Another Country Series by Pellinor

Go to main “Another Country Series” page

Another Country Series by Pellinor

Another Country I – The Apple

Another Country II – Death of Grass

Another Country III – No Abiding City

CLASSIFICATION: SRA (though I don’t think it will be too scary for non-shippers)

RATING: PG (bad words and violence no greater than we get in the show; a little nudity; no sex.)

SUMMARY: Mulder finds the key, while Scully faces an old enemy.

SPOILERS: Up to the end of season 5, though we branch off somewhere before “The End.”

DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Fox owns them, and I make no money from them.

This is somewhat different. There’s quite a bit of mytharc here, and a whole lot of angst and character exploration, but the plot is really… well… almost fantasy, I suppose.

British spelling alert! I know people have complained, but, really, I’m British, and this spelling is me.

Another Country I – The Apple

He was kneeling when she found him, his rain-soaked hair stark against his too-pale skin. His head was lowered, his neck exposed, like a fool awaiting his execution. His right arm hung limply at his side, the fingers swaying with his breathing, blood drip dripping onto his discarded gun.

He didn’t move. Drip, sway… and nothing. She saw no flicker in his eyes; no awareness.

“Mulder?” Soft like the rain. She was all tension – all fast breathing and focus like steel. She held her gun with white knuckles in one hand; the other she held out for balance, alert for noise, ready to move.

She heard his breathing. He had run fast, leaving her, chasing a killer into the night, and now here she was, and he was alone.

She swallowed. “Mulder?”

Nothing. His left palm was open and he held something dark. His eyes seemed to see nothing else.

“Mulder?” Rain trickled down her trigger finger. She imagined the killer’s eyes in the darkness, watching them, ready to strike at her partner’s naked neck. “Is he…?”

“He’s…” His voice was dull. He moistened his lips, but didn’t look at her, didn’t move. “He’s gone.”

“Not dead?” she said sharply.

“Gone.” But it rose at the end, almost wonderingly. It was almost tangible, the life coming back into his body. He looked at her, and saw her. “He’s no danger, Scully. I caught it,” he said, a flicker of delight in his eyes.

She refused to let herself relax. She bent forward and picked up his gun, handing it to him silently. He made no move to take it. “What are you holding?” she asked, her voice unyielding. It would be the first of a thousand questions.

His fingers retracted as if burnt, closing round the dark object in his hand. She heard a sharp inhalation, then a soft relieved sigh, but, “nothing,” was all he said.

<Nothing…>

“Is he…?” She paused, swallowed, then changed tack. Skinner would ask, and she would ask, but she was also a doctor, and a friend. She let a breath out and knelt down, reaching for the dripping fingers. “Are you hurt?”

“Yes.” He looked at her, all eagerness and need, and again she was struck by the wrongness of the thing. <It’s not Mulder. It’s not him.>

Her hand shook. “Where?” Her voice was level, calm.

“Arm.” Again, the wrongness, the eagerness to admit to his injuries. She didn’t miss the way his left hand snaked into his pocket and went to ground there. “He had a knife.”

She drew her hand back, making no move to look at his wound. The blood flow was slight and there was deceit in his eyes. “What are you holding?” she asked again.

“I…” He ran a nervous tongue over his lips, and something flashed across his eyes that could have been fear, could have been hate. “I…” And then he sighed, and was himself again, wet, hurt and weary. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, Scully.”

She looked for the lie in his eyes, but saw nothing. She would remember it, afterwards, when memory was all she had of him.

Scully closed the door behind her, crossing the office on silent feet. Though he was facing her, he didn’t look up, didn’t see her. His head was lowered, and both hands were turned palm upwards on the desk. The dark object rested in one; the other was limp.

She touched him on that hand, sharply, almost a slap. She wasn’t sure what she hoped – to startle him into some unguarded admission, to make him drop his guard?

She got neither.

“Scully.” The movements of his lips, his neck, were sluggish, though his fingers moved fast enough, curling round the object until the knuckles were white.

“Was that his?” Her fingers rested on his, warm against cold.

“Not now.” He swallowed. She saw his throat move, and then, above it, saw how his chin was shadowed with the stubble of a night without sleep. “I don’t think it ever really was,” he said, slowly, as if every word was a revelation to be worked for.

She could see it through his fingers. It was round, flat, smooth – a stone, perhaps, though disk-like. It nestled in his palm as if made for it. In her palm, she knew, it would be too big for her to close her fingers around.

“You got it.” She took a deep breath. His eyes glinted. “It, but not him.” The police, Skinner, all asking the same questions.

“Yes.” He nodded, and there was no sign of shame on his face. “He went away. I grabbed his wrist, and only this was solid, Scully. Only this was solid.”

“You shouldn’t have touched it, Mulder.” She shook her head ruefully, clinging to the security of the ordinary. “Fingerprints.”

“No.” His lips curled in a faint indulgent smile. “Not his. Not here.”

She was still touching his hand, she realised. Now she drew back. She stood, hands pressed firmly on the edge of the table, leaning forward. “Are you saying he was a ghost – a spirit? Is that what you’re going to tell Skinner? A ghost who could hurt you with a knife and give you a…”

She struggled. She sought words for it, but there was only one. Through his bleached transparent fingers, she saw nothing but a blackness that was the apotheosis of blackness. Mulder was drained by it; sucked dry. One glance, and the colour filled her mind, though it was a blackness that went far beyond colour. She knew suddenly that it could exist in any shape, any form, but the colour was its essence.

And then she blinked, and it was only a stone, and she was breathing fast, her mind bruised.

It was only a stone, and Mulder was… She smiled to herself. <Mulder is Mulder.>

“Not a ghost, Scully.” He smiled, and she knew that only a second had passed though she felt as if she had tumbled through vast universes. “A spirit? Maybe. Only this was solid, Scully.” And then he turned his hand over, hiding it, and seemed to consciously collect himself. He sighed. “Tell Skinner he knocked me down, attacked me. Tell him it was dark. Tell him he ran away. Tell him…” He shrugged. “Tell the police to keep looking.”

“But you don’t believe any of that?” Her voice was steel.

“It’s what they want to hear. If I tell the truth, who believes me?” He breathed out slowly. His voice was unreadable. Self-pity, weariness, hurt, or wry amusement? Even after five years, she couldn’t always tell.

She reached for his hand again, her fingertips brushing the inside of his wrist. “You can tell me.” She wanted to touch his face, to raise his chin and make him see the sincerity in her eyes. He didn’t look up. “I won’t… I might not always be able to believe, but I always believe in you, Mulder. Can’t that be enough?”

Silence. She hesitated, then did it, reaching for his face with a hand that, strangely, shook. He was unresisting, letting her guide his face upwards, like a saint, kneeling, passionately waiting.

“Mulder?”

He held her gaze – one, two – then blinked. He didn’t fight her touch, but his eyes were no longer seeing her. “I told you the truth,” he murmured.

“No.” Sharp. “No, Mulder.” Softness turned to steel. She felt as if she had given something of herself to him and been rebuffed. “There’s something…” Her hand lashed out, closing round the hand that held the stone. “What is this, Mulder? Why?”

“Nothing.” She thought it was fear in his eyes. “Leave it. Please Scully. Soon. I’m not ready. I’m… Soon…”

“Partners, Mulder.” She snapped at his wrist, sudden, surprising both of them. Her anger had come from nothing – nothing, except five years of half-truths and lies to ‘protect’ her.

“No.” It was not Mulder in that voice – not him at all. “No!” His fingers tightened on the stone until his whole arm shook and she knew that she would never break their grip. “You could have broken it, Scully.”

He raised his other hand and for a second, seeing his hate-filled eyes, she thought he was about to hit her. A second later, and she hated herself for even thinking it.

They were both breathing fast.

“Mulder?”

The fire in his eyes went out. They shone, and she wondered if there were tears there. Her own eyes pricked, and there was an ache in her throat.

“Broken,” she echoed, wondering if she had, after all.

“I…” He ran a hand over his face. “I’m looking. I’m… It’s… Nearly there, Scully. Soon.”

“Let it go, Mulder,” she said, wearily. She meant more than just the stone, though she had no way of knowing, then, what she was asking.

He shut his eyes. His hand twitched.

“Let it go.”

Slowly, his eyes opened. He looked at her, and his eyes were those of a man accepting a terrible burden, facing his destiny. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

And he made his choice, and she didn’t understand it, then.

He chose his path, and all things started from here.

Something called to her that night, pulling her from deepest sleep.

<Dana…> But there were no words in that call, not really. It pulled at her mind, on a level so elemental that it needed no words, no names. <Dana. Come…>

She sat, her fingers touching the back of her neck, and stared into the night.

“It’s started.” Her lips moved, just once, and then were still.

Still…

She stayed that way for a very long time, as silent tears fell down her face, and, in the darkness, there was no-one there to see them.

“Mulder.” She knew the fear showed in her voice. Five years of hiding, and she was tired of it, so tired of it. “It’s happening again. It’s started.”

Only the slow rise and fall of his chest showed her that he was alive. His skin was waxen, pale. He shimmered, and for a moment her tired, tear-ravaged eyes saw the posters and files of his office like a faint ghostly overlay on his face.

Her eyes… She saw through him.

She blinked. “Mulder.” The old invisible cord pulled her fingers to the back of her neck, probing, wondering. “The implant. It’s like before. It’s calling me.” There was a crack in her voice as she said more than she had intended. “What if I can’t fight it?”

He moved his head like a swimmer fighting through deep water. “It’s close, Scully.”

“That’s what I fear, too,” she said, simply. Even as she said it, she knew that they were talking about two completely different things.

<The date is set.> She remembered his eyes, dark and intense. They had talked, two years before, late into the night over his mother’s hospital bed. He had taken her hand in his, like one swearing an oath. <When the time comes, I’ll give up everything just to fight it. I’ll die, stopping it.> At the end, his voice had been emotionless, stating it like fact, or prophecy. Even then, she had shivered, chilled.

“It’s close.” There was the same intensity in his eyes, now. “I’m nearly there, Scully. Nearly.”

Beneath her fingers the implant was dead. Last night, her fingers had tingled with the vibrancy of it, though she was sure it had moved in no physical sense.

“It’s a key, Scully. It’s the key to everything.” He raised his hand, though his fingers hid the object’s blackness. He had looked like this one April morning, drugged with water and raving of the Holy Grail. “It’s the key to… maybe to all possible worlds, Scully.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “All possible worlds?”

“I can feel them. It’s only fragments. I haven’t learnt to hear its language, yet. It’s all falling into place…” He shook his head, smiled. “I’m not making sense. I can’t explain it, Scully. We haven’t got the words for it.”

The cord pulled. Her fingers twitched. <Dana. It’s time. Come…> Only memory, though.

“He used it to jump.” He shrugged. “Worlds? Dimensions? He was never quite wholly here. He belonged… somewhere else. Just as he flipped back, I grabbed the… the key.”

She shook her head ruefully. <Why couldn’t you tell me this yesterday, Mulder, when I could have been interested? Too late, Mulder…> “Too late,” she murmured aloud.

“As soon as I touched it…” He was a fanatic describing a transcendent experience… or a madman, raving, transformed by joy. “It was like a million voices all talking at once. I felt its importance; I couldn’t tell how. It’s all… It’s all falling into one note, one voice.”

One voice… <Dana…>

“There’s Samantha’s voice there – and yours. It’s like…” He laughed, happier than she had ever heard him. “I want you to understand this, Scully. It’s like those pages of coloured dots. When you look at them, suddenly you see that they’re not dots after all, but a face, or a cat, or a…” He smiled. “Or an alien.”

“They were only ever dots to me.” Soft. “I never saw the alien.”

He was fire, ignoring her, though he used her name. “I’ll master it, Scully. I’ll go…” He laughed, and there was real amazement in the sound. “I never thought of other worlds like this. I thought that other worlds were far off in space. They were my dream, my nightmare. I based my life on a false…” His fingers tightened round the blackness. “I never dreamt of other worlds here, Scully.” Each word was emphatic, distinct. “And now I’m holding them all in one hand…”

She pushed her chair back, harsh against the floor. “Is this it, Mulder?” She gestured at the files, at his poster. “You can forget all this? Damn it, Mulder.” She slammed her fist on the desk, but could say no more, not aloud.

“It calls to me.” She caught glimpses of the bottomless black pool through his fingers. His voice was like a child’s, grudgingly confiding. “When I touch it – really touch it – it’s like… like fingers reaching for my chest. I feel… I feel as if I’m dying, Scully.”

Once, she would have laughed at that, or worried about his sanity. That was long ago. Now, she knew that innocent small objects could call, could speak

The cord pulled. Beneath the skin of her neck, it was dormant, but waiting.

“Don’t let it,” she said, sharply. “Don’t let it control you.”

“No.” It was a growl in his throat. “No…”

“Throw it away.” There were tears in his eyes, and anger at his choice. “Nothing matters to you right now but it calling.” It was not a question. She saw the truth in his eyes. “Can that be a good thing, Mulder?” She swallowed hard, and spoke the truth, though it was always hard. “If something’s starting… I need you, Mulder. I need you to… to be yourself. We both need that.”

He blinked. “I am…”

“The implant… Somehow it’s calling me.” It cost her to tell him. “I hate that, Mulder – hate that. I’d give anything… ” She swallowed hard. “How can you accept this voluntarily?” She felt it like a personal hurt. For a moment, she hated him.

He blinked again, eyelids flickering innocently. “How can I not?”

His innocence, his ignorance, made tears prick her eyes. From the start, he had let himself be manipulated, throwing himself on the mercy of Deep Throat, of X – men who used him for their own ends. He seemed to need it, almost to thrive on it.

The hand with the stone was pressed against his chest. The other he spread, fingers wide, in a gesture of innocence. “It’s immensely powerful – I know that. I know it’s dangerous. I know it could control me, or kill me, perhaps. I know that. It’s a price worth paying, Scully. For the truth…” He shook his head slowly. “That’s worth anything, Scully. Anything…”

Her eyelids flickered shut, once, twice, and tears pushed from them, wanting to flow down her cheeks. “Not to me, Mulder,” she said, scarcely above a whisper.

She touched her neck and came to a realisation. Her abduction, her cancer, her daughter… All had been beyond her control, inflicted on her. She would control her own life in the future, whatever the cost.

“Not to me,” she said, again, and her eyes blurred. She saw her future, then.

Again, and again, and again. There was a horrible familiarity about their lives, now. She would enter the office, close the door, and talk. Bent over the object that he called “the key”, he would sometimes hear her words, sometimes hear nothing.

Still, she spoke.

“I’ve decided, Mulder.” She had seen herself in the mirror that morning, pale and taut, her eyes rimmed red with the tears she could never shed during the day when others would see.

A muscle in his jaw moved. His shirt was a different colour from the previous night, and, at some point, a coffee cup had been filled, and emptied. Perhaps he was travelling home late at night and coming to the office early in the morning, but in his mind, she knew, he was no longer really in either.

“They could take me at any time.” She dug her nails into her palms and resisted the urge to touch her neck. “When I go home at night, and I know that we… that’s it’s like this between us… What if this were the last day they let us be together? What if this were my last day ever?”

His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. His eyes were hooded.

“The implant’s calling me. It wants me to follow, to docilely go to a place and await my abduction. I’m fighting it, but it’s hard, Mulder. It’s hard to fight myself.” She bit her lips, held it, and managed to keep control. “If I don’t go, they’ll use it to track me, and come for me wherever I hide.”

His fingers tightened.

“That incident at the dam…” She swallowed hard. “I kept some names of the people who survived that. They’ve all gone. I’m the only one… They’ll be coming for me soon, Mulder.”

If he had looked at her then, she would have cried.

“With the cancer, I knew how long I had. It gave me time. It…” She raised her chin. “I learnt how to live with it. I learnt how to stop it controlling me, how to conquer it, if not in body but in… in myself, Mulder.”

She was talking to a mirror, arguing to herself. Perhaps he heard; perhaps he didn’t. She wasn’t sure which she wanted. There were tears in her voice, and if he heard them…

“I don’t know that the cancer will return if I remove the implant, but I have to work on the assumption that it will,” she said, trying to speak of it with the detachment of a scientist.

She saw the shadows in the folds of his shirt.

“It’s my own choice, Mulder. I’m doing it with my eyes open. If it returns, it’s something I’ve chosen, something I control. I want you to understand that.” She clenched her fists as sudden anger welled up. “Damn it, Mulder, I refuse to be controlled any more by a bit of metal in my neck. It’s taking something away from me. It’s…” She breathed out slowly, and the anger washed away, replaced by nothing but a deep sadness. “I’d rather die as myself, Mulder, than live, never knowing if my thoughts are my own, and never knowing when they’ll come and it will all finish.”

Her hand shook as she reached for his. It shook still as she held it, poised above it, suddenly afraid to actually touch him.

“If they’re taking us all now, I think… I think it means that something big is starting. Maybe this is it, Mulder.”

Above his head, she saw his poster, and hated it. Right at the start, his ‘truth’ was supposed to bring happiness. It was never supposed to be terrible.

“You might be on your own for that, Mulder, and I’m sorry, but at least you would have time to prepare. If I was taken…” Her eyes clouded. “I don’t want to give you another Samantha, Mulder. If it returned… I think I could accept my death this time, Mulder, and I hope – I believe – that you could learn to as well.”

He blinked, but his eyes were as dead afterwards as before.

“It would be the going suddenly, the leaving things unfinished…” She closed her fingers round his wrist. The skin was cold, but… <solid> she thought, wonderingly. <What did I fear?>

There was the slightest of hitches in his breathing. His eyes seemed to swim with moisture, though nothing was shed.

She swallowed. “Leaving things unfinished, Mulder.” Soft cold skin beneath her fingers. <Leaving things like this.>

Nothing.

She raised her head, stepped back. She knew the anger would come, but for now there was nothing but a deep, aching weariness, and grief at the pity of it.

“I might be choosing to die, Mulder,” she murmured. “The truth you’ve searched for your whole life is… maybe it’s here, Mulder, now.” She touched her neck. “I feel from it that the date has come. The time has come, Mulder, and you don’t care.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re not even hearing me…”

The control was close to breaking. She would… God, if she stayed she would… what? Break down? Scream?

She backed towards the door. She would tell him again tomorrow, her face a mask, and she would make him listen, and then she would hate him.

In the hallway, she slammed a fist into the wall, hard, just once, and then she walked away.

In the stairwell, one foot on the second step, the other half off the first, the world exploded.

It was on the television screens, and the newspapers. She saw it when she closed her eyes, as if the blast had burnt it into her retinas, and it surrounded her when she opened them.

The reporter’s lips moved. She had muted the sound, but she knew the words by now, heard them a hundred times on different channels. “A spokesperson for the rescue team says that there is no chance of finding anyone else alive, but it will take weeks to sift through the rubble. More bodies remain.”

Her arms were stiff by her side, her nails digging deep semi-circles into her palms. She held her lower lip between her teeth, and her eyes were dry.

“The bomb is thought to have been planted in a basement office. An FBI agent who was in the office at the time is among the missing.”

<Dead> she corrected, in her mind. <Dead…>

“As you can see, several floors collapsed downwards in the blast, and serious damage was sustained by almost half the building. The science labs and the FBI’s main filing system were destroyed, though FBI officials have stressed that the Bureau will continue in its present form.”

A sheet-covered gurney, encrusted with dust. She felt the same dust in her lungs, her hair, her very being.

“Twelve bodies have been recovered, and three people remain unaccounted for. Forty-three others suffered injuries ranging from minor to critical. If the blast had been later in the day, the death toll would have been far greater, but most employees had not yet arrived at work.”

The bandage on her forehead was coarse against her skin. For two days, when she had touched it, her fingers had come away red. Her breathing was shallow, catching painfully on every breath. She had been trapped in the dusty dark hell of the stairwell for hours, imagining Mulder’s agonised screams, hearing the distant sound of the rescuers and not caring, not caring.

Every night, for the rest of her life, she would be trapped there still.

“The dead have been named as…”

“Dana.”

A soft touch on her cheek. She flinched.

“Dana. Should you be watching this?”

