Title: The Long Lowering Hour
Category: V, MSR, post-ep
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Can you say (or, indeed, remember) 'Tithonus'? Yup,
there's nothing like getting those post-eps done promptly
<g>. Teeny
one for FTF too.
Summary: Twilight draws in. Peace of a kind floats in on tides of
late
evening light.
Archive: Yes to Gossamer. Anywhere else: I won't say no, but
*please*
ask me first. I just like to know where this stuff goes. :)
Disclaimer: I am no media tycoon, not yet at least, although the
world
domination plans proceed apace. Hence I do not own the Discovery
Channel,
nor indeed anything else you recognise, which belongs to CC, 1013
and Fox.
I'm not making a red cent off this.
Feedback: Always worshipped at cazfic@ymail.com
Author's Notes: What can I tell ya? I see eps months after most
of you guys
do, I write at a glacial pace, and a little slice of peacefulness
was
yearning to get out of me while I hammered away at some bigger
projects and waited (and waited...and waited...) for season 7 to
roll
my way. If you can still remember 'Tithonus', come on in and take
a
seat <g>. Many thanks and cookies to EPur, Alicia, Luce and
Kristy
for betas at such a busy time of year :).
Oh yeah: so it's not at all seasonal. I'm not good at seasonal.
Nevertheless, this one is a little belated X-mas/Hanukah present
for all my
dear fic friends, and most especially for EPur, Luce, Windle,
Kristy,
Alicia, Shawne, JET, Katrina, Fic-Auntie jerry and Luperkal. It's
also
for Bonnie, who pouted.
*****
The Long Lowering Hour (1/1) by CazQ
( cazfic@ymail.com )
******
"I looked and saw your love
In the shadow of your heart
As a diver sees the pearl
In the shadow of the sea;
And I murmured, not above
My breath, but all apart, -
"Ah! you can love, true girl,
And is your love for me?"
from 'Three Shadows' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
*****
It is still light in the room, in this strange no-time between
day and
darkness. The light sliding in through the window is the liquid,
golden
light of dreams, the slanting sunbeams that illumine remembered
childhood
scenes. Although it is winter now, and the sun lacks much real
heat,
somehow this is still the light that bathes memories of clambakes
on the
beach; dust pluming behind him on a quiet back-road as he rode
his bike
home for dinner; playing catch in the back yard with Sam, the
grass long and
whispering dryly against bare legs...
He sits by the couch and watches it wash over her like nectar,
like
ambrosia. Like a quiet ocean of visible blessings.
It has been six days since he brought her home from New York, and
in that
time he has not strayed from her side except to let her bathe and
sleep. The
close proximity has brought about friction, inevitably. She
strains against
her own invalid state like a wolf against a leash, and in doing
so turns and
strains against him. Last night she raised her voice to him for
the first
time in weeks, temper fraying at last like the end of a fuse.
Today was easier for it, though. She had released her pain, her
frustration,
her weariness at her lack of independence, and the dark wrack of
storm
clouds passed on, breaking up, dissipating. Behind them, only
sunlight and
air washed clean and fresh, easier to breathe.
Today she got up late, to a light brunch of fresh fruit and
pastries he
bought from the bakery three blocks over. He remembers walking
home along
the sleepy streets, marveling at the crispness of the air, one of
those rare
winter days where the sun breaks through and the world seems a
newly-made
thing. It had rained in the night, real rain rather than freezing
sleet, and
the sky seemed so much bigger, somehow, further away, rising and
rising
into glorious blue above him.
They read the Sunday papers together, watched some old black and
white
movie on cable, 'The Philadelphia Story', he thinks. He doesn't
know. He was
watching her more than he was watching the movie, watching the
way she held
her breath and then smiled a little with relief when Katharine
Hepburn broke
off her engagement, as if she had not seen the movie a dozen
times before.
Watching the way her hand would creep sometimes to where the
thick dressing
sat beneath her T-shirt, resting lightly on her midriff, as if
attracted to
the pain the way a needle is drawn to a magnet.
He is not her lover, whatever unkind tongues may say. At least,
they have
not ever made love, have not really kissed, have not held one
another close
and whispered confessions of passion into the shell-like,
delicate curves of
an ear. Yet here he is, sleeping on her couch, his toothbrush in
a washbag
by her bathroom sink, doing her grocery shopping, bringing her
medication
from the pharmacy, distracting her from the pain, from the
nearness of her
mortality. Watching over her.
