Night Giving Off Flames by Jesemie's Evil Twin jesemie@hotmail.com or eviljesemie@yahoo.com Summary: "Yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible." - John Milton Disclaimer: Not mine. Grr. Category: Angst, Oddness, M/S. Quasi-Post-Colonization AU that occurs sometime after "Hollywood AD". Oddness. One wee-tiny spoiler for "HAD" and hardly any others whatsoever. Did I mention it's Odd? Thank You: Shari and Liza. Mwa! You rock. Feedback: Would be lovely, please and thank you. jesemie@hotmail.com or eviljesemie@yahoo.com Scullyfic Improv (elements given at end) June 2000 - - - "How beautiful the body is... How terrible when torn. The little flame of life sinks lower and lower and, with a flicker, goes out. It goes out like a candle goes out. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest at extinction, then submits. It has its say, then is silent." - Dr. Norman Bethune - - - Yesterday was autumn in the park. Family cookouts cast off sweet savory fragrances. Hills simmered with foliage like fluttering chiffon scraps. Little fires in the trees, and plumes of flesh-hot smoke blistering the air. She was allowed the luxury of a late afternoon walk without restraints or walls, and she tried to act as though the scenery and sensations appealed to her. After all, there was the blue plate sky, the green benches peeling, a row of eleven-year-olds with small sail boats laid on the lake to skid away from shore in the pricking breeze. There were yikkering russet-shaded squirrels dashing between chestnut trees. Two teenagers tangoed in thrift-store tuxedos, one giggling, the other loudly making fun of his companion's unflattering cummerbund. Their feet crossed and they shrieked as they fell, happily, into a poorly raked pile of leaves. It was normal and beautiful in a flippantly cruel sort of way. What she wanted most was to close her eyes against the descending evening's red blossom of setting sun, to rush into the lake that seemed to bleed with that laceration of light and let a crash of ice water stop her heart. But the fourth shifter was there, as always, and it would have protected her from herself. Today there is a deal being made in the arterial hallway outside her metallic room, and the walls squeal with the angry reverberations. The fourth shifter - she will never call it or any of them a master - is the loudest arguer, but its words halt quickly. It has been appeased, it seems. The door opens, and two flashlight beams throw infinite shards of white off the walls. Something pulls her from the bed, further bruising her already battered arms and wrists in a quick struggle, and ties a tight sash over her eyes. Minutes later, she sits wilted in the backseat of a van, listening to frantic footsteps on pavement rush up to the vehicle. She hears the shifter say, "Leave now. You have less than two minutes to vacate the premises. I can't stall them once they're here." A door opens, and something pricks her finger while the shifter yells, "Hurry! They're coming!" The sash is removed but the air is dark and blood-burst, and the last thing she sees before losing consciousness is the shifter at the van window. Its body expands, bulks, distorts and is restored to its natural shape. Its eyes are no longer his eyes. It is no longer him. It was never really him, she thinks again with awful relief. Her finger stings and Mulder is dead and she collapses asleep, and this is one of the few comforts Scully has been granted since he died. - - - The phone rings once, and he answers it without speaking. "We have her," says the smooth voice on the other end. He forces the quaver out of his words by asking very slowly and quietly, "She's alive?" "Of course. The broker's willing to make a trade." Dammit. "No trades. I have cash." A pause, and not even breath. Quickly, with unrestrained desperation, he continues, "I have nothing to trade, but I have plenty of money. You know that." He's pacing in front of the small fireplace, just short of hitting the hearthstone with his knuckles. "I do." Bastard, he thinks. "Please." "'Please,' what?" the amused voice asks. Please. Please. He reins in his words, the desolateness. "Please work something out. You'll get a huge cut, you know that." "Money is really of very little use to me at this point." "I have nothing to trade. Nothing." "You could trade yourself." "Would that work?" "Probably not." "It's much more fun if they break me by breaking her, right?" "They've already broken her. Now they're waiting for you." "I've been officially disappeared, neutralized as a threat, remember?" "Oh yeah. You could always raise yourself from the dead." He swallows. "You know what they've promised." And he closes his eyes for just a minute to block out any image the words might conjure. "Yeah. That would suck," the voice grins maliciously. "She has a very nice ass. It'd be a real shame to see it endangered further were you to crawl back to civilization. So why would you take this risk?" Something sticky and leaden catches in his throat, and he inhales shakily around the nausea churning up from his stomach. "I'm not going back." I can't go back, he thinks with a pang of sorrow. Maybe I can't save her either. The voice turns thoughtful, murmuring, "Lucky for you she can't go back herself. I still don't see what the commotion's about. It's been months. Shouldn't you just forget her and join the dark side once and for all? Or is that too obvious a tact?" "Make the fucking deal." "You mean that literally?" He clenches his jaw, a gesture wasted in the empty room, and growls, "If you don't do this, and I find you, I'll kill you." "That would certainly be a change of pace. I'm cowering," the voice chuckles. It is the voice of someone who has his feet propped on a desk, who has a handcuffed whore waiting to give him blowjobs or waiting to be killed, the voice of a man who could push someone's head under water and smile, smile, smile while liquid spills into the victim's lungs like gasoline. "Okay, okay. I'll make the deal. We'll be there by morning. But the price's