Mulder’s face flashed on the screen, black and white and grainy. He lingered for a second, then disappeared, replaced by another. “It’s such a bad photograph, Mom. Who gave them that photograph?”

“Dana.” Her mother sat down beside her on the couch. Her eyes were red, though her daughter’s were dry. “I…”

“You don’t know, Mom.” Her voice was dull. Her hands were shaking with the tension of her muscles. “I hate him.”

The older woman said nothing. Her soft fingers stroked her daughter’s arm.

On the screen, a bereaved wife wept in unadulterated grief.

“We were… He was…” She took a deep breath. “He hasn’t even let me mourn for him. Before he died, he was so…” Tears in her throat stopped her. “I hate him, Mom. I miss him. I…”

Warm fingers, and, somewhere, the smell of coffee.

“Grief is… It’s terrible, Mom, but it’s uncomplicated. It’s what we’re supposed to feel.” She dug her nails into the cushion. “I can’t… I hate him for making it so bad between us, and then dying. I… I hate myself for hating him. I…” She felt her face begin to crumble, and fought it. “How can I begin to grieve for him when… Mom, I need… I need…”

“Dana.” There was an apology in her mother’s eyes. “I want to help you. I… I need to know. Were you lovers?”

She snatched back her instinctive denial. “Yes,” she said, slowly, consideringly. “Not in the way you think.”

“I know.” Her mother smiled sadly. “I understand. You… You’ll never forget him, Dana.” Her eyes flickered to the picture on the mantelpiece – her husband, proud in his uniform. “You’ll get through it.”

Suddenly, strangely, she was laughing. “Don’t you see, Mom? Don’t you see?” Laughter released the tears that nothing else could. Water dripped onto her shirt and spread in dark stains. “There’s no time. It’s started…”

She had been let in for a few minutes to stand, mute, at Skinner’s hospital bed, her fist pressed against her mouth. He had not yet awoken – not yet heard that he would never walk again.

There had been no late-night visit from Frohike, or message of any kind from the Gunmen. When she dialled their number, there was only silence.

On the television, an unidentified old man, shot by a single gunshot to the back of the head, seemed hauntingly familiar to her, speaking words of comfort at a time in her life that was shrouded in nightmare and forgotten bright white light.

And Mulder…

She bit her lip, and the back of her neck burnt.

She held the vial between thumb and forefinger. Light reflected on glass, and she could see nothing inside it. Even when she tilted it and heard the soft skittering of a speck of metal moving, she could not see it.

Mulder had spent his life looking to the stars, as if he expected the cold vastness of the universe to shout out some overwhelming answer. She, though, knew now that true terror could lie in the tiniest of things.

Her implant – her saviour; her destroyer.

He had wanted to change the world. She had only wanted to live.

“Agent Scully?”

She blinked. The doctor’s words seemed hardly real to her. Voices sounded in her mind. There was Mulder’s voice, saying that no price was too great. He was the past. There was her mother’s voice, raised in tearful anger, the previous night, tonight, and, perhaps, for ever. There was her own voice, speaking terrible words, saying that she hated him.

“Is it because of him – because of Fox?” Her mother, pleading, trying so desperately to understand. “I know it hurts, but this isn’t the answer.”

She remembered…

“It’s not a suicide attempt, Mom,” she had said, wearily. Her eyes had been dry, and, this time, she had not had to fight to keep them so. She had been beyond tears, cold and resolved. “Don’t you know me at all?”

“Then what is it, Dana?” The once-soft fingers had closed round her wrist, hurting. “Tell me, Dana. Help me to understand why you are choosing to die.”

“It’s…” She’d inhaled deeply, then exhaled, once, twice. Inside, she’d been a screaming void, but, through it all, one thing had been clear. This was right for her. “Maybe it is about Mulder, in a way,” she’d said, quietly. “He left with so much… unfinished. There was so much wrong between us.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t want to do that to you, Mom. I want to know when. I want time.”

Her mother’s face had set in stone, her eyes hard. “The daughter I know would have fought them,” she’s said, coldly. “You think they’ll take you again, and so, to avoid that, you kill yourself? I have never known you to be defeatist before, Dana. Your father would have been ashamed of you.”

<Oh, Mom…> Now, remembering, the room blurred as she fought tears. Then, she had been drained dry of feeling. <Ahab… You think that?>

Then, her eyes had reflected her mother’s steel. “They can’t be fought, Mom. Mulder and I…” And she had wavered. It had been hard to hold, so hard, but she had always valued control above all things. “We fought and fought, and each time… each time we suffered more, we lost more, Mom. We suffered for every scrap of… of useless information, and they laughed at us – they laughed at us. I no longer doubt that they’re going to win.” She had stood tall, stating it like a creed. “Only a fool fights the inevitable. All I want is the die free of them – to choose the way I die. I need that control, Mom. Can’t you see?”

God! She had practised telling Mulder. She had never once practised telling her mother. It had drained her in ways she had never known possible.

Her mother’s eyes had shone with heavy reproachful tears. The touch of her fingers had softened, stroking. “Fox fought the inevitable, Dana. He would never give up. Does that make him a fool too?”

“Did.” A raw painful shout. “Did, Mom. He’s dead.”

But there had been not even a shadow of comprehension or forgiveness in her mother’s eyes.

“Agent Scully?”

The doctor. She started, and wondered who she was weeping for – herself, her mother, or Mulder? Only her mother deserved her tears.

She blinked, and handed him the vial. “Destroy it,” she said, firmly.

There would be no looking back.

On grainy black and white, every shadow might be blood.

Behind her, the crime scene tape whispered in the breeze. Rain fell. The rubble had thickened into mud and clung to everything. There was dust in her lungs and dust on her feet.

Strangely, impossibly, the air was cloying with the scent of flowers.

It was her first time back, five days after the explosion – five days after so much ended. Before, always, she had looked upon her work as something she could put her back up against, as a means to recovery. This time, there was no work to go to. She was lost, at home, with coldness between her and her mother, and not even able to grieve for him.

She was standing, watching, waiting for… what? To find him? To honour him? To lay his memory to rest and then move on?

What?

“We’ve got it.” The voice was crackly through the radio. There was no triumph in it. The team had found the remains of the bomb, but knew that they were working in a tomb.

She held the video screen in a deathly stare, not daring even to blink, as if part of her still madly hoped that a second would make the difference between life and death – that only her eyes, watching a grainy screen, could see the impossible pleading flicker of his hand beneath the rubble.

The world narrowed. It was her and the screen, her and the screen, her and the screen…

She swallowed hard, blindly flailing an arm out, desperate for the support of something solid. She felt the very air was closing in, passionately waiting for… what? “Have… have you found him?” she stammered, and the reality of her voice was an anchor, of sorts.

“Not yet.” The voice was so weary. Five days they had worked, and only now had they worked down to Mulder’s level. No longer sustained by the hope that the would find anyone alive, the whole teams’ movements were sluggish, their eyes shell-shocked.

The camera panned slowly, jerking with the man’s breathing. The floor was all rubble, but in it she saw a shattered mug, a charred file, and, amazingly, like some cruel joke, his “I want to believe” poster, dreadfully intact.

She looked away. When she turned back, it had gone, and her breath caught in what was almost a sob. <No! Go back to it. Please… Show me again. I want to…>

She pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

She dreaded them finding his body; she needed them to find his body. She would raise a shaking hand and touch his dead skin, ugly in his agonised dying. Then, slowly, she would run it down his body, holding it just above his torn clothes, seeing the broken limbs, the gashes, the repulsiveness of it.

She would see how he’d suffered, and maybe then she could weep for him, maybe then she could forgive him. She was caught between grief and hatred, stuck in a hellish limbo. His dead flesh, to her, would be her key, her escape, her catharsis.

She would make herself weep for him.

“There. What the…?”

She stiffened. The cut on her head throbbed faster, pulsing with her tension. “What?” <Mulder?> It was a black hand closing on her stomach, squeezing away her life.

The camera was still. There was distant breathing, shallow and sharp.

She blinked; watched. Lips moved silently. <Mulder, Mulder, Mulder…>

A gloved hand reached out, passing through the camera’s vision, then down and away. The fingers flexed and she saw them for an instant like the claws of a grasping bird, reaching for carrion, for rotting flesh.

<No…>

Reality shifted almost imperceptibly. She smelled flowers again, and heard the rain, and on the screen she saw his blood in the shadows of the wreckage, and his pleading fingers in anything grey.

“It’s a… a stone of some sort.” The man’s voice was different, too. It was higher, wondering. She knew suddenly that he was smiling. “I’ll…”

“No!” she cried, sharp and desperate. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, desperate to run down there, to tear at the rubble with her bare hands until her fingertips were dark with blood. “No! He was holding that when he… When it…” She swallowed. “He was holding it. He’ll be here. He’ll be near. He’ll be…”

And then the wreckage shifted, and the screen blanked to one grey.

She knew him by his distance, his detachment. Paramedics shouted orders and engines roared, but, amidst it all, one man was still. Sitting in the back of an ambulance, his clothes bloodied, his whole body seemed to be arched round the object in his hand.

Her focus narrowed. She was before him in an instant, wearing the face that had intimidated hardened criminals.

“Give it to me.”

He moved sluggishly. His lips moved, framed a “what?”, but no sound came out.

“The thing you found in my office.”

His fingers closed around it. His eyes sparked.

“Give it to me.”

She reached for the gun at her side – not drawing it, but letting him see her intent. All around, the team was tending to its own. The wreckage had shifted. All had been hurt; none had been killed. No-one remembered her.

“Give it to me.” She grabbed the front of his jacket, crushing it in her fist. She felt capable of anything, and fully alive. “Give it to me.”

Slowly, slowly, his fingers uncurled…

There was a transparency to her mother’s skin.

“Did they find his… ” Fingers clenching round a towel. “Did they find… him?”

She shook her head.

It was a strange thing. It was smooth to the touch, like a polished facet of a diamond, yet it didn’t shine. It was the dull rich blackness of carbon, yet it was to carbon like the sun is to a candle flame. As she had first reached for it, she had wanted to destroy it, hating it. As her fingers had closed round it, she had smiled.

“Why are you smiling, Dana?” Sharp, even angry.

She hadn’t remembered that the smile was still on her face. She hadn’t remembered getting home.

“I’m…” The smile turned into a laugh. “I’m free, Mom.”

Her mother stepped back, though her hand reached forward. Her eyes were wary, scared. “Your implant?”

Tears poured down her cheeks, though still she laughed. “Mulder. I found him.”

“But they didn’t find his body?” The fingers were convulsive on the towel – white knuckles against pale blue.

She held the stone tighter. The laughter faded, though the terrible cleansing grief remained. “No, Mom, but I found him.” <Here> she added, silently, cherishing it. “I don’t hate him any more, Mom. I don’t hate him.”

The older woman was silent.

It had called to her even before her fingers had enclosed it. There were no words in the call, or images. It called to her soul, offering an infinity of answers, and all mysteries, and all joy. It was like holding the mind of God in the palm of her hand.

She shook her head fondly. “He always hoped so much. He would sacrifice himself for his truth without a second thought. I knew this, Mom – I always knew this. This…” She gestured. “It’s so strong. He could no more have resisted this than he could have…” She swallowed hard. As her hatred faded, grief swelled, like a fist closing round her throat. “I can’t hate him for being himself, Mom.”

“This?” Her mother’s eyes glinted. “What?” She stepped forward. “This thing in your hand?”

She snapped her hands shut. “Nothing.”

Her mother was relentless, cold. “You think it has… powers… like your implant? It’s strong. It can’t be resisted…” Eyes like ice. “You willingly expose yourself to cancer to avoid being controlled by… by one object. Now you’re willingly letting yourself be controlled by another. How does that make me feel, Dana?” The ice was weeping. “I don’t want to lose you. I… I was prepared to accept that it was something that you needed to do… your integrity. I accepted that you want control…”

“I do.” She let herself blaze. “It’s not the same. This is…” <Hope. All good. The key. Mulder…> Her hand was shaking. “I’m not going to let this control me. I…” The anger washed out of her. She was weary, hurt, and so deep in grief. “I… I can understand how he was, before… before he died, now. It can heal. I just want to understand, Mom. Can’t you see that? I want to remember him well.”

Her mother’s face was closed to her, but the stone embraced her, and the stone offered understanding.

And her mother’s face was closed.

She saw flashes of worlds with skies of a thousand blues.

She felt voices and couldn’t understand them, but knew that they were calling her. She felt them. In her mind, she heard them as Melissa, as Emily… as Mulder.

She knew that she held the key.

“Dana?” Her mother’s lips moved. She seemed a million miles away, and not real. She was like a ghost, overlaid on the room.

She had never known that blackness could contain such light.

“Dana? Speak to me, please. It’s… It’s been three days…”

Just a string of syllables. It was not the language that she yearned to know.

“Dana? There have been deaths…”

She heard it this time, pondered for a second, then let it pass as unimportant. People died. People changed and moved on, but she was holding the universe in her hands.

Lips moving. “I know you lost him, Dana, but is he the only one? Is no-one else worth fighting for?”

Inside, she gave a tiny fond smile. She no longer hated him. She no longer hated him. She no longer hated him. She had thrown herself into the blackness, and it had given her those last days back. She had fought her last battle, and won it. There would be no more.

“There have been deaths…”

She blinked, once, twice, and spoke. Her voice was rusty with lack of use. “Yes. Mulder’s.”

Her mother’s tears seemed a world apart, and nothing to do with her at all.

She stepped forward into light.

The sky was bluer, the grass was richer, the shadows deeper. She heard no birds, but only the merest whisper of wind. She turned her cheek towards the sun, but it didn’t warm her.

Clasped in her cupped hands like holy water, the stone lay. It was dead to her now. It was black, and a stone, and nothing more. She wondered if it had ever been anything more, outside her mind, and Mulder’s.

She remembered holding it, and it seeming to call to her. Holding it for the first time was as close to her as yesterday, yet an eternity away.

She remembered her mother’s lips moving, as if viewed through thick glass, but not the words.

She remembered Mulder. She remembered nights of hating him, then a single night of mourning him, eyes red-rimmed in the darkness, and then no more nights.

She had no memory of stepping out into the light, or of coming into a place where the grass was green.

<Where?>

She transferred the stone into just one hand, clasped tightly by her side, and looked around. There were wisps of cloud in the sky, and an undulating breeze on the blades of grass. A dark bird flew languidly, but only one. On her right, a pool was specked with needle-sharp flashes of reflected light. On her left was the curve of a hill, and distant smoke from a valley.

She reached for her gun, and found nothing.

She saw twisted branched of bare trees, and wind battered stumps. Fear began to replace wonder. She was unarmed and her feet were bare, and, while the light was brighter, the shadows were deeper. She had seen grass, a bird, and some smoke, but no other sign of life.

But then she saw a flash of white, and the world was changed utterly in an instant.

“Mulder?”

Her lips moved. No sound.

She cleared her throat. “Mulder?”

He was kneeling by the pool, hunched forward, his fingers trailing in the water. His naked back was towards her, his skin marred with sun burn and dark bruises. Caught between breaths, she stood, running her eyes down the curve of his spine.

“Mulder?” The air seemed to swallow her. It was scarcely above a whisper, though she cried it with all her soul.

She drew near him on silent feet and pressed her hand against her mouth, stifling further speech. She was not ready to see the recognition in his eyes. She would drink in the sight of him first.

Only afterwards, when she was back in the dark tragedy that was her reality, would she wonder at her acceptance. At the time, seeing him, she never doubted his reality, never asked how. She would come to call it an enchantment, of a sort. Surprised by joy, she was less than herself, then.

<Mulder.>

She could see him in profile. As she watched, he pulled his hand out of the water and held it up, letting the water drip from his fingers. It was falling diamonds, beautiful. His mouth curled into a smile, and she heard his laugh, more joyous than she had ever heard him.

His laugh was like poison to her joy.

She dug her fingers into her palm.

He plunged forward, sinking both hands into the water, then throwing his arms wide above his head. For a moment, he had a halo of shining rain, and his laughter was pure as falling water.

She cleared her throat, half hoping that he would hear her and turn round, eyes alight with joyful recognition, yet half hoping that he wouldn’t hear her and would save her from that. If he saw her now, he would see eyes that shone with tears and hear a voice that shook and was hoarse. Part of her wanted him to see her like that, and to know; part of her wanted to be to him as she had always been.

“Mulder?”

He shook jewels from his fingers.

It was time.

She blinked back her unshed tears, raised her chin, and walked towards him.

“Mulder.”

He froze. His fingers, still outstretched to the water, quivered, and the muscles across his back screamed tension.

She smiled, saying words that were so inadequate for all she wanted to say. “Are you okay, Mulder?”

Afterwards, she would almost weep with the shame of it. She had been so untrue to herself, then. Blinded by the sight of a friend she’d so longed for, she’d never thought to question why he was there, or how.

He had died. He was dead.

“Mulder?” she tried again, a note of desperation in her rising voice. She reached a hand to him, like someone cajoling a timid animal.

His face was a mask of terror. There was no recognition in his eyes – none at all. He bared his teeth in a grimace, and made a low noise in his throat. His naked body was twitching, warring between fear and hostility.

Her hand shook. “Mulder? I’m Dana Scully. Do you remember me?”

His head lashed away, then crept round again, slowly. His emotions were naked, but his eyes glinted too. He feared and hated her, but was curious about her, too. She saw her Mulder in those eyes, fascinated even by the thing he most feared.

She swallowed. “Why are you afraid of me, Mulder?” she asked, softly.

He let his breath out and slumped, defeated, arms slack. He was kneeling; she was standing. He looked up at her like a man looking at his executioner, and she… Oh, how it killed her to see his eyes. It would be something hard to forgive.

“Mulder?” There was dried blood on his scalp, and she brightened at that. “Do you remember anything?” Nothing. “Do you know that you’re Mulder?” Nothing. Not a flicker, though his breathing was rapid and shallow and shivery. “You must know that you can trust me, Mulder. I’ll help you find what you’ve… what they took away from you.”

Yet she was waking up, too. Before, she had been all emotion – all grief, and joy, focusing only on the mere fact of his existence. Now, he was a problem to solve, and she began to become Scully again, and, for the first time, was asking.

She saw their cold faces as they’d dug him out of the wreckage, and their cruel unsmiling masks as they’d dumped him, bruised and naked, far away from their plans… Where?

She saw silent steel assassins, pushing through the hallways of the Bureau, taking him, stealing time and memory from all who saw them, and covering their tracks with a bomb.

She saw an informant, his fingers pressed to his lips, bringing her to this place to save him. She saw an enemy, pulling her from the daze of the last few days, dumping her here with him.

She saw… She saw no answers.

“Mulder.” She crouched down, eyes level with his. She spread her hand wide, showing that she had no weapons. “Even if you don’t remember me, this is important. Have you seen anyone? Any men in suits, watching you? Anyone who comes and…” She swallowed hard, and scanned his naked flesh for needle marks and the marks of restraints. “Does things to you.”

His mouth hung slack, stupefied, but she saw deceit in his eyes.

She was drowned by pain on his behalf, and sharp anger at him. He had ignored her for days before, too. “Answer me, Mulder. Please.”

She was crouched, off balance, and reaching for him, when he ran.

She saw him stumble and go down.

He was grainy, distant. Maybe the cloud was lowering, or the air was thickening with an evening mist… ; she couldn’t care. All her focus was on him, and he was fading, he was fading.

“Mulder.” Sharp.

He glanced over his shoulder, his face a perfect mask of panic. He whimpered. Hair slammed on his forehead. He clawed at the stony ground, pulling himself to his feet, and she saw blood like a thick lush ribbon on his leg.

“Mulder.”

She felt no stones beneath her feet. Adrenaline carried her. Perhaps when she stopped she would feel the agony of rocks slashing at bare skin, and sharp points hiding in grass.

“Mulder. Stop!” His running was like a slap to her, and the hurt tinged her voice. It echoed in her ears, sharp, angry, threatening.

Was she that to him? Hand pressed to her mouth as she ran. <Oh God, am I that to him…?>

He ran, head whipping round, seeing her gaining on him. His chest was heaving as if the air was too thin for him, or his body too weak for his headlong flight. She heard the rasping terror of his breathing.

