Title: Hands Against Walls
Category: V, A, UST/MSR, post-ep for Amor Fati
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Biogenesis/6E/AF
Summary: Place your hand flat against a wall. Imagine that
someone is on the
other side, their hand only inches from yours. Imagine that in
the place between
your two hands the wall begins to melt away.
Archive: Yes to Gossamer. Anywhere else: please
ask me first. I just like to know where this stuff goes.
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 Chris's toys every
now and
again for fun, not profit.
Feedback: cazfic@ymail.com
URL: http://cazq.freeservers.com
Author's Note: This fic considers itself to be for the good
ladies of Yes, Virginia..., just for being themselves, for Wen
and Kate in particular for providing inspiration in the form of
fic and background sounds, and for Pequod, without whom it would
not have been possible in the first place.
Many, many thanks to lovely beta crew members JET, Kristy,
Alicia, EPur and Luce, who, amongst other things, prevented
Mulder from being a wall <g>. He is probably almost as
grateful as I am.
******
Hands Against Walls (1/1) by CazQ
(cazfic@ymail.com)
******
"Give me your hand. Place it on my bare breast
and take the chance of merging skin with skin.
Your hand will hold the heat when you withdraw it,
leaving a cold, invisible handprint,
change for both of us. Who knows what comes next?"
'She Teaches Him To Reach Out', Martha Elizabeth
******
It's darkening outside now and someone walks past along the
balcony, icebucket swinging in their hand. All the lights are off
in her room, and so they are silhouetted for a second outside the
window. As they pass on by they are singing, loosely, quietly,
the chorus of 'Hey Jude', filling in with a soft humming where
they run out of words. She looks up as they pass and feels her
heart swell and crack a little at the happiness in that softly
singing voice.
The motel room is too quiet, too still. Mulder fell asleep on the
other bed a few hours earlier, mid-sentence, but even in his
sleep he stirred a little, mumbled sleep-thickened phrases to
himself occasionally, made the room feel alive around her. Now
he's absent, having woken at about six, stretched, cat-like, and
excused himself to go and shower in his own room, on the other
side of the wall. She feels his absence along every inch of her
skin.
He has done a lot of sleeping since they arrived here. Despite
his regular insistences
that he's feeling fine and his removal of the white surrender
flag of bandages round his head, he tires quickly, having to take
afternoon naps like a small child. That's fine by her.
She presented this little trip to him as a necessity, as a
prudent way of disappearing from the view of all interested
parties for a little while after she spirited him away from that
hideous, antiseptic torture room. The truth is she knew that they
wouldn't be coming back for him. She has no illusions about that:
she was permitted to take him, rather than stealing him out from
under their noses. They allowed her to walk into the heart of the
horror and bring back him out because they had already finished
with him.
She also knew, though, that after a week of being caged in his
apartment he wasn't going to be content to do much more resting
and healing, not without a watchful eye on him. So she brought
him here, to the nowhere town of Black Creek, in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, tucked away safely out of sight in a thick blanket of
hill and forest, and installed them both in a crumbling little
family-run motel for a few days. It could be any town, any
forest. It's not D.C., which is enough for her.
She needs this as much as he does, in truth. After a week of
tossing and turning in bed, of broken nights when what little
sleep she got was haunted by murky, fragmented dreams of
searching and never finding, of failing, of things slipping
through her fingers, she wanted to have him near for a while, to
know that if she woke in the night he would only be on the other
side of a wall.
Since they took him, he doesn't like to fall asleep alone, she's
realised. He makes weak excuses to come to her room when he's
about to tumble down into sleep during the day, so that he can
fall for a short while in safety, curled up on her other bed.
Right now he needs the safety of knowing that she will pull a
blanket over his huddled form, that she will sit quietly in the
corner and just listen to the slow tide of his breath until he
wakes, that she will not let him slip under too far.