going up." "Fine." "And I'll have to insist on a bonus." Logs in the heart split under the laving fire. "Yes." Whatever it takes. Just... make them stop hurting her. Please. "Good then. Good." Krycek's voice and the airless choke around it are replaced by a dial tone, and Mulder returns the receiver to its cradle, and puts his head in his hands, and waits. - - - The sash has been replaced over her eyes. Her wrists and ankles are bound. She does not move to sit up for almost an hour after waking. The vacuum of the van is mostly undisturbed; she imagines the voices outside the stopped vehicle as intercepted dreams, overheard conversations at restaurants, half-tuned radio stations. They are not voices with which she should be concerned. Her stiff body betrays her, and shakes, her head lulling against a frosted pane. She is not surprised that there is a fifth shifter. She can hear it. It has, of course, his voice. These shifters have in their curiosity apparently turned her into a group project. The months since her involuntary surreptitious expiration (the second shifter's term) in the real world have felt a lifetime, and she has become one of their more interesting subjects. She stopped fighting weeks ago, after the third shifter's more pronounced physical explorations (its term), and since that time her worth has quadrupled. The best slave is the obedient slave. She knows she is not the only captive, merely another of the casualties of a disorganized and short-sighted attempt at revolution - spoils of not-quite-war - but it unnerves her nonetheless that they have customized her imprisonment, tailor-cut her punishment in their bemused fascination with her. They knew her so well from the very beginning. It is speaking in a low, tight voice. "Let me see her." "First things first. We have financial matters to discuss." "You'll be compensated. I need to see her. Is she hurt?" "What else would you expect?" Then a thumping, wet sort of noise before it speaks again, sounding almost frantic. "What have they done to her?" "It's no longer important. We've bought the contract. They have no jurisdiction over her now. Well, in terms of immediate ownership, at least. She's ours. Yours, for a fee." Familiar, that voice. A woman's. Early morning wind whistles a lament along the lines of the van. The voices are bargaining. It sounds very upset the way he used to, dangerous elements in his tone concealed beneath the quiet. "Do you understand, then?" the woman is asking. "She is damaged goods. We won't be held responsible for her condition. That was not part of the arrangement." "You could have killed her the way this went down. And drugging her-- " "We did what was necessary," a man interjects. Familiar. Familiar. "The last owner was a weak link in the rebel community. It's your good fortune our transaction was so amicable. She'll live." "She's hurt," it says. "She's gone," the first voice snaps. "This is what's left." "What did they do to her?" "They took out all those pretty silver chips, for one thing, all those little microscopic pieces of shrapnel inside her." The wind, hard and dark on the van, pushing against the window. It must be standing very close; she can hear it whisper. "They took out the chip?" "They cured her." And the man's voice is manic glee, is the hard dark wind around the words. Cured me, Scully thinks. And now I can die. - - - At dawn, in the foggy mizzle, the house looks stooped and wind-beaten, oatmeal-colored clapboard inlaid with pale turquoise windows. A short trail of awkwardly spaced clay medallions in the side yard's khaki grass leads around the corner of the house to an oak door and a long narrow limestone-floored porch. When the Gunmen brought him to this house almost a year ago, he immediately thought of it as home, an obvious conclusion: he had no-where else to go. But there was something else. He thought maybe he remembered dreaming of that porch, the view of the backyard from one of the tiny bedrooms - a cramp of grass and weeds, honeysuckle and azalea gone wild jammed against the house by the forest, the ominous, reaching trees. He chose to forget the part of the dream where he woke to see her being dragged away by faceless men, her eyes wide and shattered. This morning he returns from the cold damp backyard with a twiggy basket full of leaves that look as though they might be radioactive - neon colors, oranges and reds and yellows so unreal and bright it's as though they've been invented just this year for this autumn. He wonders idly if they'd glow in the dark if he held them under electric light for a few minutes, and in his mind's eye he pictures the entire forest shimmering phosphorescent in moonshine. Against the flat brown of the basket, the colors are all the caustic shades of fire. The house is quiet, as always, uninterrupted by its newest resident. Mulder does not wish to invade her privacy, but his paranoia triumphs after a short mental debate. He opens the door to Scully's bedroom very slowly. She is asleep on her stomach on the old double-bed, one palm flat against a stiff-covered notebook. She must have found it, he thinks, in the bedside table's drawer. She has not removed her clothes or her shoes, and the blankets beneath her are not turned down. A bag Krycek tossed out of the van behind her last night lays untouched under a window. Mulder creeps closer to the bed, wanting to make sure she's actually breathing, and stops himself from touching her. He touched her last night, once, to help her out of the van, and she flinched away violently, unwilling to meet his eyes. He glanced to Krycek then, who shrugged and offered casually, "They always look like you." "They who?" "Them. The shifters. That was part of the game, to see how she'd react to something that looked like you." "To several somethings that looked like you," Krycek's associate said. Mulder couldn't quite keep the revulsion out of his expression, and Krycek reassured him, "Don't worry. I hear she's very cooperative these days." His throat burns now with the memory. The bruises