“Mulder.” But she was pleading, desperate. There was no way she could sound soft.

A cry came from him – animal, a half-shriek. He was a fox on an open hillside, with no cover, and no hope. His body was shiny with the slick wetness of fear.

“Mulder…”

Again and again. She had called his name so often, so often. She would be calling for him again, for ever, seeing his flight from her, his hatred of her, in her nightmares – calling, calling, and he would never turn, never talk to her, never live for her.

Never.

She choked on a sob. She was way past the point of concealment, of control, of dignity.

“Mulder…”

And he fell, and went down, and this time he was still.

It was the calm. Storm clouds churned behind her, and ahead of her, but, for now, she was in the calm.

The world was waiting half way through a breath, waiting for her to act. She felt, suddenly, that a single word could spark a flame, could start a war. A single word could change everything.

But what else could she say? “Mulder…”

He couldn’t curl tighter. His muscles quivered. His arms were wrapped round his knees, and his poor feet were a bleeding mass of shredded flesh.

<Oh, Mulder…>

Slowly, slowly, she reached out to touch his shoulder…

And then she was reeling, and someone was screaming, screaming…

“No… I won’t be…”

His voice was rusty, as if he hadn’t spoken for weeks. It was clumsy, badly articulated. His terror was inward-looking now; his hatred still directed at her.

“I won’t.” His eyes were tracking something she couldn’t see, looking deep into his mind, seeing something that terrified him. “I won’t. Don’t make me.”

She curled her fingers into a protective fist, nestled the fist against her chest, held there by the other hand. She refused to think about what it had felt like to touch him.

She was tired, suddenly – so weary of this. Would this ever end? “What, Mulder?”

“Go away,” he hissed. She wondered if he was even seeing her. “Leave me alone. Go away.”

“No, Mulder,” she said, softly, suppressing her own hurt. “I’m here. I’ll help you through this.”

“No.” He pushed himself up on his hands, crouching, poised to take off on his broken shredded feet, his swelling ankle. “No. It’s not me. I’m not… I see him in your mind. I’m not him. I’m not what you want me to be. I’m not him. I’m not him…” It rose in a high stream of denial, words merging into words like water.

She sighed, blinked. “You can’t remember me.” It wasn’t a question. Her hand still tingled from the very wrongness of him.

There was not a trace of fear in his answer, though she saw it, still, swimming across his eyes like black oil. On the surface, he was deadly resolve, his face set as would kill for it. “I don’t want to remember you. I don’t want to be him.”

She was silent. She half reached out to him, then remembered, and snatched her hand back.

“I was happy before you came,” he said, and he twitched with anger and grief. His lower lip was shaking, the veins standing out on his brow. “I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t…” He raised his trembling bloodied hand to his brow, fingers spread, and for a while he hid there behind them. “I couldn’t… think… like now,” he said, slowly. “I couldn’t… speak?”

She bit her lip. Her eyes were pricking, her throat aching.

“You’ve given me… this.” He gestured sharply at his head, finger jabbing. “Don’t… Just go away, please. Go away. Don’t give me… him as well.”

She swallowed. She was struggling, processing his words. If he was saying that he had lost his memory even down to losing his language, his ability to think, to reason… If he was saying that he had been stripped of all humanity… <Oh God, Mulder…>

“What do you remember, Mulder?” she asked, scarcely above a whisper. “Do you remember who you are?”

His eyes blazed at her. “Aren’t you listening? I remember…” He slammed his fist on the ground. “I know who you want me to be. I refuse to be him. I won’t.”

“To be yourself?” She shook her head, slowly. “No-one can do that, Mulder. You can’t live like this. You need to remember.” Her voice was soothing. “I know it’s frightening. I…” She looked down at her clasped hands. “I was in a coma, once. Do you remember? I saw myself floating in a boat on a lake. Somehow I knew that I shouldn’t be there, but the shore… the shore seemed to be such a dangerous place. I dreaded going back there. It was easier just to… to run away, to stay safe.”

“It’s my choice.”

“You’ve come so far, Mulder.” Tears blinded her. “You were… you were animal back there. You’ve… Somehow you’ve regained your humanity. Can’t you go that last step? I’m with you, Mulder, always.”

“No.” He lashed at her with the full force of his arm, aiming at her face. There was no apology in his eyes. “No…”

His flesh met hers, and everything stopped.

“I’ll hate you for it, Scully.”

She felt the skin of her cheek against her hand, soft and cushioning. His voice surrounded her. She had never heard such coldness.

“Why did you force me? Why?”

She heard the ragged sound of anger and tears, roughening his voice. She refused to look at him. His touch had exceeded all her comprehension.

“I was happy, Scully. I had nothing. I had no language, no self-consciousness. I… It’s fading already. I can’t… I can’t remember how I saw things then, but I…” His voice would haunt her forever. “I was happy…”

His laughter as the water rained onto his face. Eyes of light, and an infinite joy in the beauty of a single drop of sunlit water…

“I had nothing, and I was happy. I couldn’t conceive of the concept of ever having anything. I couldn’t conceive of the concept of nothing. I had… I had nothing, but I knew of no other life. I was happy, Scully.”

She swallowed a sob. For a minute, back at the water, she had seen a Mulder who should never have existed, yet she would give anything just to see him smile like that again.

“Now…” He breathed in deeply. She could hear him withdrawing, pulling his emotions close like a blanket. The calmer, more precise his words were, the more she knew he was falling apart inside. “It’s all back, Scully. All my failures. All the murders; the profiles. Do you know what it’s like, Scully? Do you?” She flinched away from his claw-like fingers. “I did a profile, it haunted me, but I came to terms with it and moved on. You’ve given them to me again, all new, all at the same time. Samantha… You’ve given me a lifetime’s… All in a moment, Scully. It’s… it’s too much.”

But all she could think of was the feel of his flesh against hers. She had felt a jolt, a tingle like an electric shock, and then…

She had sunk into him.

“Why did you force me, Scully?” His words, sharp, like bullets. “You touched me, and I went a little way, but not all. I could see him… me. I could see him in your eyes. I could see him, but I was outside. I don’t know how… I didn’t have his memories. I had a choice. I… I made my choice. I didn’t want to be me.”

She had sunk into him. The feel of his flesh on hers, through hers, would haunt her for ever. It felt like a taint. She was sickened by it.

She couldn’t begin to comprehend it.

“You said you’d help me through it, Scully.” His tone was deep with reproach. She knew that this, now, was a greater separation than the explosion had been. “I didn’t need to be helped. How could you, Scully? How could you? I made my choice.”

She heard the tolling of the bell in her mind. It was the death knell of their partnership. Somewhere, far away, her world was falling into ruins and death, and everything she’d believed in was crumbling.

At that moment, though, she mourned the death of friendship most acutely.

“I can’t forgive you, Scully,” he said, cold. “Don’t ask me to.”

She cherished the cold fire of her anger, though she would not look at him. “It was for…” She swallowed hard, realising the hollow arrogance of what she’d been about to say. <It was for your own good, Mulder, though you can’t see it yet> “It’s not just you, Mulder. I wanted you back. Your choice affects me too. Have you ever realised that, these last five years? I’m part of your world, now.”

She raised her head, and saw him. His knees were curled, his arms awkwardly protecting his nakedness. He looked so weary. She noticed for the first time how sunken his cheeks had become, how dark the shadows under his eyes.

“But you shouldn’t have forced me, Scully,” he murmured, though there was a hint of a truce in his voice – just a hint.

“I missed you when you died,” she said, words tumbling from her unplanned.

His head snapped up. “You think I’m dead?”

She nodded, hesitantly, then firmly, amazed at how instantly she accepted it. She had spoken to the dead before, and had never doubted the reality of her father’s presence, guiding her after his death.

“Touch me again, Scully.” Quiet, intense. His eyes were strangely sorrowing – for him; for her?

Her breathing was fast. Instinct was to snatch her hand away. She had talked to the dead, and seen them, and accepted that, but to touch him had been repulsive to her, leaving her wanting to retch.

There was something else…

“Why not?” There was an edge of resentment to his voice – or hurt. “If you don’t touch me, it’s not real, and you can carry on in your safe little world of disbelief?”

“Damn you, Mulder.” She blazed with angry tears. “What gives you the right…? I came to believe things about… about my implant, and abductions. I came to believe it, and you ignored me. What…?”

“Touch me, Scully.”

She raised her hand and slapped him across the face. <God…> Her hand sank through him. There was a solidity there somewhere beneath his flesh, and some resistance. She felt her hand come to rest where the bare whiteness of his cheekbone should have been, where flesh and blood should have been oozing through her fingers.

“You’re not there, Mulder.” Her voice wavered. Belief was so new to her, and, in a terrible overlay, she imagined Mulder’s rotting corpse beneath her fingers, imagined her fingers sinking into his putrefying flesh.

“I am, Scully.”

He was kneeling on the stony ground, his drying blood scattered on the pale rock. The blades of grass dented under the pressure of his knees, and his hair stirred in the wind. The cooling evening was raising goose-flesh on his naked skin.

She felt no wind on her face.

Her feet were bare, but unmarked with blood, and, behind her, the ground was strewn with rocks.

She snatched her hand away from his face, clutching at the grass, pawing at it, trying desperately, trying, trying, trying to grasp it, to hold it. Green fibres sinking through her hand…

“I’m…” Her words were swallowed up. She was caught in a maelstrom, lashed by blackness. “I’m not here?”

Slowly, slowly, he shook his head.

“Why did you think I was dead?”

She raised her head sluggishly, blinked, but said nothing.

“Why did you think I was dead, Scully?”

She closed her eyes, and saw again the sight that was never far from her – never. Fallen stone and plaster, and the imagined sound of his screaming… “There was a bomb,” she said, her tongue heavy. “An explosion.”

“Oh.” She heard his faint exhalation. “Oh.”

She tried to hear her own breathing. Her chest seemed to rise and fall, but there was nothing… Nothing…

“I understand.” Mulder. His voice was thick – so bleak.

There seemed no point in talking to him. What were words? Words confirmed reality, and if this was reality it was a cruel terrible joke. Ideas crystallised and would not leave her. It was falling into place, terrifying her.

“How long was it, Scully?” He laughed, a dreadful, hollow sound. It sounded as if he was flogging himself with thorns – ragged sharp sounds drawing blood. “An hour? An hour since I… Since all I needed for happiness was a single drop of sunlit water. And now…”

His breathing was ragged. If things had been different, she would have offered quiet words of comfort.

She did nothing.

“I think I did die, Scully. Really.”

“Show it to me.”

She was startled into talking to him – wraithlike illusion; devil; tormentor. She snapped her head up. “What?”

“It.”

Her mind was deep in imaginings, striving to see. A bare metal room, and herself strapped down, and drugs and electrodes and virtual reality helmets making her see this, and him.

<It showed me my worst fears, Scully. I was helpless, and you betrayed me.> Mulder’s voice in her memory, as he’d shielded his eyes with his burnt hands and spoken words she’d been sure she wasn’t meant to hear. <It seemed so real. They cut off my… My arms hurt…>

She saw the cruelty of them calling her, taking her, using the stone where the implant had failed. They had taken her, and drugged her, and sent her to this world where she wasn’t even real, where she had no body, no control, no substance – where she was a thing she couldn’t believe in, and a thing she must hate.

Was any of it real?

She lashed her wrists, struggling to feel the phantom touch of restraints in some other reality, but found nothing.

“The stone, Scully.”

She reached for it, quick and sharp, protecting it from him. Her fingers closed round it and it was real… <oh, it’s real> Against its smooth blackness, her fingers were firm, and…

<Only this was solid, Scully…> Breath caught in her throat.

“It’s the key, Scully.” His voice was dead. “It’s my prison.”

She tried to lose herself in it. It was her hope, her comfort, her salvation. It was real to her – it, only it. She couldn’t see evil it in, not any more.

“It’s doorway, and key. It…” He pressed one palm flat against the empty air, like a mime artist pushing at an invisible membrane. “The worlds are close… or very far. It makes them close. It… It weakens the walls between them. It weakens the… the fabric of reality, Scully.”

He seemed to be appealing, desperate. She couldn’t see why. She half saw him from the corner of her eye, but he was nothing.

“I knew this, then. I was trying… I couldn’t see a way through. I think…” His voice turned inwards, his throat sounding raw and scoured. “It makes the barriers permeable. The spirit can slip through; the body can’t. I… I was trying too hard. You didn’t believe, and you came.” Accusing.

She stroked it with her fingers. It was her security, now – the one thing she could touch without her fingers slipping through. It no longer absorbed her, or called to her with a yearning, aching voice.

“There was an explosion…” She heard faint noises. He was slamming something, banging… maybe sobbing. Nothing. “Around the stone, the barriers were weak. The explosion ripped it. It tore a hole in the wall between worlds, and I stepped through. I stepped through. Bodily. I… I was never supposed to be here, Scully.”

If he had been her Mulder, she would have fondly laughed at him. <Fabric of reality, Mulder? You’ve been reading too much fantasy…> But he was not, and she said nothing.

“Can you see… Can you see back, Scully?” He was fast like the wind, changing directions, changing moods. He had always been like this, able to end tragedy with a laugh, or anger with tears. “Look.”

His voice impaled her like a butterfly on a pin. She closed her white shaking fingers round the stone and, for a moment, reality flickered. She saw a ghostly overlay on the grass and naked trees: table leg; dangling white light; flickering television with tongues of flame and a high fast voice like a distant stream of water.

“I saw…” Her voice was thick, reluctant. He was not her audience. “Mom’s room. Seen from the couch…”

It flickered, and was gone.

“Have they found my body?” Low, intense.

She shook her head. “Still trapped.”

“If there was a way back, I’d see it…” It rose, like a question, desperate. “Like you did? I’d see… What, Scully? Blood and rubble? Files; a pencil; a torn poster…”

And he pounced on her like a bird with talons, reaching for her wrist, hand closing on hers, sinking through hers. His hand and her hand touched the stone at the same place, their flesh merged as one above it and around it.

She shuddered.

“I’m touching it, Scully.” There was a bereft catch in his voice. “It’s real to me, but I… I can’t see a way back.”

She stayed still, not breathing, not breathing, hoping he would go away. The sensation of his not-flesh against hers…

“Does it call to you still, Scully?” His voice was aching with longing.

She nodded, conceding that. Whatever he was, whatever she was, he was in pain, and he had been dear to her once. “A little,” she murmured. “Not like it did.”

“It doesn’t to me at all.” Utter bleakness. His hand sank away. “Not any more. It won’t show me a way back. You can go back.”

And she changed, changed in an instant. She blinked, and looked up, and saw green grass and Mulder’s beautiful face. Behind were dark fears of restraints and cruel sharp men imprisoning her. The best, lurking, was images of flickering flames, and her mother’s lips moving, saying that people had died, and a speck of metal in a glass vial.

“Maybe I don’t want to go back,” she said, slowly.

“I was never supposed to come.” He ignored her, lost deep in his own despair. His hands were shaking, clasped round his naked body, hiding from her. “There’ll never be a way back for me. I… I want to go back to how I was. Before you came… I didn’t know this, Scully. I didn’t know any of it. I was as… as displaced as I am now. I was lost. I was… I was happy.”

She looked over the rippling grass that she would never truly touch. There were swathes of death in it – brown withering tips. She saw again the smoke on the horizon, but this time saw the black angry heart to it.

His eyes were with hers. “I didn’t see it before. I…” A flash of fear, stark on his face. “The water… There was no life in it, Scully. It was clear down to the bed. It’s… it’s dying. The world’s dying, and I can’t get out – I can not get out…”

Her vision sheeting grey with mist. The television, the mantelpiece, her hand pressed against her face… All seemed real, suddenly, overlaid on his face, but with more substance.

“Do you believe any of this, Scully?” He lashed at her, voice red. He clawed for her wrist, and found it, with that sickening wrongness of the touch. “It’s… what? A dream to you? I’m here, and… and does it mean anything to you? Anything?”

“I hate you touching me.” Her voice was a whip, coiled tight and wanting to hurt.

He sank in further, insubstantial fingers gouging up her arm, up her neck, into her face, deep. “Because if I don’t touch you, you can tell yourself I’m not real – ignore what you did? You made me naked, Scully. You stripped me of… of happiness. Should I care whether you hate it?”

He leant in for a kiss, teeth bared, and in any other worlds he would have drawn blood. His body meshed with hers. It was at once a delicious communion and a rape.

“No…” She pushed. She hardly saw him, hardly felt him. Guilt and hatred were heavy on her.

“You came…” His kiss was like a blow. Hand entwined in hair, and through it. “You awakened me to what I’d lost…” Fingers sinking into her back. “You did it all, and you’ll go…” His tears fell on her breast, but she felt nothing. “And you’ll not even believe it. You’ll leave me here, and not even believe I exist.”

“Mulder.” Whisper, whisper. “Mulder…” She pawed for him and found him. Hands sinking into his hair, but she felt his essence there. She could get used to it. “I don’t know.”

“I want you to believe that I’m here.” His hands were dull at his sides. He was straight, controlled… despairing.

Her lips felt swollen. She could barely see him now. Tendrils of mist clawed at her mind. The wooden grain of furniture was suddenly very real to her.

“I need time, Mulder…”

“I can see the trees through you, Scully.” Urgent, scared.

“I…”

She reached out for him, beseeching, then snatched her hand back. <I’m not ready. I’m not ready…> She had fought belief in his world for five years. <It’s too fast…>

“You’re fading. It’s taking you back. It’s not your world…”

He was so faint to her now – so faint. She was more than half in her mother’s living room, face pressed against the soft fabric of the couch, and hand curled tightly against her mouth.

There were no restraints, no drugs, no cruel hard faces…

“It’s not my world either, Scully. It’s wrong here – wrong. I’m here. Scully, I’m here… I can’t go back with you…”

She had never heard him whimper before. Never before had he died and been reborn, and grown to the pained self-knowledge and ruefulness of adulthood, all in a day.

Never before had she given him everything he had, and stolen from him everything he wanted.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed, but her words were carried on the wind.

His mouth moved, open wide in some cry, but she heard nothing.

Her eyes were heavy.

The television showed flames, and ruins where there had once been a proud white dome. She twitched her nose and smelled smoke.

Her legs were cramped, curled up on the couch. Her hands screamed with tight curled muscles, held long in immobility. One was curled against her mouth; one held the stone against her breast.

Urgent voices called in the street – unintelligible words.

She looked for his face in the black mirror of the stone, but saw nothing. It was silent, now, and only a stone, and nothing more.

“Dana?”

Her throat was dry paper, yielding no words. <I’m back, Mom.>

Her face was wet. Her aching hand came away specked with blood.

“Dana?”

She was frozen.

end of “Another Country I: The Apple”

the story continues in “Another Country II: Death of Grass”

___

– NOTES: For those who like a little insight into the author’s head:

This story emerged from various musings on WH Auden, once again. Auden’s early poetry is infused with his belief that mankind, in its original state of nature, was without “self-consciousness”, thoroughly in tune with…. whatever it is mankind in the state of nature are in tune with. Mankind was happy. Now, with all the trappings of civilisation smothering us, and aware of self, mankind can never recover this ancient happiness. This is the Fall – the expulsion of mankind from Eden. (From whence comes the Apple reference of the title.)

Now, while I don’t believe this, it makes for a fascinating basis for fiction. I started fusing thoughts on this with reflections on Mulder, and how much of his life is based on memory. As many other authors have already explored, Mulder without his memories can often be a far happier creature than our Mulder. I just wanted to take it a little further and put Mulder in a position in which he was without memory, and without even the awareness that memory was a thing to have. Oh, and without language too. I won’t even begin to explain the wonderful theories on whether there can be true thought without language, but it’s, if anything, even more fascinating.

Add to that the fact that I’ve recently read “The Talisman”, by Peter Straub and Stephen King, which is about a parallel world in which all is not well, and have discovered the illicit pleasure that lies in doing big momentous things to the world… Well, I think this is about it. Scully’s implant, and related themes, sneaked in without my permission, though I enjoyed them once they came.

