| Out of Focus : Two By Amanda Finch [email protected] Disclaimers, etc. w. first part. 2/12 Hampstead Lodge Sheehan, Nebraska January 27, 1999 2:53 AM We didn't talk on the plane. I knew we wouldn't. I thumbed through a paperback I'd bought at the airport, always forgetting where I left off if I stopped to rub my eyes. Scully had brought a small pile of medical journals and, not surprisingly, nodded off at regular intervals. A small patch of condensation formed on the glass as she rested her head against the window. The plane landed at Chicago O'Hare at a quarter to eight. Scully primarily sleepwalked through the whole thing once we'd landed, latently angry that I'd chosen to wake her up when the fasten seatbelts light came on by dipping my finger in my icewater and poking her in the ear. I was bored, and stoked on five hot cocoas that the airline was trying to pass off as cappucino. Jonson and McGrath were sitting in the back, probably exchanging tactical assignment anecdotes or whatever it was that passed for idle chat between them. Our connecting flight became a two hour stop-over once a thick, rain-heavy fog had intervened. It was after midnight when we landed in Lincoln, and we still had to get a rental car, find Sheehan on a glovebox map and a hotel therein. She slept soundly, the kind of rest so deep she would wake up with a headache wondering when we'd gotten to the hotel. I sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. The TV was on, but I stared at the composite. You'd better be Alex Krycek, I told the face, and found his sketched eyes following me as I got up to stretch my legs. Now the drawing was halfway wedged under a complimentary copy of Cosmo, circa 1991. My eyes urgently wanted to close, but my mind was racing over the mismatched pieces of the puzzle we had. In the barely lit darkness, Scully woke abruptly, upright in the bed as if her body forbid it, eyes stuck shut. "TV too loud?" I asked softly. She covered her mouth, yawning loudly. "Are you watching one of your movies?" I turned to actually peer at the screen as one small, squealing brown animal lustfully pursued another through the grass, a droll British voice intoning about mating rituals. I smiled back at her. "Hedgehogs?" She let her eyes focus. "The sounds were the same." For the first time, she examined the hotel room, listening carefully as if a noise had bothered her. "Why did I wake up?" "Bad dream?" I offered, turning off the television, unintentionally throwing the room into darkness. "Not that I can remember," she answered. Seconds later, a lamp clicked next to her, its yellowed shade making everything appear sallow and dingy. She pushed her pillow behind her back, staring at the blank screen. "Can I ask you a question?" If she didn't know the answer to that, I was getting my own hotel room. I waited. When she spoke, there was no upward tilt to her inflection, no question implied. "I shouldn't feel bad about this." "No," I agreed. "Mulder, you don't even know what I'm about to say...Diana's resigning." I looked up from the composite. "She's all talk, Scully." She shook her head. "It was on the interoffice personnel update this morning. Her last day is Monday after next. Less than two weeks." "That bothers you?" "No. It doesn't bother me at all. Not a bit. Even when I wish it would." It was hard to look at her bloodshot blue eyes, fixed on me. "*That's* what bothers me." She felt guilty, about...not feeling guilty. It didn't get much more Catholic than that. "Scully, in a few years, Spender would've been another guy in an unmarked van with an automatic weapon. Another smoking man sitting in the corner." I didn't like the stiff, recited way the words sounded, recalling a dark moment here, a doubtful silence there. "I *almost* felt sorry for Spender when I realized his own father was about to take him out. But any pity he gained with me, he lost the minute he decided you would make a good fort. As far as I'm concerned, he was dead when he put you in the path of that bullet. It just took a couple minutes for him to die." "I know all of that." She knew better than I did, that was for sure. A bruise on her shoulder, some ugly color between dark red and black, shaped like a four-point star, marked where the bullet had pierced her flesh. A corresponding bruise, two inches above her right shoulder blade, shapeless and lighter, showed where it had torn out of her. She could trace the trajectory of that bullet like she was signing her name. It nicked the bone, because the entry wound in Spender's chest had jagged splinters of bone embedded in it, along with a button from his shirt. It tunnelled through his left ventricle, which bled so quickly into the rest of his body that his skin had been soft and blotchy with internal bleeding. The bullet, with all its inertia, caught his spine and tore his back right out. They pried the wad of metal from the wall behind his couch. It went through his damn couch. I don't think the preoccupation lay in what the bullet had struck, though, but in what it had missed. Variables and ballistics. If she'd been standing two inches to the left, it would've either just grazed her or missed her completely. Two inches to the right, and it would've shattered her collarbone, forcing its way through still-new scar tissue from her previous wounds right into her lung. Death. Not the kind of instant death Spender got, but a gasping, choking terror. Not even enough time or breath to make some brief plea with God or some other bright Something, but a few seconds to understand what hit you before the lights went out. I couldn't even *begin* to fathom that. Forget destiny and just plain dumb luck. Timing, and hers was better than mine. Always had been. I was startled out of the moment by the touch of her hand on the back of my neck, a chill like a lit fuse burning down my spine. "Mulder? What's wrong?" How long had I been sitting there, running some gory, visceral slide show through my mind? "You looked so sad for a minute," she said. "Not sad," I replied quietly. "Thankful." She smiled tightly. I wondered if she thought there was anything left deserving of gratitude. "The next time you see a gun," I told her, in some pale imitation of humor, "you put me in front of you. I figure I have two turns coming." Her smiled faded. "It doesn't work like that." So did mine. "No." I hung my head. "Of course not." She patted the pillow on my side of the bed. "Come on. There's only three hours of night left before the sun rises." I stretched out, my body feeling like it could snap back elastically, not relaxed at all. She turned off the lamp, and all I could see was my own hand, tensed into a fist next to my face as she curled up against my back. Her warmth calmed me down, and her arm around my waist anchored me to all I had left in this world that made any sense. I held her hand there. "Scully?" Her hair brushed my arm as she raised head. "What?" "You said you had a question. Did you ask me?" "Oh. I...Whether we find Krycek within the next four days or next year...what are we planning to do?" She was staring down into my face now, propped on one elbow. "*Are* we planning anything?" Like a camera flash, I was blinded for a moment by a very vivid image. The unaltered violence of it left no space for interpretation. Not *Krycek's* face, or his agony. Mine. "Mulder?" I swallowed. "I don't know. Whatever the situation...deems necessary." That sounded frighteningly like one of those detached platitudes Spender had told me about, too euphemistic to be anyone's truth. Whether Scully accepted that or was just too tired to argue, I didn't know. She was asleep again though. Sleep wasn't going to happen for me anytime real soon. But then it did. The falling dream was like an old friend. Of course, according to Jung, most people wake up from it. Not me. I just kept falling and falling. If anything woke me up, it was boredom. All that falling got monotonous when I couldn't foresee hitting anything to stop it. It's what she and I had been doing since this began, just falling indefinitely. But she had shaken loose of my hand. She was descending at her own rate, now no longer in sight. She'd think that was pretty damn funny and explain the lack of applicable physics in that scenario: We'd fall at the same rate. "Dreams and physics," I called down to her over the air rushing around us, "have nothing to do with each other!" She smiled up at me, started to say something, and she hit the ground. I woke up, inhaling sharply and jolting her beside me. In my mind, I told her to grab onto something else, to let me go ahead and free fall while she found some solid ground. Before, when I'd told her to leave, she hadn't heeded my words. But now -- Now I was afraid they would make sense. ------------------------------------------- One / Two / Three / Four / Five / Six / Seven /Eight / Nine / Ten / Eleven / Twelve .. |