There is no word for this thing between Scully and himself in the
English
language, none that he can think of. Not "friends", not
"colleagues", not
even that trusty old fall-back "partners". None of
these will do anymore.
Still, he does not feel he has the right to call her
"lover". Not yet. Not
ever, perhaps.
He thinks she is sleeping now. She lies on the couch, head
cushioned by
pillows, turned slightly towards the TV, on which birds of
paradise glow
like gemstones against the lush green velvet darknesses of
rainforests.
Scully likes the Discovery Channel, which came as no great
surprise, but
still struck him as something he ought to have known. After
watching several
days worth of it with her, he knows now that she doesn't watch it
for the
science, but because she finds it restful, soothing, the visual
equivalent
of comfort food. He likes knowing this about her, likes knowing
it so much
that it scares him a little.
The hand lying over her t-shirt, over her dressing, over her
wound, rises
and falls gently as she breathes in slow tides. Shadow pools in
the hollow
of her eye, beneath the brow-bone, a startlingly lovely contrast
to the thin
gold-plating of light over the gentle curve of her eyelid. He
could look at
that light and that darkness lying so softly over her closed eye
for hours.
Instead, he leans forward out of his chair and quietly lifts the
remote off
the coffee table, silencing the TV, dropping a cloak of darkness
over
those shimmering, gaudy birds that suddenly seem a little too
bright, a
little too flamboyant for his state of mind. She does not stir,
blissfully
deep in sleep. He stands slowly, wincing as his knees crackle
like
distant gunfire. Not getting any younger. Neither of them are.
He pads into the kitchen and confronts the mess left from their
early dinner
of Thai takeout. Somehow, there is a simple pleasure to being in
domestic
mode here, to clearing up the debris of two shared lives. A
season of grace
for him, in some odd fashion: as long as she is convalescing and
requires
his help here in the house, he gets to make-believe that he is
not a lonely
man fast approaching the wrong side of forty. He gets to play
house a
little, gets to brush his teeth in a bathroom where there are two
toothbrushes by the sink, get to pass the front door and see his
London Fog hanging beside hers.
He putters about the kitchen quietly, clearing away the jumble of
empty
cartons, wiping down the table, washing up two glasses, tossing
two handfuls
of paper napkins into the trash. He flicks through Scully's
small, neatly
ordered collection of recipe books, reflecting that maybe
tomorrow he will
cook her something to eat instead of giving her more food out of
bags, boxes
and cartons. Something fresh...he is no great cook, but he pauses
to enjoy
pleasant, vague sense-images of her kitchen filling with warm,
spicy scents,
the comforting rattle of saucepans, the crisp, green freshness of
a bowl of
salad on the table...
Yes. He will cook for her, somehow.
As he puts the clean dishes away in their designated place in the
cupboard
over the sink, he thinks once more that he ought to be feeling
far
more...what? Uneasy? Terrified? Haunted? Something a little
closer to
his normal reactions to one of Scully's brushes with the Grim
Reaper,
anyway. He wonders for a second just how twisted it is that he
can have
"normal" reactions to the near-death of the person
he... the person who...
The thing he has been trying to get a hold of all day, that
feeling, like a
half-faded memory of an emotion, faint wisps of pale smoke and
mist trailing
round him...it melts away again, like frost in the sunlight. For
a second he
had it there, in his hand...being so near to her all the time is
distracting
him, clouding his mind. He knows that there is something
important happening
in this place in these days of rest, that something in the air
between them
is changing, growing, but he cannot quite grasp it or define it
yet.
Not for the first time, he wonders if maybe he cannot see the
forest for the
trees.
Anyway. Where was he? Oh yes...he's been there, done that, bought
the
T-shirt. He spent some of the longest hours of his sorry life
running
through all those tried and tested emotions on the flight up to
New York,
fists slowly clenching and unclenching reflexively on the
armrests beside
him. He remembers the landing at JFK most clearly of all, that
grey, grey
morning. When they fly together, she is fine taking off, but she
hates
landings. She sits there with one hand on his knee or his
forearm, gripping
him like that would help keep the plane from crashing headlong
into the
ground, although she does not look at him until they are safely
back on
terra firma, when she will release him with a small, embarrassed
smile and a
muttered thanks.
He remembers how achingly lonely it felt not to have those small
fingers
clenched in a death grip on his knee on the descent. How, to his
horrified
shame, tears started burning behind his eyes, right there in the
middle of
economy class.