FEEDBACK: Love it, either at then end of this part, the next part, or the end of the series.

“Another Country: Death of Grass”

by Pellinor ([email protected])

CLASSIFICATION: SRA (though I don’t think it will be too scary for non-shippers)

RATING: PG

SUMMARY: There is something deeply, terribly, wrong in Mulder’s world…

Another Country II – Death of Grass

It had been great once, this place. Crowded streets, and mirrored buildings against the sky; masonry and monuments.

It was dead now – dead for untold centuries. It had died, and the wind had taken dust and soil and seeds of grass and had covered it beyond all imagination.

Mulder sank to his knees.

The wind came from the sea, cold and unrelenting. Only to the leeward side of the great toppled towers were there ghosts. The earth mounds had spared these buildings, and the ruins were still recognisable: an apartment block with specks of red paint on the rotten door; a store with a gaping front; a metal stairway…

Silent there, his wondering hand against his mouth, it had been easy for Mulder to see ghosts. He’d seen smiling faces passing on the stairway, and women buying clothes. He’d seen children. It had looked too much like a city there, and his imagination had populated it

He preferred the waterfront. Buffeted by the wind, there was little that looked like a city there. He could half close his eyes and see nothing but grass and sand and waves, and could tell himself he was in the countryside, not in a graveyard.

His eyes hid from the truth. He knew, though.

The miasma of low cloud that was almost rain collected on his hair and ran down his face, slow and spare. His eyes ached, and the water that dripped off his chin could have been warm tears mingling with the rain.

The fall of great cities. It was no mere archaeological relic, cold and distant. He felt it with a great, personal pain. It was the nightmare future. It was… <The date. The date…> Deep shaking breath as he clenched his shaking fists. <This would be long after. This is what they would want for us.>

He had seen something of his own apartment in that red door, though there was nothing the same about them. It spoke to his fears. It moved him.

And then he opened his eyes fully, and saw it. An animal had dug, once, though the hole was old and crumbling. Shiny with wetness, a human shin bone protruded from the earth, and, close by, barely recognisable, the immeasurably old remains of a digital watch.

There was the faintest whisper in the air – some small difference. Rain was falling, and the sky was greying towards the welcome veil of darkness. Wind still stirred his hair and the sea was rhythmic, hypnotic.

“You left.”

Scully’s voice, faint. He smiled internally, strangely pleased at that, but then he remembered what she did, and how she had left him, and the smile faded.

“Why did you leave?” Her voice had that icy control that always masked her deepest hurt, or sharpest anger. “This isn’t where I saw you last.”

He cleared his throat, speaking the first words he had spoken since her last coming. “You expected me to wait, after…?” He ran his hand over his wet face. “I didn’t know you’d come back. I didn’t know if you believed I existed.”

He wondered if she would ever understand how much that had hurt.

“But I came back.” Scarcely above a whisper. Her hair was paler than it should be, untouched by rain.

He snatched his gaze downwards. There was earth on his hand, and he wondered darkly how many bodies from the long-dead city were there, rotted, on his fingers. He said nothing. He was amazed how much it touched him – that she had swallowed her disbelief and come back to him.

“Did you run, after I… went?” Her words were bitter, sharp. “Run away hoping I couldn’t find you. Ditch me? This is…” She spread her hands. “This is… This is miles away. There was no sea there.”

He took a deep breath, feeling the cold assault of the wind on his lungs. “I walked. My feet hurt, but I walked. I couldn’t stay there, not after you… awakened me. I needed to find out. I need to know what sort of world I’m in. It was dying, there.”

Her head moved – one side, then the other. When she spoke, there was a terrible resonance in her voice. “This place died long ago. What is it? A city?”

He nodded, his throat convulsing. “It could have been Washington, New York… anywhere. It could be us. Something destroyed it.”

She shrugged. “A long time ago.”

“A long time ago.” He could derive no comfort from that. “Something happened then, and something’s happening now.” He looked at her, wild, and wishing intensely that she was truly with him, truly real. “Look at it, Scully.”

She blinked. He could see her chest rise and fall, though it was surely nothing more than a memory of breathing. Her eyes scanned, seeing the dying grass, and, in the dusk, the spreading stain of decay on the hillside beyond.

“I’ve seen it everywhere, Scully. Days, now.” He could hear the tremor in his voice. “It’s starting; it’s spreading. I… I’d fight it, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t know… Is there anyone else? Is this world worth fighting for?”

A shadow passed over her face, but she said only, “days?” Her voice was distracted.

He nodded bleakly. It was a slap in the face, a rejection.

“Hours.” There was a challenge in her eyes. “I came back. Mom was there. I went to bed, closed the door… and came over. Only hours, Mulder.”

He laughed, for what else could he do? “Remember Narnia, Scully? Time runs differently here. You live a lifetime and become kings and queens, but get back in time for tea.”

There was no smile on her lips. She seemed scarcely to have heard him.

His breathing quickened.

“Scully?” Urgent, but she didn’t look at him. “I might be the only person alive in this whole world. I don’t belong here. It’s dying around me…”

His words meant so much more. <Help me, Scully. Support me. Believe in me. Love me…>

Her hands were tight clasped, her attitude defensive. “I believe in you, Mulder,” she said, quickly, though she spoke it as if the revelation hurt her.

<Why can’t you give more, Scully?> He closed his eyes, and said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking about it…” She took a deep breath. “It’s not unscientific. Theories of hyperspace are becoming more and more accepted within the physics community. There are mathematical equations that describe the workings of the physical world. When we assume that there are multiple dimensions, they become simpler, more unified.” She recited it all on one note, not connecting with her words at all.

On the hillside, the stain was darker, and spreading. He drew his emotions close, knowing that she had not changed. He had hoped that, because of was him, she could simply feel it and believe, and not need reasons.

“They talk about flatlanders – people who live in only two dimensions. They’re like paper cut-outs lying on the desk.” She closed her eyes. “If I picked one up… They would be incapable of envisaging the third dimension. If I lifted one up, to its friends it would just have disappeared. I could put it down somewhere else, on the floor, perhaps. It would think that it had jumped worlds. It would be magic. It would be… It would be beyond its comprehension.”

He gave a bark of laughter. “Happened to Homer Simpson once.”

“Coming here…” She opened her eyes and for the first time he saw the fear in them, well concealed. “It’s incredible. It’s not impossible, Mulder. There are things I haven’t explained yet, but…” Her hand snatched out for his, then withdrew, as if remembering how she would go through him.

<Can’t bear to touch me, Scully?> He had never in his life felt so alone, so bereft. He was without an anchor here, not knowing what to strive for.

“The so-called laws of physics are only theories, Mulder, though we treat them as fact. Theories can be overturned by empirical evidence.” She swallowed, looked down. “I haven’t always remembered this. I’ve clung to what I knew as fact. I’ve been quick to dismiss evidence as anomalies.”

He lashed out at her. He would make her hold him, make her accept. “Feel this, Scully.” His fingers sank into the essence of her, closing round where the bone of her wrist should be. “Can’t you…” There was a catch in his voice. “Can’t you just feel this, and believe. For God’s sake, it’s me, Scully. I don’t want to be argued away as a scientific anomaly. I want…”

“I can’t do that.” Her voice was tight. She was answering his unspoken thought, knowing. “It’s wrong to expect me to. I can’t be… untrue to myself. I need to argue things, to explain things. I can’t work on blind faith, Mulder. I can’t. It’s not fair.”

He let his breath out in a slow exhalation. Still he held her, his wet hand closing round the appearance of her dry one. He felt wild, desperate.

“I’ve come a long way, accepting this, Mulder. It’s…” And she paused, frowning, and he filled in the gaps for her, hearing her resent him for making her, hearing her hate him for overturning her certainties. Then she smiled softly, ruefully. “It’s not as hard as I thought it would be. Somehow I thought believing would change me somehow. I’m… I’m still Dana Scully.”

He heard his own breathing, in and out, in and out. It was shaking as he shivered in the wind of the darkening night.

“You want me to believe you without question,” she said, dully, as if he had disappointed her somehow by his silence. “How can I do that? I have never done that. You knew, always, that I would stand by what I thought was right. I believed in what you were fighting for, but if you’d started fighting using their methods, become as bad as them… I couldn’t have supported you then. You knew that, Mulder, didn’t you?”

He had nothing left to him. He had to nod, slowly, grudgingly. “I know,” he whispered, mouth moving silently in the wind that never even touched her.

He had no anger left. She believed in him, and she had come, and she was his hope in the darkness of this alien world, and she was his scourge, his tormentor.

Tears swelled in his eyes, though none fell. Blindly, he pulled her, buckling at the knees, falling. His face sank into her chest, and he could almost feel a faint vibration on his cheek from where her heart should have been. It was sensual, strange. The feeling clutched at his throat.

“You can go, Scully,” he mouthed. There was the faintest touch of warmth on his face. <You can come, and go. I think… I think, soon, I might hate you for it.>

Whisper-soft fingers touched his hair. Below him, close in the deepening night, was the creeping stain of decay, of death.

When he looked up, she was gone.

Nights were the worst.

Fox Mulder had nightmares when he was young, after that November night that changed things for ever.

He would wake, his terror beyond description. He was alone in the world, alone in the darkness, suffocated in the darkness. Everyone – the loved, the hated, the unknown – all had disappeared into the void that had taken Samantha. Nothing existed – nothing. There was just him and the darkness, him and the darkness, him and the darkness…

And the noise of his father crunching seeds.

He had had nightmares when he was young, and now he was living that nightmare.

He spent one night, days after he had last seen her, huddled in the shelter of a ruined house, head resting on a mound that hid untold bodies, and once-treasured toys and trinkets. The wind and rain gave him no relief. The silence was absolute, and every second of that dark silence told him that the world was dying, and that he was alone.

He had never slept well in silence.

For too long, now, he had lulled himself to sleep with the murmur of a soft television, though he had never before realised how absolutely he had come to depend on it. As a child it had been his father’s seeds; as an adult, the television. They were human sounds in the darkness and dread of the night. They were a promise that he was not alone.

But now the silence was absolute, and he was alone.

He clutched his arms round his knees, holding them tight to his chest, curling for comfort as well as warmth. He was shaking, rigid with terror. He saw himself as an ant – a tiny creature on the face of a vast world, insignificant and solitary. Emptiness swirled beyond him, and over the hillside the stain of decay spread, fiercer, ever closer to him.

He could not see.

“Scully,” he mouthed. Scully was gone; Scully was an illusion; Scully was never coming back. “Scully…”

But he was alone.

He was alone.

Alone.

In the rain-soaked mornings, with the blackened grass drooping and dying behind him, he would stand up and he would walk, following the sea, seeking… what?

He was alone. Death surrounded him, but always ahead was the elusive impossible goal – some thriving emerald city, perhaps, where the people smiled and bathed him in love, and a wise man would show him the way home.

He had been here before.

As a child, he had been so needy of love, so starved. After Samantha had gone, no-one had smiled at him. He had been alone in his broken family, and alone at school on a small island where everyone knew his name and pointed. He had been alone at work, treated as a flawed genius by men who used his talents, then discarded him, and never bothered to hide their laughter.

He had been alone, and death had surrounded him. Images in his dreams – Deep Throat, Melissa, his father… Every step forward brought suffering, and yet more horrible revelations.

But he had never stopped. He was the shark, doggedly swimming. There had been lapses along the way – nights when he had wanted to curl in the darkness of his solitude and just give up – but in the morning he had been ready, his head raised and his hand on his gun, ready to face impossible odds, always hoping, hoping…

And so, in the rain-soaked mornings, alone, with the blackened grass drooping and dying around him, he walked.

He had been in this world for his whole life, and he had never once stopped walking.

There was no emerald city, but there was a man.

Sunk to his knees in a field of sparse coarse corn, there was a man. His head was bowed. One hand was pressed to his chest, and he was breathing deeply.

Mulder stopped, watched. Hope flared inside him. He had seen sharp eyes low in the grass, and occasional dark birds, but this was the first real human life he had seen.

The man coughed.

“Are you okay?” Mulder stepped forward, hands stretched out to show that his palms were empty.

The man gave no reaction. The hand on his chest moved to his brow, kneading it with his fingers as if his head was throbbing.

“Sir?” There was a tremor in Mulder’s voice. He had walked so far sustained by the hope that there was life, but it had been wild hope, not sure expectation.

The man lowered his hand. His eyes were full of fear.

Mulder’s breathing was tight. <Can he see me? Can he?> He ran his tongue over his dry lips. “Sir?”

The man’s mouth fell open.

Mulder knelt down, one hand reaching out, his neck lowered submissively. A distant part of his mind registered that the people of this world could be hostile, but he needed to overcome this man’s fear – needed to. The man would know truths.

“Are you okay? Can you…” Pause. “Can you hear me? See me?”

The man’s face was lined, with age and care. Beside him in the corn was a scythe of gleaming steel, cast seamlessly, though his clothes were little more than rags in shades of brown. As Mulder watched, his eyes flickered, and he spoke…

He spoke words. A flow like water of unintelligible words in an alien language, painted with the unmistakable tone of fear.

Mulder tensed, almost cried out in dread. He could be praying, a torrent of pleading words to some otherworldly god, begging for protection from some spirit he could only sense.

“Can you see me?” His hand twitched. He wanted to grab the man’s wrist, to force him to look at him, to see him. <Talk to me. Look at me. Am I still alone? Am I real to you?>

Words flowed, high and angry, punctuated with gasps for breath. Was he seeing him? Was he seeing him?

“Are you okay?” But it was desperate now, the tone almost accusing. He lunged for the man, and his fingers closed round his wrist and the man’s flesh was solid.

It was solid.

He let his eyes slip shut, relief depriving him of strength. It was solid.

“I’m…” His tongue was heavy. “I’m sorry.” He looked down at his wrist, and the man’s emaciated hand, whitening under his grip. But it was too soon to let him go, to forgo the sweet welcome touch of something human.

The man’s lips moved, framing unknown words. He seemed to go limp.

“Can you understand me at all?” Mulder asked, wearily. His elation was fading. The man was solid, and he was not alone, but he could remember days at the Bureau, surrounded by people, talk and laughter swirling around him, but excluding him. Loneliness could be most acute when there were people.

The man let out a breath, shaky. His eyes glinted.

“You can’t, can you?” He closed his eyes again, and it felt like a hand closing round his throat.

And then fire slashed at his arm. Words like bullets, high and angry. Fire…

He opened his eyes, and stared, betrayed, at the warm blood on his hand, and the way the knife shone even in the light rain.

It shone still as if it fell to the ground and lay there, and as the man’s blood-spattered fingers uncurled limply. Words still ran from him.

Mulder was beyond words. He pressed his right hand against the slash on his left forearm, feeling the blood well between his fingers. He let his eyes fill with betrayal and reproach.

Still the man spoke.

Pain like swelling fire throbbed with his heart beat. “I don’t understand,” he cried, hurt and lost.

The previous night he had felt unutterably alone. This was worse. If the emerald city was there, it was full of people who didn’t speak his language and whose smiles were not for him. They would attack him, drive him out, hate him. It was Samantha in a field in Canada, not knowing him. It was Samantha in a diner, pulling away from him, fear in her eyes.

And still the man spoke.

“What are you saying?” he almost sobbed. It was staggering, hurt and exhausted, through a field of blood, and reaching the gorgeous tower, but finding it locked to him.

“He’s asking if you’ve come back. Are you the first of them, come back to finish it?”

<Scully…>

Life was rushing from the man like sand in an hour glass, inexorably.

Scully’s face was clouded. “I can’t touch him properly, Mulder. I can’t see what’s wrong.”

There was still fresh blood seeping through Mulder’s fingers, though less now. “He was short of breath. He was kneeling when I found him.”

She faced him, speaking only for him. “He’s dying, I think.” Then she faced the man, speaking to his closed eyes. “Where does it hurt?”

His lips moved.

“It doesn’t,” she said, wonderingly, though the man’s words had not been in English. “He says he’s just tired. Numbness. Where?”

A word, like a child half asleep.

“Starting in the extremities. Spreading… where? God, I don’t… I’m sorry. I know how to help you.”

Nothing. The skin on his exposed throat seemed to flicker, and then there was nothing.

Soft as a whisper. “Touch him for me, Mulder?”

His fingers were encrusted with dried blood. He reached out and touched the man’s neck; counted… waited… “Nothing.”

Her shoulders slumped.

“Everything dies here, Scully,” he said fiercely, and felt the moisture rising in his eyes. “Everything.”

He buried him, using the scythe and the knife, and just one hand. He buried him in the middle of a circle of wilting corn.

Scully watched, hand pressed to her mouth. “I can’t help.”

“No.” Harsh. He was out of breath, and in pain, and hurt more fundamentally than that.

“Your arm…”

“I’m fine.”

He had torn a strip from his sleeve – from the dirty shirt that had travelled with him from another world. Reborn in this world, knowing no more than a child, he had thrown his clothes off and luxuriated merely in being alive. When he became Fox Mulder again, shamed, he had put them on again.

“No, Mulder. I won’t accept that.”

He reached for him, and touched him, though he saw her face tighten beforehand, as if steeling herself to do it. It was like bathing his arm in warm water – soft yet resisting, comforting and deeply sensual.

The pain eased a little. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.

“I’m…” He breathed, swallowed. “I’m okay.” He couldn’t accept her comfort – couldn’t. “Why could you understand him, Scully?”

Her hand fell. He saw an obscure flicker of hurt on her face. “I don’t know.”

“I’m here, really, bodily, and… I can’t speak their language, Scully.” It meant so much more than a matter of mere words.

She was silent.

“You… You can come and go. You can understand. You can go back to… to people. People speak your language in two worlds, and I have none, Scully.”

Her lips moved – one syllable that could have been “me.”

“Why could you understand him?” And this time he shouted, full of bitter anger. “Why you and not me?”

She raised her chin, and her eyes, sorrowing but defiant, showed that she would take no anger from him. “I don’t know, Mulder.”

He held her gaze, breathed – once, twice – and forced his anger to cool, to harden. “You’re not here,” he said, slowly. “You’re… It’s astral projection, of sorts. You’re here in spirit. Maybe…” He took a deep breath. “Maybe you’re not hearing words at all, but thoughts, spirit to spirit.”

She folded her arms. Her face hardened.

He ran a hand over his moist brow, and exhaled long and slow. He would accept defeat on this, and ask. He needed to know. “What was he saying, Scully?”

She stiffened. Her spirit appeared to him in the form of her body, even down to the dark shadows under her eyes and the pale tension of her neck.

“I need to know, Scully.” Desperate. “Tell me. I need to know…”

“He said…” Her hand reached out for his, then retracted, and he knew that his touch still revolted her. She seemed to draw her emotions inwards, and her voice become tight. “He was scared of you, Mulder. He couldn’t understand you. He thought you were one of ‘them’ come back. He slashed at you to see if you bled like normal people.”

He felt cold inside.

“He said ‘you’ve given us so little time. You left, and we were shattered. We didn’t know how to live without the lash, or how to think. You left, and have given us a few years without your rule. We’ve begun to learn. We can grow food, and live, and…’” Her gaze was clear, and her voice became intense, personal. “He said that they were beginning to hope, Mulder. He said that the world was being reborn.”

He saw dying grass, and the world darkening like a stain. “Hope for a few years. Not now.”

“How can you say that, Mulder?” She flashed fire. “You know nothing of this place. I have never known you to give up.”

He almost hated her then. “Live here, Scully, and then say that. Wake up in the morning to see grass that was green last night all withered. Live here alone, with no chance of getting home. Live here, Scully, and then see if you can talk of hope.”

“I’d live here with you if I could,” she said, softly.

The anger faded. He was standing there, heart racing, breathing fast and shallow. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said, almost a murmur. “There was a civilisation, and it died, long ago now. I don’t know… Was it the whole world, or just one country in it? If I walk far enough, will I find another country? Will I find…?.”

Wind whispered in the corn.

