Chapter 10

Is this a place I can rest my poor head
And gather my thoughts in sweet silence?
And is this a place where feelings are dead
From an overexposure to violence?
Is this a place I can slowly face
The only one I truly can know?

These are tears from a long time ago
I've got these tears from a long time ago
And I need to cry thirty years or so
These are tears from a long time ago.

                           -John Hiatt

Rubbing her eyes, Scully stood and paced the room. She wanted to march
in there and fight with him, but something held her back. Frustrated,
she jabbed the button on her answering machine, listening to the
overly polite voice tell her she had no new messages. She rolled her
eyes, wondering why she even had the damn thing. She knew there had
been a time when she'd had other friends, other things to do. Actual
appointments to keep. A time she could have become something else,
anything else. When she was just one star in the universe.

Until Mulder's gravitational pull had become too strong. He'd almost
crushed her, but instead she'd pulled too, exerting her own force. Now
they were like binary stars, orbiting around each other continuously. 

She could feel it even now, as her steps kept taking her back to the
bedroom door. <He's hurt, that's all, resentful, angry. So why can't
he just say that?> Finally, she gave up and slumped back onto the
couch. She knew she was right, she just wasn't sure how to convince
him. <Story of my life>

Leaning sideways she inhaled the scent of him that lingered on the
cushions. She'd just close her eyes for a minute, then they would work
this out...
*****************************************

Heaving a sigh, Mulder flopped down on his couch. Yes, his couch. The
one piece of furniture he'd decided to bring into this place. Scully
had refused to let him keep it in the living room, but consented to
the bedroom out of some weird sense of nostalgia. At times when he
needed to reconnect with himself, he gravitated there. He never slept
there anymore; the alternative was just too tempting. Of course,
tonight could be a first. <If she had any sense she'd throw me out on
my ass> He lay back on the couch, wallowing in leather and self-pity.

<Scully.

Who needs her. 

I was doing just fine before she came along anyway. 

Okay, maybe fine isn't a good word.

Semantics.

Shitty. Shitty would be a better word. I was alone and miserable and
hated the world.

I saw only the slimmest chance that I would do some good, be a benefit
to somebody, sometime in my life. Samantha. Maybe if I could save my
sister it would be okay. It. Everything. My Life. Of course I never
sat down to figure out exactly how her recovery would restore me, but
who had time? I had a purpose now, a mission that necessarily started
and ended in a basement office.

I did know what I was doing, I just didn't care. I would sift through
this excrement from the bowels of the FBI for as long as they would
let me. If they stopped paying me I'd do it on my own. I'd pictured
myself as a modern-day Howard Hughes, paranoid and reclusive up until
his last days.

Fuck everybody else. I was gonna walk right into that oncoming train.
If it took an hour or a day or a week or a year, I'd keep walking.

The few friends I had left sounded warnings. "Mulder, come on back to
VCS. We need you." "Mulder, you play poker?" "Mulder, we've got an
extra ticket to see the 'Skins lose. You interested?" Sometimes it was
hard to ignore them, but I just stayed focused. One-track mind, so to
speak. I would find her or die trying. And to tell the truth, at that
point it didn't matter which.

And then Scully walked right into my suicide mission of a life.

Like a wounded animal, incapable of understanding its own need for
help, I frightened her a few times. But she doesn't spook easily. She
reached out a hand and waited calmly for me to come to her. To curl up
and lick my wounds and hope that she would love me. Or at the very
least not hurt me anymore.

And just about the time she'd made me want to live again, she was
gone. I was in the fetal position for longer than I care to remember.
And this time there were no half-forgotten friends to pull me out of
it. Sleeping with Kristin, I could hear the blaring of the train's
whistle in the distance.

Until they brought her back.

Even when she was dying, at least I knew where she was, and was able
to make feeble, rejected attempts at comforting her. The not-knowing
was the worst.

I know how you feel, Sam. I just wish you didn't have to go through
this.>


Mulder rolled off the couch. He wasn't going to get any sleep anyway.
He smiled, remembering what he used to watch when he couldn't sleep.
He had better things to watch now, if he could just come up with a
decent apology.

He slowly opened the bedroom door, fully expecting a pointy projectile
to bounce off his head. When none came, he was sure she'd left. 

Then he saw her.

