killed her.

She probably would have picked up her underwear if
she'd known, Scully thinks.   She kicks them behind a
door before Mulder passes to preserve Darcy's dignity.

They meet up again in front of the refrigerator.
Mulder absently slides the pieces of Darcy's magnetic
poetry around.  Scully tries to find a clue to what
he's thinking from the phrases he's creating, but
"magnificent naked candy" doesn't seem to hold any
real meaning.   She watches him rub his chin until she
can't stand it.

"What are you thinking?" she asks quietly, feeling
frustrated because she's come up with nothing to go on
herself.  She feels like she's off her game.

"I was thinking about that bowling alley case back in
'97.  Harold Spueller and the disembodied souls he
saw?"  He looks at her closely, saying more in the
silence.  "I'm wondering if this could be something
like that."

She feels shaky, like the ground is moving beneath
her.  He doesn't say anything more, doesn't mention
her own vision or illness, doesn't mention that truth.
 She thinks it might be easier if he just said it
aloud.

"But, Mulder, in that case, there were visions of the
victims already dead.  Not in a bar having drinks like
Darcy Reigers or at a middle school basketball game
like Colleen Tierney."

"No, not exactly." He bites his lip, stares into the
living room.  "But how else to explain all this,
Scully?"

She shakes her head.

"How does a killer abduct his victim from one location
and dump them, already dead, clear across town, a good
five miles away, within minutes?" Mulder asks,
sounding like he's talking out loud to himself.
"Without being seen at all?"

"I can't explain it, Mulder," she says.

He nods, distracted.  She knows he's already putting
the pieces of the puzzle together, and that he'll get
it right if given enough time.   It is his amazing
gift.

"Let's check out the Tierney place," he says, heading
for the door.  "If you're done here," he adds as an
afterthought, already on the front porch.

She follows him, thinking of her own apartment, all
the dark secrets it might reveal.

- x -

When she was eight years old, Scully asked for a puppy
for her birthday.  Her family was living in the tight
quarters of naval housing in San Diego, and her
parents didn't think the Scullys could squeeze another
yapping, fussy creature into the space.  Scully had
lost her pet rabbit a few years before, and they
probably didn't trust her to care for another more
demanding, more high-maintence animal either.  So they
gave her a beautiful red Japanese fighting fish
instead, a bright blue bow tied around the knot of the
plastic bag that held it.  She named him Freddy and
kept him in a tiny glass bowl on the shelf between her
and Melissa's bed.  Her father had spent time in
Japan, and she liked to imagine the sea beneath his
ship full of lovely, ruby-colored fish, graceful and
needless, tough as warriors.  When she worried, she
thought that they might protect him.

She was the only one surprised that Freddy barely
lasted three months, even though she fed him properly
and changed his water carefully, the way her mother
taught her in the kitchen sink.  She put his dry,
shrunken body in an old velvet jewelry box that had
once contained a bracelet from some old, distant aunt,
and held a burial for him in the backyard.  She made
her father wear his dress whites and she wore her dark
blue Easter dress.  Melissa held wild flowers in her
hands and tied white ribbons in her braids, but her
face had a pinched, crushed look to it, as if she
could sense her sister's sadness and wanted to share
every minute of it.

Her father presided over the event, saying a few kind
words about Freddy then leading Scully, her mother,
Missy, and Charlie in the 'Our Father.' Bill was off
somewhere, riding his bike down hills, because he'd
already declared the whole thing stupid.

"It's just a dumb old fish, Dana," he'd told her that
morning as he bolted out the back door.  He always
spoke to her as if she were a baby, someone who'd
never understand the way the world worked.  "Don't
waste everybody's time.  Flush him down the toilet!"

She cried and pounded her fists on the wall after hed
left, but she was calm and dry-eyed by time she faced
her father and grabbed his warm hand.  He patted her
head afterwards, seeming proud and awed of his little
girl.  She hoped that would make her feel better.

Years later, she tried to bury her daughter in San
Diego, just miles from the backyard where Freddy
rested.  Mulder brought flowers and handed her his
stiff white handkerchief.  He wanted to hold her hand
but she wouldn't let him get close enough to do it.

Later, after she realized They'd left her nothing but
a box of sand and a new ache to add to her collection,
she saw tears in his eyes.  She gave him back his
hanky and tried not to look at his stunning, mournful
face.

- x -

She's always loved Mulder for his bravery and
integrity, his uncanny knack for grand gestures of
courage and strength, but he plays the hero so well in
Groton that it makes her feel almost unworthy.

In the wooded area behind the junior high, he cases
down the six foot five inch, two hundred eighty pound
suspect, and lays the guy out cold on the damp, mossy
earth, knocking the wind out of himself and smearing
mud on the knees of his pants in the process.  She
watches him cuff Curtis Duncan, and feels almost
unnecessary, a tag-along only there to witness
Mulder's greatness in the moment.  The boys from the
local PD smile at him in worship, like shy kids
watching the star quarterback walk down the halls.
She knows how that feels, she thinks, to be caught up
in the wonder that is Fox Mulder, the pure goodness
and strength that the man radiates.

She could warn them that it's almost like staring up
into the sun, but she thinks they're probably safe.
They only want to buy him beer, dinner, a fancy new
suit to show their gratitude. She is included too, but
she doesn't think they know exactly what she's done to
help save the day.  She is great in their eyes only
because of her association with Mulder.  She smiles at
their kind words anyway.

Later, they are at the police station, taking care of
paper work, when Angie, one of the receptionists, and
her daughter come in, the little girl sobbing against
her mother's hip.  Angie tells them that the family's
yellow lab, Barney, has run off, and even though
they've driven through their entire neighborhood,
they've had no luck.

With the suspect caught, everyone's got free time, so
they form a rag-tag search party.  Mulder and one of
the deputies head off with Angie, taking the entire
thing seriously even though they've just been working
a homicide.  Scully is left with the little girl,
sitting on the curb in front of the missing dog's home
in case he finds his way back.  She holds Julia's
small, sticky hand, but the girl in inconsolable,
crying hot, helpless tears.

"I left the gate open this morning," she wails.  "It's
my fault Barney got lost!"

Scully smoothes back her dark, messy curls and tries
to calm her, but Julia bawls her little eyes out,
until she sees Mulder and the deputy charging up the
street, Barney pulling them home on a makeshift leash
made of old rope.  The little girl squeals, the sound
that Scully imagines she makes when she hears the ice
cream man's bells or that she has a snow day off from
school, and runs for her dog, squeezing him around his
golden neck, accepting his slobbery kisses like gifts.

