******
Part III: The Floodtide
******
"A little while a little love
The scattering autumn hoards for us
Whose bower is not yet ruinous
Nor quite unleaved our songless grove.
Only across the shaken boughs
We hear the floodtides seek the sea,
And deep in both our hearts they rouse
One wail for thee and me."
- from "A Little While", Dante Gabriel Rossetti
******
In the weeks that followed, as they pursued the dying sun ever
westward into the emptied heart of the country, she surprised
herself with her capacity for slaughter.
Perhaps it was because, all through those three bloodied months,
she did not think of it as slaughter. Perhaps any human who had
looked into the eyes of a shape-shifter or a shape-shifter as it
struggled and died at the end of the blade would not think of it
as slaughter. She did not know what it was. She had thought long
and hard about the ramifications of killing other living
creatures so ruthlessly. Then she had watched one die.
They had stumbled across a cell of eight shape-shifters who had
somehow worked their way into Grey-infested territory. The battle
that followed was quick and chaotic. They lost Ron in that
engagement, their first loss in battle. A shape-shifter had
crushed his larynx with a single hand. She had heard an odd sound
as she saw his eyes roll back into his head and his body convulse
-- it had been her own howl of rage.
As the creature paused to be certain that its victim was dead
where he lay on the ground, Jack had stepped up behind it,
noiseless as a cat, and slipped a sharpened hunting knife into
the base of its neck. Glancing up as she retreated quickly from
the freshly-fallen, already-bubbling remains of another shape-shifter,
she saw the creature die. She was shaken, because no light went
out in its eyes. She had seen many people die, and had always
found that the moment of death could be told as precisely with
the eyes as with heart monitors and ECGs, because at the very end
the light in the eyes dwindled and died, the features subtly re-cast
themselves. When they had lain Ron in the rough, shallow grave
they had dug for him, something had been gone from his face, had
disappeared and left him looking almost like a stranger. With
these *things*, there was just a kind of nothingness, a blankness
that sent chills scurrying through her veins.
It was then that she stopped thinking of it as killing and
started thinking of it as extermination, although always with the
uncomfortable knowledge prickling at the back of her mind that
that was how the aliens saw what they were doing to the natural
inhabitants of Earth. To a shape-shifter, she surmised, killing a
Grey was an act of war, whereas killing Ron was simply an act of
extermination. As she and Mulder had said scant weeks before --
pouring boiling water on the ant's nest.
She suspected that Mulder had similar thoughts, although they did
not speak of it. There was a price to be exacted, nature demanded
it, and they paid the cost of becoming an effective resistance.
She saw the dark hollows beneath his eyes deepen, his mouth set
in a hard line when he was lost in thought, as if she looked into
a mirror when she looked at his face. She held her cross in her
right hand, closing it into a fist around it, and silently told
the universe that what she did, she did of her own free will.
Then she got up in the morning, ate breakfast and helped to plan
the setting of explosives around a Grey compound that would kill
hundreds more.
Not kill, though. Exterminate. Because the best of people do what
they must and say what they must to retain their sanity. Because,
skirting the suburbs of more than one large town, they saw the
ruins still smouldering after weeks, months. Because in places
they began to come across the bodies of those who had escaped the
abductions but whose luck had then run out, blackened husks no
longer recognizable as men or women, bodies scarred by unknown
weapons in ways none of them had ever seen in their deepest,
blackest dreams, bodies swept aside, tossed out of the way like
rag dolls. Because still more often they found nothing, evidence
of an attempt at total erasure of the mere irritation that was
mankind, like the cars piled up twenty-deep on the bigger roads,
apparently having smashed into each other when their drivers were
taken. Evidence of what some of the group began to refer to, in
hushed voices, as the great Vanishing.
Standing with Ralph and Tam beside a stretch of interstate
highway, staring at a pile of twisted metal where five driverless
vehicles had engaged in a tangled metal embrace no human could
have survived, she winced when Jack peered into the wreckage and
called out in a flat, tired voice, "No. No bodies." She
winced and silently promised the louring, hostile clouds that
they would stand. They would not consent to vanish.
******
It was in the midst of all that killing that love spoke its name
more and more loudly into their ears. Thinking about that, Mulder
almost had to smile. He and Scully had been moving towards each
other for a long, long time, but always at a pace about as fast
as continental drift. The only moments in the past when their
relationship had seemed to move in real time had been when one or
other of them was hospitalised or in mortal danger. It made sense,
in the somewhat twisted, complicated way that they had always
made sense to each other, that they would finally take that one,
little, life-altering step during the ending of the world. After
all, hadn't he always held back from putting his feelings for her
out into the open in case it caused the world to end? Now that it
had, his perspective had shifted, subtly, slightly, but just
enough.
When the day came, then, it seemed natural and right, even as it
also seemed as startling and amazing as birdsong above a
battlefield.
Although in the depths of his imagination they came together at
last with a noise of thunder and breaking waves, in a glorious
fury of love that threatened to overthrow him, rationally he knew
that they finally met and embraced within a blind, silent, secret
space.
Their little group was sheltering that night in an abandoned
motel for lack of anywhere safer, slipping in under cover of
darkness, all praying that they had trekked far enough from the
Grey compound they had blown sky-high that morning to evade
pursuit. Standing staring at the rose of flame blossoming from
the explosive charges earlier in the day, she had sought out his
hand and held it so tight that her fingernails broke the skin of
his palm, whispering a one-word oath: "Together". As he
had felt the hot burn of pain on his palm, he had known. Somehow
then, he had known, that it was finally time.
With sleeping bodies on each side beyond whisper-thin walls,
weary beyond words as the last sparks of the adrenaline buzz died
out, they were quiet, so quiet, biting their lips to stay silent
as a gentle, chaste clasp of the hand turned to embrace turned to
kiss turned to her body burning against his.
He could not even see her face as she moved and shuddered under
him, was not able to look into her eyes as his hands, trembling
from exhaustion and awe, made love to every inch of her skin:
there could be no question of making enough light to see by. Even
his eerie ability to see through the darkness to her deserted him.
Instead his memories of that night when everything and nothing
changed would be the sense-pictures of a blind man.
The indefinable scent of her, rising from the warm crease of her
inner arm and the oh-so-smooth spot right behind her ear.
The raised ridges of scars on her body like Braille.
The way her flesh jumped beneath his fingertips as he trailed a
hand down between her breasts and past her navel.
The heat of her tongue as she lapped at the hollow at the base of
his throat.
The taste of her kisses, faintly smoky from the whisky they had
all nipped at to steady their nerves on the long walk to shelter.
The delicious heat and dizzying tightness within her.
The sudden pleasure-pain of her nails raking down the length of
his back as she cried out, once, in the night, a sound of release,
of surrender, and of triumph.
"I'm not a perfect man," he whispered to her in the
naked dark as she fell asleep, "I'm so far from perfect it's
not even funny, but this is a kind of perfect, Scully."
As he lay wrapped around her, sleep tugging at him, and marvelled
at the slightness of her warm, compact body in his arms, Mulder
thought about how people talk of how they fall in love with a
dream, with an idea, with a place, with a person. Poets, singers,
writers, even the lonely, half-crazy old woman who tells her life
story to strangers on a park bench; they all want to tell of how
they fell into love, fell down into a person.
As they lay in the cloaking, forgiving deep of the night, he
thought that they had not fallen, but had risen out of the dark
and into each other, into loving. This, he thought, slowly
stroking his hands up and down the warm, downy lengths of her
forearms, this was what he had been trying to remember. This was
what it was to be free.
******
Three nights later, Mulder woke in the rock womb of a cave high
in the mountains. They were now approaching the continental
divide, the air thinning a little more each day as they entered
Colorado and climbed higher, through ranges that were really only
outcroppings of the enormous rearing mass of the true Rockies,
which lay further west. He felt the absence of her body against
his as keenly as he might feel the absence of a limb. He
stretched out blindly in the darkness, hand groping across
blankets, across rock. Something scuttled beneath his fingers in
the blackness, briefly, leaving him with the quick sense picture
of hard chitinous shell, spiny legs, delicate antennae brushing
like feathers over his palm. He crawled out of the cocoon of the
sleeping bag, threw aside the blanket, and grabbed his Sig and
holster. He strapped them on, stood carefully and began picking
his way between sleeping bodies.