Curled up tightly on her couch, breathing deeply. Alone. <Now, what's
wrong with this picture?>

He sat down in the chair near her, turning off lights as he went. Her
eyelids fluttered as she moved about in a dream.
  
There should be some justice in dreams, he thought. If bad things
happen to you when you are awake, you should be allowed happy dreams.
Of course, he knew from his own case that that wasn't true.

<I wonder if she sees her sister.

I see mine.

I wonder if she sees her father.

I see mine.

What are you dreaming, Scully?>

****************

Midday sunlight filtered through the leaves as Scully ran across the
yard. Looking around, she stopped, hands on hips, calling out a little
too loudly. "Come out, come out wherever you are." She could hear a
girlish giggle not far away, and turned in its direction. 
"You're such a good hider! I'll give you a prize if you come out right
now!" She smiled, seeming to know this would work.

Another giggle, this one behind her. She turned again, saw nothing.
Peering behind the bushes, she wondered how such a small child could
hide so well for so long. "Emily, come out now. I'm tired of this game."

This time she heard the giggle above her. She peered up into the tree,
squinting into the sun. When she looked back down, her yard was filled
with men and women in business suits, looking at charts and files. 

She shouldered her way through the faceless crowd. "Emily...Emily."
She asked a man near her, "Have you seen a little girl?" But he didn't
answer her, just turned away.

Frantic now, she was yelling. "Has anybody here seen a little girl?
Somebody has to have seen her! Can someone please help me look?" 

No one answered her. No one even turned to look.

In a blink, she was standing in a church. A tiny coffin right in front
of her. There was a man standing there, somehow she knew he'd been in
her yard too. His face was passive as he placed a hand on the coffin.
"We found her."
*******************

With a start, Scully sat straight up, the quiet darkness robbing her
of all sensory input. Like a sailor fixing on the North Star, she
latched onto the one compass point that could show her the way home.

"Mulder?"

And in an instant he was there. She heard the crinkle of the cushion
from the armchair as he got up, suddenly surrounding her body with his.

His arm left her for a moment, reaching around to turn on a light.

With a sob she slumped into him. "She's gone." Something in her tone
told him she wasn't talking about Lauren.

"Emily?" he murmured into her hair.

She nodded, and he held her tighter, forcing away the demons that had
dared follow them into their private haven.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I was an asshole before and I'm sorry." He
rubbed his fingers down her arm. "And I'm sorry I didn't think about
how hard this is for you, too."

Scully rubbed her head into his chest. "We can't let this tear us
apart. If we do that, they win."

He kissed her temple. She looked up at him, her heart still pounding.
"What are you going to tell your sister?"

"I don't know yet." He kissed her softly on the lips. It was just like
her to slap band-aids on his wounds while she let herself bleed to
death. "Tell me about your dream." She hesitated, and he felt her
shiver.

"Please." 

And she began to speak, quietly, of light and dark, of fear and
sadness, of dreams that frightened her, and of dreams that had died.

Mulder snapped off the light, and she sank into him. Taking back
control over her mind, and over the night.

As her voice lowered to a whisper, her words began to lull him to
sleep as well. His drowsy voice slid in between hers, a lullaby in
two-part harmony.

The rhythm of his breathing, the air filling his chest calmed her, and
she was reminded of listening to the ocean in a seashell. As her
half-awake brain made these random connections, her thoughts spilled
uncensored from her lips.

"When I was little, we spent a lot of time at the beach. We were
always near the water."

"Hmm."

"I remember my mother telling me I could hear the ocean if I put a
shell to my ear. I liked that. It made me feel closer to my father
when he was away."

"Mmm-hmmm."

"That was always such a fascinating mystery to me. How the sound of
the waves could be stuck inside all those shells.  I remember when I
got older, and found out it wasn't really the ocean at all. Just the
echo of the blood running through your ears."

"Science has all the answers, huh?" he said, fighting to stay awake.

"Yes, but..."

"But sometimes, you wish you could still believe."

She didn't answer, didn't have to.

"Sometimes it's okay to want to believe in the ocean, Scully."

"Even when I know it's not true?"

"'specially then," he mumbled.

The sounds that pounded in her ears were the ocean and his breath, the
waves and his heartbeat, the surf and his voice. 

And she fell into a dreamless sleep, wanting to believe.