Mulder's smile makes him look goofy, pleased by some
secret thing.  When Angie pulls up in her mini van,
delighted as her daughter, she makes Mulder
uncomfortable with her heaping thanks and tight hugs.
Julia wants to take Mulder to the ice cream parlor in
town for a milk shake, and he agrees, reluctantly,
because he can tell how much it means to the little
girl, who bounces up and down in her little purple and
pink sneakers and tugs on his hand.

He shrugs at Scully, smiling nervously.  Angie invites
her along but she begs off, telling them flatly that
someone should finish off the paperwork before it gets
too late.  Mulder frowns, looking annoyed, and turns
his back to her, letting Julia pull him to the van.

"Thanks again, Agent Scully," Angie calls through an
open window as they pull away.  She can barely see
Mulder through the tinted glass but she knows he's not
thinking of chocolate milkshakes or strawberry
sundaes.

Scully walks back to the station, wondering about the
same things he is.

- x -

There was full disclosure regarding the date and time
of his appointment at the clinic, but he didn't ask
her to come along, and somehow she couldn't bring
herself to offer.  She sat in his office, at his desk,
making a chain of paperclips, and tried hard not to
think about why she was alone.

He came in three hours later, pale and jittery.  There
were files in his hands, like he wanted to segue right
into work, like he wanted to perform some sleight of
hand -- "Hey, Scully, look over here at this case of
kidnapping and possible demonic possession.  Then
maybe you won't remember that I was just jerking off
into a cup, thinking of you the whole time."

It wasn't arrogance that made her sure he thought of
no one but her, but a basic understanding of who
Mulder was.  She wasn't entirely convinced that his
were lascivious thoughts either but she knew that the
entire time he was focused on giving her what she
wanted.  It was a madman's devotion.

But she could tell that he wasn't going to mention
what had happened, and she didn't feel right asking
him.  They spent the entire afternoon together in the
office, being as courteous and careful with one
another as they ever had.  She made him coffee just
the way he liked it and he let her pick the CD for the
office boom box.  He couldn't seem to meet her eyes
for longer than five seconds and she tried not to take
offense at that.

He felt utterly vulnerable, she knew, stripped naked
before her.  She wondered if it was anything like the
way she felt when he was able to read her mind and
heart.  When it was almost six, she gathered her
things together and stood before his desk, patient.
He was hunched over, scribbling hurriedly on a yellow
legal pad.

"Hey, Mulder," she said, trying to sound casual.  "I
don't have anything to eat at home, so I was going to
stop at Vincent's for dinner.  Wanna join me?"

He looked up, his glasses slipping to the end of his
nose.  There was something about his wide eyes and the
grim line of his mouth that made her feel guilty.

"Ah, thanks for the offer, Scully, but I'm pretty
tired."  He flushed then, hearing his own words and
not liking their implication. "Besides I've got some
stuff to finish up here."  He nodded at his cluttered
desk.

"All right.  Good night, Mulder."

She headed for the door, resisting the urge to look
back at him over her shoulder.  Almost there, she saw
something in her peripheral vision, soaring through
the air beside her head.  The rubber band smacked
against the wall and fell to the ground.  When she
faced Mulder, his fingers were still in rubber band
snapping position.  He smiled sheepishly.

"The thing is, Scully, that I didn't realize how
strenuous manual labor could be."

He slouched back in his chair, looking like a punk
teenager in the back of geometry class.  She chuckled,
shaking her head.  She could believe, even if it was
only for one minute, that things would be all right.
Of course they hadn't even gotten to the trickest part
yet -- Scully walking around and both of them knowing
that part of Mulder was inside her, growing or trying
to anyway.

"Well, then, maybe we should see about hazard pay for
you," she said, feeling steadier.

He nodded, smiling gratefully.  "See you tomorrow,
Scully."

That was the last time that they mentioned what he'd
done for her.  She knew that it would be.

- x -

She still feels queasy from dinner when she knocks on
Mulder's door.  He is sitting up against the headboard
of his lumpy motel bed, watching a hockey game.  She
doesn't think he has any real interest in it, but he's
watching intently, following the puck like he's got
big money on the outcome.  The can of Coke resting on
his stomach bobs when he stutters out a deep breath as
the puck finds the back of the net and a green light
flashes over the goal.

"Detective Cartlin just called," she tells him.  He
nods absently, but is watching the replay, not looking
her way. "Curtis Duncan has signed a confession and
been denied bail.  He even admitted to an unsolved
homicide in Providence back in '89."

"Well, that's all tied up neatly," Mulder says.  He
glances at her, cocking his head.  "You still refuse
to believe that Darcy Reigers, Colleen Tierney, and
Kristen Oliver appeared as disembodied souls?"

She sighs, sinking into a corner chair.

"I still can't explain what happened here, Mulder.  I
still don't know how Duncan did it," she says tiredly.
"What I do know is that if you hadn't been so sure
about it, if you hadn't spooked Duncan, we'd still be
chasing dead ends.  I know that much."

He nods, looking surprised, then turns back to the
game.  On the ice, two skaters drop their sticks and
gloves, and throw punches like they're heavy weight
champs.  Mulder slides to the edge of the bed to get
closer to the screen.

"Check it out, Scully.  That guy just lost a tooth!"

She looks more carefully at the TV, where there is a
guy on his hands and knees, mouth gaping, dripping
blood onto the ice like rain.  The other player is
held back by a couple of teammates and a referee, and
Scully is stunned by his anger, the violence.

"What's with the hockey?" she asks Mulder.  "Isn't
there a baseball game on?"

His eyes move to her for a moment, then skip back to
the television.  He scowls, face drawn like a prune,
and thumbs the remote to raise the volume.

"If you wanna watch the Mets, Scully," he says, voice
pitched low.  "Do it on your own TV."

The sound of his voice makes her cringe, and she
stands, ready to leave.  She thinks back to dinner,
when they sat at a tight table in Costello's Clam
Company, barely speaking to one another.  Her fingers
were greasy and sticky, and she felt as uncomfortable
as Mulder looked.  They'd been invited to dinner with
the cops from the case at an upscale place further up
the waterfront, but Mulder had politely declined on
their behalf.  She doesn't know if he'd hoped they
would talk or if it was just a way to punish her,
remind them both that theirs was a world of two and no
matter who passed through, it would always come back
to them, sitting across from each other with their
questions and doubts and hurts.  He hadn't done more
than grunt or mumble at her during dinner, and she'd
been angry and stubborn herself.

She doesn't have the strength to play these games with
him anymore.  She's at his door, the brass knob cold
and rough in her hand, when she decides to change the
rules.

"What did you mean yesterday?" she asks, keeping her
back to him.  "When you said that it might have been
about you too.  What did you mean?"

