Title: Dreams of Sleeping Fishes (1/1)
Author: CazQ
Category: V, UST, post-ep for 'all things'
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Heavy for 'all things', slight for 'Lazarus', 'The
Pilot', 'Closure' and the Emily arc.
Summary: "She has dreamed lives and possibilities with
Mulder, as she did with Daniel, but only now is she ready to
dream this one into reality."
Distribution: Yes to Gossamer. Xemplary: no. Anywhere else:
please ask me first.
Disclaimer: I do not own Mulder, Scully or indeed the X-Files,
all of which
belong to CC, 1013 and Fox. I merely play with other people's
toys every now
and again for fun, not profit.
Feedback: cazfic@ymail.com
URL: http://cazq.freeservers.com
Author's note: My thanks to Marasmus, for her reassurances and
immense knowledge of beer <g>, and to Virginia, as ever.
*****
"Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake."
- Henry David Thoreau
*****
Sitting on the couch that moulds to her body like a gentle
embrace, she listens to Mulder making them tea and thinks about
dreams.
She taps a fingernail idly against the face of her wrist-watch.
She had dreamed entire lives with Daniel before they had even
slept together once. In idle moments, she would slip into these
dreamscaped lives. On trains, waiting for buses, in bed just
before sleep. She would pass time by imagining not just how it
would be to kiss this man, to go to bed with him, but how it
would be to conduct the shabby, tantalising intricacies of an
illicit affair with him. Where they would go to eat dinner so as
to avoid being seen by anyone either of them might know. What
lies she would use to deceive her room-mate when she came home
late at night reeking of sex, adoration and the scent of his
cigar smoke.
Once they were involved, she would imagine how it might come out
into the open, how she would hold herself and how she would
arrange her expression if people knew, the tears and the
messiness.
Her mind always careful, always trying to stay three steps ahead
of the game, dreaming every possible scenario into being in order
to examine it from all angles. She might have been younger, freer,
back then, but she still carried out this kind of risk assessment
before throwing herself off the precipices of life-changing
decisions.
In a way it was like clairvoyancy, this power of imagining,
dreaming so many different life paths into and out of being. She
wonders now if it was a kind of clairvoyancy that tricked her out
of being able to see the world as it really was.
She had not just *considered* spending her whole life with Daniel.
In a way, she did spend lifetimes with him, although he didn't
know it. Such secrets she keeps from the men who've moved across
her life, always holding certain cards close to her chest.
She dreamed lives with him in other ways too. In the early days
of their relationship she had extraordinarily vivid dreams,
almost every night. She would wake from a night of dreaming him
more exhausted than when she went to sleep, a slow grind of ache
at the back of her skull. There was one dream she had again and
again. Years later, it still visited her, when he was gone from
her life, when she was with Jack, and even during the early X-files
years when Mulder was slowly but surely annexing that area of her
life where she had always kept her lovers.
In the dream, Daniel stands by a lake in a park, showing a little
boy with chestnut hair how to work the controls for his motorized
toy sail-boat. He only notices her when she steps forward and
tugs at his sleeve. She says to him, lightly, "Who's this?",
and he looks at her quizzically and asks her if she doesn't
recognise her own son. The boy has her hair, and her freckles,
but Daniel's eyes. "I always wanted a little girl," she
says, in a daze. Daniel shakes his head solemnly, and tells her
that sons are gifts and daughters are burdens. Distracted by
their talking, the boy capsizes the sail-boat and begins to cry.
"Dana," Daniel says, ignoring the child, "your
patient, a sixty year-old Caucasian male, presents with a three-month
history of worsening dyspnea on exertion and right-sided
pleuritic chest pain. Marked jugular venous distention, scant
right basilar pulmonary rates, a pericardial knock, and severe
lower extremity edema are present on physical examination. What
do you do next?"
She stands by the water, her mouth working but no words coming
out, and Daniel shakes his head again, before getting out a red
ball-point pen from his jacket pocket and carefully drawing an F
in a large circle on the back of her hand. Tears stinging at the
backs of her eyes, she turns and is standing in the gymnasium of
her old high school, dressed for her graduation ceremony. Bill
and Charlie stand there, wearing white coats with stethoscopes
round their necks over naval dress uniforms, and tell her in
perfect unison, "Sons are gifts and daughters are burdens".
Often, when she wakes from this dream, her pillow is damp with
tears.
Mulder's footsteps as he comes across the room bring her back to
herself. "You okay there?" he asks, very casually,
handing her a grey stoneware mug and settling himself down beside
her.
She shakes her head back and forth ever so slightly. "Yes.