She's a little afraid of how strongly she's come to love the look
on his face when he wakes up, how she's come to ache inside for
the sight of it. She likes it far more than the blankly innocent
look he has in sleep. The emptiness of that sleeping face worries
her now because it's too close to the absence she saw when she
came, like Snow White's prince, to rouse him from enchanted
slumber with a tear, an exhortation and a kiss. Too close to the
absence of approaching death.
No, she likes the look he wears when she leans over him and runs
her hand along his face, strokes his shoulder, shakes him gently
free. She can see his healing mind rising then, shaking off the
layers of soothing oblivion, coming up towards her like a swimmer
rising up from deep water. As he breaks the surface his eyelids
flutter and she has to resist the urge to bend down and kiss each
eye open for him. He wakes confused, foggy with slumber for just
for a second, then gives her a small, contented smile and reaches
out. That's the first thing he does when he wakes up from these
cat-naps in her room, reaches out for her. A hand groping out
from under the blankets, warm, so warm, fingers curling out
around her own for a moment's clasp. She wonders what he does in
the mornings when he wakes up in his own bed, reaches out and
finds only blankets and the blank, white emptiness of tumbled
sheets.
She puts her hand out, lips curving slightly in a bitter-sweet
smile at her own folly, and places her palm flat against the
wall, grubby white paint under her wandering lifeline and
loveline. She lets her eyes slip shut and imagines him on the
other side of the wall, his hand flat against it, skin, blood and
bone separated by just one thickness of wall.
She has not told him that on the plane to Africa, alone in her
tent at night, on that windswept beach, she would shut her eyes,
press her palm against plastic and metal, canvas or sand, and
imagine it pressed against a hospital wall. At those times she
would imagine him just the other side of that wall, knowing that
her hand was there even though he could not see it. She has not
told him that in her dreams, the ones she woke from with a start,
sometimes she dreamt of that wall dissolving under their hands
until she could reach through and lay her hand flat against his
skin, on his brow, the contact somehow soothing the frenzy
stirring within the blind chambers of his brain.
Nor has she told him that in other dreams, the ones she woke from
with a choked scream, she saw Jesus standing at the sea's edge,
looking at his own reflection on the face of the waters. That
when she drew near, trembling, awed, she could see that where the
reflected image of his face should have been there was only a
grey blur. That when she looked up she saw Jesus Christ himself
dissolving away before her, drifting away like sea-mist into the
darkness over the Atlantic.
The weight of these things is like a stone sitting just below her
heart, and so she opens her eyes, takes her hand from the wall
and goes for a shower in the tiny, mildewed bathroom, turning the
water up as hot as she can bear it. It dribbles out of a
limescale-encrusted showerhead and when she raises her hands to
wash her hair under the weak flow, she swears she can still feel
the odd grain or two of African sand lodged against her scalp.
Scrubbed, shining and pink from the shower, she slips into an old
sweatshirt and blue jeans, jams her feet into a pair of battered
white tennis shoes, leaving the laces trailing, and steps outside
for a breath of fresh air. The chill of the October air, damp and
tasting slightly of a coming winter, prickles at her scalp under
her damp hair and makes her feel like her warm body is glowing in
the deepening dusk, like a lantern. She breathes in a lungful of
air only slightly tainted with exhaust fumes from the road, and
feels a little more alive.
She realises that she is also breathing in cigarette smoke.
Mulder is standing hunched over the balcony railing opposite her
door, looking down at the half-empty motel parking lot, the quiet
road and the velvety black forest beyond and taking slow drags on
a cigarette. She shuffles over to join him and leans her arms on
the splintering wooden rail next to him, telling herself that she
stands so close for body heat and not just to make sure that he's
really there.
"You don't smoke," she states quietly, after a minute.
He picks a flake of white paint off the rail and rubs it between
thumb and forefinger before he answers. "No," he says,
looking down at the cigarette in his hand with a faint air of
surprise, "no, I don't. Neither do you. Want a drag?"
She takes the cigarette from him, their fingertips brushing
together for a split second, and holds it out in front of her,
looking at it curiously. "No, I don't think so," she
says eventually. She watches the thin wraith of smoke rising up
before her, twisting and lit up by the dim fluorescents overhead,
then hands it back.