He sighs, and must mute the TV because the room goes
silent, like the eerie stillness of dawn.

"Scully.  It's late."

She remembers the words as her own, and hearing Mulder
parrot them back to her makes her realize how tired
and cranky she is.  That night, Mulder was sensitive
enough not to push her.  She owes him the same
courtesy.  The door creaks open in front of her, a
world waiting outside.

"Scully, hold on."  She hears the mattress groan,
feels him somehow closer to her.  She turns, and his
head is buried in his hand, fingers tugging at his
hair.  "Okay, look.  That night?  That night at your
apartment, after you'd asked me to help you?"

He looks up at her, pleading.  She can only nod,
feeling helpless.

"When I said yes, the look on your face, Scully..." He
shakes his head, eyes sleepy and dark.  "The way you
smiled... it made me feel like for the first time in a
long while, I was doing the right thing.  It made me
so happy to be able to give that to you."

She drops her head, studies her feet.  She doesn't
know why it is so difficult to accept kindness from
him, why it feels like he's going for a choke hold
whenever he offers up his love.  She doesn't know why
the knowledge that he'd do virtually anything she
asked, even something as ridiculously personal as
masturbate on command, makes her feel like she's
suffocating.

When she watches him, twisting the cheap, flowery
bedspread between his fingers, she is shamed by the
feeling that she holds him in the palm of her hand.
She has never wanted that kind of power over him,
never wanted the responsibility of it.

But, then, that was the very thing she counted on when
she asked him to help her, she thinks.  She isn't sure
if it's simple disgust she feels for herself or a
deep, dark hatred.  She knows that Mulder is watching
her, trying to get a sense of his footing.  If she
looks at his eyes too long, she's not sure she'll be
able to stay in this room.

"It wasn't until later that I realized," Mulder says,
his voice hitting at her heart.  "Later, when it
didn't work, I knew that there was more to it than
making you smile.  I realized how badly I wanted it to
happen for you.  How much I wanted you to be a
mother."  He wipes a hand across his mouth, down his
chin, gathering strength.  "That was when I understood
how invested I was.  I knew that it was about
something I wanted for myself too."

She looks at him sharply, head snapping up like
whiplash.  His face is slack, entirely open and
vulnerable, like the sky.  He must see something
pressing him in her eyes because he nods, like she's
asked a question aloud.

"I have no family left anymore, Scully."

She exhales loudly through her nose, not allowing
herself a full-fledged gasp.  She doesn't know why
this surprises her.  Mulder has always seemed an
orphan to her, loveless and abandoned, searching the
skies for something he can't find in earthly things.
But she sees now that there was no way that he would
have said no to her, even if he didn't love her in a
boundless, moonstruck way that made him willing to
scrape out his soul and offer it up to her.  He was
looking for something to tie him to this world, to
give him reason to leave the heavens alone.

She closes her eyes but Mulder keeps talking, sounding
like he's on trial.

"So I thought that maybe we could try another way.  I
wanted to make sure that we exhausted every
possibility, that we didn't give up too easily."  He
laughs, surprised.  "I even considered adoption, if
you can believe it. But then I didn't know how you
felt about that.  I thought it might be important to
you to actually have the experience of carrying..."
She looks at him, jaw clenched.  He is staring at some
point past her head, some spot on the dingy gray
walls.  "So I came back to finding a way for you to
have a child.  You know, donor eggs or fertility
drugs.  There's this new procedure they're trying
out--"

She sighs, bitter.  "You do realize this is my body
you're talking about, right?" She forces herself to
look directly into his questing eyes.  "It's my body,
Mulder."

His mouth drops open, shocked, and he looks away.  The
muscle in his jaw is twitching wildly, and he seems
like some feral creature, dangerous and angry.

"I know that," he says coldly.  "I never imagined I
had any real control here, Scully."

She folds her arms across her chest, wanting to
disappear.  Instead, she feels larger than life, every
part of body -- blood, bone, muscle, skin -- seeming
obvious and impossible to ignore.

"Do you expect me to thank you, Mulder?  Is that what
you think I should do?" she asks, no real malice in
her voice.  She sounds tired.

"Forget it, Scully.  Just forget it." He punches an
impotent fist into the lumpy mattress, and turns his
side to her.  "Don't come in here and ask me questions
that you don't really want to know the answers to, all
right?  Don't pretend you want to know what I'm
feeling when it's the absolute last thing you want to
understand."

She feels a sting like a paper-cut inside her.
Something slight but deep, that can't take even the
slightest pressure.

"I don't know how you can stand there and act like
I've overstepped boundaries.  That I'm interfering
somehow," he whispers, and she's afraid his voice
might disappear into the darkness outside the window.
"You asked me, Scully.  You asked me, all right?"

When she nods, there are tears slipping free from her
eyes, but she turns for the door so Mulder won't see.
Back in her own room, she buries her face in a limp
pillow and prays for sleep.

- x -

He poured a shot of whiskey into a juice glass and
left it on her bedside table.  He lit a couple of
candles scented like cinnamon because she asked him
to, and sat next to her in bed, tucking the blankets
around her, like she was a sick child instead of a
broken hearted woman.

He started talking then, mainly because he was afraid
of what silence might do to her, she thought.  His
voice sounded distant and bewildered, as if he were
someplace he never imagined he'd be.  He told her
about the day that his sister was born, how he could
remember being fed grilled cheese sandwiches and
cherry vanilla ice cream while he and his father
waited for news.  He thought it strange that his
father wasn't with his mother, that he left her alone
with masked strangers and sat in the cool, chattery
cafeteria reading the newspaper, doing the crossword
puzzle.  When Mulder finally saw his baby sister,
almost twenty-four hours later, she was red, pruney
mess, and he thought she was boring, just another
breakable treasure that he wasn't allowed to lay his
dirty fingers on.

Scully remembered Charlie as a toddler, hiding under
the kitchen table so he could pour an entire shaker of
pepper into his smart, little mouth, scribbling on the
sofa with their mother's red lipstick, but she was
barely three when he was born so she couldn't remember
that.  She stayed quiet, holding on to her precious
ache, and listened to Mulder.  She listened carefully,
because even after years together, every bit of his
history, every day of his life before her, was
something to be treasured and marveled at.  Even when
she was ready to drop off, when she wanted to close
her eyes and forget the ugly, cruel world they were
hiding from, she listened to his mellow, mumbly words,
the tenderness of his memories.

When he ran out of stories about Samantha, she asked
him to tell her about miracles.  She asked him to
remind her why she should believe.

It wasn't Mulder's fault that she forgot by the time
morning came.