on her arms are old and fresh both, and streaked with brown blood rubbed out from under her skin by the rope that had bound her. Her ankles are rimmed with similar lavender-green bruises. He eases the book from under her hand. It's his journal, an odd mishmash of newspaper clippings and coordinates and culled emails, leftovers the Gunmen had, things they've found and delivered to him discreetly: an old crime scene photograph of him, Scully, and Skinner standing in a hot tub, pointing up at a piece of showroom ceiling directly above it, where a giant grizzly cocoon of unknown origins had usurped a light fixture; two pages of an old chat-room printout where Frohike extorted Scully's phone number in exchange for sworn secrecy about having discovered the day spa where Mulder once, on a lark, opted for a pedicure; a note Agent Brever slipped Scully in a meeting once - "Richard Gere's on line two", the code for "Skinner's calling and wants to know what you and your partner have managed to fuck up this time". The journal constituted almost all the tangible proof, according to Byers, that Mulder ever existed. The only tangible proof that his existence meant anything at all - means anything at all - sleeps, and he does not touch her. He places the journal on the bedside table, finds a mazarine cotton throw in a vanity drawer, and drapes it over her. He returns to the kitchen, takes a seat at the hundred-year-old oak table. Beside the basket of leaves, the contract he's signed that makes her his glares at him, sickeningly. Nothing here is right. The real world does not remember them but he knows that he could endure that forever if only he could touch her. But, of course, even in this place there are some things that are not allowed. - - - End Part One of Three - - - Part Two of Three Disclaimers, etc. in Part One - - - You can leave at any time, it said. Something in her still fought for self-preservation, and since she didn't trust the shifter at all, she went no-where. On the fourth day as property of the fifth shifter, she broke her routine of staring out the window and not answering the soft-toned questions asked of her. She decided to risk a bath. The door's lock was broken, and once she settled that she could not go longer without bathing, she entered the small sage-colored room and pushed the heavy chest, with its drawers of towels and washcloths, generic q-tips and tissue paper, toothpaste and bandages, against the door. She undressed quickly, and her fingers felt as though they had already been submerged in water. She wrenched the shower faucet on and stepped inside the tub. She bathed in two minutes, standing beneath a limp spray of ice water. The water incised her dry skin with such bitter coldness she didn't stop shivering for hours. No longer than she was wet, she felt scrubbed raw, bleached. For the rest of the day, the shifter watched her with something like concern in its expression. It thought her unappealing in her gloom, she assumed. Good. It offered her one of its sweaters, a cotton pullover faded the glaucous colors of the sea, green-grey and grey-blue. Scully refused to acknowledge the gesture, and it left the sweater on her bed. Her bed, she scoffed. As if anything in this world was hers. At night, she noted, it usually read while sitting in a wooden folding chair at the end of the hallway, by the bay windowsill on which it kept a cracked-base lamp. She wondered why it wouldn't sit in the living room, why it chose the creaky cold hallway cubby with the shoddy lighting and the old clacking uncomfortable chair. The living room at least had a couch. Its bedroom at least had an upholstered chair. She didn't really care though, as long as it stayed away from her. "Did you eat anything for lunch?" it asked her once this week, entering the kitchen where she sat dumbly at the table. She had nothing to do, but that didn't mean she wanted to eat its food or carry on a conversation with it. She had stolen a handful of cherries out of the squatty refrigerator earlier in the day; she'd eaten a piece of wheat bread for breakfast. She was full for minutes. She pushed back from the table, stood, and pivoted out of the room. That was almost a week ago. It has not asked her to perform experiments or any unspeakable acts. It does not ask anything of her except maybe her company, and even that is an unstated request. Its eyes track her, but not obtrusively, and sometimes she catches it leaning toward her as though she were the only source of warmth in the room. Scully cannot deny that she is as aware of it as it seems to be of her. The house is small and the two of them have a tendency to overlap, bumping into each other absently when walking around corners, both reaching for a doorknob at the same time. Sometimes she feels it must be following her, but other times she receives the impression that it is trying to fade into the background, to escape from her. It goes outside for a few hours every day, wandering off into the thick forest. She went the first time it asked. It said, "Would you like to go for a walk?" and she shrugged. The forest was waiting for winter that afternoon by staying motionless. Grey sky painted itself damply between the dulled bony trees. She walked down to the stream, picking her footsteps deliberately, avoiding branches and limbs and logs fallen in the faint path, and skipped stones across the shallow wrinkled surface of leaf-cluttered water. She ignored subsequent suggestions of activities. It takes at least one walk a day and always looks a little surprised she hasn't gone anywhere, is still picking at the arm of the chair in her bedroom or dully watching the hearth's fire when it returns. She cannot determine whether it is proud of her loyalty as a slave or disappointed she isn't more of a challenge. What the fifth shifter looks, over anything, is defeated. Exhausted. It looks like him, undeniably, maybe more so than the others because of this tempered energy around it. She can see it out of the corner of her eye one night, its posture in the