“If what he said is true… What does it mean, Scully?” He looked at his blood, and wondered. “Was it a war? This country was invaded, and ruled for… centuries?… by the enemy. The people were enslaved, or oppressed somehow. They forget what freedom was. There were no cities. It’s like Rome sacked by the barbarians – the new rulers infinitely less advanced than the old ones, but ruthless. And now, recently, the rulers have gone and they’re beginning to struggle back to life. It’s a rebirth.”

But there was no joy in it – none at all.

“They have so little.” Scully’s voice was distant. “So little, but they see hope ahead of them. We have so much… so much to lose. Better to be here, with nothing…”

“But you don’t understand, Scully,” he cut in, dully. “There’s something else wrong here – something… I don’t know what it is…”

For years, Fox Mulder had been haunted by the alien.

Sometimes he had felt as if he was on a thread, dangling between two opposing poles, pushed and pulled between their warring forces.

On one side, there was his little girl with braids – his goal, his heaven. She was happiness. She was a family and childhood made complete again. She was his teenage years spent smiling, warm in his parents’ love. She was fullness, and life. She was his sister, but she was so much more than his sister.

She was his elixir, his grail.

On the other side, there was the alien – the whip lash on his back, driving him on. The alien… It was a spindly figure bathed in light, stealing happiness. It was failure, barricaded in a deserted observatory, close to the truth but frozen with fear. It was smoke. It was Scully, dying. It was hard eyes and a ‘can you die now?’ Like darkness, it stole Samantha, it ate happiness.

It was his enemy.

Alone in the darkness of a world that was not his own, Fox Mulder knew that he was the alien.

He was ready for her this time, his senses attuned to her coming. He had spent another long dark night, and awoken to a day still darker. She came so easily, shared so little, and left at will.

Part of him wanted her to hurt for that.

“Why do you keep coming, Scully?” he said, harshly, not looking up. He held a withered grass stalk in his hand and twisted it, twisted it.

She was silent for several breaths. “I want to see you,” she said at last, softly.

“This often?” He raised his head, made his eyes hard. “Time runs differently, you said. How long is it for you since last time? Just a few hours?”

“Hours.” She nodded. “Yes. I came in the night, and the morning. Now it’s afternoon.”

“Why do you come so often? Haven’t you got a life?”

He could feel himself, careering down a steep rocky slope. He wanted to hurt, to strike out. Why? To see the hatred in her eyes and hear her say goodbye? To destroy himself, to push her away, to justify his self-pity? To make himself truly the alien?

He was hurting himself; he was hurting her.

He could not stop.

“I come…” Soft, but he could hear the tension there. She could hardly bring herself to look at him. “I want to, Mulder. I miss you.”

He pulled his knees up, wrapping his arms around them. The dead grass fell from his hand.

He was silent, eyes closed.

“Mulder?” He felt the brush of gentle breeze that was her hand passing close to his. “Why are you like this?”

“I miss people,” he said, harshly, wildly. “I miss hearing voices on the television. I miss the Gunmen. I… God, Scully. I even miss Skinner. There’s no-one here – no-one I can speak to. I…” He heaved a shaking breath, and he meant what he said, intensely. “You still have all that. You only lost me; I lost everything.”

He hoped she heard the hatred in his voice. A moment later, seeing her concern recoil, he wished desperately that she had been able to see the need beneath his hatred.

“Life’s not all good for me right now.” Her voice was tight. “The FBI building’s gone. I have no work.” Absently, her hand half-rose towards her neck, then she let it fall.

He saw the image of her cross there.

“So you come here for escape?” He gave a bark of laughter, though he was closer to anger despairing tears. “I don’t want to be an escape, Scully – something to do because you’re bored.”

Her eyes closed. He could see her, pulling herself in, hiding.

He bit his lip. Part of him screamed out to apologise, but he had suffered too many dark lonely nights. If she could understand just part of what it was like for him…

“Can you see, Scully?” He was almost pleading.

She opened her eyes, and she was all steel, her eyes and her voice issuing a challenge. “I’m coming because I miss you, Mulder. I want to see you. I love you.”

He laughed, short and harsh.

He saw the hurt on her face, but she hid it so well, passed it off as cold controlled anger. Her chest was moving in tight fast breaths.

He shook his head wearily. “Don’t use that as an excuse, Scully. Say it like it is.” <Please… Not that…>

“An excuse?” She looked as if she had been slapped. Control slipped. It was all anger on her face now.

He blinked hard, and kept focused. He looked down at his folded hands, at the torn nails, muddy with a world that was not home. “I remember more than you think, Scully. I remember you were afraid of something, before… before I left. If something’s starting, I want you to face it, Scully. For the world…; for me. I don’t want to be your hiding place.”

Her head snapped up. “You say that, Mulder? You remember…?” Her fingers strayed to her neck again. “Have you ever once asked? Who’s running away, Mulder?”

He swallowed hard. “I can’t go back. Here… I’m here… It’s almost more than I can live with. If I knew what was happening to home…” He felt his face crumpling, fought it, but was beyond that. There had been too many nights. “I couldn’t bear it, Scully – knowing, and being unable to do anything. I couldn’t…”

“I’m not running, Mulder,” she interrupted, firm, now, and without anger. He saw her fingers hesitate for a moment, then touch his clasped hands, sinking through them to the knee. “Do you understand? I’m not running.”

But she didn’t meet his gaze.

Her fingers stroked. “Why did you laugh?” she asked, softly, hurt in her eyes. She so seldom initiated contact, and he knew, suddenly, how much it had cost her to say what she had said, and to touch him now.

“Love…” He turned away and looked to the horizon. “Samantha said it sometimes, when she was little. No-one else…”

She sounded suddenly drowned in tears, her words thick. “Ever?”

He pulled himself back from the brink, realising he’d said too much. He clutched for words, any words… “You should go.” Blindly. “I can’t get back… This isn’t real for you. You’ll be losing yourself in a… a fantasy world. I can’t let you, Scully.”

“I make my own choices, Mulder,” she said, and he heard the resolve in it, and the reproach even through the soft tone. “I choose to come. I want to.”

A dark bird flew overhead, fast, as if fleeing something. He watched it, wondered briefly, then returned.

“I’ve been here all my life, Scully.” He spread his hands, gesturing at the barren ruins of the countryside. “A fantasy world… A place no-one believes in. Alone.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t… I don’t want you to get involved, Scully. You got too deep into my world before, and you’ve suffered because of me. It’s time for you to back off. Please.”

He felt as if he was dying, twisted with pain.

“No.” She kept her gaze level. She had knelt down while he was speaking, her hands folded gently in her lap. “No, Mulder. I can’t do that. I won’t.”

Just minutes ago, he had almost hated her.

Tears blinded his eyes, and he couldn’t speak.

It was torture without her; it was torture with her.

He had been wrong to think that the solitude was the worst. At night, the aching loneliness pressed on him like the beating leathery wings of some night monster, flapping and cold. Silence made him want to scream.

But when she came… Oh, but when she came…

When she was beside him, he lived. He smiled, he talked, he shared… he lived.

She was sweet torture. She was a golden key, just brushed by his fingers, then snatched away. She was the terrible taunting picture of escape. She could come and go freely, and, when she came, she was the stabbing agony of the reminder that he could not. If he flared with pleasure at her soft feather touch, then he flared with pain and resentment that something so small could be so much to him.

He was a dying man in the desert, cherishing and worshipping a blackened patch of water, yet hating it at the same time for having such power over him.

In the darkness, he clutched his arms round his body, a low moan escaping his throat. He saw her lips, her hair, her eyes. He ached for them; he hated them.

He had nothing, and her. Any joy that he felt in her was just a reminder of how little he had – of how the greatest thing he could hope to see was a smile on her lips.

He would never fall that far. He would never say “I love you.”

The morning was clouded. The rain had finally stopped, but he had not seen the sun since Scully had first come. Bleak, in a grey world, he walked through the grass, eyes fixed only on the building on the horizon.

He felt her silent steps beside him, though, in the soft grass, only one pair of feet left prints. He didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge her. He would show that he could live without her.

“Mulder?” A soft whisper.

He read her thoughts. “Yes.” He nodded, sighed. He still felt a spark of joy to speak to her, and to have her answer. “I see it.”

“That’s… ” She paused. Her face was pale, tense. “Modern. That city was ruined long ago, but this…”

It was tall, though not a tower. Its corners were regular, and metal gleamed.

“It might be inhabited.” She sounded uncharacteristically nervous. “You haven’t got a gun.”

He felt the weight of things unresolved between them, and saw fear in her eyes. , though she said nothing, as if she had said too much the previous time.

He flashed briefly onto the image of men with guns, seeing him as the alien he was, aiming at his head.

“What would happen if I died here?” he wondered, aloud. “Maybe I died in that explosion, and this is death. It’s my personal Hell – stuck in a dying world, powerless, alone. They show me glimpses of happiness in you, then you slip away…”

Her lips moved, silently framing words. “No, Mulder…”

“If I died here, would I move on? Is there an endless string of worlds, each one further away, each one worse? Would I jump back?” He breathed in sharply. “Would I jump back, Scully? Dying sent me here. Can dying send me back?”

“No.” Sharp. She seemed to be fighting something. “Don’t try it. I want… I need you to be here. I need time.”

“Why?” He stopped walking and whirled to face her. “What future do you see us having? Is this part of the grieving process for you, Scully? You’ll come for a while, then move on. You’ll tell yourself that all this…” He gestured at the world. “That this is a… what? A hallucination derived from grief? ‘It’s common for the bereaved to convince themselves that they are seeing visions of the person who died,’ you’ll say, dismissing me.”

She reached into her pocket, and he knew that she was fingering the stone.

“I think…” He closed his eyes. “I think I hope that they do have guns…”

She was silent, but he felt her shock. He wanted to wound her, and he was hurting, with a bone-deep ache.

“It would be best for you, Scully.” He was sinking deep, believing his own words. “It would let you move on. I know how you always hated to believe. You need to move on – to tell yourself that this was a hallucination, and to let yourself live. You have always prized control, Scully. Go back, throw away the stone, and…”

He knew the next word would crack on tears.

“I believe, Mulder.” Her words were quiet. “I told you before. We talked about this. I believe this is real. I believe you are real, and I choose to be with you.”

He sought the hot core of anger and clung to that, using it to avert his tears. “You’d keep me in this prison, Scully. There’s nothing for me here. You… you visit. Like a prison visitor and I’m left rotting in Hell. I don’t want to live like this…”

“You’d kill yourself?” Cold.

His legs gave way. He collapsed to the ground, arms folded tightly round the biting pain in his stomach. “If death was an end to it…” He choked on a sob. “Death might be another life, and worse… worse than this. I can’t live here. I can’t… I can’t risk dying. I…”

Soft hands moved through him. She tried no words of comfort, for there were none possible.

They stayed that way in silence for a very long time, until the wind had dried his tears stiff on his cheeks.

“Mulder?”

His neck felt stiff. He raised his head and blinked painfully into the light.

“Mulder? Look.”

The light had shifted. Still covered with white haze, the sun was struggling through the sheeting clouds. The metal on the building gleamed brighter, and the sparks shone on twisted barbed wire at its perimeter, and a dark gleam in front of it.

“It’s a pool of something. Not water.”

She was changing the subject, turning a page, running away. He was grateful. He found new facets of his fears just by talking about them.

He stood up and walked on. They were close now, and every step showed more. There was a crack in the side of the building, and some dark liquid trickled from it, pooled on the ground, then moved in a sluggish stream into the sea.

He no longer expected to find people here. To his surprise, he felt relief.

“It looks like a… a plant of some sort,” he said, slowly. “Manufacturing? Refining? What?”

He ran. He felt fear tight in his throat, and expectation. The place was deserted, but not for long. Even in this hopeless, empty world, he felt something of the old thrill of answers close by.

“Oil…” Scully’s voice was little more than a soft exhalation.

“Oil.” He crouched down beside the pool, breathing fast. Above him, on the wall of the building, oil trickled from an air vent. It was if the place had been deserted with the machinery still running, oil pouring out and filling the building until it had to seek any way out that it could.

It was thick and viscous, and the surface rippled with the wind.

He reached out his hand and – “No, Mulder!” – touched it.

It was thick between his fingers. He rubbed them together, but it was elusive. His mind was sluggish. He rubbed again, but there was nothing on his hands at all. Black oil coagulating like worms, moving up his arms, welling from the pool to embrace his knees…

“Mulder,” he heard, distant.

They moved.

He wanted to swat at them, beat at them, drive them off his body, but he was without strength. The touch of the oil burnt him with a deep hurt down to the bone. His body screamed out in remembered pain, and the knowledge of worse pain to come.

Scully’s fingers like a soft breeze, passing through them ineffectually.

“Mulder…”

He raised his hand to his face, claw-like. The other hand stretched forward, pleading. Oil moved on his neck, his face… Touch on his eye like knife in his soul.

Hands from another world pawing at him, sinking into him, trying to turn him over… Her beautiful dear face, clouded with concern, lips moving in words he could not hear.

And then blackness like a stain spread over her face, and he convulsed into darkness.

He woke to her pale, tight fear.

“Scully.” His voice was scraped with sandpaper. His tongue felt heavy, and moving his head was beyond him.

“Mulder.” She looked deeply shaken, as if part of her world had shifted. “I… I couldn’t touch you properly. I couldn’t help you.”

His mind was bruised, straying, unsure of what was reality and whether he was speaking aloud. “Last time…” He coughed weakly, pain lancing through his chest. “When I was in Russia. I… I remember my hand. I was moving my fingers. I was reaching… All I could think of was how you had been there in Alaska, and how, if… if I reached for you, you would be there.”

“I couldn’t help you,” she said, again. “I’m a doctor…”

He struggled to sit up, but could not. “I… I thought I was dying. You were there. I woke up, and you were there…”

He left her to understand. She was silent, biting her lip, but then she smiled, wanly. “What was that?” was all she said.

“The black oil.” He turned his head and saw it, drying flakes on his skin and clothes. The oil still in the pool struggled towards him, but could not reach him. “Why?” He coughed, and rubbed his eyes deeply against the sting of the oil. “How did it leave me?”

“It went into you,” she said, trouble. “You convulsed, then collapsed. I… I thought you were doing to die.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “Then they came out again and dried up.”

This time he managed to push himself up to a sitting position, passing through Scully’s hands as she tried, by instinct only, to help him. “I had the vaccine.”

He couldn’t remember what he had told her about Russia. He protected her from some things, and protected himself from the telling of others.

She nodded, her eyes distant. “I can’t touch you, Mulder. I can’t help you. If… if something happens again, I can’t… I can’t do anything to stop it.”

He opened his mouth, about to speak, but then suddenly her words faded to insignificance. He gasped, doubled up with horror, eyes staring, hands stretching…

“Mulder?” Like a distant whisper.

“The black oil…” His words were a horrified croak. “Here. What if… Scully…” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, fiercely. “I thought this was a different world. What if it’s the future? I’ve jumped in time. The black oil… The city…” He whirled on her, seeing her blanched face and the comprehension in her eyes. “What if it’s our future, after they come. This is how it ends.”

She ran a nervous tongue over her lips. “I don’t believe in time travel, Mulder.”

He grabbed her shoulders and his hands sank right into her, though her essence was there and tangible. He held her instead with the intensity of his voice, his eyes, his fear. “If it is… I have to fight it, Scully. I have to go back. I have to stop this from happening.”

She laughed, then her eyes filled with apology. Her lips moved again. “I don’t believe in time travel. Even if I did, I wouldn’t believe that the past could be changed.”

“You won’t give me that hope?” he said, low and reproachful.

“It’s not mine to give.” She held his gaze, sincere and rueful.

“I need to know.” He pulled away from her. The pain was nothing to him now. He wanted to stand, to run, to seek. “Is this our world? Do you know this place? Anything?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said, at last. “I saw nothing in that city that I recognised from any other city, but…”

“It could be,” he finished for her. “We don’t know. Will we ever know?” He pushed himself shakily to his feet. “I have to live with that too.”

And then she seemed to spark with fire. “Wherever this is…” She raised her head, her gaze fierce and defiant. “We, as outsiders, see what this world has lost, but to the people living here… There’s hope here, Mulder. I see hope. That man said their… their oppressors have left them. They have so little, but they never known a world with a lot. They have more than they used to have, because they have freedom now.”

“How can you see hope here?” He gestured behind her, at the brown stains on the hillside, and the death of the grass.

“How can you not?” Her gaze was clear. “I have always known you to hope, Mulder. When I was… gone… you hoped for me when no-one else did. You’ve hoped for your sister’s return. How…?”

Her words were knives. He turned his head towards the sea and tuned them out.

“Mulder?” Softer. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” Her hand was like water on his back. “But is it better to live as they do, rebuilding from nothing, or to live at the start of it, when we have everything, and can only lose?”

“Are we at the beginning?” He drew in a shaky breath. “At home, I mean, Scully? Is that why you come here? It’s crumbling around you at home. It’s falling. This is starting. You think there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

She was silent.

“Maybe you’re right, Scully,” he said, slowly. “When I first came here, I had nothing, but I was happy. I didn’t know what I’d lost.” Breathing still hurt him. He forced himself past the pain, taking long deep breaths. “That man… He had so little, but to him it was a rebirth.”

She murmured. “Yes.”

He sighed bleakly. “But I can never be like him. I know, now. You awakened me. I know the past. I know what it was like before, and what the world has lost. I know. I could never forget that. I could never accept.”

“I think I could,” she said, quietly. “We have fought, and suffered, and fought, and suffered. There comes a time when it becomes too much. There is hope, of a sort, in accepting what we have, and learning how to… to just conquer fear.”

“If you knew that this was our future, would it make a difference?” he said, almost harshly. “You’d still not fight?”

“It would confirm me in my choice.” Her voice was low. “I would know that fighting was just futile. I would… I would fight by not letting them conquer my spirit. I would accept, and keep my dignity.”

“Then we’re different, Scully.” His hurt eyes found fresh tears, and his vision blurred. He felt a deep sadness that was beyond words. “I would give anything to be in your position. If I could go back… God, Scully. If only I could go back to the start of it and fight…”

He couldn’t finish.

Her eyes hardened into cold steel. “Don’t judge me, Mulder. I made my choice.” Her hand moved absently to the back of her neck.

He looked back at the sea, and hated it. “I had my choice made for me.”

She made no answer.

The clouds cleared at night, and he saw stars.

He saw strange constellations, and he wept.

He had moved on, in the morning. With the sun overhead, he stood on a hill, one hand on a tree trunk. In the valley below was a small village. Smoke curled from the houses, and people moved in gentle comings and goings.

He turned a smiling face to her on her arrival. “It’s not our world.” He raised his hand upwards, like a prophet calling to his God. “The stars are different.”

“Oh.” A smile flickered on her face, then died.

He turned back, watching the far-away people. “I don’t know where it is. Another dimension? Far away in space? It’s not our future, though, Scully.”

She said nothing.

“You know what that means, Scully?” He tightened his fingers, letting them dig into the bark. “Whatever happened here… It might not happen to our world. It can still be stopped. The future is never written. We can fight it.” He drew in a breath. “You can fight it.”

“Don’t decide my life for me, Mulder.” Her voice was tight.

He was carried on the wings of his passion, rushing on, unable to stop. “The black oil… Do you see, Scully? It’s a warning. It’s what could happen to our world. Remember this. Tell everyone. Start a fight, a crusade. Stop it.”

“I can’t do that, Mulder.”

“Can’t? They’re the same, Scully.” He whirled on her, hands raised to hold her. “Have you begun to think through the implications of this? I’ve thought of little else since I found out.”

“What?”

“The colonisation happened here, long ago. Is it a parallel world? Are they real?” He felt the old fire – a fire that had burnt down to mere embers over the years. “If it’s the same race, and they’ve mastered interdimensional travel…? They’re building an Empire across the worlds, Scully. Empires ebb and flow. They settled here, mined its resources to exhaustion, then left. As they pull away from one place, they expand in another. They’ve turned their attentions on us now.”

She laughed, hard and bitter.