- x -

There are times when she can read his mind and she
doesn't need the help of any alien artifact or junk
DNA.  She can tell from the way he squints his eyes or
slumps his shoulders, from the way he chews on his
pencil or gulps his soda.  She can tell from the way
he watches her across a room, the way his fingers
slide across her cheek.  She is an expert in
interpreting Mulder's body language at this point,
though it's rare that she puts the knowledge to good
use.

Right now he is so angry with her that he is wishing
for miles between them, bracing his arms against the
doorway as if he wants to push the walls far and wide
so he can actually stomach being in the same space
that she occupies.  His muscles twitch, like he's some
ferocious, caged animal, plotting an escape but unable
to find the means to put his plan into action.  The
Gunmen pack up their equipment silently, avoiding
looking at either of them, and she can tell they're
dying to get out of this apartment too, anxious to go
back to their dank, cluttered headquarters where they
can practice their anti-social anarchism without the
tension of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships
to distract them.

A week ago, she slapped a 'hands off' sign across her
body and dared him to push the issue.  Of course he
hadn't, being gentlemanly and too worn out, some part
of her knew, to fight her.

Now she'd gone off with Spender, and she knows what
Mulder is thinking: punishment.

She'd run off with a known criminal, a man with a
busted moral compass and a gift for double-talk, a man
whod sacrificed his own wife and children to save his
own skin, just to prove to Mulder that she could take
care of herself, that she could play the same games
that he did, that she could heal herself, find her own
way to get back what had been taken from her, without
any of his overzealous, impulsive help.

She knows this is what Mulder is thinking.

The problem is that she can't tell him that he's
right, but she can't tell him that he's entirely wrong
either.  She doesn't know why she did what she did.
She wants to believe that she went because it was the
right thing to do, because it was a way to save the
world, because she was being noble and brave.  But she
wonders.

She wonders why it was so easy for Spender to convince
her that Mulder couldn't be told.  She wonders why it
was so easy for Spender to talk her into getting into
a car with him and driving off into his ominous sunset
without even a hint as to where they were headed.  She
wonders why she stayed after she'd woken undressed in
a strange bed with no memory of how she'd gotten
there.  She, the most skeptical and dubious of
persons, allowed Spender to play her for a fool
without putting up even the semblance of a fight.  She
wonders how that was able to happen.

Mulder drags a bottle of tequila from the back of a
cabinet and splashes some into a glass.  Sunlight
makes it look as if it holds liquid gold, burning
crescents on the pale walls of his kitchen.  She waits
for him to say something, anything, because she knows
there is nothing left for her to say.

He downs the tequila in a quick gulp then looks at
her, eyes glazed.

"You remember where this office was?"

She is insulted by the question, as if she, a trained
investigator, wouldn't keep track of something as
significant as Spender's address.  But then Mulder
believes a trained agent wouldn's put her life in the
hands of the devil either.  She nods, watching his
fingers strangle the glass in his hand.

"I guess you're driving," he says, nodding back toward
the bottle on the counter.  He's had one shot and she
knows he's capable of driving himself but she's
grateful for that small bit of control.  It's the
thing she needs to steady herself.

She watches the road carefully as she drives, trying
to anticipate every pothole, every bump in the road.
Mulder braces a foot against the dashboard and hides
his face.

She can't help but feel a twinge of anger herself.
This is Mulder after all.  Who is he to judge her
actions, she thinks.  After all the risks he's taken,
the lengths he's gone to in the name of the all mighty
truth.  And it unnerves her to be the center of his
feeling like this, the thing he's focused on.  It
happens so rarely and indiscriminately, she's never
prepared for it.

Because, really, he runs so hot and cold with her.
One day he's agreeing to father her child, looking at
her like she's the only good thing he's ever known in
his life, and the next he's shoving her out of the way
so he can run head-on into some undefined, unsolvable
mystery.  He'll bring her a linzer tart from the
bakery by his gym one morning just because he knows
how much she likes them and that she won't buy
themselves because she'd fret over calories, fat
grams, and carbs, but by the afternoon he's taunting
her about her stubbornness, her close-minded
practicality.  One minute he's spinning around her
like she's the center of his strange universe,
something distant and remote but unspeakably
beautiful, then he'll ignore her for weeks because
someone crawls out of the shadows and dangles a
sparkly silver of the truth in front of him, and if
she doesn't tag along, if she doesn't tell him the
things he wants to hear, it's like she doesn't matter,
that he lives alone in a world and likes it that way.

She never knows where she stands, just what it is he
expects from her.

Afterwards, Mulder sits on the hood of her car and
tips his head back toward the sky.  He looks older,
like someone she doesn't know, and it hits her that
one day she may be without him.  It's strange that
given all his brushes with death, his walks on the
wildside, she isn't aware of this constantly, but she
sees now that the best case scenario is that he
simply grows old and dies before her eyes, slowly and
unremarkably, like the color bleached out of stone by
the sun day after day.

Maybe they're afraid of the same thing, she thinks.
She feels him sneering at her though, as mean and ugly
as he's ever been, and she can't offer him any
charity.

A bike messenger zooms past on the sidewalk, and man
carrying a guitar case stomps down the street, pushing
her closer to Mulder as he veers toward her.  She
looks at the blue sky above and wishes she were
somewhere else.

Mulder shakes his head, squinting at her.  "Just
answer one question for me, Scully.  One question."

She nods, readying herself for the blow.

"Why?"

The sunlight smoothes out every line and mark on his
face, so he looks like himself again, like the moody,
brilliant, sensitive, demanding punk that he is.  She
looks down at the cracks in the sidewalk, at the thin,
needy blades of grass growing through them, pushing
for the sun.

"I've been trying to answer that in my own head,
Mulder.  But the truth is that I don't really know
why," she says.  "I mean, I had reasons at the time
and they all seemed so solid and important, but now I
just don't know if ... I don't know why."

Mulder closes his eyes, head drooping, and sighs.  "I
need a better answer than that, Scully."

He slides off the car, wobbling for a moment before
steadying himself on the curb.  Down the street a car
alarm is blaring, and he turns that way for a moment,
watching nothing.

"Will you take me home now?" he asks.

She feels for the keys in her pocket and nods.

When they arrive back at his place, she watches the
back of his jacket as he climbs out of the car, and
she wants to reach out and grab a handful, she wants
to push him into the gutter.

"I didn't mean to make you worry, Mulder," she says
quietly.  "I am certain about that."

He stops, one long leg leaning on the curb, and looks
at her, unimpressed.

"We both seem to be doing a lot lately that we don't
mean."