chair by the hall window awkward and coiled. The book it is reading is a dime-store novel, probably printed around the time such books really only cost a dime. The paper is yellowed and the cover is torn diagonally. It reads almost the entire novel before looking up even once. Then, it gazes out the window at the chilling drisk falling in a haze against the glass. Its fingers thrum the book's broken spine. After a long time, it looks down at the book in its lap, and it rubs its eye carefully. It sits there for hours it seems, head bent, before finally going to bed, the door snicking shut behind it. In the early dark hours of the morning, noises like stifled sobs emanate from its room, the sounds creeping through the walls of the house, muffled gaunt and eerie under the blankets she shrouds herself in as she watches her bedroom door, the hallway shadows licking up its face. She sleeps in brief snatches, not wanting to be unconscious too long. She despises waking to those wraithlike noises, sounds too much like the cries in her half-remembered nightmares. She wonders what sort of notes it takes about her. There must be journals, maybe a few video cameras, bugs, tracking devices secreted in the walls and corners, hidden alarms and locks waiting to be tripped. She hasn't investigated, figuring the effort futile. She doesn't really want to know how she looks on film, what the water's spiked with, the new ways in which she can be restrained, prodded, tortured, what its ultimate plans are for her. The notebook she found on her first night has been updated a few times, but the entries are impersonal and vague and in any case she does not think the shifter would be careless in its observations or hypotheses. Considering the others were more than thorough, this one has an equally innovative angle, she supposes, something else to discover about her. The fourth shifter could hear every thought in her head - sometimes it would laugh out loud, mirthlessly - but the third told her once that thoughts were an inadequate way of judging or predicting someone's actions. As in illustration, it was surprised she cried silently when it carved into her, a sharp speculum inserted between her legs, because, it said, her thoughts were a seared white, inscrutable. It seemed impressed. The fifth shifter has not touched her. Its objective, she guesses, has something to do with convincing her, slowly, that it is him. That would be an interesting study, she thinks, the examination of someone's actions as a memory is debunked. The study of dying is ripe with possibilities. She asks the fifth shifter about this at dinner one evening. Its fork clatters on the table. She suspects it is startled by the mere presence of her voice; she hasn't spoken to it at all since she arrived. Its eyes are very worried. It is probably anxious about job security, test results, that sort of thing. It has not mentioned a sixth shifter, but she assumes there will be one eventually. She never stays with one very long. "What?" he chokes. "If I say that I believe you're him, what happens then?" It shakes its head. "I don't understand. Him who?" "Him. You know. My friend. The one your... kind helped kill. I'm part of an experiment borne of boredom, am I not? An idle infatuation? I was the enemy and now I'm a slave and none of you seem to have enough to do. You're just staying low-key, I guess. One atrocity at a time, pretty simple. Something to pass the time until another rebellion is formed." It is blanched ashen - it is probably appalled at her behavior. A good slave should never speak to a master like this. "I just want to know," she says, "what happens if I believe he's still alive. What magic rabbit do you pull out of your hat to dampen my spirits, rain on my parade, make me bleed a little more? Is there footage of his death, video spliced and edited to most effectively confirm his actual demise?" She is smiling, ice tightening her chest, making her head hurt. It looks at her as though she has struck it, and then it drops its gaze to the table, and its eyes close briefly. When it raises its head, its eyes are wet and green and for a second, just a second, it is him, entirely him, his broken gorgeous heart right there, right there-- No. It is biting back tears - it is very good, she thinks, very compelling - and it asks, quietly, "How did he die?" And she puts her hands on the table and begins to speak because, she thinks, in spite of everything she may as well keep telling the truth, even if it kills her. The pronoun confusion is not lost on her. - - - He focuses on his hands on the table top, wills his breathing shallow and silent. Her voice is a splintery thing, a screamed-sore ache. Since her arrival, she's been a ghost in the house, all milk-thin skin and shock-red hair. The resignation in her at first made him want to hit something, and hard, made him want to build roaring fires and let the sparks flick out and ignite the living room carpet, bury them. Now she is speaking as though hypnotized by the pain of recollection, and sickness sinks inside him. Her rusty voice flattens, diminishes. She seems to be turning the words over carefully in her mind, cautious that they might betray her, reveal too precisely what she isn't saying. "The emergency exit door was open," she says. "I walked inside like a fool - disregarded all my training, all my knowledge of how these people operate. I didn't call for backup. I had one gun and he'd been missing for two days." Me, Mulder thinks. That was me. Wasn't it? He hadn't meant to be gone so long, searching, and the police investigators working with him swore they had told her where he was going. "The auditorium was empty, most of the lights were out, and the backstage area was cluttered with orchestra chairs and music stands, and I remember thinking how odd it was to be back there when no-one was around. The concert we'd attended, the contact we had to meet-- hundreds of people attended the performance. I knew one of the quartet's cellists from college and I snuck backstage to say