“They destroy the world, and then move on. We are nothing to them, Scully. Cities fall. The people…” He spread his hand, encompassing the valley. “Perhaps they vaccinated a few to keep them alive as slaves. Perhaps these people have hybrid blood. Perhaps some were naturally immune. Most died; a few lived. Shattered survivors keeping hope alive… Humanity refusing to give in.”

Her laughter trickled away.

“Even if it’s not the same… Even if the oil is just a coincidence… We have to fight. I have to…” He swallowed against the welling emotion. “I need to go back, Scully. I need it so badly.”

“To see all this start?” she said, harshly.

“To see all this stopped.” He raised his head as if swearing an oath. “When it started here… We don’t know how it happened, Scully. Did this world have men who knew the plans of the colonists like we have? Did this world have a vaccine?”

“Perhaps it had more, and it was all no use to them.”

He shook his head desperately. “Perhaps… I need to know. Even if there’s no hope at all, I need to… I need to see that hope. I need to fight it. I… I can’t. Not here.”

“Don’t live through me, Mulder.”

He looked up and saw her for the first time. He had heard her words, hardly registering them. He had not seen her face, or read her emotions. He saw regret in her eyes, and sorrow.

“Do you believe any of this, Scully?” he asked, quietly.

She was silent for a very long time, considering. “I believe in you, Mulder,” was all she said.

“Do you believe that the colonists are the same? Do you believe in the aliens? Do you believe in… in the date? Do you believe that a war is starting and that… that this can be the result?” His fingers whispered through her wrist, his eyes burning. “Do you, Scully?”

Her eyes shone with tears. “I believe in you, Mulder. Can’t that be enough?”

He was breathing fast and shallow. “Do you? Really? Then make my coming here meaningful. Learn from it. Fight to stop this happening in our world. Fight for me.”

She snatched at her hand, pulling it away with a whisper touch of angry air. “Damn it, Mulder, that’s not fair.”

Her hand reached into her pocket and touched the stone, and he could feel her willing herself away. She was fading to him, growing transparent. He felt a sudden conviction that she would be gone to him forever.

“This world’s being reborn,” she said, quietly. “If – if – what you say is true… Mulder, all it shows me is that my world is dying – that nothing can save it.”

“Your world?” he echoed. That simple word hurt him more than anything. “It still feels like mine, too. I need to be there. If it’s dying, I need to die with it.”

There was nothing of Scully in the eyes that looked back at him. She was cold, hurt, cynical, defeatist.

As he watched, she glanced over her shoulder, as if seeing back into the world he could no longer share.

Just before she winked out of existence, he saw her eyes widen in horror.

Dusk fell, and he was alone.

His back was against the tree, and, below him, flickering light came from the village windows. The sky was darkening, and alien stars began to appear in the night.

There was just enough light left for him to see the spreading stain of death that surrounded him like a pool, grass turning brown and wilting.

His breath caught.

He turned and climbed the few steps to the top of the hill and looked back – back along the curving coast, following his path. Inland, distant hills were green. Death hugged the coastline.

Between his fingers he was twisting a blade of grass again and again, its harsh edges rasping against his skin. He dropped it as if it burnt him.

<It’s dying…>

He remembered the man in the field of corn, and the glazed eyes of his death. Before that, he had held him.

<It’s dying…>

The black oil had merged with his blood, and had died. The touch of him had killed it. He could no longer believe that it was the vaccine.

“I’m the poison,” he said aloud, and fell to his knees. “It’s me…”

Alien to the world. A freak. Thrown here against nature. An alien; a virus. He was the invader in the body of this world – unnatural, unwanted. His touch was death. The world had survived untold centuries under the colonists, and was struggling towards rebirth, and he was killing it.

He was killing hope.

“Scully…” His voice was strangled. Horror seized him round the throat and dug in like claws, drawing blood. “Scully, it’s me…”

He was the enemy.

End of “Another Country II: Death of Grass”

The story continues in “Another Country III: No Abiding City”

NOTES: for those who like to get into the author’s head. If not, skip on to the next part.

If the first story in this series came from philosophy, this one is purely X-Files. I started thinking about Mulder’s essential solitude. I wonder if he has ever been truly close to anyone, before Scully. I doubt it. I feel that, in his whole life, he had been alone, surrounded by people who don’t believe him, trust him, or like him. He is cut off from normal society, in many ways. Even Scully, as in this story, is bound to him, but apart. For her own reasons, she seldom opens up to him, and she has several times made clear to him (in the show) that, while she is his partner in his quest, she will draw the line and not go with him all the way.

In this story, Mulder realises that he had been here in this world all his life, in a very real sense. To me, this is pivotal to what I was trying to do here. Mulder is alone in a world that doesn’t understand him. Scully is, in this story, at once bound to him, and a thing apart. Yup, we’re talking metaphors here. Sorry….

Or you can read it just as a straight story if you like.

“Another Country III: No Abiding City”

by Pellinor ([email protected])

___

CLASSIFICATION: SRA (though I don’t think it will be too scary for non-shippers)

RATING: PG

SUMMARY: Scully faces the future, and as for Mulder… Is there any way back for him at all?

___

A small note: For this story, Mrs Scully lives within walking distance of Scully’s apartment (“Paper Clip”) and Scully herself lives in Georgetown (the Movie.) I am not making bold statement about this being the truth; it is just what I want for this story.

Another Country III – No Abiding City

She came back to the feel of fingers on her throat. They were pressing, probing, and the darkness was too deep for her to see.

She cleared her throat. She was heavy with the familiar ache of returning home. Travelling weakened her, and dulled her senses.

“Dana? Dana. Thank God.”

“Mom?”

She pushed the hand away. It seemed to burn her, by being not him. The one person whose touch she so needed to feel would never be able to touch her again.

A candle flickered and her mother’s face took on a golden halo and deep etched shadows. It aged her. “Candle went out.” She smiled weakly. “I… God, Dana. When I came in and saw you, I thought it was… it was the…”

“I’m okay.” She spoke firmly, pushing herself up. She had started her journey lying on the bed, but at some point had fallen onto the floor.

“No.” Her mother impaled her with her gaze. “I don’t accept that, Dana. You were completely unresponsive. Your eyes were open but you were unaware of your surroundings. And there’s that…”

She followed her mother’s finger and saw a blood-stained tissue, at the edge of the pool of light. She remembered, now. She had wiped her nose, cleaned her face, and plunged headlong into… <into Mulder> she thought, wearily.

She closed her hand around the stone, and knew it for the wonderful thing it was. It no longer controlled her. She had learnt to speak its language, and it was her freedom.

“Dana?” Her mother bit her lip, her forehead deeply lined. “I wish you’d talk.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, sharply.

“There’s… ” A deep breath. “I don’t know how long we’ve got. I don’t want to end it like this. You… you said it yourself, Dana.” The older woman’s eyes were shining. “To die, unprepared, with things left unfinished… It’s a terrible thing.”

Scully closed her eyes. “I know, Mom.” She passed a hand across her face, finding even that simply movement tiring. Each time, she felt less and less part of her own body, as if she was drifting away, becoming more and more spirit. “Perhaps… Perhaps sometimes we can get second chances.”

She heard her mother’s sharp intake of breath.

“I saw Mulder, Mom,” she murmured, unable to meet her mother’s eyes. “It’s all… It’s… better between us.” She chose her words carefully.

Silence.

“Mom?” She opened her eyes warily, looking for the disbelief in her mother’s eyes.

“I know.” A hand enclosed hers, soft fingers circling. “I saw Bill, for a while, after. Sometimes I still do. I… I believe that those we truly love never really leave us. Something of them lives as long as we do, inside us.”

She pulled her hand away, though her eyes were stinging. “Not like that, Mom. I’ve really seen him. Truly. In the flesh. I… Can’t you see how hard it is for me – me – to believe this, Mom? If I’ve accepted it, then…”

“You’ve been through a lot, Dana. We all have.” Soft, hateful, crooning tones of a mother to a sick child. “Things are uncertain. I understand the urge to escape, but…” She blinked fiercely. “I need you, Dana. I can’t face this alone.”

“Mulder needs me.” Smooth softness of stone on her fingers.

“I need you.” Her mother grabbed her upper arms, squeezing. “Do you know what’s happening out there, Dana? Do you?”

She swallowed, shook her head, and thought of Mulder’s bleak eyes.

“The White House blown up, and the Capitol. Bombs in malls and department stores and museums. Power generators taken out for the whole of the city. Riots, harshly put down. Unmarked planes dropping bombs, Dana.” Her mother’s voice was bleak with her litany of death. “The wind has brought the smoke here. There’s barely air to breathe, outside.”

A ruined city, half overgrown with centuries of grass, and the pale face of the man who might have been the first to walk through those streets since they were crowded and alive.

“I need you to help me face it, Dana. No-one should be alone right now.”

<No> she thought, ruefully. <Mulder is…> She saw his arms curled round his knees, eyes distant as they stared into the heart of an unknown land.

“Who’s doing this to us, Dana? Do you know?” Fingers squeezing tighter. “Is this related to what you spoke of – what Fox used to speak of. Is it?”

“I… ” She pulled her mind back from him, reluctantly. She could almost hear him calling to her. “I… I don’t know. Perhaps. Probably.” Oil on his eyes and her fear as his breathing faded and she could not touch him. She shuddered. “It’s not all they can do. It might be the start – to weaken us, or to show their hand. The date may still be years away. Maybe they just want to show certain… rebels that resistance is futile.”

“Date of what?” Voice like steel.

“Colonisation.” And she almost wept then. That Mulder had to leave this world before she could begin to say his words, or believe him.

Accepting his reality had made her resistance crumble. Theories she had long fought became likely truths – things unknown that could yet be understood. Believing did not make her less than herself. She was still Scully, still wanting proof and still trying to understand.

It was a revelation, though it had slipped up on her so gently, so subtlety, like the soft whisper feel of his hand passing through hers. She wanted to weep at it; she wanted to laugh.

“Colonisation, Dana?”

She shook her head sharply, and blinked back tears. “Perhaps. Mulder believes there is an extra-terrestrial race who plan to colonise Earth.” True to him, she stated his beliefs without qualification, though she did not yet share his absolute faith. “He believes that there are people in power – people within our government – who support this process, for reasons of their own. Whether their origin is extra-terrestrial or not, I have seen undeniable evidence of the weapons they intend to use.”

She felt close to him – so close. In her mind, he was crying out to her, distressed more than she had ever seen him, needing her. <But I need to stay here, Mulder – just for a little while…> She was arguing his cause, speaking his truths, though her mother’s eyes were hardening with disbelief and rejection. Though away from him, she was being true to him, and to herself.

Her mother’s hand shook, and her eyes were wary. “I… I don’t know if I can accept that. I…” She swallowed. “What now, Dana?” Two words that encompassed so much. <What now for us? What now for the world?>

She rested her head on her hand. “I don’t know, Mom. I… I need to see Mulder again.”

Her mother’s eyes blazed with something that could have been anger, could have been fear.

And there was pounding at the door.

“They’ve come.” The older woman pressed her hand against her mouth. “I won’t let them take you.”

He heard the words in the rhythm of his footsteps, pounding like a chant. He heard it whispered by the wind in the dead rattling branches on the trees. He heard it in the dying man’s rasp that was the blackened grass stalks scraping together.

Fox Mulder was no stranger to guilt. In his life, he had waded through blood to the knee, his hands dripping. His father, his sister, his informants, Scully… They were old familiar burdens, tormenting him in his long dark nights of sleeplessness.

He would waken, heart pounding, to his father’s cold unforgiving face, telling him that he’d lost his sister again and broken his mother’s heart. He would feel the sweat of his face and, for a half-dreaming instant, feel the sticky slickness of his father’s blood. He would return home to a flashing red light on his machine, and hear again a desperate plea for help that came too late.

He had lived with this, suffered this, endured this. It had been the life he knew.

He spread his hands before him, staring at the fingers as if they were repulsive.

In his darkest nights, before, he had sometimes feared that he was death to all he touched – a cause of suffering to all who let themselves close to him.

Now… Now, his touch was death.

Death – his own death – tasted sweet to Fox Mulder, then.

He had never feared death. Death was of less consequence than the truths he had hoped to reveal. Cold men had asked him, many times, “can you die now?” when the fear of death had been nothing against the shining goal that was the truth about his sister. “You’d trade your life for his?” “For my mother’s…”

“Mulder, sometimes I think you have a death wish.” Scully had smiled, once, though he had read the fear beneath her voice.

“I’m not trying to die, Scully.” He had touched her face gently. “I just… I don’t fear death. Why should I? I would regret nothing but the things left undone, the people left behind. I would rather die finding the truth, than live without it.”

“The truth’s no use if you’re dead.”

He had shaken his head, gently disagreeing. “No, Scully. If I knew, as I died, that I had found her… I would die well. I would leave the truth as a legacy to…”

“To me?” Her voice had been tight. “Maybe I’d rather have you.”

“I’m not suicidal,” he had said, firmly, eyes intense. “I wouldn’t do that… to you, or to me. I’m stubborn, Scully – contrary. I fight. I can’t give in.”

But he had contemplated suicide once, sitting in the darkness with a gun and the ruins of everything he had ever believed in. Scully dying, evidence dissolving into dust, memory – the basis of his life – a fraud, and nothing inside him ever to be trusted again.

Death, then, had been an escape. It was freedom, and a rest that he had never known in life. It was the dream of a battered soldier, weary beyond fighting.

He had not done it.

When Scully had recovered, he had sworn a secret vow never to contemplate it again. She had fought, and kept her strength and dignity in the face of death. He would be true to her, match her, strength to strength.

But now… <God, Scully. I have to.>

He bit his lip against the miasma of despair that wrapped him like a shroud. Unable to go further on, to spread his poison into the still-living land, he had retraced his steps, back along the shore to the lake of oil, and beyond. He was in a wilderness after the bomb had dropped. He was black cancer in the growing body of the world. He was an invader. He was death.

Suicide was a duty.

“Scully…” He cried aloud, voice cracked with despair, as if, somehow, she could hear him through the worlds that divided them.

He needed her. He needed to talk to her, to explain. He needed her blessing, her assurance that he was doing right. He needed to say his goodbyes.

At the very end of all things, he would not ditch her.

“Scully,” he cried again, sinking to his knees.

His still-healing feet were weary from miles of walking, but still she didn’t come.

She did not come.

Voices roused him as evening darkened. Alien angry voices intruding into the sleep that was closer to unconsciousness. Carried on the wind, the words were more than he could understand.

Crying hoarsely, he pushed himself up on his hands, his injured arm protesting. “No,” he murmured. “No…”

Four men surrounded him, encircled him. Their faces spoke a universal language, etched with hard lines of hatred and promised violence.

“No,” he said again, scuttling backwards. Their violence was nothing. He had taken beatings before, and they had no weapons but their fists. All he could think of, screaming his mind, was the vision of four more deaths because of him. If their fists touched him, his poison would crawl up their arms like oil, infecting them.

Their voices were high with accusation. In the eyes of the tallest, he saw something that could have been grief.

“No. You’ll die if you touch me. You mustn’t. Please…” But he couldn’t understand them; they couldn’t understand him. He was floundering, knowing that he would never give up trying to explain, but knowing too that he could never get them to understand.

They would die.

He lunged to one side, seeking a break in the circle, but they were fast. Hard bodies blocked him. A foot hooked his ankle, and he crashed down, dead earth filling his mouth.

Voices jabbered, their meaning emphasised with kicks. A leather boot ground his hand into the dirt; strong fingers clamped his hair, pulling his head back until he gagged. His vision sheeted red, head pounding with blood.

“No. No. Don’t. Mustn’t.” Words forced through ragged wet breaths. “Stop. Please.”

He was arguing for their lives. It never once occurred to him to argue for his own.

“No…”

He reached out pleadingly with his good hand, digging the fingers into the dirt. Nails cracked with pain. Earth welled between his fingers. He focused on that hand, on that hand, on that hand… He would sink into that hand, hypnotise himself, take himself away from reality. Perhaps they would think he was dead and leave him, and they could still be saved.

Like waters of a dark pool, he let it close around him. Nearly there. Nearly…

Arms manhandled him, and he was limp, head flopping down. Visions sheeting red and black as his body was torn with jagged abuse, pulling him back.

<No…>

He pulled open heavy eyelids, and saw, and understood. As blows made him jerk helplessly against the hands that held him still, he could see only the freshly dug earth in the dead field. He had buried a man here, and others had exhumed him, to give him the burial of their choice, amongst friends.

They had seen him from a distance, perhaps, days earlier, talking to their friend, and had then seen the man die. They knew him as the killer he was.

As they discarded him like a rag, broken amongst the blackened stems of grass, he knew that he had deserved their beating, though they had not.

Slashes of grass, stark against the red agony of his sight. Focusing was beyond him, but, ghost-like beyond them, he thought he saw them stagger and fall.

His only hope was that Scully came before he died.

Hard fingers closed around her wrist, pulling her. She blazed with anger, resisting, fighting.

“Dana.” Her mother’s voice, firm, through the fog of unreality. She could almost see the ghostly overlay of green hills and the sea, and the dark depths that was Mulder. “Dana. Don’t.”

She blinked, and came wholly back. “Damn it, Bill – let me go.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m not coming.”

“Mom…” He was still the bullying older brother appealing to his mother. “Talk to her. Make her.”

Her mother stepped forward, on soft anxious feet. Behind her, the baby coughed in the thin smoke that had crept in from outside. Tara cooed softly, her face blotched pale and red.

“Dana.” Margaret Scully crouched down, eyes guarded. “Why?”

“I…” She nursed her bruised hand, breathing deeply. “I don’t want to run from them any more. I don’t want them to watch us run and hide, laughing all the time. I don’t want them to tease us with false hopes of safety. I don’t want to live, wondering every day if they’re going to find us – if today is the last. I want dignity.”

Her mother raised her hand slowly, cupping her cheek, then snaking her fingers through her hair, caressing the back of her neck. “It’s about this, isn’t it?” she asked, softly. “Your implant. We didn’t agree on that, but I do understand. By accepting death from cancer, you had to accept that nothing could be done – that you just had to accept. You want to win a personal victory of… of dignity in the face of death.”

She nodded shakily. She had never expected to find understanding here.

“It was hard for you, Dana. I know you. You’re a fighter – fierce. Your father was always proud of you. I was wrong – cruel – when I said otherwise.” Her mother’s eyes shone with tears. She made no attempt to fight them, crying openly, without shame. “I know it was hard for you to accept the cancer. I… I think it was so hard that you’ve… you’re going too far, Dana. You think you must accept everything.”

“No.” There was no doubts in her voice, though, inside, her mother’s words touched her. “It’s not like that. How do we know that Bill can take us to safety? This… It can spread. Nowhere is truly safe. I just don’t want to run, prolonging it. I want to face it, calm and dignified. I want…” Her voice sank to a whisper. This was not for Bill to hear. “I want to be free to see Mulder again.”

“I know.” Soft fingers stroked her cheek, like a baby. “I know, sweetheart. I know how tempting it is to forget all this and just be with him. I know.”

She stiffened, raised her head, fighting the touch.

“You’ve been through so much, Dana. Reality is… it’s harsh, Dana. But if what you say is true… Fox fought this all his life. He wouldn’t want you to accept it. He’d want you to stay safe for him.”

“I know.” She smiled, sadly, beginning to let herself drift. “We fought, this afternoon. He wants me to start a crusade, fighting this. I told him it wasn’t possible. You know Mulder, Mom. Never gives up…”

“Dana.” There was such grief in her mother’s voice.

“You think I’m insane, don’t you?” She raised her chin, her gaze clear, defiant. “You think Mulder’s death and the cancer, and… and everything that’s happened is driving me into a fantasy world of unreality.” She gave a brittle mirthless laugh. “Maybe you’re right. It’s a fantasy world, but… I believe it’s true, Mom. I no longer doubt it.”

“Dana.” Soft fingers reaching for her. “I’m so sorry. I know… You need to talk to someone, Dana, but we have no time.” Noises welled in the background – sirens, and shouts. The heavy smell of smoke was ingrained into everything. “Come with us now, please. We’ll all help each other.”