"That you, Mulder?"
"Yeah," he whispered back, hearing his hushed voice
echo softly off the cave walls. "Tam?"
He squinted, waited for his night vision to kick in. The faint
outline of Tam gradually sketched itself in by the starlight
filtering in through the cave-mouth. She sat hunched on a ledge
of rock, rifle laid across her lap, perfectly still with the
composure of some twisted Pieta. Michaelangelo would have loved
her strong brow, the graceful arch of her neck, the faint gleam
of light lying on black marble skin, the way the plaid and cotton
of her clothes draped over her defined, solid muscles. He might
even have loved the weapon cradled like a dead Christ in her arms.
He calculated quickly: Tam's watch, which meant it must be
between two and four in the morning.
"Yup. Scully said you might come by. I'm s'posed to tell you
to go back to sleep, she'll be back soon. She said I wasn't to
tell you on any account that she'd gone up the trail to the right
a-ways." Mulder saw teeth flash white in her shadowed face,
quickly.
"Thanks, Tam," he whispered, passing by her and ducking
out under the lip of the rocky ceiling.
"You packing, Mulder?" she called softly after him.
He turned to show her the Sig holstered under his shirt and the
long, thin stiletto-blade sheathed at his waist, lifted a hand in
a quick wave to acknowledge her nod of the head, and jogged off
up the trail. His feet thudded on the packed carpet of pine
needles, and the small, secret sounds of the forest seemed
unnaturally loud in his ears.
He found her a few hundred yards up the trail, sitting on a
fallen log, staring out into the utter blackness of the forest.
He sat down beside her without saying a word, and they sat in
silence for a while, the wheel of the stars turning slowly
overhead.
"You weren't supposed to follow me. I just wanted to take
ten minutes to think."
"You couldn't think with me around? Somewhere safe?" He
stamped down on the kindling fire of anger. Not the time.
"Mulder, I'm a private person, you know that," she said,
gesturing helplessly. They were both speaking in hushed, low
voices. They were in the cathedral of night, before the altar of
the past. "It's hard for me, having one small group of
people around every minute
of every day."
"I liked it better when it was just you and me too, Scully."
She turned then, looking at him in shock. He held up his hand to
forestall her response. "No, I don't mean...after, I mean
before. The way we were. On cases, in the office -- it was always
just you and me against the world, wasn't it? Just the two of us.
I could kid myself that for you there was only me, only me in the
world. The way it was for me with you."
She sat for a time just looking at him, eyes wide, the whites of
them gleaming by starlight.
"Did you ever think maybe it *was* that way for me, Mulder?"
He nodded, smiled a little. "Yeah, sometimes. I only just
started believing it lately, though."
She sighed, then, and moved along the log until she was right
beside him, her thigh touching his, her arm alongside his.
"Would you put your arm around me, Mulder? Please?" she
asked, in an oddly formal tone, as though she were asking him if
he would care to dance. The absurdity of her request struck him
strongly, that she should ask so stiffly for this when hours
before, wrapped together in the brush above the camp, he had been
melded to her skin, moving deep inside the slow-burn of her. He
did not smile, though, aware as he was that she should not have
had to ask.
He slipped an arm around her shoulders, drew her in close, as
though about to impart some momentous confidence. "Close
your eyes for me, Scully," he instructed her. She looked up
at him, clearly trying to discern his meaning, but he kept his
face carefully blank, and she had to give up, settling back
against him and closing her eyes.
"Good. Now," he whispered, laying his head against hers
where it rested on his shoulder, "would you like to know
what we're doing tonight?"
"Mulder, what --"
"You ever wish on a star, Scully?" He looked up at the
cold scatter of stars ice-bright overhead, and shivered a little.
"No. Not lately, anyway. The stars haven't seemed quite the
same for a while now."
"Me neither. Maybe we should. Maybe we could just pretend a
little? Because I was thinking...we've never even been on a real
date, you know? So I was thinking: if I *was* going to make
wishes, I'd wish for that. We'd go to the ballpark, Scully."
"Mulder --" she began.
"Shhh. It's just pretending, Scully. A little bit of sanity
in the night. It won't do any harm. I pick you up, of course,
because I'm a gentleman, and I do still remember the etiquette of
dates, even if it has been a while. I'm on time, for once, but
you're running a little late, and when you open the door your
hair isn't quite dry from the shower. I tell you to leave it,
because I like the way it curls and waves when you let it dry on
its own --"
"You do?" she murmured, breath warm against his
shoulder through the flannel of his shirt.
"Yeah, I do. So you and I and your curly hair go out to the
car, and we drive down to the ballpark with Bruce Springsteen on
the stereo, because you find the tape on the dash, and it turns
out the Boss is one of your old favourites too --"
"Which song?"
He paused a second, considered. "'Born To Run'. Has to be,
Scully. I'm afraid if you disagree I'll have to decide that maybe
this date was a mistake and I should just drive you back home."
"Everybody's out on the run tonight, but there's no place
left to hide," she quoted at him, her voice edged with irony.
"Together Wendy we can live with the sadness," he
whispered, ever-so-gently but carefully light.
"I guess that'll do, then. As long as I can sing along to
the chorus without any snide remarks about my singing voice,"
she murmured after a moment.
"Good. And don't worry, I don't have any Three Dog Night in
my tape collection," he said, grinning into the night.
"So, we drive along, and you have the good grace not to make
fun of *my* tuneless singing when I join in on the choruses. We
don't have far to go, because we're going to a Little League game.
Couldn't get Orioles tickets at such late notice. So, soon it's
the second inning, and we're be sitting up in the creaky old
wooden bleachers, eating popcorn I brought along especially, and
you're sitting on my leather jacket so you don't get splinters in
inconvenient places."
"You wore your leather jacket? That's nice. What else?"
she mumbled sleepily.
"Uh, well, it's a warm night, so I've gone with blue jeans,
sneakers and a grey t-shirt. It's pretty casual for a first date,
but I figured you've seen me looking a lot worse plenty of times
before, so this ought to be okay."
"So what am I wearing?"
"You look just great. Better than great. You're wearing blue
jeans too, and a white t-shirt that hugs your figure in all the
right places, and one of those nice little button-down sweaters
in this pale, mint green colour. Sneakers, no make-up."
"That doesn't sound great, it sounds dull," she
protested softly.
"Okay, so next time I'll take you someplace you can wear a
dress with a capital D, some tight, short black number that goes
with four-inch heels and makes every guy in the place gape when
we walk in. But you look perfect for tonight. Just perfect. And I'm
sitting next to you wondering what to say, feeling about thirteen
again, hoping like hell that the prettiest girl in the ballpark
is gonna let me kiss her goodnight at the end of the date."
"So what *do* you say?"
"Well, I still can't think of anything, so I decide that the
best way to be sure of that goodnight kiss is to get it now. So I
lean across while you're saying something about the pitcher's
curveball, and kiss you in the middle of your sentence, and you
taste like popcorn, and after a second you put your arms around
my neck and kiss me back. It's slow and soft and sweet, and then
suddenly your tongue is slipping into my mouth and I'm damn glad
we're sitting high up in back where people can't see us, because
we're making out like a couple of teenagers on these splintery
old bleachers, and it's the most erotic thing I can remember
happening to me in years."
"It is, huh?" she muttered sleepily, one hand idly
playing with the buttons on his shirtfront.
"Oh yeah. Baseball and Scully. What could be sweeter?"
"Mmm. Remember that night you tried to teach me to hit a
home run?"
"Yeah."
"I thought for sure you'd kiss me that night."
"I'm sorry, Scully, I just didn't --"
"Don't be sorry. It was one of the purest things I've done
in a long, long time. I think maybe we should go back to camp,
Mulder. Tam will worry until we're back in."
He held her for a second longer, unwilling to leave the sun-warmed
bleachers, the taste of popcorn, the umpire's call of "Striiike
two!" ringing out in the soft, warm night. Then he stood,
helped to her feet and turned to go back down the trail.
"Mulder?"
"Yeah?"
"I..." She trailed off, looked down at the ground
quickly, then back up at him, almost shyly. "I had a really
nice time. Thank you." She stood up on tiptoe, and pressed
her lips against his quickly in a soft kiss. Then she was gone,
picking her way back down the trail towards the cave.