He doesn't bring it to his mouth again, just leans there with it
in his hand. "I haven't smoked since college," he tells
her. "It seemed like the right thing to be doing then,
drinking a lot of black coffee, staying up late into the night
working, smoking a lot of cheap cigarettes. I gave up after just
a month, when I realised that it was slowing down my running and
that I didn't like it all that much in the first place. I
just...thought I'd try it again. See if it was still as
unpleasant as I remembered."
"And is it?"
"Yeah, pretty much." He turns his head and grins at
her, teeth flashing white in the dimness and she smiles back,
feeling a little bubble of happiness rise up inside at the sight
of the smile that she had feared gone under the smooth, dull
surface of catatonia forever. He suddenly flicks the cigarette
out over the rail, and together they watch the bright, burning
end arc out into the air and then fall to earth like a star,
extinguishing itself on the hard blacktop of the parking lot.
She takes her arms off the rail to hug herself against the damp,
cool air. A slim moon - pure white, hanging there like a
parenthesis that has lost its other half - is hauling itself up
above the massed dark of the trees across the road.
Without warning he leans over and rests his head on the top of
hers, his ear almost flat against her skull. She bites her lip to
suppress a giggle born of strung-out nerves snapping back into
place and the urge to ask him if he is trying to hear her
thoughts. A car turns in off the road and its headlights sweep
across them, producing a surge of shyness in her, as if being
caught in the lights in such a casually intimate posture were
tantamount to being seen in flagrante delicto.
"You smell...clean," he mumbles. "Your hair gets
really cold when it's wet, you know."
"Sorry."
"It's okay. It smells nice. Fresh." He moves just a
fraction, and she realises that he is rubbing his cheek back and
forth over her damp hair, like a kitten nuzzling up to its
mother.
Below them a family is climbing out of the newly arrived car, a
beat-up looking station wagon. A woman with a sleeping baby in a
sling against her chest leads a fractious little girl by the hand
towards the rooms underneath them. As they pass under the balcony
and out of sight the child looks up, and stops whining for a
moment when Mulder, grave-faced, lifts his head from Scully's and
sticks his tongue out at her. The girl stares back for a second,
and then sticks her little tongue out too. Scully lets the
laughter out this time, feeling it rise up not on a swell of
hysteria but on another little bubble of genuine happiness, and
Mulder gives her a pleased, toothy smile.
"You know what I like about this place?" he says, warm
fingers of one hand creeping along the rail to stroke gently back
and forth over the skin of her wrist. "It could be anywhere.
Anywhere, USA. Any one of a thousand back-end-of-nowhere towns
with a failing motel and a twisty little through-road that hardly
anyone travels on. In fact, I'm not even sure I do know where we
are, that I could point to it on a map. I like that."
She nods, tucking a damp strand of hair behind her ear, and
thinks that she knows what she likes about it. It's safe, and
quiet, and nobody knows they're there. She likes that.
They stand watching the moon swim upwards in the sky, the
occasional car or truck swishing by on the road, lights blazing
in the dark, and listen to the muted sounds of people moving
around below them, going in and out of rooms.
"Hey, Scully, you'll catch a chill if you're not
careful," he says. "You wanna go back inside?"
She lets him guide her into her room, kicks off her shoes and
sits on the bed to watch him moving round the room, switching on
lights, drawing the blinds. It's as if by getting him here, where
nobody can touch him again for a little while, she's used up
every iota of energy and will she possessed and must now be
content to shuffle around, eat, sleep, watch TV, guard his sleep
and recharge. He leans over a lamp to switch it on and in the
wash of light over his face she sees again how gaunt he still
looks. She can't help but notice the livid line of the scar just
about concealed by his tufty, wild hair, the new marks of
weariness around eyes and mouth, the curious translucent quality
his skin has taken on, as if his recent sufferings have literally
worn him out.