By the time he arrived in the hospital and saw her with his own
eyes, saw
that she was still alive, still in one piece, still his, the
terror and the
anger and the guilt had drifted away, leaving a quiet sense of
wonder and
gratitude. Those feelings of raging grief will be back to haunt
him,
probably on the first night he spends back in the cool expanse of
his lonely
bed. For now, they remain distant, subsumed by the need to
experience this
season of rest with her, to experience, to feel, to remind
himself that yes,
she lives.
She lives. Yes. She has not yet spoken to him of what happened in
Fellig's
apartment, not in anything more than broken allusions and
enigmatic remarks
that tail off into nothing. For now, that is all right. Let there
be no
death here, only life. Let there be no death...
He finishes carefully stacking the plates away and slips out into
the living
room to take another look at the sleeper on the couch. She's
awake, and
looking right back at him.
"Hey, Mulder," she says softly, giving him a tired
smile.
"Hey," he replies, moving over to sink down on the
floor beside the couch.
She watches with some amusement as he sits down, folding himself
into the
small space between couch and coffee table, pulling his long legs
up to his
body to fit down beside her. "Sleep well?"
"I guess," she says absently, looking not at his face
but at his hands,
resting clasped together, as if in prayer, on his knees. "I
had a dream..."
"Yeah?" he says gently, unable to think of an
appropriate response.
"Yeah." She is silent for a minute, hand circling
slowly, restlessly above
her stomach, tracing patterns on the thin cotton of the blue
t-shirt she
wears. He wishes she wouldn't do that. It's as if her wound
exercises some
deadly fascination for her, pulls at her on a subconscious level,
demanding
that she be always aware of it, always circling around it, the
scarred
phantom of the maelstrom of blood and hurt Ritter placed inside
her.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" Afraid she will say
no, close the door
onto whatever dark chamber she strayed into in her sleep, leaving
a piece of
herself within. Afraid she will say yes, tell him in that small,
tired voice
of terrible things, things that will not fit into this
comfortable, hollow
illusion of a safe, shared life he has spent the past few days
constructing.
"I...there was a camera...a bright face, I couldn't
look..." she says
uncertainly, trailing off, and he has the sense that she is
walking along
the top of a high wall, teetering, gazing down on the other side.
The other
side to where he stands, watching, helpless. He is afraid of what
will
happen to her if she falls.
"Maybe some other time," she says finally. They sit in
silence for a minute,
and he watches her watching him from under those pale little
lashes, bare of
mascara. Without make-up, she looks younger, her face somehow
more open,
more ready to be touched. "Mulder, could you bring me the
book on my writing
desk, please?"
Wordlessly, he rises and goes to the desk. The book is the only
thing left
lying out on its smooth, pristine surface. E. M. Forster, 'A Room
With A
View'. A nice copy too, bound in slightly worn, dark crimson
leather, the
gold embossed lettering on the spine and cover glinting in the
late, low
light.
Twilight is drawing in now. It is the long, lowering hour when
the light
fades away slowly, so slowly, the world spinning into night. He
feels as if
the growing darkness is falling like a soft blanket around them,
over them,
shielding them from jealous eyes. He takes her the book.
Reluctantly, he
reaches over to switch on the lamp at the end of the couch, but
she stops
his outstretched hand with her own.
"It's okay. I can see just fine. There's enough light right
now. Would
you...would you sit down?" she asks him. "I wanted to
read something to
you."
He obeys, resuming his place beside the couch, by her head. She
opens the
book, flicking through the pages to the one she wants. Her eyes,
as they
track back and forth, skimming through the text, seem to have an
odd light
of their own, as if she has been looking on other worlds in her
sleep and
sees them still, somehow.
"Listen" she says, and he does.
" 'Am I justified?' Into his own eyes tears came. 'Yes, for
we fight for
more than Love or Pleasure; there is Truth. Truth counts. Truth
does
count.'"
Her sweet, low voice trails off, and he realises that while she
has been
reading he has leaned his head down against the arm of the couch,
as if it
weighed too much to hold up, and that the hand that is not
holding the book
is threading itself lightly and slowly through his hair.
Her hand, small, white, sacred, circles his head now instead of
her wound.
He feels as if her waking has thrown him into a dream of his own,
a dream
where light moves like honey and thick golden syrup, where
thought slides
along like a lazy river. He wants to ask her what suddenly
prompted her to
share that with him, but he is afraid to speak and break the
spell her hand
is weaving around him.