Alone in the dark, he raised his right hand to his lips for a
second, held it there.
"Mulder, c'mon." He looked up, and saw that she was
waiting a little way down the slope, half-turned back towards him.
Waiting for him. He let his hand fall to his side, and went down
to join her.
******
One week later, the Calls began.
She was off in the trees answering a call of nature, of all
things, when it came. They were moving through dense ever-green
forest to an old log-cabin campground their scouts had found that
day, hoping to set up there that evening and then mount a
sabotage run against an alien encampment a few miles west. She
had just stood up and buttoned her jeans when she felt a
throbbing at the base of her neck, and then a terrifying muddying
of her thoughts, as if her brain-cells were being replaced with
soft lint. Together with that, an irresistible *tugging* at her
lower limbs, almost as if there were ropes around her legs
yanking her south.
"Jeeee-sus," she hissed on a long exhalation of breath.
"Oh, no, no, *no*..."
She reached an arm out blindly and groped at the air until her
hand met hard, unyielding bark. She managed to stumble to the
tree and clutch at it, welcoming the rough surface of the bark
digging into the skin of her hands. That was how Mindy found her.
"Dana," she heard, far off in the fog somewhere, a high-pitched,
worried female voice. Mindy, she thought desperately, struggling
until she had reached through the fog of her mind and found a
name to pin on the voice. She tried to shout back, her throat
working dryly, but could not form the words.
"Dana, are you there? Are you okay?" The voice was
closer, and again she tried to answer, but all she could manage
was a thick, slurred sound that was something like "Muhhhh."
It must have been enough, because the next thing she heard was,
"Oh my God, Dana! Are you all right?" She felt Mindy's
plump hands on her, pulling her gently off the tree, and she
turned and clung fiercely to the other woman, all the time trying
to form words and fighting the blur enfolding her mind and the
pull at her legs.
"Mulder," Mindy was yelling desperately, "Mulder,
something's wrong, something's wrong with Dana!" Then he was
there, blundering through the bushes in a headlong rush and
pulling her almost roughly away from Mindy, looking her over
desperately for wounds, asking over and over again what it was,
what was wrong, what could he do.
"I don't know, Mulder, could it be a stroke? She can't *speak*,"
she heard Mindy say in a thick, choking voice, and she managed to
shake her head and place one hand on the back of her neck,
looking into Mulder's eyes, *willing* him to understand, for that
old wordless communication trick to work.
"The chip?" he guessed almost immediately, placing one
of his hands over hers. "Is that it, Scully?"
She nodded, and then, to her everlasting relief, passed out.
When she came round, minutes later, the pull, the urge in her
very bones to *go*, was still there, but weaker. The encroaching
tide of fuzziness in her brain seemed to have retreated too. She
was lying on a bedroll, not her own, with Mulder clutching one of
her hands so tightly it hurt and staring down at her with his
panic face on.
"Don't let me *go*, Mulder," she croaked, squeezing his
hand.
"Oh no, please, no," he breathed, shaking his head,
squeezing his eyes shut for a second. "They were calling you
again? Through the chip?"
She nodded. "I can still feel it, but not so strong. Like
before. Before Ruskin Dam."
She raised her head a little and looked around. They had
obviously stopped to set up camp, even though daylight was
burning. People were bustling around setting up tents and
building fires, keeping a tactful and perhaps slightly scared
distance from them.
When she looked back at Mulder, she was shocked to see that he
was crying silently, tears squeezing out from his clenched-shut
eyes, his body taut as a bowstring as he tried to stop his sobs
from shaking him, trying to hide it from her. She remembered a
night, lifetimes ago, in the cool sterility of a hospital room,
when he cried like that, thinking she was asleep, screaming
silently as he knelt by her side.
She reached up and pulled his face down to hers. He started with
surprise, and then, she could have sworn, stopped breathing for a
long moment as she kissed away the tears trickling down his
cheeks. That grounded her a little, his skin, his heat, numbing
the steady throb she felt, or imagined she felt, at the back of
her neck, distracting her for a while from the orders to get up
and walk her brain seemed to be giving to her legs.
"Don't let me go," she whispered again. "Could you
just talk to me, Mulder?"
He laughed a little then, self-consciously. "About what?"
"I don't care. Anything. You'll think of something: I have a
hard enough time getting you to shut up most of the time. I just
want to hear you. So I have something to focus on besides an
overwhelming desire to go south for the winter."
So he talked. He lay down next to her on the bedroll as the group
conscientiously busied themselves at a distance, held her tight
and talked to her, desperately, about anything and everything. He
told her about the highs and lows of every game the Knicks had
played that season, his favourite lines from all the worst B-movies
he'd ever seen, his first kiss, with a girl named Julie on a boat-dock
one hot summer at Quonochontaug, the time he and Sam built a
snowman bigger than both of them, obscure psychology theories he'd
learned at college. He described the sun setting over the water
at the summer house on a perfect June evening the year he turned
ten. He told her about the first time he ever flew in a plane,
the first time he got behind the wheel of a car, the first time
he got in a fight and won. He told her the stories of his
favourite X-files, the ones Skinner had always refused to sign
off on, like the lady in Vermont who claimed her chickens had
been abducted by aliens and had returned with a miraculous gift
of healing.
He poured out the sum of all his experience into her, and she
received it, grasping at it with both hands, feeling him pull her
back into shore slowly and steadily. She buried her face in his
sweater and thought that, even including the first time they had
made love, she could not remember a more intimate experience. And
eventually, mercifully, anchored like that, she slipped into
sleep.
******
They Called her twice more before she came to him, as a shrinking,
fearful part of him had known she would. Both times, thank God,
their little group (Mulder could not yet think of them as the
Rebels without getting absurd "Star Wars" images in his
head) had been encamped, rather than on the move where she might
have slipped away from the back of the group. At least when they
were settled into a camp, someone was always on watch, always
ready to stop Scully if they saw her walking off with that
distinctive dazed look on her face.
That evening, the group gathered, napped, cooked and chatted in
unaccustomed luxury. They had camped in the function room of an
abandoned Holiday Inn near Boulder, having decided to risk a
couple of nights under a solid roof. Several of their number were
suffering from nasty cases of a flu-like virus that one of them
must have been incubating for weeks. Mulder was sitting by the
roaring fire built in a trash-can in the middle of the floor,
showing Mindy, for the third time, how to clean her hunting rifle.
Scully padded across the carpeted floor towards them in thick men's
socks, and Mulder saw the shadow of fear flit over Mindy's
rounded, pleasant features.
"Hey Mulder, Mindy," Scully said, in a slightly
strained voice, sitting down Indian-style on the floor next to
them.
"Hey Scully," he said quietly, as lightly as he could,
reaching out to touch her arm for a second and then going back to
his task.
"Hi Dana," Mindy mumbled. "How ya doin'?"
"Pretty good, thanks," Scully said, as though she and
Mindy were making small talk at a church coffee morning.
"Great!" Mindy replied, with too much enthusiasm,"Oh,
that's just great. Uh, listen, thanks for the help, Mulder, but I
reckon I've got it licked now."
He looked sceptically at the older woman. "You sure?
"Oh, yeah, I just wanted to go over it again to be sure.
Thanks again. G'night now, guys."
They said goodnight and watched Mindy scurry away to her bedroll.
Scully sighed, looking after her, and said casually, "She's
terrified of me now, you know. Ever since she found me after the
first time. Oh, she's still sweet and kind and solicitous about
my welfare and what have you, but she doesn't walk near me on the
trail if she can help it, and she can't quite look me in the eye."
He ached for her, but kept his tone as studiedly casual as her.
"I know, but it's hard for her, for all of them, to
understand. You and I have had years to get used to ideas like
alien chips and strange ships in the skies. These people have
only had a couple of months. It's difficult for them to adjust,
they're still nervous as hell under the bravado and the fire-starting.
I guess it's more difficult for some of them than for others, too.
I get the feeling Mindy was always a touch neurotic. How're the
patients?" he asked, changing the topic swiftly.
She stifled a yawn before answering. "Oh, they'll do. I
think they'll be well enough to get moving again within a couple
of days again, although what they should have, and really need,
is a few days bed rest. I don't think this illness is hitting
them so hard because their bodies can't cope with the demands
they've been placing on them. Annie's fever's fallen, at any rate,
and she was the one I was most worried about."