Yes. Sorry. Mulder...you ever have a recurring dream?"
He raises his eyebrows, and then nods. "Sure. A couple.
Neither of them particularly good. One I had when I was just a
little kid, one of those surreal but terrifying ones. One I've
had since college." He turns his mug slowly in the fingers
of his right hand. "Have you been having bad dreams, Scully?"
"I...I'm not sure. Strange ones, maybe, rather than bad."
He studies her carefully, the pale blue light from the fishtank
casting odd shadows and washes of luminosity on them both. "Well,"
he says, taking a sip from his steaming mug of tea, "even
bad dreams can be good in a way. Cathartic. You confront that
which terrifies you in the safe space of a dream. Your body is
paralysed, you're in no physical danger, and when it's over you
can forget the whole things within minutes of waking up, so you
don't dwell on it." He runs a finger round the rim of his
mug, coughs, and says, "Scully, have you been dreaming about
Daniel? About your past?"
"Not...not directly about him. But about certain aspects of
my past, yes."
He nods, and says quietly, "So. While I was gone. Tell me
about it. Tell me all about it."
She picks up her own mug of tea, looks down at it in her joined
hands and chews on her lower lip for a moment. "Okay. I'll
try. Bear with me, Mulder. I'm not sure I know where this story
starts yet."
"But you know where it ends?" he asks carefully
She looks up and meets his gaze. Suddenly she feels a smile
spread and glow inside her, rising to her lips, and unconsciously
he mirrors it, so that she sees her own half-doubtful, half-hopeful
expression reflected in his very flesh. "Maybe. Maybe not. I
guess the point is being willing to find out."
******
Later, enfolded in warmth, in a rough blanket that drapes heavy
and comforting over her limbs, she dreams.
She enters Mulder's apartment without knocking, finds him sitting
on the couch, a fine bone-china tea service set out in front of
him. "Would you like to have some tea?" he offers,
smiling at her.
She walks into the room, kneels on the floor opposite him. "Sure,"
she says, watching as his large hands lift the paper-thin cups,
pour the fragrant liquid, moving as slowly and precisely as a
geisha conducting a tea ceremony.
He hands her a cup, and as she inhales the warm, scented steam
rising from it, he says in Colleen's voice, "Have you ever
had moments when everything gets incredibly clear? When time
seems to expand?"
"Yes," she says, rising from her place on the floor.
She walks around the table, stopping in front of him, and bends
down, lifting his hands and kissing the backs of them lightly.
"Yes. Speak to me, Mulder."
He smiles again, gentle and glowing, and everything is glowing,
not just his smile, in the light of one small candle that sheds a
disproportionate amount of light, and she realises that she is
wearing only a robe and her underwear.
"Well," he says, placing those large, strong hands on
her hips, warm through the thin fabric of the robe, and stroking
his thumbs lightly over her hip-bones as he draws her closer and
closer still, "I was twelve when it happened. My sister was
eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night. Just gone,
vanished. No note, no phone calls, no evidence of anything."
The past coils round her like smoke rising from incense sticks as
he speaks, and the room is at once his living-room and a long-distant
motel room, melting into each other so that she drifts in time.
"You never found her," she says, remembering how she'd
replied that night, slowly placing her hands on his shoulders.
Behind him, the wall melts away, and she sees a pair of ornate
red doors, standing slightly ajar.
"But I did," he whispers, his thumbs still circling
hypnotically on her hips, "we did, we're not in Bellefleur,
Oregon anymore, Toto."
"And you're free," she whispers back, leaning down
towards his upturned face.
"I am. But are you?" he asks, just before their mouths
meet.
The doors swing open, and she stands by a lake in a park. Toy
sail-boats tack back and forth across the water, although she has
the sense that they are somehow real boats, just seen very far
away, as though she looks at them down the wrong end of a
telescope.
A little girl stands by the water, the controls for one of the
sail-boats in her hands. "Hello Emily," she says,
although the child is red-headed, not blonde, skinny, freckly and
gap-toothed.
The little girl brings one of the boats into shore, takes Scully's
hand, and they step aboard it, because it is suddenly the right
size. She inhales the scent of salt water, sun-warmed paint and
wood. Leaning over the side, she looks down into the water and
sees a shoal of fishes that turn into Daniel, Jack Willis, her
brothers and, bizarrely, Walter Skinner, swimming after her under
the surface, but they have somewhere to make port before night
falls, and so she turns away and faces into the scouring sea air
as the little girl steers the boat and laughs into the face of
the wind.
******
Mulder sits on the coffee table, watching her, for a long time.