Her fingers wind in his hair, as if to say, that made me think of
you. He
knows it, although she does not speak.
She begins to read again, her voice still unwavering, steady and
calm.
" 'You kiss me,' said the girl. 'You kiss me. I will try.'
" 'He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling
that, in gaining the
man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world.
Throughout the
squalor of her homeward drive - she spoke at once - his
salutation remained.
He had robbed the body of its taint, the world's taunts of their
sting; he
had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She 'never exactly
understood',
she would say in after years, 'how he managed to strengthen her.
It was as
if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.' ' "
She closes the book gently, barely making a sound, and lays it
flat on her
chest. Her fingers still wander over his scalp, smoothing through
the short
strands.
"Do you think a person can make someone see the whole of
everything at once
that way?" she asks, her voice different now, smaller, less
certain. A voice
wanting and not quite daring to hope.
"I don't know," he answers honestly. "I...I hope
so. It's a nice thought."
"I think Fellig made me see everything at once," she
muses, as if speaking
to herself. "He...Mulder, if you had met him, had looked
into his eyes, you
would have seen..he wasn't a holy man, not by any means, but I
think maybe
there was holiness working through him. I think he showed me the
world as it
really could be, and the place I would have in it, if I didn't
learn...if I
didn't learn and understand."
"Understand what?" He is proud that he speaks the words
without a tremor in
his voice, although he can feel his hands trembling, and he knows
that he is
nervously rubbing one thumb back and forth, back and forth over
his knuckles
in a quick, wary motion.
" 'The holiness of direct desire' ", she replies.
"The need to have life
while it's there for the taking. He was...he was beyond lonely,
Mulder. He'd
been alone in the world for so long that he'd just stopped caring
about
anything, anything but getting the shot. There was a kind of
empty space at
the heart of him. I don't know if he would have lived forever,
but I
know...when I looked into his eyes as he told me that you don't
want to be
around when love is gone..."
"Oh," he says stupidly, unable in this moment to fathom
her meaning, the
path her thoughts are leading them down.
"Yes," she says quietly, uncertainly, fingers slowly
trailing down from his
hair, along the outer curve of his ear, down to trace along his
jawline. Her
hand stops when she touches his lips with one dry, warm
fingertip, resting
there with the lightest of pressures. "He told me...he said
I should count
my blessings," she murmurs.
"Am I one of your blessings, Scully?" he asks quietly,
the words escaping
from some shadowed, secret place inside him before he can call
them back. He
watches her face, sensing suddenly the weight of the whole world
turning and
returning on the pivot of this question.
"I...you kiss me," she whispers in response, voice
shaking, made naked with
fear. "You kiss me, Mulder. I will try."
He remains still in the thick, sweet, golden winter light for a
long moment
of time, feeling the burden of all her hopes, her desires, her
holy terrors
and uncertainties settle in his arms, exactly the weight of her
still body
lying over his shoulder beneath caverns of ice. Almost as if he
had never
held them there for her in the first place. Almost.
Then he rises up onto his knees, her hand coming with him, that
one finger
never leaving his lips. When he is kneeling and can look into her
eyes and
be sure of what she wants him to do, he reaches up and closes a
hand around
her wrist. He feels the tiny flutter of the blood, pulsing past
beneath the
skin, rushing along in her veins. Alive.
He pulls her hand away from his mouth and looks at it with all
the wonder of
an astronomer sighting a new star in the heavens, sensing through
it the
startled-animal stillness of her whole body in the pivotal
moment, the
breath held unmoving in her lungs. Then he leans forward and
kisses the tip
of that finger, a baby kiss, delicate and careful, and feels the
breath rush
out of her body.
He moves on, kissing her upturned palm, the skin over the
slate-coloured
twine of veins at her wrist, the pale, sweet skin on the inside
of her
forearm and her elbow, the freckled curve of her shoulder, the
graceful
white column of her neck. Now he is almost close enough, and as
he leans
forward her eyes slip shut, lashes fluttering against her cheeks
like the
wings of birds taking flight.
He leans in, closer, close enough to feel the warm summer breeze,
the soft
tide of air that is her breath against his lips, and in the
golden, hallowed
infinity before his mouth captures hers he whispers into her,
"You kiss me,
Scully. You kiss me. We will try."
FINIS
******
cazfic@ymail.com