He nodded. Annie had surprised them all by proving to be a
vicious little fighter, who took great pleasure in taking
advantage of her light weight to creep almost noiselessly through
the night and slide a knife into the back of a shape-shifter's
neck. She was only a little wisp of a thing, though, and had
probably been taking two steps to every one of Mulder's just to
keep up and hiding her exhaustion. She had been the first to fall
ill, and there had been no hiding it when she had woken them all
up by screaming in the grip of fever-induced hallucinations a
couple of nights ago. Mulder's blood still ran cold at the memory
of her crying out, pleading, "No, no, no, don't make me go
into the basement, they're all *dead* down there!". He
wondered bleakly for a moment who else might get sick, and how
long they might be trapped in this hotel.
"And how are *you* feeling?" he asked Scully, gently.
"Pretty good. *Really*, Mulder. But we both know I'm not
going to be forever, the way things are going."
It was his turn to sigh, and he looked down at his gun-oil
slicked hands, willing her not to say it.
"Mulder. Look at me. We have to talk about this. I'm a
liability to myself and to the whole group with this thing in me.
It's a curse, not a blessing now, if it ever was that to start
with."
He looked up and spread his hands helplessly, showing her hands
with dark grease and dirt outlining head-line, life-line and love-line.
"We don't have another option, Scully. We know what will
happen if we take the chip out. I'd rather you were here in one
piece, even if we have to keep an eye on you, than --"
She interrupted, words suddenly pouring out of her in a stream,
although her tone was as precise and calmly scientific as ever.
"No, Mulder, we don't know. I know you've always believed
that the chip sent my cancer into remission, but we don't have
any firm scientific proof of that. You've theorised in the past
that it might function as some kind of tracking device too, as
well as allowing Them to have me at their beck and call. We don't
know They aren't deciding right now to start tracking me with it,
in which case they'd be tracking the whole group, and I'd be even
more of a liability than I already am. I dislike it as much as
you, but the fact remains that we *do* have another option."
He ran a finger up and down, up and down the back of her hand,
leaving a dark streak behind, unable to look her in the eye,
begging her silently not not *not* to say it. She grasped his
hand suddenly, laced her fingers between his own, and tipped his
head up with her other hand so that he had to shut his eyes or
meet her gaze.
"The chip has to come out. I'd rather take the chance that
my cancer will return than die in a way that They decree."
He shook his head, unable to shed a tear. Couldn't she see the
fear eating him away like acid at the thought of her cancer
returning, the thought of watching her wither away slowly in
front of him again and not being able to do a damn thing?
Yes, he thought. She could see it, just as he could see her
terror. He had long known that it was her fear, not his own, that
had the power to break him. He wanted so much for her to be
strong now, for her to say that they'd find another way, that
everything would be all right, and as he saw her biting at her
lower lip to stop it trembling, he knew that she was so, so
afraid.
"Yes," she said quietly, clutching his hand still.
"I need you, Mulder. I need your help now, as much as I ever
have." She paused, and then repeated his own words back to
him. "Sometimes the best we can do for those we love is give
them mercy."
He stiffened. "I won't do it, Scully. I *can't*. You're
asking me to kill you."
"I need you to take the chip out of my neck for me,"
she continued, as though he had not even spoken.
A log cracked in the fire and fell, releasing a shower of sparks
and causing the flames to leap up. He looked around him and saw
their friends, their companions, carrying on with the minutiae of
camp life outside their little bubble of suffering.
"I'm sorry, Scully," he choked out desperately. "I
*can't*."
Her face hardened over, like ice setting on a lake. "Then I'll
do it myself," she told him.
For minutes after she walked away, he felt his fingers wrapping
vainly around the burning emptiness where her hand had rested in
his. He stared into the white heart of the fire and tried to tell
himself that she would not do it, that she could not. I want to
believe, he thought bitterly. He sat, and waited for her to come
back, for her to say that she hadn't been serious, that there was
another way, and when she didn't come back he bent his head,
looked down at his empty hands, and thought brokenly that there
was no mercy.
******
She was careful not to look in the mirror as she opened out the
first-aid kit, setting out the sterile scalpel, the swabs and
iodine and the band-aids in front of her in a mathematically
precise formation. Instead she admired the gleam of the scalpel's
blade against the faux-marble around the sink, the way the weak
sunlight from the single high window lay along it like
quicksilver.
Beside her neatly arranged instruments of redemption lay the
usual motel bathroom clutter: sewing kit, shower-cap, tiny bars
of soap, Lilliputian bottles of shower gel and shampoo. An almost-smile
twitched at the corners of her mouth as she remembered Mulder
checking out of second-rate motels up and down the country with a
choir-boy innocent face and trench-coat pockets stuffed full of
purloined toiletries.
A quick, irritated shake of the head, like a horse shying away
from a fly. Not now. One thing at a time.
She scraped her hair back into a neat ponytail, lifting it away
to reveal the downy white skin on the back of her neck. She
resolutely did not think of his slender fingers pushing aside the
same hair to lay that place bare to him, of his lips nuzzling
against the nape of her neck with the lightest of touches. Her
fingers went straight to the spot, unerringly finding the tiny
bump where the skin rose up over its hidden secret. She swabbed
the area quickly with iodine, the cool, damp cotton-wool soft
against her skin.
Taking a long, slow breath, she left one hand in place, over the
scar where the incision must go, and with the other grasped the
scalpel. The proliferation of memories that day was wearing her
out, stretching her to the point where her whole body thrummed
like a wire tight with tension. She unwillingly saw every autopsy
since Oregon laid out before her for her examination, like the
assorted organs of a cadaver. All the times she lifted the
scalpel and guided it through the yielding flesh, hoping to
redeem the dead by her actions.
And all the time, running through some low, dark, clouded place
in her mind like a tape on loop, words spoken in the somnolent
warmth of a long-ago classroom in Sister Carmel's reverent,
quavering voice. "And he went a little farther, and fell on
his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou
wilt."
It would not pass from her.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, feeling hot liquid slip out
from between the lids, clinging to her lashes, burning down her
cheeks. Suddenly, with a sound that was half-exhalation, half-cry,
she raised her hand and made the cut, a quick, merciless motion.
Blood was on her fingers, warm and slippery. Missed. Damn it.
This time she composed herself, clenched her teeth, and hit the
mark, slicing open the skin and pulling the chip out with gently
probing fingertips, like a twisted party trick. Nothing up my
sleeve, nothing in my neck, she thought, biting her lip, hard.
She brought her hand round and peered at her bloodied fingertip,
where the chip perched, minute, warm from her body. She'd almost
expected to feel something straightaway, as though she'd cut out
a vital organ. In a sense, of course, she had, but even if the
decay had begun immediately, she would not have felt it yet,
wouldn't have been aware of the darkly poisonous cells awakening
and breeding in her skull. She had told Mulder that they couldn't
prove that the chip had sent her into remission, and it had been
the truth, but what she hadn't said was that, despite the lack of
firm, empirically tested ground to stand on, she had begun to
believe that the chip had saved her.
What was keeping her set on the course she had chosen now was
that she had also begun to believe that as it had saved her, it
had fated her to destruction by other means. Her mind insistently
turned and returned to the memory of waking up in a hospital bed
near Ruskin Dam and being shown pictures of things she could not
quite make herself recall.
Before she could change her mind and be tempted to keep it, she
climbed up on to the closed lid of the toilet and dropped the
chip unceremoniously through the little gap where cold air sliced
in through a tiny, frosted glass window just below the ceiling.
When she'd climbed back down on shaky legs, she did look in the
mirror, at that lean, pale, tired face that still looked like
that of a stranger to her. Still bleeding. Blood was smeared over
the side of her neck, spattering the sink and the tiles where she'd
let it drip without check. She swiped iodine over the wound again,
hissing at the sting, and applied a dressing as best she could
without the benefit of sight, but the first cut was still
bleeding. Feeling a warm tickle as a thin rivulet began to run
under her collar, she grabbed the nearest thing, a fluffy white
motel towel, and dabbed at the back of her neck.
When she lifted the towel away and let it fall to the floor, it
lay on the tiles like a dead animal, pelt splashed with blood.
She sank to the cool floor, but did not realise she was crying
until Mulder found her.