The delicate skin of her eyelids shivers as eventually she drops
into REM sleep and her eyes begin to flick back and forth across
vistas only she can see. Under the blanket, her limbs twitch
occasionally, the way a cat's will when it lies curled up by the
fire dreaming feline dreams of hunting and running.
He rises quietly to go and wash the mugs. He watches the water
run, waiting for it to get hot, and thinks about what they have
said to each other. If all possible choices have led her here, to
his apartment, to sleeping safe and secure under his watchful eye,
then all his choices must have been leading him to here too. To *her*.
This is not a new idea to him. He orients himself by her. Leaving
for England without her, he was on edge, uncertain. There was no
one there to listen to him mocking the articles in the airline
magazine, no one to cadge an extra packet of peanuts or pretzels
from, no one falling asleep, a heavy, warm weight on his shoulder,
during the execrable inflight movies.He wandered around fields
near Avebury under iced blue skies, getting mud all over his
sneakers, and kept turning to comment to her and finding that she
wasn't there. He sat in a pub watching his shoes steam and dry
before the smouldering log fire, nursing a pint of Theakston's
Old Peculier, and felt flat and disappointed, because he would've
liked to have seen her expression when he ordered it.
Coming home, he felt as though he had been set straight again,
although his body had become terminally confused about whether it
was time to eat breakfast, lunch or dinner. He sat in his cramped
coach class seat, sticking his legs out into the aisle, shut his
eyes and day-dreamed about how when he got back he would go over
to her place, admit that the trip had been a bust, give her the
Whittard's English Breakfast Tea he had bought for her, maybe
suggest they ordered a pizza. He had felt his internal compass
swing back to true north. Birds, he thought, must feel that way
when they migrate, when they turn on the wind and feel the maps
pulsing in their blood sing true, the thin skin of magnetism
shivering over the earth resolving itself into a flight-path to
follow home.
Drying the mugs and putting them back in the cupboard, he finds
himself humming that old Talking Heads song about letting the
days go by and asking yourself how you got here, and smiles to
himself in the dark kitchen. Back in the living room, Scully
murmurs something in her sleep, shifting as if she would burrow
further into the cushions of the couch. He carefully picks her
shoes up from their position under the coffee table, where she
had toed them off, and places them, side by side, neatly beside
the couch.
Undressing in his room, he thinks of what he said to her. How he
ducked the issue. How he told her they should probably not get
into the idea that one wrong turn would have led to them being
apart at that late hour. Sliding between the covers, he promises
himself that they will find an hour when it is not too late to
get into all the meanings that throws up. All the possibilities.
Slowly, easily, he slides into sleep, and in the darkened rooms,
only a thin wall between them, they begin to breath in sync as
the air of his apartment becomes thick and hazy with dreams.
Dreams that slide and bleed into each other like watercolour.
*****
Scully sits beside him, curled up in the window seat, watching
the world slide by beyond the wing of the plane. She wears high-heeled
gleaming black pumps, naval dress whites, and a pair of those
horribly unflattering plastic safety goggles she sometimes wears
for autopsies.
"Do you know what an eidolon is, Mulder?" she asks,
still looking out the window. Over her shoulder, through the
thick little oval of glass, he can see a slice of blue sky.
"Sure," he says. "It's an ideal, a phantom image.
It can refer to the representation of a person your mind creates
within a dream."
"Right," she says, turning to him. "But I'm real.
I'm real for as long as you dream a little dream of me. And you're
all kinds of real, because I'm dreaming of you."
She puts a finger to her smiling lips, like a child about to
share a secret, and, turning, dives out the window. He leans over
to watch her cutting down through the air in a swan-dive to the
wrinkled blue ocean below, and from a long, long way down she
calls back to him, but the rushing, oxygenless air cuts her words
into ribbons.
He is in an airport, rushing through the baggage hall and out
into the concourse, looking everywhere for her bright hair and
her slim frame moving through the crowds. He finds a scalpel on
the floor beside a fake potted tree, a black high-heeled pump
lying discarded near a check-in desk, a black suit jacket slung
over a hard grey plastic seat. She's here somewhere, she must be,
because wherever they go they always pass through airports. When
he looks up there is an electronic announcements board over his
head, the kind you find in train stations, and as he watches it
flickers, letters forming in neon yellow, saying "I'm not
here. I've left it behind."
He fights his way through the revolving doors onto the sidewalk
where cabs draw up and disgorge travellers, but the sidewalk isn't
there. He walks down along the sea-wall to the harbour, and
watches her mooring up a boat as a little girl secures the tiller.
"You know how to sail, Mulder?" she shouts, looking up
and flicking her hair out of her face.
