by Justin Glasser
She lay pressed against her partner's warm body, arms curled around him, feeling the rise and fall of his breath beneath her cheek, the soothing pulse of his heart. She was so close she could smell the faint tang of his sweat. She was too close, but she didn't dare move.
She had dozed off almost immediately after pulling herself against Mulder's reluctant form, but it had been too long since she had slept with someone else: she woke up every time he moved. Every time he shifted his legs, or adjusted the pillow, every time he sighed in a dream, she came awake, her thoughts drifting aimlessly in the pitch darkness.
If she were home, she might have called him. She did that, sometimes, when she couldn't sleep well. Mulder was almost always up until two or three in the morning, and if she felt like talking she would reach for the cordless by the bed and call him up, to listen to the calm throatiness of his voice until she felt willing to try sleeping again. They didn't talk of anything important when she called. Once she had told him about how she'd learned to swim (her older brother Bill had rowed her to the middle of the lake and thrown her in, unbeknownest to Ahab), and one memorable time Mulder had revealed how he and Phoebe Greene had met (a pub, of course) and how many drinks it had taken for her to get him home (a number she couldn't remember although she kept thinking "seven," knowing it was wrong).
It was ironic, she thought, that Mulder was asleep right beside her when she would normally be calling him to set her own mind at rest.
She turned, suddenly and without thinking, realizing only after she did so that Mulder must have felt her: he sighed and mumbled something, then turned with her, curling his legs up behind hers and wrapping one arm around her waist.
"What do you dream about?" she'd asked him once, during one of her late night calls.
His voice had purred in her ear. "Why do you ask?"
"Mulder, I'm serious."
He had been silent for so long that she had actually started to listen to the television show he'd had on in the background, some news segment about dairy farming.
"I dream about a lot of things," he'd said. "You know that."
Sure she knew. She knew that more than once she had bolted through the connecting door between their hotel rooms and found him, sweaty and panting, sitting straight up in bed or still writhing in his sheets, crying or gasping for air.
She knew *that* he dreamed, not *what* he dreamed.
Mulder's finger twitched on her hip, and she heard him make a tiny sound in the back of his throat. "Chasing rabbits," Ahab had told her when she was five and had asked why their dashaund's feet moved when he slept. "He's chasing rabbits, Dana," her father'd said, hugging her close. "All dogs do when they have good dreams."
Lying in the cool darkness, Mulder curled up tight against her back, she hoped that herr partner was having the Mulder equivalent of the rabbit chasing dream.
*****
I am walking into the Hoover Building through the front door, although I never do that, but it�s a dream, so it�s okay. I pass through the metal detector, and collect my keys from Carl, the security guard who holds the plastic tray. I have never actually spoken to him before but I know his name in the way that you know everybody�s name in dreams, and he says hello to me.
�Looking sharp, Agent Mulder,� Carl says, smiling.
�Thanks,� I say, and head toward the elevator.
The elevator is visible from the lobby--the burnished stainless steel confronting the bovine crowd of federal employees with their reflections--so I think I can get there without a problem, but something happens, the light wavers and I get lost, ending up in a hallway lit only by the flickering of a single fluorescent bulb. There are old pieces of office furniture at the end of the hall--a desk cants to one side, missing a leg. Cheap, adjustable metal shelve like the ones I have in my apartment line the wall, covered (as mine are) with files and papers in sloppy stacks. I lean over and try to read the label, but it's blurry, so I give up.
I turn to leave the hallway, and Carl stands behind me.
�Hey--� I say.
�You had to look, didn�t you, Agent Mulder,� he says, no longer friendly security guard, but menacing, smiling.
�No, this is all--�
�You�ll have to suffer for this one,� he says.
�This is a mistake!� I protest, stepping past Carl, heading back to the main lobby.
�You bet it is,� he says. I feel the cool snip of handcuffs on my wrist.
�Hey!� I try to spin, but Carl has my other wrist locked in now and he shoves them into the center of my back, pushing me forward and propelling me toward the far side of the lobby.
�Scully!� I cry, catching sight of her coming through the metal detector. I have never been so happy to see her in my life. Scully hasn�t heard me, though. She walks through the detector and heads straight to the elevators which I can see from here. How did I take a wrong turn?
�Scully!� She does not turn. The elevator door closes, and when I turn my head to look for other help I see her again, and again. A whole series of Scullys wearing a hundred different suits, come streaming in the door.
�Scully!� Some of them turn to look, but their glances are the curious glances of people watching a scene. None of them seems to recognize me. �Where�s my partner?�
I am wriggling in Carl�s grip, trying to twist my hands free. �Where�s my partner? Scully will tell you I�m innocent. Where�s Scully?�
Carl�s laugh booms from near my ear. �Your partner.� The laugh echoes again.
He is shoving me toward a door gaping in the far wall. There is no light behind the door. Just black, just darkness, and this strikes me as odd.
�Just *get* my partner, Carl. She�ll fix everything, I swear!�
�You don�t have any partner, Agent Mulder.�
"What? What about Scully? Where�s Scully?�
We are three yards away from the door now, and the darkness is impenetrable. I am certain that there is something behind that door. I know it.