hello, when I thought it was safe before the meeting, and there were dozens of musicians shuffling back and forth, dozens of instrument cases and stage-hands. "The auditorium felt so wrong when it was empty." He looks up when she pauses, and her face is drawn and turned away. "Scully?" he asks softly. "Don't call me that," she hisses, yanking her hand off the table. "You have no right, none," and she moves back quickly, as though certain he will strike her. "I'm sorry," he murmurs. "You're right." Trying to placate, he moves back himself, putting more distance between them, the safety of space. He wants to hold her more than he's ever wanted anything in his life. "You have no right," she repeats, her words weak and fear-filled. "The auditorium was empty - he wasn't there, I thought he'd be there, and there was nothing. "The exit sign at the end of the hallway glowed hell-red, and whatever instinct told me to go back to the auditorium told me to get out immediately, and I ran and pushed the door open and ran out onto the parking lot behind the building. "People had been eradicated from the world. That's what it felt like. No cars or planes going by, no partying students dribbling through the streets, no dogs barking, no movement, not even wind. Ten o'clock at night and everything was asleep. "There was a gas station adjacent the parking lot. Bright white gas station like a single light bulb in the pitch black room of the world. "Poetic, isn't it?" she smiles horribly. Now the dread is creeping up his body, static-clinging to his nerves. He thinks he may get very sick. Something awful is going to be said. She's going to tell him everything. "The sky boiled," she says. She says, "It boiled kelly green like your blood. It boiled and roiled and bubbled, and as soon as it rolled back to black the auditorium exploded behind me. "Fire, fire everywhere. "They came out of no-where, I never saw them coming, they grabbed me and I felt a needle puncture my arm and the spike of the drugs and they dragged me toward the fire, and two other shifters were dragging him towards us, and they forced us both down on our knees," she says. And he does know how this part of the story ends and tears prick the backs of his eyes and his head hurts and he doesn't want to listen. She says, her voice barely audible, "They hit him. I could hear the crack over the fire. They hit him and hit him and hit him. Every crack sounded just like a log splitting. Did you know that? "They stopped and he was dying and there was blood on his shirt, trickling down his arm, blood underneath him leaking out and the puddle - you'll love this - the puddle grew so large I could see the flames in the rubble behind us-- I could see the reflection of fire in his blood." And she laughs once, wiping her mouth with her fingertips and letting unnoticed tears fall onto the table. "Did you know," she says confidentially, "did you know that dririmancy is the practice of divining the future by observing dripping blood? "He told me that once," she says. The room is tilting beneath him. He closes his eyes against the crazy glinting spin, and when he reopens them she is sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, and her arms around them like a vice. She says, "He was dying. He was dying and broken and they wouldn't let me touch him. "He died," she whispers. "I saw him take his last breath and the shifters carried me into a van and there were police cars and fire engines arriving on the scene by then, screeching into the lot. There was a chase but they couldn't catch us and his body was left in the parking lot and I could hear the cracks of his bones, could smell the blood." That's where I was killed, he thinks. That's where I died. She stands up from her chair and walks out of the room, grief measuring her movements. He stays at the table, looks at the forgotten food, the fork on its side. He didn't die, technically. Especially considering he'd been one of the law enforcement officials who pulled into the parking lot just in time to see Scully being towed into an unmarked van that disappeared off a county road twelve minutes into a high-speed chase. The van was recovered from a ravine the next morning. Blood staining one of the seats was positively identified as belonging to Special Agent Dana Scully, who was, two days afterwards, erased from existence. Her family's claims went unanswered, unresolved. The body of a man who had once looked vaguely similar to Special Agent Fox Mulder, the body beaten beyond recognition in the parking lot, was never identified. Two days later, Fox Mulder was expunged from the world, as his partner had been. Tonight, he sits at his table in the wrong world until he trusts himself not to vomit upon standing. He slips into her bedroom and tiptoes to her bedside. He brushes the inside of her wrist with his fingers, feels the sweet-slow hot pulse there. He touches her only once, and only for a second. He tries not to think that he may lose her yet again, and permanently. His eyes are dry and stinging. He is awake until dawn, her heat echoing across the nerves in his palms as though he's been scalded. - - - End Part Two of Three - - - Part Three of Three Disclaimers, etc. in Part One - - - It has torn up the contract. Pieces are scattered on the floor where she dumped them out of the wooden breadbox a few days ago. It tore up the contract and said she was free to leave at any time, as she had been from the beginning. It seemed discouraged that she merely took the box from it and turned away. The box tipped in her hand and the contract drifted to the floor nonchalantly. There's a new entry in the journal, a small photograph of Scully. On the back, in smeared orange ink, someone has written, "Scully, Vermont Vampires". She remembers the case, but her expression in the photograph is unfamiliar. Her pictorial twin stares directly into the camera, eyes flashing and smile sly. "Frohike says hi," it says, towering over her shoulder. She snaps the journal shut. "Why don't you keep this in your room?" She