He crosses the room toward her and stretches himself out beside
her on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, head pillowed on his
hands. Close, close enough for his every minute move to translate
into movement of the soft, lumpy mattress under them. She has
noticed that she wakes up in the mornings lying in a mattress
valley in the middle of the bed. It's what her mother calls a
nose-to-nose bed, old and worn enough that you end up
nose-to-nose with your bedmate by daybreak. She tries not to
allow herself to think about waking up nose-to-nose with him,
about lying inches away to watch the slow surfacing from sleep
she loves to see on his face. Not now, not with him on the bed
with her.
"Scully, you have to stop looking at me like I might vanish
if you turn your back," he tells the ceiling, although with
no exasperation in his voice, only fondness.
"I know you won't vanish if I turn around," she says,
trying not to sound irritated. Doesn't she have a right to watch
him occasionally with these hungry, scared eyes? Didn't he stand
too close, talk too softly, breathe down her neck for weeks after
her abduction, after her illness? That's the way the world works
now, she wants to tell him. He vanished when she wasn't paying
attention. God vanished.
As she is reeling inside from that last thought, which surfaces
like a shark, all fearfulness and dead eyes rising from deep
quiet water, he turns over onto his stomach and looks up at her
from under the spiky, disarrayed fall of his hair. "Shut
your eyes and tell me that," he says, quietly challenging.
"Mulder, don't be so --"
"Please?"
She sighs a little theatrically and closes her eyes. "There,
happy?"
"Now say it."
"I know you won't vanish if I..."
Her voice thickens slightly in her throat as she stares into the
nothingness behind her eyelids, and she feels the fingers of her
right hand begin to tremble. Before she can clear her throat and
try to finish the sentence, his hand closes over hers, grasping
tight to still the shaking of nerve, bone and sinew. She opens
her eyes, looking down at their joined hands through a swimming
film of tears that she blinks away in frustration.
"Sorry, Scully. That wasn't fair," he says with genuine
contrition, stroking the pad of his thumb back and forth over the
back of her hand where the blue-green veins run over delicate
bones.
They sit in silence for a while, and then, moved by an
irresistible impulse, she reaches out with her free hand and very
lightly runs a finger along the line of scar tissue forming at
his hairline. He flinches a little, and then squeezes her hand.
When she looks down at him, she sees a sudden vulnerability in
his face that shows her once again the terrified child who has
lost his sister to the night.
"Is it...does it look that bad?" he asks, sounding like
Gibson, a child-man, eyes full of a terrible knowledge beyond his
years. Sometimes she thinks that he has had to live two lives in
the space of his one, and it shows in his eyes. Compassion is a
warm glow of light rising up within her, with which she aches to
encompass and illuminate him.
"No," she reassures him, smoothing his hair back down
over his forehead as much as she can. "No. You can hardly
see it even if you know it's there. Just don't ever shave your
head, okay?"
His soft chuff of laughter is accompanied by another quick
squeeze of the hand. "Thanks. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity:
that's me."
She smiles and ruffles his hair again. God, why can't she stop
touching him? She looks down at their hands and amends that. Why
can't they stop touching each other? When they stood in his
doorway a few days ago she could hardly bear to take her hands
off him, to stop cradling his oh-so-fragile head in her hands. Is
it just the need of two survivors to keep reassuring themselves
of each other's continued existence?
No, she thinks, feeling the soft strands of hair slip like
whispers through her fingers. No. They have begun to overlap one
another, to blur into each other at the edges. She has gone into
his world deeper than ever before, gone to the edges of the known
and beyond and come back with more questions than
answers...questions that radiate emptiness, fear, that create the
desire to reach out and find some firm thing on which to anchor
herself. She knows his world a little more with every month that
passes, and now she knows it in her bones, in her blood.
"How do you bear it, Mulder?" she bursts out. "How
do you bear it, getting up each morning, and believing that
there's no God?"
He sits up quickly, cross-legged, leaning forward to look into
her eyes with naked concern on his face. "Scully, first of
all, I've never said that I don't believe there is a God. I
believe that I have no way of *knowing* that there is a God.