He's out of the car and up the stairs before she can
stop him.  The sun has gone down now, just a faded
purple bruise behind Mulder's building, and she misses
it with a fierceness that takes her by surprise.  Her
apartment will be dark and musty, empty for a couple
of days now.  She watches a light go on inside
Mulder's apartment then points her car toward home.

- x -


continued in WHttD by Buckingham (4 of 4)

continued from WHttD by Buckingham (3 of 4)
buckingham15@yahoo.com

- x  

She could go to church.

She could go to church, kneel in a dark, cramped
confessional where the air is heavy with smoke and
tears and sin, and ask a priest for forgiveness.  But
she wonders if a priest could truly understand the
things that she's sorry for, the shameful deeds that
plague her soul night after night.  The strange thing
is that she doesn't feel like she owes Mulder an
apology for the thing he is angriest about.  He is not
her keeper, despite what he might think.  She does
feel guilty, though, as if she's broken something
precious and has been trying to hide the pieces in a
dark, forgotten corner.  She feels regret like a
heartburn.

She wonders sometimes what advice she'd be given, not
from a cool, politely distant priest, but from
girlfriends, if she had any to consult, or her sister,
if she were still around to wax poetic about Mulder s
ancient soul, his beautiful but troubled aura, his
wild, melancholy spirit.  What would her mother say,
she wonders, if she ever shared more than the mere
basics.  She couldn't even tell her that she was
trying to have a child, too afraid that she wouldn't
approve, too afraid of how disappointed she'd be when
it didn't work out, so now there doesn't seem to be a
good place to start.

What could she say, Scully wonders.  Mom, I asked
Mulder to be the father of my child, which of course
was only a silly dream, but every time he tries to
move further into my life, every time he tries to take
the smallest bit of control, it seems like an
intrusion.  He is just too much.  But I can't leave
him, I won't leave him.  So what do I do, Mom?

She knows her mother wouldn t understand.  She doesn't
understand it all herself most of the time.  The truth
is that she and Mulder are in a world alone, where
others are uninvited, unwelcome, where the rules and
terrain are their secret knowledge, where they barely
have each other most of the time.

It isn't fair to blame Mulder for the way he loves
her, so much and so deeply that he can forget it
sometimes, like the way he forgets his phone number or
blood type.  She knows this.  She knows that his love
for her comes naturally to him, simply, that it s
nothing he has to think about or reconcile, nothing he
has to analyze or consider.  It just is, always will
be.  It's why he can forget the fact for weeks, then
come back to it again, the same intense, crushing
feeling, without missing a beat, like picking up a
book after tossing it aside for days and finding your
spot marked.  It's that easy for him.

She can never stop thinking of him, it seems.  When
she lay dying, when she sat alone and watched her
daughter die, when she tried to leave him, when she
marked her skin in independence.  Mulder was miles
away when she lay in an exam room, hips raised, but
she thought of nothing but him.  He is always present
for her, no matter where she is or what she is trying
to do.  To punish him for that is blatantly unfair,
and she knows it.  She just doesn't know how to stop.

- x  

He wakes her at three a.m. on a Friday morning to do
an autopsy because he is convinced that a girl has
drowned in puddle of ectoplasma.  When he turns out to
be wrong, he's already moved on to the next big thing.
 He expects her to follow him to England and trace
circles in crops.  He buys the tickets without even
asking for her scientific opinion, for her thoughts.
He takes for granted that she will tag along, no
questions asked.

Mulder's biggest problem is that he thinks he holds
some kind of dominion over her life, a right to wake
her up in bed so she spends an entire day tired and
cranky.  He thinks he has a right to send her off to
another continent on a moment's notice and jam her
weekend full of silly paranormal exploration.  That
drives her crazy, so even though she suspects that the
trip to England is a peace offering of sorts, a way to
get away to neutral ground so they can work together
and sort things out, she cannot go with him.  She
can't give in like that.

She asked him to father her child but she hates how
much of her life is tied up in him.  There is
something wrong with that, she knows, some flawed
logic or insanity, plain and simple, about it.  She
tries to pretend that bubble baths and quiet nights at
home can compete with the thrill of watching Mulder in
action, of problem-solving with him, challenging one
another in all things, and fails miserably.

She feels queasy, something ominous threatening on the
horizon, the moment he storms out of the office, but
even worse than that, bored.  She turns to their work
for comfort and tries to forget about England.

- x  

When she runs into her old lover, when she comes
face to face with her old life and all its persuasive,
twisted charms, something starts to shift.  Mulder is
an ocean away and she feels rudderless.  Every time he
goes away, she finds herself believing in all his
extreme possibilities, clinging to all the things that
make Mulder who he is.  It's as if she needs to keep
him close, keep him in her topsy-turvy sphere.

In a Buddhist temple, she finds her own truth.  She
sees her life in totality and she knows that she is
blessed.  She knows that the life she left behind, with
Daniel and his impossible love and a bright future in
medicine, was abandoned for a reason, and she feels
calm and sure of herself for the first time in months.

Seeing Daniel, coming face to face with those dreary
ghosts -- was she ever really that wide-eyed girl who
looked up at her teacher with pure admiration, who
thought 'I only want him to know me, to respect me, to
realize that I'm capable of being his equal,' then 'I
only want him to want me from afar, to feel that
forbidden thrill of attraction that I feel,' then 'I
only want to touch him once, to be his just once, to
own his body one single time, have him in my bed
once,' then finally, inevitably, 'I only want him to
love me;' was she ever really that girl? -- has made
see the things that have been hidden for so long.
This is not the life that she envisioned for herself
ten years ago in Med School, doesn't resemble the
fantasies she had for herself then but she can see now --  
Daniel has taught her one last thing -- that however
different it might be from all that she wanted then,
it is still a full life, brimming with purpose and
excitement and, if she'd only open herself up to it,
love.

In the steam rising from a tea cup, she sees Mulder
clearly for the first time in months, and he is
beautiful, with his snowflake face and sulky hair.  He
listens to her story, looking dazed and grateful, like
she's given him a gift, returned something he's been
waiting on for a while.  Mulder, she thinks, has
always been too easy to please, too easy to hurt.  He
is like a child that way, delighted by the possibility
of mermaids and fairies and little green men, happy
when she follows him into haunted Christmas houses,
brings him fancy hot cocoa with shaved chocolate,
listens to his theory of astral and etheric alchemy
and how they have Jungian implications without rolling
her eyes, thankful when she sees the same six-foot
blood sucking bug that he does, when she rubs his back
and holds him close for an entire night after his
mother ends her life, when she files his paperwork and
organizes his cabinets.