Something inside him seemed to stretch briefly past breaking
point, and she curled up tight and let the storm of his grief
explode over and around her as he raged at her to tell him where
the chip was, so that they could put it back in. She looked down
at her bloodied hands, past them at his enormous feet in his
heavy black boots as he rushed round the tiny room looking for
the chip. She thought, incongruously, big feet, like clown feet,
and, on the heels of that thought: this is shock. Eventually she
mustered the strength to point blindly up at the window, and he
understood. Oh, God, he understood. As he sank down beside her
and gathered her into his arms, all she could think was not that
her cancer would now return, that she would die, but that she had
just simultaneously saved and destroyed the one person who loved
her more perfectly than anyone else in the worlds of the living
or the dead.
But at least, she thought fiercely, squeezing her bloody hands
into fists, at least I did it by my own hand. Of my own free will.
******
In a strange way, when the nosebleeds began again four short
weeks later, in early March, it felt like an anti-climax.
He was astounded by how matter-of-fact she was about it -- by how
matter-of-fact they both were about it. They were sitting out the
third day of confinement in yet another run-down, ratty motel
near Steamboat Springs, waiting for enemy movements in the area
to settle down enough to allow them to send out more scouts.
There was some kind of operations base constructed by the shape-shifting
aliens in a valley several miles to the north. Tall, rangy Carl,
a quiet school-teacher they had picked up a week earlier, who had
been the last scout to venture out, had returned to tell Mulder
that it looked as though "If we sit tight, the rats might
wipe out the cockroaches for us", having seen what they now
recognised as Grey ships apparently reconnoitring the area.
The night before Mulder had woken pressed up tight against Scully,
her breath light on his face, and heard her more breathe than
whisper the words, "Hear that? They're wiping each other out."
Listening hard, he had indeed heard the dull thuds of explosions
ripping into the fabric of the night.
"Mulder?"
Layla's voice broke into his thoughts, and he looked up from his
pot of soup simmering over the camping stove. Ralph's tall, rangy
wife stood above him, twisting her hands together nervously.
"Mulder, I think maybe you'd better come see Dana."
He broke into a run half-way down the hallway, Layla trotting
along behind him. When he pushed his way into the conference room
where the women had gathered to be checked over by Scully for
their various aches, pains and snuffles, the bright red stains of
blood on the white handkerchief in Scully's hand and the matching
smear on the pale skin above her mouth seemed to scream out to
him. In that instant he saw what he had blinded himself to over
the preceding month: the way her skin had changed from a healthy
ivory to a papery white, how her bones lay far too close to her
skin, how much bigger her startlingly bright eyes had become in a
face once rounded and smooth-fleshed as a peach.
He skidded to a halt in front of the knot of clucking women
clustered around Scully. She looked up, dabbing delicately at her
nose, and gave him a slightly watery smile.
"Hey, Mulder. I'm leaking."
He walked slowly across the cheap, stained, smog-coloured carpet
to her side, fished around in the pockets of his jeans, and
dropped to his knees.
"You know, this might not be the best moment for a proposal,"
she said dryly.
"Here, Scully. I guess you'll be needing this." He
opened his closed right hand to reveal a pristine, folded, white
cotton handkerchief.
"How long have you had that in your pocket?" she asked
softly, eyes fixed on him as though they were completely alone in
the room.
"A gentleman *always* carries a handkerchief, Scully,"
he reprimanded her. "I have twelve more folded up in the
bottom of my backpack," he added in lower, secret tones.
"But of course," she murmured. She brought the bloodied
scrap of cloth away from her nose, and replaced it with his clean
one, but no more blood stained it.
"Well, I guess it stopped. How about that. You must be my
lucky charm, Mulder," she said, her tone still deliberately
light. To his amazement, she actually gave him a conspiratorial
wink. While he was still reeling from the sight of Dana Scully
winking at anyone, she touched the tip of her index finger to her
lips, and then pressed it lightly against his mouth.
"I'm just going to go and clean up," she announced.
"Don't move, anybody who hasn't had their check-up yet.
Doctor Scully's Ad-Hoc Surgery is still open for business."
She gave him one more quick, secret smile, and left, clutching
both handkerchiefs in one fist.
He trailed slowly after her, and watched her disappear down the
corridor, missing somehow the sharp clicking percussion of the
heels she had always worn back when life was semi-normal for them.
He started slightly when he felt a light touch on his arm, and
turned to see Annie, biting her lip and looking about ready to
burst.
"What is it, Annie?" he asked, feeling a sudden wave of
exhaustion wash over him as he spoke so that the effort of
shaping and pushing out breath was almost too much.
"Dana's nose bleeding -- is it to do with what she did to
her chip?"
"How do you know about that?" he asked carefully.
She shrugged. "Two and two make four. We all knew about the
chip, the things it could do. We couldn't miss the dressing on
her neck, even if she did keep wearing her hair down and pulling
her collar up. We figured she took it out, but we didn't like to
ask. Mulder, we all care for Dana. If she was sick -- if she was
dying, even -- we'd want to know."
"What if she wouldn't want to tell?"
"Some secrets just can't be kept. Between what you and Dana
have said about your lives before, everyone knows Dana came
pretty near to dying when she was sick before. If she's getting
sick again, she can't keep it hidden. It won't *stay* hidden."
He slipped a finger inside the collar of his sweat-shirt and
tugged at it restlessly. Licking his suddenly dry lips, he took a
moment to work out that the slight metal tang on his tongue was
the taste of blood left behind by Scully's finger-kiss.
"She isn't dying, Annie. She is sick, and we don't have a
miracle for her this time, but she's not dying." His gaze
flicked off the girl's thin face and back down the hallway where
Scully had disappeared. "Not yet. She's still living."
******
She saw the progression of her illness in his darkening eyes over
those weeks. She had no soft-spoken, white-garbed, death angel
doctors this time to prepare the omens for her to interpret, no
inside-out X-ray pictures of the tumour cuddling up to her
forebrain to hold up to the failing light, no medical map to
chart the progression of her voyaging cancer from her skull into
her bloodstream. But she knew, all the same.
In much the same way, she knew when it was time to stop fighting.
The thought of trying to self-medicate, to give herself
chemotherapy whilst on the run through a ruined world, was
nonsensical, a through-the-looking glass concept. That, of course,
did not stop Mulder from suggesting it. He swung at that time
between making love to her as though she were made of whispers
and might melt away in his arms at any second, and a kind of
hungry ferocity that saddened her as it aroused her, because she
knew what he was trying to prove. It was when he had her sleepy,
pleasure-hazed and vulnerable after love that he would oh-so-innocently
murmur in her ear, asking her with carefully reined-in
desperation whether there was nothing they could do, whether she
could treat herself if they found a hospital with the right
medical supplies, whether she could teach him to administer
whatever treatment she needed.
"Mulder, I'm not an oncologist, I'm a pathologist. I work
with the dead, I don't cure the incurable. Even if we had the
means, which my doctors never did last time around, under the
circumstances there's no way I could consider trying to treat
myself for this. I know what you're trying to do, and I
understand it, but you have to stop this," she whispered
late one night, rolling within their double sleeping bag and
pressing her palms hard against his chest. "I'm getting
weaker, and sicker, and I'm going to die." She heard his
sharp intake of breath, and cursed the tears starting in her eyes.
"Dammit, Scully," he said, his voice very small in the
blackness of the latest abandoned hotel room.
"I'm going to die," she repeated, more gently, "and
we have to think about how long I can keep slowing up the group
before I have to stay behind."
"I'm not going to leave you!" he spat, like an angry
cat. "How could you even think --"
"I know," she told him. "I know you aren't. I can't
help it, Mulder, I still say 'I' when I should be saying 'we'
sometimes, that's all. That's all, I promise."
"You know, Tom used to hunt and ski round here," he
said slowly, after a minute. Tom was Tom Delaney, a slightly wild-eyed
banker from Burlington who they had picked up five days ago,
wandering round a grocery store in a tiny mountain township. He
had been alone since coming down from the mountains where he had
been on a hunting trip and finding the towns empty of people.
Since they had met him he had done little else but talk, the pent-up
words of months pouring out of him in an agonised rush. "His
family had a cabin up in the mountains above Grand Junction. It
would be above the snowline. We'd be safe there, the aliens can't
function well in the cold, they keep to the lowlands --"
"Are you ready?" she asked carefully, straining to see
some glimmer of light reflected from his eyes in the dark. "Do
you think we could make it up there? That you're ready to leave
them all behind and be alone again?"