can sense him shrug. "There's no reason to. I'm not hiding anything." She moves away from it, placing the journal on the bedroom windowsill. "What do you want?" she asks tiredly. "I just thought I'd tell you the guys say hi. They miss you." "So that's where you were this morning, out socializing with the Gunmen?" Her words are acidic, and they're making it nervous apparently. "We try to meet every few months. There's a tentative schedule and if we can, we go into whatever town we've chosen and see who else shows. Frohike was there today." She has no comment. "Do you remember the Vermont vampire case?" She has rebuffed practically every single question it has asked her and she's not much in the mood to start chatting now. But there is a question that's been nagging at her. "Where are we anyway?" This startles it. "I-- I don't know. I've never known. The Gunmen set this up. Maybe they own the house, I don't know. They liquidated all my assets right before... I was captured. They're the ones who bought my freedom, basically. I told them to keep the rest of the money. I don't have a car, I don't have a driver's license. I don't exist. The Gunmen pay the electricity and water bills. The basement's stocked with supplies that should last another year, and I guess I'll ask for some Wal-Mart cash then. I think we estimated that the funds should last for a minimum of ten years. We do what we have to do then, I guess. "There isn't a phone, hell, there's hardly a road back to this property. This land isn't marked on any standard map. I guess there's a town on the other side of the woods but I don't really know. The town five miles down the road has a population of less than one hundred people. Everyone's friendly, but I haven't done much exploring. There aren't many road signs and I haven't asked what the name of the town is, though I assume it's a farming community. Hard times there. Could be the midwest, or anywhere. I haven't picked up a distinct accent, and the cities I've met the Gunmen in have all been oddly devoid of state placements. The names are vague, typical. Brownville, Centre, Green Lake." She's quiet, taking this in. "You still think I'm one of them, don't you?" it asks. "I asked you if you wanted to go today and you wouldn't answer. You still think I'm going to hurt you." Its voice sounds chipped on the last two words. Ah-ha, she thinks. I'm finally really frustrating it. It's going to retaliate. This will all be over soon. She leaves the room, crosses through the kitchen, and goes outside. The air is metallic and drizzly, the wind revving itself aside the house, cutting through the carcasses of flowering bushes. She takes the pebble-laced trail into the forest, noting with abnormal satisfaction that it is following her. It could kill her by the stream, leave her to rot. She thinks she probably wouldn't mind. But it follows her as though they're just on a hike. It pushes into the forest, picks up sticks and pokes at logs and looks around. Takes in the chaotic scenery of the woods. They walk along the edge of the stream. The water makes blurbering noises and wind rattles the treetops in a faster rhythm. "There weren't vampires in Vermont," she says, speaking sourly. Its entire being is suddenly hopeful. A tentative but palpable optimism glows off it. "There _were_ vampires in Vermont. We just didn't find any. Remember that sneak-attack blizzard? The motel was packed - I've never seen so many disgruntled tourists in one spot." Scully responds before she can stop herself. "That family next door to me, with the six kids who kept fighting over the Game Boy-- I thought they were going to knock down a wall." Its voice is excited, pure happiness undisguised. "Oh, or the deputy who kept zipping out of the booth at the restaurant to go 'freshen up' every time we'd start talking about the case? When we were filling out the paperwork afterwards, he told me he wasn't usually that squeamish, but puncture marks really got to him." "He's the guy who believed Langly was a real reporter." "Frohike swears you never gave him back his gloves." "Like I'd keep a pair of fingerless gloves." "They came in handy when the vampires were after us." She and it are talking as though it might be him, and she's amazed at how easy it is to revert to habit. No effort whatsoever, and for the first time in ages she feels whole. "There were no vampires after us. Wolves perhaps, but no vampires." "You think I'd start tossing slushballs at _wolves_? Do I look that stupid?" "I think dropping a weapon while in pursuit of a potential perpetrator is... unwise. Besides which, the wolves were the ones doing the pursuing." "Hmpf. Those were vampires. You were throwing snowballs at them too." "Coyote, possibly. Or really smart dogs." "I smacked one right in the head with a snowball - I'd embedded a rock in it. What a great sound." She rolls her eyes, ready to make a snide comment, but it captures her shoulder roughly, briefly. She spins around, tossed out of the temporary contentment. It's on the ground, groaning, and her heart is going too fast. "Ouch. A lovely trip." It climbs to its feet by holding onto a sapling. The forest feels like a monochrome hallucination, cold and bleak, hollow and ruined, and she wants to run. It has pushed up its left sleeve, revealing the elbow that's skinned, rough red around the edges but not dripping blood yet. Red. Red. She staggers back, rapidly disgusted with herself for her pathetic weakness, for her naivete and idiocy, and enraged at it, for existing at all. "How?" she gasps angrily. "How did you manage this? This-- this-- what a dreadful trick." He straightens out his arm, wincing. "I slipped. It was an accident." "I am not talking about you tripping. I am talking about _this_," and she jerks his arm, twisting it to see the skinned elbow again. "Don't tell me you don't fucking know what I'm talking about. How did you do this?" Her voice has risen to a sore pitch. "Some kind of chemical on your skin, and exposure makes your blood turn red? Or what, transfusions? Trying to