Daniel, even in her most hopeful, blissed-out moods,
seemed somehow above her, faraway and impossible to
please.  He would sneer sometimes at the clothes she
wore, the wine she ordered, the way she dealt with
patients, the sounds she made in bed, and she never
quite understood what her shortcomings were, where she
went wrong.  She always wanted to believe that the
quality of her mind, of character, would be enough but
Daniel always seemed to make her doubt it.  What kind
of person was she after all, she often thought,
sleeping with a married man, indulging in fantasies of
what her life could be like if he left his wife and
daughter and just loved her?  His love always made her
feel unworthy, cheap, wicked.

She looks at Mulder, sipping on hot Earl Grey, and she
feels nothing but peace.  She is shamed by the fact
that just days ago she thought his all-encompassing,
rough and tumble love was a burden.  She can't be
angry with the way he loves her when she sees plain as
day that she loves him in that same primal,
unforgiving way.  She's shot him, bullied shadowy,
reluctant informants, stood in contempt of Congress,
held a gun on her boss, lied to the FBI brass, all
weepy and heartbroken, that Mulder had offed himself,
autopsied his mother, taken over emergency rooms, and
fought off viruses, all for Mulder.  She's loved him
like some wild creature backed into a corner -- in the
New Mexican desert, in Alaskan snow drifts, on a Civil
War battlefield, in a Texas cornfield, on the beaches
of the Ivory Coast, where it was so pure and white
that it felt like another world.

She thinks of every moment when his simple
wise-cracking, seed-spitting, ESPN-watching,
heavy-hearted presence made her world seem full, and
she knows now that he is the solitary miracle of her
life.

She remembers once again what she asked of him, that
part of himself that she's always known was hers but
was never been able to accept.  She thinks of her
nerve, the gall and selfishness, expecting him to turn
over what she needed and not see her asking as an
invitation to something more.  She thinks of how she
saw the failure as hers, the disappointment as
something she owned alone, and how Mulder saw it as
shared, something they should carry together.  She
thinks of how he must have grieved, alone, after
leaving her apartment that night, after making sure
she would be all right, when all he wanted was for her
to reach out and let him show her that he understood.
She thinks of the plans she had for their child, the
silly, hopeful dreams that she had, and realizes he
must have had his own.  She thinks of him trying to
make it all better, of trying to find a way to right
all the wrongs, but not just for her.

For us, he told himself.  I'm doing this for us, for
our family.

She is exhausted by it all -- the past few days, the
past few months, the past few years.  Mulder drones on
next to her, and she is heartsick with love for him.
Her eyes close before she can tell him, but she's
already made the promise to herself.

- x  

In the dream, Mulder skimmed stones across a pond,
throwing hard.  Time moved forward with the beating of
her heart, and she stood back and watched him,
unrushed.  The sky above was gray and watery, but
there were streaks of silver here and there like early
starlight.  His arm snapped back and a stone flew
forward, bouncing on the water five times before it
sank beneath the surface near the middle of the pond.

"That was a good one," she called through the trees.

Mulder looked back at her over his shoulder, grinning.
 "No big deal.  I've been practicing for years."

"Can you teach me some time?" she asked.

He turned and faced her, hands on hip.  "You mean your
dad never taught you?  Your brothers?" 

She shook her head.  She felt rain starting to drip
through the leaves of the trees in a diamond-bright
mist.  Her sweater clung to her skin, and Mulder's
pale t-shirt shone transparent under the luminous, wet
sky.

"I can teach you," he said solemnly.  "It's pretty
easy actually.  All in the wrist, as they say."

He lifted another stone from the shore and reared back
to throw.  Lightening shot across the sky, silver and
elegant, and she splashed through a shallow puddle,
holding time in the palm of her hand.

- x  

Later, when she sits beside him on his bed, it seems
that he is waiting for her.

He is sitting up, pillow propped behind his back,
reading a second-hand edition of 'Great Expectations,' 
its biding broken and patched up with yellowed tape.
He smiles in the amber light and rubs at his eyes.

"Sleeping beauty awakens," he says, in a husky,
middle-of-the-night voice.   "And she's so
self-sufficient that she didn't even need a kiss from
Prince Charming."  He lays the book face down across
his bare chest.  "Good thing, too, since I'm not sure
there are any guys meeting that description around
these parts."

She shakes her head, grinning with a secret smile.  If
he only knew, she thinks.  Sitting up in bed,
half-dressed and sleepy, with pale moonlight kissing
his skin gold, watching her with his dark, adoring
eyes, he is the most charming thing that she's ever
seen.  It's so easy to forget that they've been tense
and uncomfortable with one another for weeks.  She
doesn't want to remember any day when Mulder didn't
look like this for her.

"I came to tell you something," she says.  He cocks
his head and smiles shyly, looking interested and
pleased.  "I came to tell you that no matter how many
different paths there might be, how many different
lives I could be leading, this is the right one.  This
is the one I choose."  She slides closer to him, her
hip resting against his thigh, the bed moving under
them like ocean waves, pushing against one another.
 "In the end, Mulder, you are the only choice."

He snuffles out a loud breath, wild-eyed and stunned.
He closes his book, pushing it aside, and looks down
at his lap.  When he looks at her again, Mulder is
shimmering, looking beholden and lovesick.

 "Saying the feeling is mutual seems pretty inadequate
after all you ve told me tonight," he tells her
quietly.   "But right back at ya, Scully."

She isn't waiting for him to declare himself because
he did that months ago.  He reaches for her hand,
holds it to his mouth.  She feels dizzy and weak, but
entirely sure of herself.

He kisses her first but she still thinks that it was
her idea, her desire that led to it.  Tumbling into
bed with Mulder is so much easier than she'd ever
thought, so much less frightening in reality than all
her overanalyzing of the possibility led her to
believe.  He touches her with years of pent-up feeling
and she gives it back for all she's worth.  She thinks
that the weight of his body on top of her should make
her feel trapped, but all she feels is delivered, like
the rapture is taking place in Mulder's bedroom and
she's first on the list.

She wishes that she was surprised that he is this
good, this committed to her, but it's no shock to find
herself sobbing against his mouth, scraping at his
back like she's afraid he'll fly off into the ether if
she's not careful.

 "I'm sorry,"  he moans, just after he comes.  He
touches a spot on her shoulder where he's left an
impression of his teeth, where the skin is shiny with
saliva and small beads of blood.  "God, Scully.  I'm
so sorry."

She shakes her head and tries to soothe him, stroking
his damp hair, hushing him, her eyes stinging with
sweat and tears.  It feels wrong suddenly because they
are in bed and Mulder is apologizing and she is
crying.  She feels herself tensing up, wondering about
mistakes and morning-afters.   But Mulder makes it
better, kissing her sore shoulder, soaking up her
tears with his mouth.  He lulls her to sleep somehow,
like he's casting a spell.