"I won't be alone," he answered, too smoothly. "You'll
be with me. So, I guess we talk to Sam privately when we can,
find out more about the cabin, equip ourselves -- and then we
tell the others."
"Yeah," she mumbled, pressing herself against him,
suddenly cold. "I guess so."
******
Until the moment the words "We're leaving," left Scully's
mouth, he hadn't been able to imagine the group's response. They
numbered twenty-five by now, which made everyone feel more secure
when it came to carrying out attacks, but more paranoid about the
possibility of being discovered and wiped out, like a troublesome
fly being swatted.
They had prepared the way a little: after swearing the twitchy,
eager-to-please Tom to secrecy, they had told a few of the
original group their intentions. Layla and Tam, the two women
Scully had become closest to, had been told, and Mulder had taken
it upon himself to tell Jack and Ralph.
Now, as the rest of the group gaped at them from around the
campfire, his eyes sought out those four and saw their looks of
compassion, although Jack's was shot through with anger too.
Mulder hadn't figured out how fond the old tough-nut had become
of Scully -- of them both -- until he had broken the news to him.
Jack had nodded, silently, pressing his lips together hard until
the blood drained from the flesh, and then swung round and
smashed his fist into a tree-trunk with a force that had shocked
and, frankly, scared Mulder, and left the knuckles of Jack's left
hand torn and bleeding. When he had taken the older man to Scully
to get his bleeding hand cleaned and bandaged, Mulder had seen
Jack's bloodshot, fierce blue eyes glaze over with tears, as
Scully bowed her head over his hand and ministered to it, and he
had known in that moment that the others would not let them walk
away easily.
Carl was the first to speak up. "But I don't understand. How
will that help anyone? Where will you *go*?"
"We have somewhere to head for, Carl. Somewhere safe. We're
going to head up, above the snowline. We know that the aliens don't
like cold, they need warmth to incubate and breed their young. We'll
be as safe there as anywhere else." Scully's voice was
remarkably calm, and firm, as if she was standing in her business
suit in a Hoover Building board-room giving a presentation.
Mulder felt her hand tremble and squeeze his tightly, though, and
he knew. He knew.
"Dana, you're...you're sick already. What if it's too far?
What if you're not strong enough?" It was Annie's turn to
speak now, her eyes huge in her frightened little face, looking
younger than ever as she stared at them.
"I'm strong enough. I know my body, I know myself. I can
make it. And if it did happen that way, at least I wouldn't have
slowed down the group anymore. You have to face it, all of you.
In my present state, I'm a liability to you. This is the best way.
Anyhow, aren't you forgetting Mulder? He'll be with me." He
glanced at her face out of the corner of his eye, and was
overwhelmed by the strength and conviction with which her next
words rang out. "He and I are more than capable of looking
after each other. You must all know that I'd trust Mulder with my
life in a heartbeat. If he's with me, I'll be fine."
"It doesn't feel right, Dana," Mindy said unexpectedly.
She blushed as all eyes turned to her, but plunged ahead. "It
doesn't feel right to send you off into the woods to die. That's
like something you'd do to a dog, not a person. If we let you do
this, how are we any better than Them?"
Scully was staring at Mindy in surprise. After a moment, though,
she gave the other woman a slow, warm, full-hearted smile. "You
are better. So much better. Never doubt that. And you're not
sending me. I'm going -- we're going -- of our own accord. Don't
try and stand in our way. Give me that dignity." Her nails
bit into his palm, and he swallowed, hard.
There was a long silence, during which the people huddled round
the fire, their faces shadowed and fractured by the leaping light
of the flames, stared at the ground, at their shoes, anywhere but
at each other or at him and Scully.
In the end, it was Layla who acted first, moving away from Ralph's
side to embrace Scully. Mulder let her hand go and stepped back
slightly as the women clung to each other for a moment, and then,
to his surprise, was enfolded in Layla's lean, muscular arms too,
as she stepped away from Scully. After a moment's hesitancy, the
others began to follow suit, getting to their feet and coming
towards them with a quiet, dignified grace, every person round
the fire embracing himself and Scully as though in a slow ritual
dance. When the last person, Ralph, had stepped away from Mulder,
giving him a final squeeze of the shoulder as he went, Layla
cleared her throat and asked them quietly, "Well, then, what
do you need? What can we do for you...before you go?"
******
"Scully," she heard him ask one night a week later as
they lay together in the temporary shelter of an abandoned ski-lodge,
"do you...do you still pray?" His voice seemed terribly
small and fearful there in the night, divorced from the imposing
reality of his physical appearance.
She said nothing for a time, considering, as she lay in the crook
of his arm, hearing the slow, deep tides of his breath.
"I've been trying, Mulder."
Silence. She moved a little closer to him inside the sleeping bag,
hearing the nylon rustle under them, unnaturally loud in the
stillness.
"There was a time," she continued, feeling all at once
far more naked to him than she has ever done before, "when I
didn't even want to try. After we left the city. But I had to,
you see. I knew Mom must have been dead, and Bill, and Charlie,
and everyone else, and so I said prayers for the repose of their
souls, every night. It was funny, I didn't even know if I still
believed in the God I was addressing those prayers to, but it was
like something deeper than conscious will. Like something rising
up from inside and taking over. Like instinct."
"Or like faith, maybe," he murmured in the dark beside
her.
"Maybe."
"And then?"
"Then I kept praying, and it just got easier. It felt a
little more right, every time. I'd pray in the dark, after you'd
fallen asleep, staring up into the blackness. Not even prayers,
sometimes. Sometimes it was more like I was accusing God inside
my head. I remember thinking of the Book of Job one night, and
thinking that if Job had had to endure half of what we've had to
go through, he would've forsaken the Lord."
She fell quiet again, choosing her words, but she felt him there
next to her. Listening.
"Then a few nights later I was ranting away at God, and
suddenly it was like someone had walked into a dark room in my
head and switched on a light. I remembered that Job had wept, and
despaired, cursed the day he was born, asked God again and again
why this suffering was being heaped upon him -- but at least he
kept speaking to God. That's where the faith lay. That's when I
knew I still believed. It's not an easy belief, Mulder, but it's
something."
He stroked the soft valley of warm skin between her breasts with
the tip of one long finger for a minute, and then spoke.
"After Sam was taken," he began, his voice sounding
thin and strained, "I prayed, you know. I'd lie in bed and
pray so hard I'd end up clenching my jaw and balling up my hands
into fists, like I could pray with my whole body. I did that for
months before I figured out that she wasn't coming back, however
many prayers I said."
She longed to reach out and find his brow, stroke it, smooth away
the deep lines she knew would be graven there, but she remained
still, letting him have the time to reach down inside himself for
these things, as he did for her.
"I stopped even considering the idea of God on what should
have been Sam's ninth birthday," he said. "I haven't
set foot in a synagogue since. I never prayed again, either...not
until you got sick." His voice cracked a little on the last
few words, and her heart twisted inside her for both their sakes,
but he carried on.
"I didn't pray when you disappeared. When Sam went, that
taught me that God doesn't give you people back just because you
ask him to. I decided that the best hope was to carry on trying
to get you back myself, like I'd done with Sam, all those years.
In the end, it was nothing that *I* had done that made you show
up in that hospital, or made you wake up, and I shoved that fact
into the back of my mind and tried not to examine it too often.
But when you got sick -- I don't know. It was despair, Scully. I
found myself despairing, and something inside me was so ready to
try anything, however unlikely, however hopeless. I prayed then,
once, in the night, although it wasn't a very good prayer, I don't
think."
"Good enough, Mulder," she whispered, reaching for the
hand lying between her breasts, bringing it to her mouth and
gently kissing it.
"The thing is, Scully, I'd like to try now. To pray, I mean.
For Sam, for you and me, for all of us. I'm just not sure I know
how. It's been a very long time. I don't even remember the
Mourner's Kaddish anymore, the prayer you say for the dead. I was
thinking about this while we were walking this afternoon, and I
thought, Scully. Scully will know a prayer that will do."
"Okay," she said gently. "Okay." She gripped
his hand a little more tightly, weaving their fingers together.