“No.” But she didn’t show her anger. Firmly, lovingly, she removed her mother’s hand. She was asserting her break, though she had no desire for it to be acrimonious. Let them both have good memories to carry into the future. “I’m sane, it’s true, and I’m staying.”

“To die?” Bill cut in harshly. “Is that something that partner of yours taught you – how to commit suicide?”

“I’m not doing Mulder’s will, Bill,” she said coldly. “He wants me to fight. I am fighting, but in my own way. I have always sought the… the internal victory. I have wanted nothing more than to overcome my own fears – to face dangers without flinching.” Her head was high. She was stating a creed, arguing with passion. “I have always thought that strength meant taking on everything, never admitting to fear or doubt. I now know I was wrong. There is strength in being unafraid to admit defeat.”

Bill’s face twisted in disgust. “If Dad could hear you…”

“I…” She swallowed. “I don’t need Dad’s approval. I make my own choices. I’m… I’m free.”

“Choices?” He laughed. Margaret Scully’s silence was almost tangible – a living thing.

“Choices? Yes. You know so little, Bill.” She felt scarcely anchored to reality at all. She was flying free, sure of herself and of her course. “Mulder and I… We know what this means. You think it’s something that… what? Running a few hundred miles will stop? Is that it? You’re like a wounded animal, running from hunters. They set the pace. I… I choose not to accept that life. I see no hope in the world. I can see hope only in the way I intend to face what is coming.”

“Dana…” Her mother spoke through streaming tears. “I can’t ever like this. I… I don’t know if I can forgive you. I… God, Dana. I don’t even know if you’re sane. How can I let you stay here if you’re not thinking properly – if you’re not yourself?”

“I’m not insane, Mom.” She took her mother’s face in her hands, cupping her cheeks gently. She would salvage what she could from this parting, though something would be broken forever. “I just don’t want to run.”

“But you are running, Dana.” Soft. “Can’t you see? You’re running from reality. You’re running to… to visions of Fox. You were scarcely aware of me for days, staring at that stone. After we leave… What will you do, Dana? Hold that stone, close your eyes, and lose yourself in Fox, unaware even as they come to kill you?”

<Perhaps> she thought, and hugged it close. <But it’s not weakness; it’s not escape. It’s liberation. Can’t you see?>

But she swallowed hard, and said nothing of it, cherishing her dreams of him and keeping them safe, private.

“If they don’t come – if the… trouble goes away… I’ll find you, Mom,” she conceded, though part of her thought she was probably lying. Sometimes lies were necessary for survival.

“I… I can’t force you, Dana.” There was such pain in her mother’s eyes. “I don’t believe you’re right. I can’t ever like it.”

“Please, Mom.” She shook, feeling no shame in being still a daughter even as she was Agent Scully. “Please… Can we end this well?”

And she lost herself in her mother’s arms.

She came to him. Always, wherever she was, wherever he had travelled to, she arrived in his world by his side. They were in different worlds, insuperably far apart, but bound together, inescapable.

“Mulder.”

She thought he was sleeping, at first, in the rich grey darkness of just before dawn. She saw his outlines only, and the light shadow of his body. It was almost as if he were the spirit, and not her after all.

“Mulder.” She touched him softly, fingers shimmering. She had hated that touch at first – that feeling of flesh as water – but now she could feel the intimacy of the thing. Physical touch was nothing to this. She felt she could caress his very soul, sinking through the armour of flesh and blood. “Mulder,” she murmured again, voice soft as the distant sea.

He groaned. His eyes opened and were stars in the darkness. “Scully.” His voice was slurred, as if he was still half in sleep. “I’ve been waiting for you. I wanted…” A weak cough. “I wanted to see you before…” The stars flickered out.

She glanced out to see and saw waves tipped with light, and the grey sky tinged with gold. She would say her farewells before dawn. She wasn’t sure she could bear to see his face when she told him, or for him to see hers.

“Mulder.” She withdrew her hand. She would not patronise him by offering comfort with one hand while thrusting a dagger with the other. “I… I don’t know how many more times I can come here.”

He breathed in sharply, then let it out with a long slow sigh. His eyes were still closed. After that one breath, he was silent. She fought the sudden, insane, fear that she had killed him.

And part of her knew that, by condemning him to perpetual solitude in an alien world, in a very real sense, she had.

<Oh, Mulder> she thought, her hand itching to touch his face.

She swallowed hard. “It’s started, Mulder.” Even here, a world away, the smell of smoke hung heavy on her. “They’re close now. I… I have never been one to run – you know that, Mulder. I want to stay and face them.” Her hand moved to the back of her neck, following old habit. “I feel death is close now. I want to face it without fear.”

He was silent, though she felt that his eyes were open, looking at her, damning her.

She blinked back tears that even a spirit could shed. “Can you understand, Mulder? It’s so important to me that you do. In times like this, nothing is certain. If I kept coming, every visit might be my last, and you’d never know. Every day… Mulder, every day you’d be waiting, waiting… hoping…”

She saw again his bright eyes in the night, telling her about his sister, and how nothing else mattered to him. She would not give him another Samantha to long for, but it was so hard – it was so hard. She was torn by duty and longing.

Her hand reached for his face, though she did not touch him. She felt his closeness, and drew comfort from it, though he could not see her. “But…” She struggled. “I… I want to keep seeing you until I die, Mulder. This is what I want. This…” <You> “I… I sound so cruel, Mulder. I don’t want to be cruel.”

“You’re right.” His voice was almost harsh. “We should say our farewells now and end it right here.”

She couldn’t begin to read his voice. She looked for sarcasm, or despair, but found only hollow acceptance.

“I’m only glad that you realise it too, Scully.” He cleared his throat. Even afterwards, his voice was scarcely above a whisper. “I was trying… Over and over in my head. I… I didn’t know how to tell you.”

There was something in his voice that chilled her. “What?” She mouthed it only, unable to speak.

“I can’t stay here.” His voice was dull, even emotionless, but she could read him, now. Years of closeness had taught her to see the shuddering fear behind his facade.

She took a deep breath, hand reaching for the comfort of the stone – her passport back to a place that was no longer home. “You said you couldn’t leave,” she said, like a challenge.

“I can’t.” She felt his fear and, as if touching him closer than mere flesh had given her a connection to his thoughts, she realised why he was afraid. He had found comfort, like a refuge after a dark night of storms. He had found acceptance. It was telling her that scared him. He needed her blessing, her support, for… what?

“Tell me, Mulder.” Low, intense.

“I need to die.”

Anger flared red inside her. He needed her blessing, but she as unable to give it.

“I can not accept that, Mulder,” she said, coldly. “I can not respect it.”

Her rejection hurt him worse than the four men’s fists.

Fox Mulder had never cared what people thought of him. He had sacrificed that. If people laughed at him in the hallways, then it was a price worth paying. If his enemies laughed at his puny attempts to find the truth, then it was a price worth paying.

Sometimes, late at night, he thought they were right to laugh.

Earlier in his career, when they had praised him constantly, it had been… difficult. Praise made him fear tomorrow, dread the inevitable let-down. Approval could only be lost. Trust placed in him lead only to betrayal. Love given by parents to a small boy would only turn into cold rejection.

Respect was a sharp precipice; contempt was safer. In time, he had learnt not to be hurt by it.

In his life, only a few had, serpent-like, slipped through. Only three. Only three people had the power to hurt him. Words could hurt him – news and threats delivered by a cold anonymous voice – but not people. Only three. Three could hurt him.

His mother; his father; Scully.

With two of them, he had craved their respect, but had never gained it. Contempt in their eyes had hurt more than a thousand jibes at the Academy.

And Scully… Scully was balm to him. Her respect, her support, was a constant. They fought, they disagreed, they drifted through periods of coldness, but she had always respected him.

He had lost that. It was only now that he was truly alone. She could touch him and be closer than two humans had ever been; she could leave him and be a world away – further apart than two humans had ever been. Now she was beside him, touching his face, yet the gulf was insuperable.

But he would not waver. He could not.

<Scully> he cried, silently. <Understand. Heal this… Heal us.>

He had drifted away from her. She was silent, watching the dawn, hearing the echo of his words, and hers.

She didn’t want it to end like this.

“Mulder?” Soft.

She turned back to him, ready to speak, but her words caught in her throat. Dawn was turning into day and she could see him at last, awkwardly pulled up onto one elbow and covered with blood. His hair was matted, his eye swollen, his breathing fast and shallow as if his ribs pained him.

He didn’t stir at her gasp. She sensed he was wandering in a dark world of his mind that hurt far more than his body did.

“What happened?” She fought, and kept her voice level, like a dispassionate doctor. For his self-respect, she always kept it like that, being the doctor, not the mother, to his hurts.

His eyes opened slowly, painfully. “Men.” His breath shuddered. “You see where we are, Scully? It’s where that man died. They must have seen us together and thought – knew – that I’d killed him. They came for me last night.” There was no anger in his voice.

Her hand wandered everywhere. She moved faster and faster, touching but not touching, unable to do anything. She was a doctor who could not heal, could not even examine him. Frustration welled up inside her like a scream. Being powerless was always the worst for her.

“Is anything…?”

“I’m okay, Scully.” He sounded so weary. “It hurts. Nothing serious.” He gave a terrible bitter laugh. “Not that it matters now…”

“Why?” Her frustration came out in anger at him – at everything, but at him most of all. “Why are you trying to kill yourself? I thought better of you, Mulder. I thought you’d never give up. From that very first day, Mulder, it was your tenacity that I most admired in you.”

She had seen him, sometimes, like a hero of myth, fighting the gods, wading through the battlefield with blood streaming from a thousand cuts. He would laugh at fate, walk into Hell without flinching even as fear grabbed him by the throat.

“I’m doing no more than you are, Scully,” he said softly. He looked as if she had whipped him cruelly.

She tensed. “I’m not… I… I’m just choosing not to run and hide.”

She thought she saw contempt in his eyes, and something else, too – a burning, blazing longing. “If I was in your position, Scully… I’d give anything to be in your position. I’d never give up. I’d fight them. I’d run; I’d hide. I’d go underground and start a resistance. I could never accept their victory.” His voice grew louder, almost a shout. “You’ve accepted it, Scully. Why? They’ve only just started, and you’ve accepted that they’ll win. You’re putting your own self-respect before… before the whole world, Scully. Does it matter if they have you running – if they shame you? Does it matter as long as you’re fighting? I’d let them hunt me like an animal if I thought it could save just one life.”

She had never hated him more than now. “And you’re not?” she said, coldly. “Why is it selfish for me to stand firm and let them kill me, or wait for their cancer to kill me. Why is that selfish, when you killing yourself isn’t. Where’s the nobility in that?”

Something flickered across his eyes. She saw them close off, and if he was protecting her from something. “It’s different,” he murmured, scarcely loud enough for her to hear.

She refused to let him escape. “Why is it different?”

“Because…” He blinked, and his eyes shone with tears. “It’s not me, Scully. If it was just me, it would be different, but it’s not. I owe it to the world to die.”

<And you owe it to the world to live> She heard his unspoken judgement, and honed her anger. Somewhere, deeper than she would let herself look, she felt the pain of guilt, and his words that rang true. She could not forgive him. Forgiveness would mean looking closely at their words, and risking finding them true.

“Why is that, Mulder?” she said, with exaggerated patience.

“I’m the poison in the world.” He gazed at her so intensely, challenging her to doubt him. The naked need in his eyes melted her anger, turning it from hot to cold. “I was never supposed to come here, not like this. You… That’s the way people are supposed to travel between worlds. I came bodily. I’m like a virus invading a body. I… I’m killing it.”

She found no words.

“Look at it, Scully.” He gestured with his eyes. “Look at it. It’s dead. Everywhere I’ve been is dead. Everyone I touched, or who touched, is dead. If you walk back over there you’ll see the men who attacked me – dead.”

She felt the truth of his words seep into her like black oil, dreadful and unwanted. She opened her mouth to object, to put her usual run of conflicting explanations, but there was nothing she could say. By coming here, she had accepted something so great that this was a small step by comparison.

She believed.

“I have to kill myself, Scully.” His eyes spoke other words. <Believe me, Scully. Respect me. Support me> “There is no way I can live here, knowing this.”

She shook her head, anger washed away like cleansing water. Grief and horror remained, but it was something they shared. They were together again, though wounded.

“No,” she said, softly. “You can’t. I… I understand. I’m sorry.”

And then she wanted to weep at the tragedy of it. He was laying down his life for a world, and the people he would save would never know, and could never understand. History was made up of countless unremembered heroes and forgotten nobility.

There was apology in his eyes, then. “I know you need me to support your course… It was important to me. I’d have done it anyway, but… Thank you, Scully. Thank you for understanding.” He took a deep breath, as if struggling to order his words. “You need it too, don’t you?”

She nodded. She knew what was coming, but could no longer hate him for it.

“I can’t agree with you, Scully. I won’t hate you. I can see why you’re doing it. You’ve been through so much since we’ve been together. We’ve fought and suffered, yet gained so little. I can understand why you want to end it now – to find… to find inner peace in just accepting.”

“But?” she said, softly. “There’s a ‘but’.”

He nodded gently. They both seemed drained beyond anger, now. They were quiet, rueful. “I would suffer any indignity to fight them. If they stripped me naked and kicked me to death, I… If I knew that I was on the right side, against them, and had never given up, then there would be dignity in my death. If I had lived in squalor, but had kept hope alive… If I had saved just one life…”

“As I doctor, I swore to save life.” She said it almost casually. He was planting seeds in her mind, and she was finding the fertile ground had always been there.

“You don’t have to be scared to run, or weak to hide. There is strength in fighting the odds.” He looked at the sky, his eyes distant, as if stating a creed. Then he faltered, wavered. “I’m sorry, Scully. I’m not judging. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, thoughts spinning in her head. She had chosen cancer – she had chosen not to run with her family – thinking it was the only way to be true to herself, to keep control over her future, and her end. But where did acceptance end and defeatism begin?

“Its hard, Mulder. It’s so hard to know what to do.”

“I know.” He held her gaze. “Find your own course, Scully. Be as happy as you can. My course is clear to me.”

“Does it have to be?” she said suddenly, wildly.

His eyes were bleak.

“Do you have to die?” She held up a hand, stopping his objection. “You have to leave this world. Does that have to mean dying? What if you could go back?”

He shook his head. “I can’t go back, Scully.”

“Have you tried?” She wouldn’t let him escape. She had felt cornered, pressed in by his disapproval, urged by him not to give in. She would give the same treatment to him. If they both preached hope, snatching at glimmers in the darkness, perhaps it would come true. “Have you really tried, Mulder?”

He was silent.

“You haven’t tried.” It was not a question. She saw confirmation in his eyes. “You assumed. It’s not like you, Mulder. You’ve accepted your prison. I thought you would be one to… to claw a tunnel with your bare fingers.”

His battered face was turned towards her, eyes steady and expectant. His tongue passed over his swollen lips.

She made a sudden decision. His words had spoken to her, his attack stirring her own guilt. “If you came back, Mulder, I… I think I would fight them. I would resist with weapons and words. I would go to war.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t do it alone, Mulder. Alone, I think… the way to resist, for me, would only be to die without fear. I can not fight a war alone.”

In his eyes, she had expected to see disapproval, but she saw only understanding. He cleared his throat. “I know, Scully.” His hand reached for hers, seeking her across worlds. “These last few years… I couldn’t have done it alone, Scully. If you had left me, I think I would have stopped fighting long ago.” His eyes shone. “I look back and I see… I see us back to back, holding our guns. I see you smiling down at me when I was lost and in pain. I see you feeding me facts, keeping me sane. I see… I see you. I see your face, and everyone else as shadows. I would have died, or given up, years ago…”

She was moved almost beyond words. Her fingers sank into the flesh of his arm, and she could almost fancy the flutter of his pulse, fast in his wrist. “I feel that… together we can face everything. We may not ever win, but we have stood firm. Together, there is hope.” The first sliver of sun appeared over the horizon, and she laughed aloud at the sight of it. “Look, Mulder – the sun.”

His smile was crooked. “Do we get sweeping violins too?”

Laughter faded warm. The intensity was broken; the feeling remained. “I have always wanted to stand alone, Mulder,” she murmured. “I thought it showed my strength. Now I see it… Sometimes, it was a weakness. I was insecure – afraid to admit that there was anything too big for me to face alone. When… things started happening…” The blackened grass was stern in the sun, reminding her of the possible future. “I was so alone, then. It was too big for me. Maybe I reacted by finding ways to justify giving up – to argue that it was the strong thing to do. Maybe…”

“You have never been weak, Scully.” His mouth curved in a smile. At the end of everything, they were finding hope, saying words that should have been said years ago. “You would face them without running. There’s strength in that.”

“And in fighting. I would do it, with you.. Alone…” She closed her eyes. “No.”

She heard his breathing, fast and tense. “An explosion brought me here.” His voice rose at the end. She heard his unspoken words.

Fire sheeted in her mind, and the memory of the acrid smell in the desert where, for a while, she thought he had died. “No,” she said, almost a gasp. <Not fire, Mulder…>

“An explosion brought me here.” There was a tremor in his firm voice. “Would another take me home? I…” He seemed to cut off what he had been about to say. He gave a strange bitter laugh. “Unfortunately I’ve lost my ruby slippers.”

She raised her hand to her mouth. “How?”

He was shifting position, apparently in pain. She wondered how much of the pain came from within, from fears scourging him. “The plant with the oil… You saw it, Scully. It had been deserted quickly, with everything still there. Nothing had been closed down. I…” He coughed, hand pressing against his lips and coming away bloody. “Close to where I came through, I saw the hills cut in terraces, like a quarry. If it was deserted equally fast…”

“There will be explosives.” Her voice was dead. She saw at once that it was his only course, yet she hated it. She knew that, whatever the outcome, the vision of Mulder ripped apart on that bomb would haunt her until her death.

“If I made it through…” He was speaking slowly, fumbling for every word, as if he was thinking as fast as telling it. “I have no way of knowing where. Wherever I am in this world, you come to me… Is that because I’m in your thoughts? Travelling bodily… I think we would have to assume that I wouldn’t come back to you.”

“I’d find you,” she said, fiercely, hands clasped like an oath.

He gave no sign of hearing her. “Maybe there’s a one-to-one correlation between the places… but to what scale? If the… the fabric of reality, as it were, is already ripped in the basement office, then maybe I’d return there, wherever I jumped from.”

<Oh God…> She gave an involuntary gasp. <Will this never end?> “Buried beneath rubble, Mulder,” she said, softly. Then a fresh fear grabbed her, talon-like, by the throat. “If you lose your memory again, Mulder… It’s a war zone in DC. If you’re wandering there like you were when I came here…”

He looked at her steadily, and she read the truth in his eyes. “Then I wouldn’t know, Scully. I wouldn’t understand. You saw me then. I would be… happy.” He burnt with longing. “I… I have never known such happiness as at that time, Scully.”

“I’d find you,” she said, almost sharply. She still felt the shadow of the hatred he had shown here, then, and the bitter resentment that awakening to her, that remembering her, had been no consolation to him.

He shook his head, eyes so sad, so weary. “No, Scully. If… If… You have to accept it, Scully. I don’t know how far I can walk like this. I don’t know if the explosive will be there, or if it will be useable. I don’t know if it will take me back. I don’t know where I’ll come back. I… Coming back to you is… God, Scully, it’s all I want. The fight, and you… I… I want it, but I… Don’t wait for me, Scully.”

The sea whispered, constant ever, unchanging as governments and races fell.

“I’ll wait by the Hoover building, Mulder.” She was defiant. She had rediscovered how to resist, and was full of fire. “It’s the only anchor we have. I’ll wait there for you…”

He grabbed her shoulders, falling through them to her soul. “Only a little while, Scully. Promise me that. Hours for you are days for me. If I’m not there in a day, I… I think you’ll have to accept that I’m never coming back. I need you to accept that. I will not be your Samantha.” There were tears catching in his voice, but his face was set as steel, eyes burning.

“I… can’t…” She swallowed. “I can accept death for me; never for someone else. How could I give up on you?”