�Ain�t no Scully, Agent Mulder,� Carl says, and this time his laugh is soft, subtle. �Scully�s gone.�
As he shoves me through the door, I begin to scream.
*****
Dana Scully was jerked out of sleep by the sudden and piercing scream of her partner.
*****
Chewing on a dried-out ham sandwich from the cafeteria, he remembered the first time he'd seen one of Mulder's nightmares happen, in Alexandria, in apartment fifty-two, looking down into the life of a man. That was why he'd been brought to this godforsaken place, because he knew the file, he knew Mulder.
He knew that approximately four out of seven nights spent in his own apartment, Fox Mulder woke up with nightmares. That frequency dimished on the road, averaging out to about two out of seven if you added the days together. He knew that Mulder never slept in the other room, that he didn't even have a bed in the apartment, and that Mulder got up once and only once each night to go to the bathroom no matter how much the mobile surrveillance team said he drank or didn't drink.
He knew that Mulder hadn't had sex between December 1994 and November 1996 because those were the dates when he had been up there, watching Mulder jerk off on practically a daily basis. That had been his time in the Box before getting promoted to unit commander. Before he was so fucking good at his job that his name had been mentioned specifically when they knew Mulder had his nose to the ground, sniffing around the higher-ups, looking for Agent Scully yet again.
Poor bastard probably thought he wasn't supposed to save her.
That first dream hadn't been the worst he'd seen-- there were some nights when the screams made him leap out of his chair--but it was the one he remembered when he was driving to his shoddy apartment in the thin grey dawns. He'd been watching Mulder for almost a week, creating an initial subject profile--typical activities, standard sleep and waking patterns, areas of vulnerability, the usual--when he noticed that his subject was no longer unconscious on his couch but curled up in a ball in the small space between the couch and the coffee table. Turning up the volume revealed that his subject was keening to himself in a small high voice. No words, just sound. After awhile (seven minutes and four seconds) the noise stopped. In another forty-nine seconds, Mulder was back on the couch asleep.
He'd made a note of it in the log, thinking that Mulder had issues his bosses had only hinted at in the briefing, but that morning, creeping naked between his sheets to sleep the day away, he had remembered Mulder's noises and had shuddered. This had been a mild one, comparitively.
Now, watching them on the FLIR screen, he remembered that thin lonely noise. And wondered what Mulder dreamed.
*****
�Mulder! Mulder!� she shouted, fighting to be heard over the screams. She reached out in the total blackness, enocuntering his solid and slightly sweaty torso. She smacked it, her hand open.
�Mulder!�
The screaming stopped, replaced by harsh breathing and muffled sobs.
�Mulder, it's okay. You're okay.�
She felt him lie back down, trembling with adrenaline and fear. She leaned over him, bracing herself with and arm on either side of him, wishing she could see his face.
�Mulder,� she murmured.
�I�m okay, Scully.� He was talking into a pillow. She ran her fingers up his arm to his cheek, smoothed his hair back off his forehead. He was sweating up a storm, afraid. It had happened before, of course, the dreaming and the shouting, but never so close. So loudly.
�What was the dream about?� She kept petting him. In a thousand hotel rooms she had sat on the side of the bed, listening to his breathing slow until he drifted off again. She�d never touched him before, not like this, but somehow not seeing him made it easier. She could concentrate on what it felt like to have him calm under her fingers.
Gentling. That was the word. That was what it was called when you approached a skittish horse and calmed it down by stroking it. Scully, who had been a victim of an intense case of horse love as a young girl, remembered it from countless bad girl-meets- horse novels--how the young girl would approach slowly with her hand palm up and the horse would settle under her ministrations until it would eat sugar from her hand. That�s what she was doing-- gentling Mulder.
�It was nothing,� he said.
�Mm hmm,� she answered. She leaned down over his arm and rested her chin on his shoulder. Mulder smelled of sweat and sleep, the particular warm scent of male skin. She had missed this in the last couple of years. Missed the sex, but even more than that, missed this smell.
This was Mulder.
�You don�t want to talk about it?� she asked. She was using what her mother called the Honey voice, so-called not because it was sweet, but because the word �honey� hung around it like a blanket. �You don�t want to talk, honey?� was the real question, but Scully didn�t use the word �honey� in general, and certainly not with Mulder.
�No, I don�t.�
�Okay.� Scully patted his shoulder and lay back down facing him. For a long time there was silence, that deep and impenetrable silence that seems to come only with absolute darkness.
Mulder�s voice slipped through that silence, hardly making a dent. �Scully,� he said.
�Yes,� she answered, and the honey still hung on her words.
�Can I--� he sighed. �Can, um, can I--�
She reached out and hooked her arm around his neck, drawing him up against her. His arms snaked around her waist and his nose nuzzled into her neck. She felt very small suddenly, aware of their size difference and how easily he encircled her. After awhile, she heard him speak, although his words were muffled by the fabric of her t-shirt.
�What?�
�I don�t suppose we�ll be doing this either,� he said lifting his head so she could hear him.
She chuckled, knowing that he was keeping his hips as far away from her as possible, and struck by his thoughtfulness. Only Mulder would cling so tightly to her and still try to protect her from his erection.
�Don�t push your luck,� she said.
*****End 6/10*****