make yourself more human? Or like my daughter, part of an end-stage hybridization experiment?" Blood trickles down its arm and almost reaches her crushing grip on his wrist. She lets go abruptly. "Is this how you're supposed to convince me? A little blood-letting and that'll clench the vote and I'll think you're him?" It isn't looking at her, but it swallows and speaks quietly to the ground. "I am him." "You're nothing," she says viciously. "Nothing." She staggers up the muddy drung, her foot catching on a tree root. The hitch slows her for a moment, but she continues. Her vision is off a bit, as though she's peering through old glass, infinitely slow-poured in a window pane, distorting the view slightly. At the top of the path, she blinks, and her eyes burn so badly she whimpers. A long time passes, and it does not come back to the house. At eleven p.m., when sleet is cascading over the dripstones and gutters, she hears the fifth shifter open the porch door and walk into the kitchen. It must light the oil lamp on the counter, and little flickers of gold scurry under her bedroom door. There had been a frozen rainstorm like this almost a year ago, and she had been at Mulder's apartment, feet tucked under a pillow as she stretched out on his couch. He sat in the chair at the desk, explaining all the different means of prognostication people had used over the years. He was fascinated with the topic that evening even though they'd talked about it before. He had a new dictionary on the parapsychic. Tea lights arranged on a saucer burned on his coffee table and his hands cast monstrous spider-shaped shadows on the walls. The shadows loomed and whipped darkly around the room, but his actual hands were bronze and animated and she found herself mesmerized by them. She could hear the sleet spinning silver outside the apartment, a white noise backdrop for his voice. She was sleepy, but amused. Her thoughts wandered and listed but always came back to focus on him, and he was saying, "...And before there was the highly respected field of meteorology, there was aeromancy. What did you dream last night?" "Excuse me?" He grinned a little, his eyes locked on hers. "What did you dream about last night? Any idea?" She shook her head with a smile, trying to keep up. "Um, I dreamt I was at a bar in this really sleazy dress-- " "Ooh." "And there were all of these college students shoved in this hideous blue pleather booth, and they were drinking heavily, of course. And I was talking to two of the guys, and I told the one sipping a glass of wine that he should become a vinologist-- " "Pardon?" "Connoisseur of wines." "Oh." "And I told the other guy that there was a college I knew about that specialized in zymurgy, and he seemed impressed. Then I woke up." "Zymurgy? The, uh, um," he snapped his fingers, face screwed in concentration. "The chemistry of brewing and distilling." Mulder looked at her blankly for a second. "You use words like zymurgy in your dreams?" "Well, yeah." "Wow," he said, sounding dazzled. "What's your point?" "About what?" "Why'd you ask me what I dreamt?" He was watching her like he thought she might start saving the world at any minute, like he was waiting for her to break into song or produce fairies out of thin air. "Mulder?" "Oh! Dreams. Divination by dreams was called oneirocriticism. Guess you'll be going bar-hopping soon." She smirked. "I doubt it. On the other hand, think of all the dreams you've had that've seemed to come true." "Same goes for you, you know." "Only a few." "Still." They kept talking, for hours it seemed, about future landscapes plotted in sleep, and visions that made people go mad, and the great history of clairvoyants and mystics and oracles. He ended up on the couch, his feet propped next to the candles. "You're going to set your socks on fire." "I'll just smother them with your blanket. My blanket. Whatever." By that point she was fully curled beneath an old twin bedspread he'd produced from a closet, and she was sleepier and sleepier while at the same time wide awake and watching him. "You'll have to wrestle it away from me first." He leaned over until he was close enough that he barely had to say the words for her to hear them. "I think that can be arranged." Then they were silent for a while, staring at the candle. "Fire's pretty," she said, yawning. "Gorgeous," he said. "It is," she insisted. "There's even a term for fire-worship - pyrolatry. Look that up in your dictionary. Fire's lovely when it isn't destroying something." "I agree with you. It is gorgeous. One of the most beautiful shades I can think of." He paused. "Your hair is fire." She snorted delicately. "Sorry," he said with a small smile of chagrin. "I guess everyone tells you that, huh?" "You hadn't," she said softly. He touched her then, grazing the backs of his fingers over her cheek, and she felt herself slide closer to sleep. She blinked her eyes open and looked at him. He was almost asleep too. She rearranged the blanket so that it covered both of them quite a lot. Returning to the means of prophesy topic, Mulder mumbled, "Divination by means of ashes was called tephromancy." He stopped talking, and yawned. "People sometimes use flame to divine the future, right?" she asked in her sleep-slurred voice, her face half-pressed against his leg. "Sure," he said. And then it was silent until morning, and by that time she'd forgotten the question and he'd forgotten to give an answer. Now Scully rises from her dark bed, and opens the door, and goes into the kitchen. "We had a discussion once, he and I," she says. It nods for her to continue. "I asked him what divination by flame was called." "Lampadomany," it replies flatly. "Do you have all his memories? Is that one of the things you can do? Did you steal _everything_?" she asks, feeling breathless and hysterical and missing Mulder so much she's almost weeping. It shakes its head feebly, and its eyes are bright and sorrowful. "No," it whispers. "No." "Why should I believe you're him? Tell me. Give me some definitive proof. Give me