“You have to. If I try this, it’s the end, you know that. No more visits. End it now. Close it. Don’t live in a half-life of wild hopes. Choose your course and stick with it. Don’t put your life on hold, waiting for me.”

She knew he was describing himself. She had heard him so often. “I’ll do it, when…”, and he’d always stopped himself there, almost guiltily. <When Samantha returns… When my quest is over and my life can begin… When I become whole…>

“I don’t…” Grief smothered her.

His fingers were like water. “You know I need the stone, don’t you, Scully, if I’m to jump?” Soft. “This is truly the end.”

It had held her so intensely, once, calling to her in words just beyond her reach. It was warm, now – a comfort. It was her key to Mulder. It was another country, another road. It was her talisman, assuring her that they could never hold her.

She tightened her hands on it protectively even as she pulled it out and let the air of an alien world enfold it.

“I want more time…” Scully was blurring, shimmering, though her essence seemed to shine with resistance. “I want to talk… I…” She was pacing, pacing, feet silently soft above the dead earth. “I want to know your favourite books, Mulder, and your childhood pets. I want to talk about my prom date and for it really to be you this time. I want to… to know you.”

Mulder’s head was heavy. Pain throbbed throughout his body, and the pain of losing her the worst of all. “Could we talk about such things, now?” he asked, softly. He wanted to touch her. “We know each other, Scully. We’ve seen each other in pain, and fear, and grief, and anger. We’ve seen past the masks. Only you, Scully…”

He swallowed painfully. He had stripped layers off for Scully, letting her in until they could communicate volumes with a single glance.

She stopped. “Only you…” Her palms on his cheeks, sinking, and her eyes locked on his. “Only you know me. I… I have kept secrets from you, too. I am always a private person, Mulder, but…” Shining tears in the eyes of a spirit. “No-one else in any world could understand me. We have shared so much together – things that no-one else could comprehend. My life would be an enigma to any other man; their life would be dull to me. We have fought a noble cause, Mulder. I see pride in that. We have stood firm together.”

“I have known that for a long time, though I told you less than I should have.” He could almost hear the ticking of the clock, like a drum of death. His hands raised to enclose hers, though there was so little there. “I thought it was partnership.” He smiled. “It was partnership.”

“Nothing more?”

“What more can there be?” The world was misting over, swimming. “Partnership is friendship, understanding, support… love.”

“I said I loved you. You laughed.” He heard the hurt in her voice. Something had changed. She no longer sought to disguise it.

He paused. The world had shifted on its axis, changing so much. Losing everything made things clear, and social convention, barriers, masks… all were nothing, here.

“I thought love was something… alien,” he said, slowly. “I have never known love. I saw it as… flowers, and romance, and… and something magical, changing everything. I thought love would change our relationship, lose what we have already…” He took a deep breath. “I was wrong.”

There was a ghost of a smile. She lowered her hands, reaching for the stone. Eyes spoke without needing words. His hands closed over hers, touching the hard smoothness of the stone, fingers merging into one.

“I think…” He swallowed. He was saying things he had never said before – never thought to say. He was fumbling into the darkness. “I think we’ve had love for a very long time, haven’t we? It’s… it’s a deepening.”

He felt rather than heard her nod. “I wish I could kiss you,” she said, a simple lament.

“If I get back, kiss me.” His voice was cracked, smothered. He gave a short laugh, saturated with tears. “Kiss the ugly frog, Scully, and you might get lucky. You might find a prince.”

“I don’t want a prince, Mulder.”

Voice from beyond all things.

She was fading, fading…

… and he was alone in a lifeless field, holding a dark stone, and bereft.

She walked. Like Orpheus walking through the underworld to win his bride, she walked through Hell – through streets crowded with cars abandoned in terrified flight, past bombed burnt-out buildings.

She saw no people. She searched through the fog that was her awareness of this world, and found no answers. If her mother had told her where they had gone, it had been when she had been wandering at Mulder’s side, losing herself in a world where neither of them belonged.

“They’ve run,” she murmured, her hand sunk by habit into her now-empty pocket. “Run away to… where?”

It was like some strange shock wave after the bomb had fallen, spreading in expanding rings. In the outlying districts was smoke and violence, fear and pain; in the middle was a black hole of silence and death. Outside, beyond the outer ring, was… what? Green fields and a sanctuary? She knew that the expanding waves would hit them soon, and there was no guaranteed safety.

She saw lifelessness, and solitude. Looking up, she strained to see helicopters, or planes in the morning sky – signs that other cities knew and were trying to help, or that other countries were still safe and alive.

She saw nothing.

She wondered when the distant regular sound of planes landing and departing had ceased, and whether anyone had noticed. When civilisation is collapsing on all sides, abnormality becomes normal, unremarked upon. People protect themselves, forgetting to look for the sounds of other lives.

In some windows, she saw smears of faces, and eyes watching her, warily. She wondered if they were quivering, too scared to run, or if they, like her, saw nobility is staying, in standing firm as death approached. A strange, tarnished, hollow nobility.

But faces were people, and people could make an army.

A dark-clad shadow greeted her in the ruins of the Hoover building.

“Scully.”

She reached for her gun, letting him see her intent, but did not draw it, not yet. “Krycek,” she said, coldly.

He smiled sardonically, cocking an eyebrow – a mocking salutation. “You proved me right, Agent Scully. There were those who thought that you’d given up. I knew you were just biding your time.”

All she could think of was that somewhere, behind him, Mulder might need her. “Get out of my way, Krycek,” she said, wearily.

“No.”

And something seemed to change in him. She saw a sudden intensity in his eyes that she had never seen before. She had sometimes felt that playing all sides had been almost a game to the man, but this… this was different.

She refused to soften. “Have you come to kill me, Krycek?” She drew her gun. “I’ll kill you too.”

He paused, seeming to consider the deal, then shook his head. “Dying would be easier, don’t you think?” He shrugged. “No. I don’t want to die. Do you, Scully?”

He was trying to play her like a cat with a mouse. Anger flared in her. “Not if I can kill you first.”

He spread his hands. “Let’s not play games, Agent Scully. There’s a time for lies, and there’s a time for honesty.”

“You know the meaning of the word?” she spat. She was itching to get past him, itching to get to Mulder.

“Scully.” He shut his eyes briefly. In the harsh light of day, she saw how his face had aged in the last few years. He was etched by experience, hard as stone. “We have… things… between us in the past. There’s… There’s no time for that any more. Enemies must join together. Mulder and I were on the same side, in the end.”

She almost killed him for that alone. “You dare compare yourself to Mulder…”

He shook his head sadly. “I admired Mulder, Scully. I even liked him. He was the man I could have been. He had tenacity, nobility… He stuck with the losing side, whatever the cost. I… God, I hated him sometimes. He had you and Skinner and all his informants ready to die for him. Would anyone have died for me?”

Tears started in her eyes at his words, but she held on to her anger. “I can’t feel sorry for you, Krycek. You chose to do what you did.”

“I know.” He nodded. His eyes shone. “And I believe that our cause is just.”

She gestured at the destruction around them. “This?”

“This wasn’t us. Them – some of them.” He took a deep breath. “There has been a split in the Syndicate. Some of them wish to proceed with the project.”

“Which is?” Cold.

“Damn it, Scully, you know this,” he hissed, low and impatient. “Did you listen to anything Mulder told you, or believe any of it? The colonists are coming. You’ve seen their weapons. They will kill us, possess us, enslave us, use us to breed monsters. And what more besides? I have no doubt that they didn’t tell us everything.”

“This is it,” she said. It was not a question.

“This is preliminary, and that’s our main hope.” He leant forward, not caring about the gun she still pointed at his stomach. “We believe they found out about the resistance, and struck a warning shot, helped by their sympathisers. This is not the colonisation.”

She swallowed. “Resistance.”

“Some in the Syndicate.” He gave a strange smile. “Me. Even your Skinner has just joined us. I would have wanted Mulder, too.”

She tightened her grip on her gun. “He would never have joined you.”

“It’s a thing beyond personal hatreds, Scully. I told Mulder once. There’s more at stake here. We have a vaccine, and knowledge of the enemy, and the will to fight. We believe there is hope.”

For an instant, she found herself glad that Mulder was not here. If he had been given that choice… It would kill him to join the enemy, to condone everything they had done in the past, but it would kill him to turn his back on hope, or to feel that he was putting himself before the world.

“Scully?” His voice was surprisingly soft. “Will you join us? Your medicine and science would be useful to us. Fight this. Don’t let them win.”

“Even without Mulder?” Her voice was harsh. “It was always him, wasn’t it?”

He nodded, making no attempt to save her feelings. “Mulder was a player. Mulder…” He smiled. “Mulder burned.”

Slowly, she nodded, understand. She felt no resentment. When they had dealt with Mulder, they had been dealing with her, since the two of them were joined, partners. He burned with the fires of determination, but, without her, the flames would have gone out long ago.

“Perhaps,” she murmured. She held his gaze. “I can never trust you, Krycek. I’m… I’m not sure if this is way I want to fight. I… I have so much…”

His hand reached for her, brushing her cheek. With a cry, she swatted at it as if it was a fly, and stood there, breathing hard in the dust.

“Just to wish you luck, Scully.” He smiled mockingly. “What can you do alone…? Die? Die well, if that’s your choice.”

She clenched her fist. “Damn it, Krycek, I said…”

“I know what you said.” He turned his back on her.

Walking was hard, with one leg dragging behind him. Breathing was a ragged ripping tear in his chest. His head throbbed. In the night, he curled up and shivered, unable to sleep. In the day, the sun glittered strangely.

Mulder was climbing, leaving behind the sea whose very sound seemed alien, now – dead water scraping on shingle. Above him, the sky swirled.

He had read once how pain had a plateau. The steady aching pain of old wounds became a familiarity, fading out of awareness. With him, though, every step was worse. He felt he was bleeding inside, strength trickling away from him with every hour, his fevered mind growing less and less able to remember where he was going.

<Scully> his mind supplied, answering that question. <Back to Scully.>

The stone was the only cool sweet thing about him. His hand felt the comfort of it, and he dimly remembered a time when it had been all to him, calling out to him in a language he could not understand.

<I’m the way back to Scully. I’m the way back to Scully…> He could understand it now. It sang to him, a soft caress on his fingers.

His other hand, dark and swollen, was pressed protectively against his chest, rising and falling with his ragged breathing. His feet walked on automatically, following no commands of his own.

Ahead was a cut face of stone. It was irregular, lumps and shadows. He stared at them, shaking with his every step. Shadows and stone… He made them into faces in his mind. Two shadows of a pair of eyes, a curve of an angry mouth, a wisp of hair… Not Scully, though. He had a memory, an imagining, that Scully was there waiting for him on the other side of death.

He couldn’t imagine how.

She waited. She couldn’t stop pacing, pacing, pacing…

The wreckage had been deserted, only half explored, and only half tidied away. Mulder’s office was buried deep, but, stretching into the sky like a beacon, the stairwell still stood. Curled in the stairwell, she had heard the moment of Mulder’s death. Now, standing firm in the same place, she hoped she would witness his rebirth.

Her mind was swirling. Krycek, Mulder, herself… all arguing on how to face the future. To fight; to die…

“God…” She closed her eyes. She suddenly longed so intensely for the time when her greatest decision had been about what colour ribbon to wear in her hair. They argued so. They made her feel as if she held the fate of the whole world in her hands.

And part of her just longed to go to sleep, to let it all slip away…

On her wrist, the time limped on, long seconds taking her further away from Mulder.

<Am I weak> she asked herself <to make no decisions until I find out if he’ll be with me…?>

It troubled her.

Time passed.

She felt she was alone at the end of the world, and still he didn’t come.

Her hands would stroke his face, like this, and she would…

Soft wind on his cheeks, but the pain awakened him. He couldn’t remember falling; he couldn’t remember drifting away into darkness. He had been walking, and now he was…

He frowned, struggling at order in the sea of fog that was his mind. It was the dark blue of late afternoon, and he was in a world of rock. Honey-coloured rock faces and strange unimaginable machines.

And, somewhere, there were voices.

“Scully,” he called out, in a cracked voice that made no sound. With the stone clutched in his fist, he turned his head desperately, searching. Once, he remembered, she had turned, and had seen behind her the image of another world superimposed on this one.

His eyes stripped the air naked, but he saw only rock. There was no ghost of another world for him, and no Scully.

His eyes were scoured with pain and loss.

The voices were closer. He pushed himself up onto his elbow, and saw the sweeping hillside down to the sea, swathed with the brown of withered grass.

Pieces fell into place. <I’m killing it> he thought, quick and horrified, with all the pain of the first realisation. <They’re coming for me.>

A small knot of men were climbing the hill, with shining weapons on their hands, and torches. The wind brought the acrid smoke to his nostrils, and he coughed weakly, specking his hand with blood.

Memory was dim, but he knew that fire was good. Fire was his passage home. Fire was his punishment for destroying the world. He would pass through fire and be purged, and would emerge to the fire that framed Scully’s soft pale face, and fingers like the wind.

If he could face it.

<I’ll die standing up> he thought, and pushed himself shakily to his feet. Then, dimly understanding that an open floor of stone did not burn well, he walked unsteadily to the cluster of buildings. Like a guard protecting a border, he backed up against the doorway and stood.

Orange fingers in the dark blue evening.

<They’re going to burn me like a witch> His face crumpled. Suddenly he was laughing – wild painful laughter that was closer to hysteria. Spooky Mulder would die as a witch. He had poisoned their world as if by magic, and they would drive out the evil with fire. It was age-old; it was primitive; it was… <the future.>

All laughter left him. Like an oasis in the desert, he found lucidity at the heart of fever and pain. He closed his eyes, and his mind filled with horror.

This world… It was a different world entirely, but it was an example. It was a world thrown back a thousand years, living on subsistence agriculture and superstition. It was a world that killed without law. It was a world that had lost everything but the will to survive… and at what cost?

Breathing fast, he closed one hand round the comfort of the stone, and pressed the other one against the building behind him. He was shaking, but his chin was raised, his eyes clear. The pain had almost left him.

“If I die here, Scully,” he mouthed, lips moving silently, talking to a woman who might never hear him again. “If I die…”

He could not finish.

Flames circled him, and eyes that glittered with hatred and fear.

It was a revelation. The sky tore like cloth, and she saw fire through the rent, enough to flinch from its warmth. It blazed brightly, beautiful yet terrible, somehow – unnatural. It was cleansing flame, drawing her, calling her. She saw nothing but the light. Longingly, she reached a hand out…

… and it winked away. She was in the darkness of a ruined building in a dead city, still.

And slumped at her feet was a body.

“Mulder.”

She hardly dared breathe. She touched him – touched him. The beauty of those lost flames was nothing to her now. Her fingers stroked his poor bruised face, his throat, his chest, and her eyes blurred with the reality of him.

“Mulder. Oh, Mulder…”

His eyes were closed. Worry began to cloud her elation. She saw dried blood in a trickle from the side of his mouth, and saw no flutter at the base of his throat.

“Mulder?”

And fresh blood mingled with the blood on his face. Rich ripe drops fell from her nose like rain on his cheeks.

She raised one hand to her nose, and the other – slow, aching fingers – reached for his neck.

Blood, and her fingers on her neck. Ever afterwards, this would be her memory.

She held him, his head resting on her lap. His right arm was wrapped awkwardly round her waist. Perhaps he was holding her. It didn’t matter.

“Mulder.” She stroked the hair off his forehead. “What now?”

“I’m fighting.” His voice was frighteningly weak. “I don’t care what it is, I’m fighting it. They can’t get away with this.”

She would never have thought that she could laugh – two tattered survivors at the end of everything. “You’ll never change, will you, Mulder?”

Her laughter punctured his intensity. He smiled back at her, though she knew the pain it must cause him. “Maybe I should. People seem to go after me.”

“You go after them, Mulder.” She shook her head fondly. “You provoke them. Nothing’s too big for you to take on. God, Mulder, you’ve even taken on death and won. Didn’t your mother ever teach you that discretion’s the better part of valour?” And, seeing his expression waver, she smiled warmly. “You’re my questing knight, Mulder. It’s how you are. I… I wouldn’t want you any other way.”

His eyes held hers. “And you?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m not like you, Mulder. I see a time to fight, and a time to… to…” She shrugged. “A time to accept defeat and gain dignity from it. A time to draw the line. I have always tackled the achievable, not the impossible. I can see victory simply in the knowledge that I have fought well.”

He let out a long breath. His face was a mask, though she could read him now, and saw hurt beneath it.

She touched his face, pulling him back towards her. “I need to tell you this, Mulder. It’s only fair that you understand that we’re… we’re different, Mulder. Our reasons are not the same. There may become a time when I can’t follow you, or you me. We have different lines.” Her vision blurred. “I want to be with you, but I can’t give up my own beliefs for you. We might not always be together.”

Light sparked in his eyes. “But we will at the start.”

She hesitated before replying. “Yes,” she said, at first. “I believe so. I see a course that…” It was hard to find the words. She had told him, earlier, about Krycek, and he had just nodded, without sign of surprise or objection, but without saying anything positive either. “I think it is a course I want to investigate.”

She raised a finger to her upper lip, wiping non-existent blood. She hoped that Krycek’s group had a cure for it, though she was not ready to tell Mulder that yet. She refused to raise his hopes only to shatter them.

“I do, too,” he said, simply.

“Skinner’s with them too.” She caught a breath. “I didn’t tell you… After the bomb, he refused to leave. He said his own agents were trapped, and he would stay with them.” She fought the lump in her throat. “Something fell on him, and his legs were…” She couldn’t continue.

“He must be formidable in a wheelchair.” Mulder smiled, and she was profoundly grateful to him for it.

She stroked his cheek, and the joy of touching him coloured all other sorrows. “It might not work out, but it’s a place to start, Mulder. When you were gone, and my work, and…” She swallowed. “I couldn’t see a place to start. Maybe I did try to escape, coming to see you.”

“I’m glad you did.” His fingers absently kneaded her waist.

The stone hadn’t come through with him. They both knew that that way was closed to them now. For better or worse, they were imprisoned in their own world.

She ran a finger over his lips, feeling his breathing, revelling in the reality of him. “I’m glad, too.”

His eyes were slipping shut. Smiling, he was drifting away from her. “Scully?” he mouthed.

“You need to get to a hospital,” she murmured, though the prospect worried her. She couldn’t begin to think how she could do it. She had passed the shell of a hospital on her journey.

“No.” His voice was weak, but content. He was more than half sunk into a fevered sleep already, his words partly dreaming. “Let me sleep. Sleep beside me, Scully. I’ll be better in the morning… I’ll… I’ll fight the aliens tomorrow.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she smiled. Softly, she bent forward and kissed him on the forehead. “I don’t want a prince, Mulder. Remember?”

His eyes glittered open. He was the old, teasing, suggestive Mulder. “Lips?” he murmured.

She gave a low ripple of laughter. “We are forward, aren’t we?” She teased his lower lip with her finger, taunting him with a promise. “Tomorrow, Mulder.”

END

NOTES: Well, this is it, and I seem to have used up all my notes at the end of the previous parts.

So, given my track record, I wonder how many of you trusted me to give a happy ending. I feel quite proud of myself. I resisted the strong urge to stop a scene earlier. I’m working hard to do “happy.” This is about my nearest yet. Of course, there’s that little matter of “the date” happening, but details, details…

THANKS: Thanks to Rebecca, Suzi and Andrew for read-through and comments. It’s about time I thanked Andrew, my husband, publicly. He always reads every scene as I write it, despite the fact that, and I quote, “I’m a nice happy person. I like my Mulders happy. I don’t like what you mean angst writers do to him.”

FEEDBACK: Love it!

EX-LIBRIS: X-LIBRIS

This file has been downloaded from x-libris.xf-redux.com. It contains work/s of X-Files FAN FICTION and FAN ART which are not affiliated with Ten-Thirteen or The Fox Network. No income is generated from these works. They are created with love and shared purely for the enjoyment of fans and are not to be sold in any format. The X-Files remain the property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen and Fox, unfortunately.

Individual stories and art remain the property of their talented creators. No copyright infringement is intended. Any copyright concerns can be addressed to [email protected].