 "Thank you," he whispers, just before she drifts off
to oblivion, and she kisses the notch in his chin to
show him that he s welcome.

Later she leaves him asleep and dresses in the
bathroom.  In the mirror she is the same person that
she was yesterday but inside she feels like has
changed.  She is a new person with the same old
feelings.  Sleeping with Mulder hasn't changed who she
is, and she's grateful for that, grateful to feel as
steady and self-assured as she did yesterday.

On her way out, she watches him sleeping and forces
herself to keep a stiff upper lip.  She won't cry for
the life she can't have or the one she left behind.
While she drives home, her shoulder throbs and it
feels like a gift.  It reminds her of all that she
does have, not the things she pines for.

- x -

They'll never have a child together and that's fine,
she thinks, because it's the way things are supposed
to be.  They have their work, their partnership, and
that's something they've created between the two of
them, something no one else can ever be a part of.
She will stay by his side and help him chase all his
silly, goofy mysteries.  She'll be there when the
mysteries turn serious and dangerous.  She'll help him
fight his battles, argue with him when he needs to get
his head out of the clouds, prove the things that he
believes with her science when she can, and never
allow him to give up.

She won't be the mother of his children but that is
all right.  They are both who they are supposed to be,
where they are supposed to be.  She won't waste time
wondering about the things she's missing out on, won t
fight the things she wants anymore.  She is ready to
embrace the life she has, no matter where it might
take her.

- x -

Mulder makes three wishes but in the end all he wants
from her is a quiet night at home, watching some
stupid movie with popcorn and beer, like normal
people.  It's so easy to give that to him, especially
since she can't keep the idiotic grin off her face all
night.  And it has nothing to do with Bill Murray's
comic genius or a cute, industrious gofer running amok
on a golf course.  It's because Mulder is beside her,
warm and jokey, smelling like soap and rain and just a
little bit like beer, and laughing like someone who
doesn't have a care in the world.  This what she would
have wished for, for sure.

 "So what's the verdict?" he asks afterwards, tapping
the remote so the television goes dark.

She sits up, pushing the bowl of popcorn out of the
way, and shrugs.   "It was all right.  Not exactly
Oscar worthy but entertaining enough."

He sighs, dissatisfied.

 "I will say this, Mulder.  You definitely know how to
show a girl a good time."

He grins wolfishly.  "You think?"

She nods slowly, flirty and giddy.  She feels as
carefree as Mulder looks.

 "Maybe you're just easy to please," he says, with a
smirk that tells her he knows something she doesn't.
She watches as he reaches beside the sofa and pulls a
large white box from beneath the fishtank.  It has a
shiny blue bow on it that throws icy sparks around the
room in the watery light from the aquarium.  "Because
the night is still young and I'm only getting warmed
up." 

He lays the box across her knees and looks at her,
expectant.  She feels jittery now, backed into some
unknown corner.  The box is large enough to contain
anything -- a sheer black teddy with crotchless
panties, hand knit baby clothes with embroidered ducks
and teddy bears, vials and vials of funky alien DNA, a
full length mink coat.  Mulder is always a wild card
and he could decide that virtually anything under the
sun is an appropriate gift for her.  She worries about
what road the contents of the box might lead them
down, how it might make them look at one another.  She
is a fool, she thinks, because her hands are
trembling.

 "Open it already, Scully," Mulder demands.  "I swear
that it won't offend your delicate sensibilities."

He is one giant nervous twitch beside her, so she can
tell how important this is to him.  She lifts the lid
gingerly, like she expects vipers or black widows to
pour out, but when she gets a good look inside, she
can only laugh.  It's silly to think that a Mets
jersey could make her feel her love for Mulder all
over again, but that's what happens, sitting on his
couch, touching the heavy material.

Mulder helps her lift it out of the box, and she can
see then that there are thick, satiny letters across
the back that spell 'Piazza,' a big '31' taking up the
bulk of the space.  She giggles again, overcome.

"I got you the black one because I figured that way it
would match the rest of your wardrobe," he tells her,
pursing his lips impishly.

 "Oh, Mul-derr," she laughs.  "This is wonderful. It's
just what I've always wanted.  How did you know?"  She
rubs her fingers against the slick numbers on the
front.  When she looks up at him, he is smiling like
he's the one who been given a gift.  "This is the best
present you've given me in a long time."

He shrugs.  "Well, you know me.  I aim to please." 

She smiles, feeling the muscles in her cheeks pull
tight.  She wraps a hand around the back of his neck
so she can pull him closer and kisses him, sweetly and
chastely.

"Thank you," she whispers against his ear.

Mulder takes the jersey and holds it up against her
chest. "The size is probably all wrong since they
tend to cut these things for a guy's body," he says,
draping it over her shoulders. "Go try it on."

For just this once, she ignores that he's ordering her
around and does what she's told.

- x -

She wondered so long if she'd know how to hold Mulder
when the time came, if she'd know how he liked to be
touched and kissed.  She wondered if they'd have to
work at it, push through the awkwardness until they
got to something sweet.  She wondered if they'd be
compatible in that way, in agreement on the where's
and how's and how often's.  She wondered long and hard
about how Mulder would feel, how he'd sound and smell
and taste in the dark of night when he came.  She
tried not to think of these things too often, but
sometimes she couldn't help herself.

She never stopped to wonder about the other side of
things, the mundane domestic kind of life they'd
share.  What movies he'd want to watch, what dinners
he'd cook for her, what gifts he'd give, what side of
the bed he'd prefer.  None of that ever occurred to
her.

Reality has a way of surprising you, she thinks.
Reality has treasures she's never contemplated.

- x -

When she gets the jersey on, all buttoned up, it
reaches the tops of her knees and she laughs when she
looks at herself in Mulder's bedroom mirror.  Somehow
the oversized jersey and her dark, fitted suit pants
don't really work for her, so she loses the pants and
goes for a more basic look.

Mulder is kneeling in front of the sofa, cleaning up
popcorn kernels and collecting beer bottles, but he
stands up when he sees her in the doorway, and
whistles, eyes going wide like a cartoon wolf.

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that
Piazza has never looked as good in his jersey as you
do right now," Mulder tells her, coming closer.

Without her shoes, she feels tiny next to him and it's
thrilling in some strange way.  He kisses her, dances
her over to the sofa blindly, never taking his mouth
off hers, and they make out in his living room like
kids, in theory anyway because while she's sure
teenagers wouldn't be above pawing at one another on a
cramped sofa, she's not sure that kids in heat could
manage the slow, unrushed manner she and Mulder have
going, the same gentle, careful style that only people
who have lived their crazy, upside down lives could
pull off.

