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The characters herein are the property of 1013, Fox and Chris Carter. No infringement on their copyright is intended. Their usage here is for entertainment purposes only. If I owned Mulder and Scully, they would be exhausted all the time...if you know what I mean. Alas, CC doesn't let them come out and play as much as I would like. But he's the boss.

Author's notes: This story is a Scully POV accompaniment to Amanda Rex's "Call It a Feeling." While you don't have to read her story to understand this one, it would be really swell if you would. I'm gonna dedicate this story to me and Amanda...us. Since finding her via the web, I've been inspired in ways I had never dreamed. Here's to many, many more, Am.

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After Monday by Willa
March 1999

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Mulder thinks I don't remember anything.

He thinks my memories of that day begin and end with a budget meeting and the death of a stranger.

But he's wrong.

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Sometimes it's easier for me to just pretend with him that I don't believe in the things that happen to us. Between us. It saves me the inevitable conversation, the defense of my skepticism. I don't want Mulder to be able to say "I told you so."

I remember our conversation before he left me in our office-fate and destiny, two interchangeable terms. "Do you believe in destiny?" he asked me. My verbal answer was philosophy, my non-verbal one would have been clear if he'd have looked in my eyes: I was destined to find you.

I remember shadows of my moments with him in the bank.

And I wonder what would have happened if he would have seen the truth inside me that day, before he ran off to greet fate. Would he have stayed? Would he have paused long enough to confront me? Would it have saved me the memory of holding him in my arms, watching him die?

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If I told him I remembered that day, I wouldn't be able to stop the fear from pouring out of me. He'd feel it. He would know what it felt like for me to watch him slip away.

I suppose he already knows, after sitting beside me when the cancer threatened to take me. But he's never believed his death would cause the same emotions in me, the same feeling of aloneness and emptiness. It was that and more.

Kneeling on the floor, holding his bleeding body in my lap, I struggled to hold together the pieces of my world shattering around me. I couldn't find his eyes. His head kept rolling to the side, and I couldn't remove my hands from his chest to tilt his face toward me. His eyes would tell whether he was alive or already dead. His eyes would say goodbye.

But the gunman wanted attention, he begged for it by waving Mulder's weapon around and accusing us of interfering. I had to give it to him, he demanded it, but I wanted-no, needed-to keep my partner alive. And I needed him to know what he'd missed in my eyes back at the office.

I thought he was dead when I woke up the next morning.

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I remember the look in his eyes when we realized we would both die. Nothing could save us from the blast of the bomb. Not our trust. Not our faith. Not our unspoken love.

Too far away from one another to make declarations. Too many things trying to distract us from saying goodbye.

I would have given anything to be near him before the bomb went off. I think I would have thrown myself into his arms. To die by his side, that's all I wanted.

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Mulder and I are not good with words. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got as far as we have, as close as we are, so few meaningful words have been exchanged between us.

I wonder if that's how we'll die someday. Without words.

I didn't tell him I was remembering. I didn't tell him that I struggled every minute to find a way to stop it, to hold on to the wisps of memory remaining.

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I wonder why neither of us learned the importance of the here and now. What is it inside of us that keeps us silent? That keeps us from confessing what the other desperately wants to hear?

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I don't want to die alone, Mulder.

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The terror of losing you is the only thing that makes me fear death.

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THE END

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