"The prayer I say for Mom, and for my family...it goes like
this. I'll say it, Mulder, and you can pray it with me, okay?"
She heard a rustle in the darkness that she took for a nod, took
a deep breath, and began, the old words learnt by rote long ago
flowing easily out of her into the night.
"Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual
light shine upon them. May their souls rest in peace with the
souls of all the faithful departed. Amen."
She squeezed her stinging eyes shut, and asked him quietly,
"How's that?"
"Good," he said thickly. "I'll remember that one.
What about us, though? Is there one we can say for you and me?"
She thought a minute, and then recalled one that seemed very
right. "I always liked this one. It was one of Dad's
favourites, an old Celtic prayer for protection. He had it
written on the flyleaf of the Bible he took with him to sea. Are
you ready?"
"Lead on, MacDuff."
She smiled and began, altering the words from 'me' to 'us' as she
went along. "May God shield us, may God fill us, may God
keep us, may God watch us. May God bring us to the land of peace,
to the country of the King, to the peace of eternity. Amen."
"That was nice," he said at length, rubbing a thumb
back and forth over her fingers. "Although Rabbi Neuberg
would probably want to know what a nice Jewish boy like me was
doing saying Christian prayers with a naked Catholic girl in a
ski-lodge."
She let her lips stretch in a full grin at that, enjoying the
sensations of her facial muscles stretching and re-shaping
themselves to accommodate a proper smile. "I'm sure, under
the circumstances, that God will understand, Mulder."
He turned her in the sleeping bag, rolling her to face him, and
drew her body as close against his as it would go. She threw an
arm over his body, pillowing her head on his arm, and prepared
for sleep, feeling a great and unexpected peace descend on her
out of the darkness.
"Mulder?" she mumbled sleepily.
"Yeah?"
"You said that you stopped praying for Sam. You didn't
though, Mulder, not completely, even if you didn't know it. You
kept looking for her. You kept the faith that she was alive."
"Well, yeah, but I don't think I see what --"
"You, Mulder," she said, struggling against her
exhaustion in order to remain conscious long enough to impart
this to him. "It was you, all along. Don't you see? You *became*
a prayer for her."
A long stillness, embroidered with the soft rustling sounds of a
wind stirring the pines outside, and the hitching breath in his
chest.
"Yes," he said, thickly, "yes. Thank you, Scully."
*****
One foot in front of the other. Just one foot in the front of the
other and repeat, over and over and over.
He walked behind her, dividing his attention between the little
green wool hat on her head and the rocky ground underfoot. Every
so often his gaze would flick to the left, checking that the road
was still there, the pitted, scarred blacktop obscured by snow
but the clear corridor of space still visible through the tree-trunks.
Another half hour or so, and it should turn away to the west and
leave them to climb on upwards through the wooded, snowy pass.
Once they left the road, they would be within a day or two's hike
of the cabin. Tom had assured them that he had left it well
stocked with food, bottled water and firewood. By that point
Mulder was refusing to think about *why* they were headed there.
It was simply a goal, concepts of warmth, real warmth, shelter,
refuge and Scully all wrapped up in a mental picture he had of a
cheery little log building, smoke curling from the chimney and
firelight flickering within.
Up ahead, Scully swore softly as she almost slipped on a
treacherously wet outcrop of rock. The way between the trees was
fairly clear of snow, since the branches of the trees around and
above them were groaning and creaking softly with it, but the
ground was still frozen dangerously hard, so that patches of mud
had turned to rough, uneven iron underfoot, and pools of moisture
in hollows had become greased ice slides for the ill-placed foot.
He looked around them at the freezing landscape and wondered if
spring was going to be coming back this year, if the thaw would
ever set in.
"You okay?" he asked, the snow somehow muffling and
deadening his voice. It was the first word either of them had
addressed to each other for hours, having walked in comfortable
silence since dawn.
"Sure," she panted, scrambling over a fallen trunk. She
waited for him to make his way over the obstacle, although
without turning round to watch his progress, and set off again.
They hit a patch of easier ground, a hollow gently sloping
upwards, and as they hiked she said in a conversational tone,
"I wanted to tell you something, Mulder. Something I dreamed
about a couple of nights ago." The words trailed back on the
crisp air over her shoulder along with the clouds of her frozen
breath.
"Okay, shoot," he said, noting that the lace of his
right boot was coming undone as he looked down to check his
footing.
"I always said I couldn't remember anything about when I was
missing," she continued, still in that same, even tone, as
if she was discussing the weather, "but I....well, I haven't
been totally honest about that. There are some things I remember,
Mulder. A very bright, cold, white light and a white room, a
completely sterile place. Men standing over me in surgical masks.
I think once one of them injected me with something as I was just
waking up, and it made me very still. There was a drill, or
something like one, making a very high-pitched noise like a
dentist's drill, and it was coming down towards my face, and I
didn't move or even scream because they'd made me very still and
far-away somehow."
Oh, oh holy fuck. He thought he might be sick, could actually
taste the thinly acid bile rising up in his gullet. She stopped
then, and he found himself thanking God, but it was apparently
only so that she could check the compass strung round her neck
for a second.
"I've been remembering these things again lately, you see.
Before I only ever dreamed them -- it wasn't really remembering.
Now I can remember them afterwards, when I'm awake, too, as clear
as they were in the dreams."
Scully strapped to an examining table. Scully unable to move to
help herself or even scream for help in one of those windowless
rooms deep inside the DOD. He heard Duane Barry's rough, edgy
voice whispering between the trees about how They took you away
and performed the tests. He stumbled on his trailing shoelace. Oh,
God, oh Scully, Scully Scully Scully...
"What do you think that means, Mulder?" she asked, as
though asking how he liked to take his tea.
Scully in a traincar, her reflection blurring and melting on
polished steel walls...
He lengthened his stride to catch up with her and reached out to
grab her shoulders. She stopped dead, as he pressed himself up
against her, the hard lump of her rucksack pressing into his
chest and belly. His hands tightened and released, tightened and
released, on the fabric of her parka, seeking the thin
disappearing flesh hiding beneath.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe...maybe the
tumour --"
She shook her head slowly. "I don't think so," she said,
and he heard an emotion he could not identify surging under her
calmly controlled tone. He wondered incredulously if it could be
happiness. "No, I don't think it's that. I think that what
they stole is coming back, Mulder. My memories. They controlled
them, hid them from me somehow with that chip, and now they're
coming back."
"I'm sorry," he muttered, wondering if he would ever
stop needing to say sorry.
"Don't be," she said, shaking her head again. "Don't
you see? I'm not theirs anymore --"
"Scully, you never were," he protested.
"Let me finish," she said gently. Somewhere off in the
woods to their right, a clatter of wings and a high shriek as a
bird broke cover. "I was theirs in part as long as I was
walking around with their chip in my body, being kept alive on
their terms. Now I'm *mine* again, Mulder. Nightmare memories and
all. Don't be sorry. It feels okay. In a way, it actually feels
good."
His hands were shaking, he saw, looking down at them dark in
their thick black gloves on the forest green of her parka's outer
shell.
She turned under his hands, placed a hand on the back of his neck
and drew his face down to her for a kiss, her lips warm and
slightly chapped. "It feels pretty good," she repeated.
"I like being able to do that and be sure it's me deciding
to do it."
He swallowed, hard. "Did you ever doubt that whatever you
felt towards me was all your own?" he asked nervously.
She stared up at him for a moment, and then smiled. "No,"
she murmured, kissing the small mole on his cheek very lightly,
"no, I never did. But you know what I mean. I've always
liked being my own person."
"I never would've noticed *that*," he joked weakly.
She stroked the line of his jaw with her gloved hand, and then
said gently, "Your shoe-lace is undone. Here, let me get
that." And, kneeling slowly down in the light snow, she bent
her wool-capped head, slipped her gloves off and carefully tied
his shoe-lace, while he looked down at her and felt his whole
body surge with love.
*****
They rejoined the road two days later after it split in two and
one fork became a rutted track. She still could not see the dirt
and gravel surface under the snow, which was heavier here, at a
higher altitude, but from the map, the compass and Tom's
directions, scrawled on a fly-leaf torn from a Gideon's Bible,
she knew they were close.