When their midnight pizza shows up at the door, she is
sweaty and panting beneath him, still in nothing but
the Mets jersey, which has ridden up considerably
thanks to Mulder's maneuvering.  He straightens his
own shirt and heads for the door.  Scully is slightly
self-conscious because she knows she can be seen from
the doorway, and thinks about throwing Mulder's
scratchy blanket across her thighs, but that only
seems like it will call more attention to her outfit.

She tries to act natural, which is absurd, since she
hasn't been in a situation like this in years, since
she's never been in a situation like this with Mulder.

The delivery guy glances over at her, grinning beneath
his gray ski cap.

"Hey," he says in her direction, bobbing his head to
non-existent music.  "Let's go Mets." 

She nods, blushing, and watches as Mulder sizes the
guy up, looking annoyed, shoves a twenty dollar bill
at him, and opens the door wider.

"Thanks a lot, buddy," he says, pushing him out the
door.  "Have a good night."

Mulder slams the door a little harder than she thinks
is necessary and presents the pizza to her, shows her
that it's just the way she wanted it -- black olives
and mushrooms on her half, pepperoni and green peppers
on his.  He is shaking his head though, looking
amused.

"I don't like the way that pizza guy was looking at
you."

"The pizza guy?" 

"Mmm hmm," he hums, sitting beside her again.  "Just
because you bring a guy a pizza doesn't mean you can
blatantly check out the hot chick draped across his
sofa wearing nothing but a Mike Piazza jersey."

"I am not 'draped' across your sofa, Mulder." 

He pauses mid-bite and gives her the once-over.  "I
guess I should have been more specific with my damn
wish."

She knows that he is joking, that it's just a tease,
but she wonders again what his final wish entailed.
He's not talking, but she's pretty confident that he
hasn't made any wishes for her or for the two of them
together.  She is confident that Mulder knows now that
everything between them will be worked for together,
earned.  He knows that he doesn't have to wish for
anything from her anymore.

Later they lie in his bed, watching SportsCenter for
the late baseball scores.  Mulder pouts because it's a
rare night when the Yankees have lost and the Mets
have won.  She is still in her jersey though most of
the buttons are undone and all of her lacy underthings
are tangled somewhere in Mulder's sheets.  He is
getting sleepy and bored with the highlights, so he
mutes the television and turns his full attention to
her.

She should be concerned about how quickly and easily
she burns for him, but she seems to have the same
effect on him.  There is equality even in this.  He
licks and bites at her neck, teasing her about her soft
spot for vampires, and she manages to flip him
underneath her, attacking him until he's incapable of
speech.

Looking down at him, she feels powerful and
benevolent.  He touches her in his sure, firm way, and
she thinks he is pretty generous himself.

Afterwards he pulls her to his side, pressing his
mouth to her ear.  He seems tense now, solemn and
guilty, and she knows he is thinking too hard.  He's
always introspective in the afterglow, which seems to
fit his personality.  Mulder's mind never takes a
minute off, and after sex, she knows he's thinking
about children that will never be, of promises left
unfulfilled.

"I want to give you everything," he whispers to her,
in the gloaming light of his bedroom.  She squirms
uncomfortably when she hears him, trying to meet his
eyes.  "And I know that I can't.  I'll probably never
be able to give you that." 

She shakes off her tears and scrapes her nails against
his back so she's sure that he's listening.  He looks
up at her and with the icy blue light of the
television, he looks like starlight, his eyes bright
but weary.

"Maybe this is it, Mulder," she tells him.  "Maybe
this is everything.  Maybe this is our miracle."  She
kisses him for all she's worth and she believes.

He smiles, but looks sad, like he's trying to appear
reassuring but has just seen too much to really feel
it.

"If only you believe like I believe we'd get by," he
says flatly, but she knows that he isn't satisfied.
He kisses her now and she tries to believe for both of
them.

When he falls asleep against her, she watches the
light from the television move across the ceiling,
pale and hopeful.  She feels like the luckiest woman
alive.

- x -

She hates the very plausible state of Oregon.

It is irrational and beneath her, but she hates that
spot on the map with everything that s inside her. It
is all black angry skies, reaching down to snatch up
whoever it likes.  It is a place where things end,
where things are lost.  She wonders if any good can
ever come from time spent there, but then she
remembers Oregon seven years ago, when she found
herself and found Mulder and learned what the universe
could hold.

She doesn't ever tell herself that he wouldn't have
gone if he had known.  She hates the mere idea.  If he
hadn't gone, he wouldn't have been her Mulder and she
wouldn't have loved him and then it wouldn't have
mattered whether he stayed or went.

Mulder would have gotten on the plane even if she had
been able to tell him.  He would have gone for all the
same reasons he went without knowing.  He would have
gone for other reasons too, she thinks.  Maybe he
would have had even more reason to go.  Maybe nothing
would have changed.

He would have gone.  She knows that.  She has to
believe it.

- x -

She cries all the time and tells herself that it's all
about hormones.  She doesn't believe it.  She has
never been this frightened before, this close to the
edge.  Something feels different this time,
irrevocably lost, and she is terrified that this is
what her life has become.

She cries when she finds a handful of sunflower seeds
in the pocket of her leather jacket.  She cries when
she finds an old voicemail from him on her cell phone,
telling that he's found a great new Mexican place
she'll love.  She cries whenever her mother asks if
there's any news.  She cries after her doctor's
appointments and when she drags herself to the infant
sections of department stores.

She cries off and on for a week in October when the
Mets and Yankees meet in the World Series. She cries
because she knows how excited Mulder would be for an
all-New York fall classic.  She cries again, with her
hand on her stomach, when the Mets lose, going down in
five games without putting up much of a fight.  Mulder
would have smiled, rubbed her nose in it, crowing
about it for months.  He might have finally gotten
that Yankees tattoo. She cries because Mulder is
missing and she is pregnant and she worries that he'll
never know.  She cries because she knows that she's
used up all of her miracles.

- x  

The End

- x -


Notes:  This story came about because I hated, hated,
hated that CC could drop a bombshell like M&S trying
to get Scully pregnant and not even imply that there
might be some emotional fallout from that.  Please.
Here's my humble attempt at least suggesting that they
struggled with the aftermath.

Before anyone asks, I did indeed Mary-Sue it a bit in
this one: I am the daughter of a Mets fan who became
one in the same way that Scully did in this story.
And yes, we're still bitter about the 2000 World
Series. :P

And yes again: I do worship at the feet of Louise
Gluck and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Questions?  Comments?  Concerns?  All welcome at
buckingham15@yahoo.com