He walks down the dock and stops, shading his eyes against the
sun which is leaping and shining on the water behind her. "Sure,"
he says, "but can't we stop? Can't we stop moving for a
while? I've been looking for you."
"We're always moving, we have to," she says, smiling.
"What matters is which way we move, and who we're going with."
If he looks down into the water lapping against the dock, he
doesn't know what he will see, but she is a sailor's daughter and
after all, it was always fire, not water, that scared him. Fire
consumes, leaving nothing, but water is a place to be born, and
so he asks her permission to come aboard.
******
In the living-room, Scully wakes with a start. She can still hear
the water gurgling and chirruping round the hull of the boat as
she stands on the deck and waits for Mulder to come across...
No. She turns her head and sees the fishtank, glowing like an
alien vessel in the corner, the aerator bubbling and chuckling,
threading the quiet with little watery noises.
Her dream is already fading. She remembers...boats...red doors...Mulder.
She stretches, looking at her watch, appalled to see it's almost
two o'clock in the morning. Sliding out from under the blanket,
she finds her shoes and puts them on. In the tank, the fish are
awake, rising and sinking in calm motion as they move around
their little glowing world. Do fish sleep, she wonders? Once she
knew the answer to that, but her biology classes and textbooks
are a dry and distant memory. All of that time is, she thinks,
smoothing down her wrinkled clothes and carefully putting a stray
thought about Daniel away on a quiet shelf in the corner of her
mind. All of that time is long gone.
Mulder might know how fish sleep. She will ask him, tomorrow.
The apartment is still faintly scented by the green tea Mulder
brewed earlier. She had been astonished when he offered her a
choice of Lipton, Earl Grey or Jasmine Green Tea, having always
pegged him as a coffee guy, and he had shrugged and grinned
secretively, offering no explanation, as she reached out past him
and chose the green and gold box.
She moves like a thief through the apartment, through the shadows
in his bedroom, where he lies breathing heavily and slowly under
thin cotton sheets, and into his tiny bathroom, where she
splashes her face with water, rinses out her dry mouth and
rearranges her clothes.
On her way out, she yanks the cord to switch off the bathroom
light and it swings out of her grasp, tap tap tapping against the
tiled wall. It doesn't sound all that loud to her, but it is
enough to disturb Mulder, because he raises his head off the
pillow to mumble her name just as she is slipping out of the door.
"Shhh, go back to sleep," she whispers, going over to
the bed. She crouches down beside him and smoothes his hair back,
as if soothing a feverish child.
"Where are you going?" he asks, looking confused, one
hand emerging from under the sheet to grasp her wrist lightly.
"Home. It's two o'clock in the morning, Mulder."
His brow furrows. "Stay," he says. "It's too late
for you to be driving home. Stay. I'll make you breakfast in the
morning. I have yoghurt, maybe."
She means to get up, pull her hand away, maybe kiss him gently on
the forehead before she leaves, no more. Instead she finds
herself asking, "Do you know how fish sleep?"
His face takes on a curious look, unless it is just the trick of
shadow on his features. She can't quite tell. "I didn't
think they did. You're...you're the sailor's daughter. You must
know."
"I did once," she whispers, "back in college. But
that's a long way behind me."
He smiles, slowly, the glint of white, strong teeth unmistakable
even in the dark, and pulls ever so slightly on her arm. "Why
don't you come aboard? There's room for two. It beats the couch."
She makes no conscious decision to do it. It's just a slow slide,
toeing off her shoes again as he tugs gently and she rises up and
across and lets herself settle against him, breathing in his warm
skin.
"I dreamed about you, I think. Before," she whispers
into his collarbone, pressing her mouth lightly against it in
what might be a dream of a ghost of a kiss.
"I dream about you all the time," he mumbles sleepily,
his lips ghosting over the crown of her head and down to the skin
of her forehead. "Maybe we're each other's dreams, Scully.
Recurring ones."
With that he falls asleep again, and she rests against him for a
long time, before stretching up slightly to kiss his sleeping
mouth and then sleeping herself. Recurring dreams, always moving,
but recurring back and back towards each other. She has dreamed
lives and possibilities with Mulder, as she did with Daniel, but
only now is she ready to dream this one into reality.
She curls into him in her sleep, and in his sleep he wraps
himself around her, close without claustrophobia, reaching out
across the separation of unconsciousness for each other's warmth.
In their dream that night she slides into the water with him, and
they breathe air into each other's mouths as they swim down
through soft water, looking for sleeping fishes and leaving the
past on the abandoned shore.
******
FINIS
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