They were following the mountain side around rather than upwards
now, although just ahead the ground began to rise to what was
hopefully the lip of a small hollow. Mulder walked ahead now,
forging a path through the firmly-packed snow that she could
follow. She was weaker, so much weaker now. She could feel her
traitor body struggling with the terrain, the thin air and the
cold at every step. Tired, very tired. How good it would be to
lie down and rest.
She stopped to sneeze, once, twice, three times, covering her
face with her hands in a long-ingrained polite gesture. Mulder
turned his head with a small smile to say "Gesundheit,"
and his smile fractured like thin pond-ice as she took her hands
away from her nose. Looking down, she saw why. Blood slicked the
palms of her gloves, and she felt the liquid warm for a second on
her face before it began to tingle and cool in the freezing air.
She heard his muttered, "Oh, shit" at the same moment
as her legs turned liquid and vanished away under her. In the
long, slow seconds as she crumpled to the ground, she had time to
note the bird of prey circling high over their heads, and,
somehow, to see herself and Mulder through its eyes, reduced to
the size of mice. High up -- she thought of the ships they saw
the night before, shooting eastwards and dancing, far off, like
fireflies, in battle, and in her muddled head the bird became the
ships were birds were circling all the time always looking down
on them seeing everything and there were no hiding places on the
wide earth --
When she regained consciousness she could feel warm, wet liquid
dripping on to her face, and wondered vaguely if Mulder was
having a nose-bleed too. She opened her eyes and found herself
cradled in his arms. Light as she was, he seemed to have having
trouble carrying her, perhaps because he was crying and could not
see the way underfoot clearly enough. He stumbled and staggered
along, muttering to her that it would not be long now, Scully,
getting closer now, nearly there, and did not actually notice
that she had woken up until she reached up a hand, trying to
caress his tired, pinched face, and clumsily poked him in the jaw
instead.
He fell once, as the ground rose more steeply, and pitched her
into a snowbank. She lay quietly as he regained his footing and
then dug her out, her limbs too heavy now to even try and
struggle upright. He cried again as he picked her up, apologising
over and over. She smiled up at him, inwardly cursing the amount
of effort it took her even to do that, and told him not to worry,
that it was fine. That she trusted him.
She trusted him when he almost went headlong over the lip of the
hollow, saving them from a bone-shattering fall at the last
second when he regained his balance. She looked only at him
during the difficult clamber down the slope and the last flounder
through thick snow. Only when he set her gently down in order to
pry the door open and told her uselessly "We're here"
did she let herself turn her head to look at the solid little
timber building, the rough log-cabin that looked to her then
better than the DC Hilton.
Inside, it was dim and dusty, until he found the woodpile out
back under a tarpaulin and a thick layer of snow. In the
firelight, the cobwebs in the corners and the splintery, honest
wood of the floor and walls might have looked even worse, but it
was solid, it was warm, it was shelter, and for the next ten days,
as she felt her very cells gradually giving up, it was a kind of
home.
Mulder left the cabin only for more wood, or snow to melt for
fresh water. They sat and waited, passing the time by telling
stories, sharing memories, or simply sitting wrapped up on bed-rolls
in front of the fire, watching the logs crackle and shift and
savouring the experience of being so near, so wrapped in each
other.
When her memories became confused, or her words more difficult to
string together, and when the pain sank its talons in and gripped
her flesh, he held her, soothed her, helped her to shore her
dissolving fragments a while longer by guessing the word or the
name she was groping for.
When he cried, when pain of another, kindred sort bore down on
him, she touched him with her clumsy, weak hands, strung enough
words together to tell him it would be all right in what was
surely the most beautiful lie they had ever shared, wrapped her
cold little fingers around his and squeezed as hard as she could.
The heart is instantaneous in its breaking, but the splinters
will work their way into the flesh, fester and inflict new pain
with every movement if permitted. She did not have to be a doctor
to know this. "I won't," she would whisper into the
darkness each night after the fire was banked and he fell into a
deep, exhausted sleep. She felt the cancer wriggling and
stretching inside her, rushing gleefully through her blood. She
clenched her teeth and told the night, "I won't let it
poison him like that. I won't let it poison us."
******
"I can't sanctify you, Mulder. Don't ask that of me. I can't
take away your guilt, because you have nothing to feel guilty
about. You have to keep fighting. It's the only way to redeem us,
all of us," she whispered, breath hot against his hand as
she kissed it gently between each sentence. He noticed that she
was slurring her words now slightly, as if she had drunk one too
many martinis: she had begun to say things that made no sense, to
muddle and mix up her words without noticing it, as the tumour's
tendrils had stealthily slipped out into her brain.
He remained silent, concentrating on the slight weight of her in
his arms as he sat before the fire, her thin body cradled in his
lap. What more was there to say?
Oh, yes.
"I love you," he said carefully, testing each word,
feeling the shape of them, the movements his tongue made to form
them. So late to be learning this new thing.
"Yes," she said, eyes fixed on her lap, "I know.
Yes."
She took a few quick, shallow breaths, like a deer panting for
water after a chase, and then turned her pinched, white face up
to him. She looked momentarily confused and little-girl-lost
frightened, as if struggling to wake from a bad dream.
"Stay with me," she said in a urgent, rasping dream-voice.
He heard the terror roughening and darkening her voice, and felt
as though he was hearing the inflections of the tumour itself.
"Stay till it's over, promise you'll stay. I'm...I'm so
afraid."
Suddenly her whole body shook violently, and for a second he was
filled with holy terror that this was it, this was the end they
had been progressing towards. Then he saw the tear glaze a hot
trail down her cheek, turning skin to glass in its wake, and he
remembered to breathe.
"I promise," he whispered, kissing her temple. "I'm
right here. I'm always here."
"Always here," she murmured with a slow, astoundingly
bright smile.
He gathered her against him, placing one hand on her hair,
stroking it to soothe her, and one over the base of her throat,
that place he had kissed with worshipping lips, lapped at
tenderly, looked at and glimpsed the perfection of the body. He
felt the blood still rushing beneath her skin there, and imagined
a world where his blood, his life, might pass through his skin
and hers into her failing body and thus sustain her.
He knew then how it was that he had been able to see her in the
dark all those months ago, the white sanctities of her soft,
smooth flesh somehow revealed to him in the thick night of an
anonymous motel room.
Paradoxically, wonderfully, he saw her by the light that poured
from the liquid blacknesses at the centre of her eyes, her pupils
like wells of light, flowing out to illumine her as though by the
grace of God. This light that he felt moving over his skin now,
enfolding them, caressing him, invisible in the weak light of day
and yet a tangible presence. This light that now was dying down.
He rocked her against him gently for hours, until the sun was low
in the sky, its light a weak wash of gold filtering through
chinks in the massed, iron-grey clouds. Until she stopped shaking.
Until there was stillness and silence in her veins, beneath her
skin.
"Oh God," he whispered, willing her body not to turn to
cold marble in his arms. His was the lover's touch, his the arms
that might sustain her and protect her. Hadn't she told him so,
in the deep watches of the night? No longer. No longer. He bit
his lower lip until the blood came.
"Oh God, oh God," he choked out, cradling her against
him. "Sanctify me, oh God, oh please."
The storm of his sobs passed on, eventually, as all things do
with time. In the stillness, as the last embers of the day
dwindled and died on the far horizon, he scrubbed at his eyes,
bowed his head, and began, willing himself not to stumble over
the words she had bequeathed to him.
"Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual
light shine upon her..."
******
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
******
Author's Notes: Skinner quotes briefly in Part I from Genesis, 1:28.
Scully also quotes from Matthew 26:39. All other quotes are
attributed within the text. Hopefully <g>.
Well, there it is. I need to say right here that this story
wouldn't exist without DashaK, who planted the seed of the idea
for a 'Furious Winter' prequel in my head many, many moons ago,
or the lovely Virginians, who encouraged it to grow with gentle
poking, as they encouraged me to grow as a writer. I owe you all
an alcoholic beverage of your choice. :)
I also owe enormous debts of gratitude to EPurSeMouve, Kristy,
Alicia K and Jesemie's Evil Twin for beta above and beyond the
call of duty in busy times. You guys made this so much more *readable*
<g>: thank you so much.
This is a story I've been wanting to tell for a long time, and it's
been almost a year in the telling. Thank you for making it this
far with me. I'd love to know what you thought. cazfic@ymail.com