Second of all, didn't you do it too, for years? I know you turned
away from the Church until after your illness --"
"I turned away from the Church, yes, but not from Him.
I...oh, I wasn't sure, Mulder, but I still wore this," she
tells him, clutching at her cross and feeling the sharp points of
the metal bite into her skin. "Always, I kept wearing it,
knowing what it signified to the world and to me. But
now...knowing what I know, knowing what I saw, I feel like a
fraud with it around my neck. I saw the word of God written on
what I can only assume was an artifact of extra-terrestrial
origin. I saw things I can't explain, that left me wondering if
the heavens are empty except for your little grey men. I..."
She trails off helplessly, feeling the hot prickle of tears again
at the back of her eyes. She lets them come, knowing now that he
will not think her any the weaker for it. He reaches out and cups
her face in his hands, as she did to him just days ago, his
thumbs wiping away each fat tear as it marks a glassy path down
her face.
"Oh, Scully," he sighs, "I wish...I wish I had an
answer for you. I wish I could make it make sense for you."
His fingers are warm and dry on her skin, and he cradles her head
like he would a new-born baby, tracing the line of her jawbone
with his fingers as they flex oh-so-slightly on her flesh.
"When I was on the plane back from Africa, I tried to pray
for you," she tells him, "and I felt like such a
failure, because I couldn't. It was as if I'd forgotten how, as
if I was speaking into a void. I didn't know if it was because
I'd forgotten how to speak to God, or if He wasn't there to
hear." She blinks the tears out of her eyes, the soft glows
of light from the lamps blurring and swimming before her, as if
she is underwater.
"You said Albert Hosteen...that he came to you, and that you
prayed together."
"Yes," she says quietly, looking down at her hands
lying in her lap, clenched into fists. She raises one and holds
it out so he can look at it. "He was there, Mulder. He was.
He told me that there were more worlds than the one I could hold
in my hand. When he wanted me to pray with him, I did. It felt
right then. It felt like it had before, like I was being heard.
When I found you, and you woke up, I felt God then, I was sure of
it. Here." She places her hand, palm down, over her heart.
Feels the quick trembling of it pulsing away, nested in her body.
"Like there was something moving inside me that my heart, my
body, was too minute to contain."
"What changed?" Mulder's voice is so low it is on the
edge of hearing. She feels it more than hears it. His breath is
soft on her face; he has come close, so close. We overlap, we
blur, we come closer, she thinks, feeling as if the world is
spinning wildly around her.
"I don't know," she admits. "I think before I was
so focused on finding you, on finding some way to make you well,
that I didn't have the time to think about it. But now...I close
my eyes at night and I see that ship, that impossibility, with
what I thought were God's words written all over it. I told you
that I don't know what to believe in anymore. It's like walking
on sand that shifts under your feet at every step."
"You can believe in me," he offers quietly. "It
isn't much to believe in, but it's a start, Scully. And I'll
always believe in you."
"Yes," she whispers, leaning forward gratefully to rest
her forehead on his. "Yes. Thank you, Mulder. Thank
you."
There is no answer, but there is this, a brief spell of rest and
comfort, a haven from the upheaval and turmoil Africa has gifted
her with. She rests there, feeling his breath stir and mix with
hers, floating in their little island of soft, warm light in the
chill October night. When at length they move, so slightly, and
their mouths meet, although he tastes of cigarette smoke and
black coffee he tastes more strongly of faith and love, and it is
as simple and easy as falling asleep.
Nobody has to fall asleep alone this night. He turns out the
lights, letting her slide down into warm, safe darkness, and then
reaches out for her, cradles her against him as though she were
the sufferer who had to be rescued, and as she slips gently down
into blessed rest, into a dream where the walls of the hospital
room melt away under their hands, the last thing she hears is him
whispering into her ear, into the warm, forgiving night.
"Let me tell you about a little boy on a beach, Scully. Let
me show you. I want you to see it. He's building
something...something wonderful..."
******
FINIS
******
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