something they couldn't have tainted." But it shakes its head again, and closes its eyes, and takes a shuddering breath. "I can't," it says. As it stands and pushes in the table chair, it says, softly, "But he loved you more than you will ever know. I can't pervert that. Nothing can." Scully does not sleep this night. And she doesn't think it does either. - - - She left this morning. She took a bag, her few clothes. All other items remain in her bedroom. He won't go in there. It smells like her. He's just waiting now. It takes a long time for a person to starve to death, but he can wait. He's good at it. She stood and watched him a long time, her hand on the doorknob. She was searching, making her final decision about him, and he wanted to grab her, shake her, force her to look directly into his eyes. He wanted to scream, "I'm Mulder. I'm him. Please. Please see me." She looked frail and abandoned and beautiful, and underneath the vulnerability he knew she was still the strongest person he'd ever known. He knew it was probably best she leave, get as far away from him as possible. She looked by turns stricken and heartbroken, and for a few oppressive seconds she seemed to be changing her mind. Then her eyes darkened and he knew she had decided that he was what she'd thought all along, that he was unquestionably the enemy, someone to escape. She was waiting, he realized, for him to change. To show his true face as a shifter. But she graced him with a small goodbye wave, and her eyes softened. And she was gone. I can't do this, he tells himself. I can't. The fire pops and wheezes. He's sitting right in front of it and he can't get warm. Shock, he thinks idly. You're going into shock. Just waiting, he thinks. What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite. He remembers Scully telling him that joke as they lurched around his motel room, flinging off snowy shoes and coats, tossing icy weapons on the bed and diving for the mini-bar of snack foods and ludicrously expensive bottles of whiskey. That evening ended in an alcoholic burn, but they laughed a lot and the hangovers weren't too bad and they had another day before more lethally-drained victims were located. Occasionally over the last months, he thought he missed the cases the most from his old life, since Scully was here in the new world, the one right thing here. So he couldn't miss her - he had her. So occasionally, he missed being in the middle of a case, in the middle of the action, the musty scents of motel rooms, the belligerence of local authorities, Skinner's roar, the weight of a gun on his hip, in his hand. More and more though, Mulder missed Scully like he did each time she was taken. The horror was too fresh this time; he could remember too well what it was like when she was dragged away by the shifters, who convinced her that thereafter everyone who looked like him would be one of them. Who made her suffer her again in ways he didn't want to contemplate. Why should he miss her? He'd found her. He couldn't touch her. He couldn't-- she didn't know him. Didn't believe. Mulder was dead. I was a stranger, he thinks. I was her most awful fear realized. She was right here, and he couldn't reach her. He'd dreamt of seeing her struggle against the shifters' arms, fire surrounding them. She struggled and shrieked and fought, laboring to get to him, the bloody body on the pavement, crushed and dead and sizzling. Fire-blood. The dream-Scully cried and cried and he ran to her, holding her as she howled and scratched and dug her nails into him. She slapped him and spit and kicked. She was fire and she turned to ash. He shambles into his bedroom when the hearth cools, bathing the house in absolute darkness. He's cold. He buckles under the pain, and slumps to the floor. Just waiting. - - - Friendship, Minnesota is the kind of town where the general store is the main attraction. She's been walking around aimlessly for hours, unsure what to do next, where to go. Scully hugs her bag closer to her chest and sits down on the wooden bench under Switch Line Grocery's blinking yellow and green sign. Her teeth almost chatter. She misses him. Her lip trembles and she chides herself, praying he's in a better place, praying he's safe in the afterlife she needs to believe exists. She's getting away, she'll be fine. I'll be fine, she thinks. But the words aren't very persuasive. The store sign blips off, and a middle-aged woman comes out the store door, keys rattling. She closes the door and locks it. She sees Scully and smiles hello. "We're closed, sorry. Were you here for the scrapbook workshop? We're having another this weekend." "Scrapbooks?" Scully asks, her throat tender. "Big new craze. You take all your pictures and mementos and slap 'em in a big journal. And there're all sorts of stickers and background sheets you can use. You can make a real keepsake for not much money. I've been making one of my granddaughter for my son to give her after I'm gone." The woman must see something in Scully's expression. "You're not from here, are you?" "No," Scully says absently. The journal. I left the journal behind. Why'd I do that? "Miss?" the woman asks. "I'm sorry," Scully says. "No, I'm not from here. I was resting for a minute. I've been walking. I'll be going now. Sorry to bother you." "Not a bother, dear. Not a bother. Have a nice evening. And get home soon, dear," the woman laughs, "it's freezing out here! I'm sure somebody's waiting for you, aren't they? Yes, ma'am, someone'll be glad you see you tonight. Keep warm, dear," and the woman climbs into her truck. Scully dashes off the porch before the beams from the headlights hit the storefront. She races out of town, shoes skidding on the pavement. She thinks she can sprint a good portion back to the house in half an hour. The slap of her shoes engulfs her thoughts, and her lungs feel like they're going to burst. But she has to get the journal. Why'd I leave it? she thinks. The road is a deep navy line swathed in creepy grey shadows, and on either side the woods are a mizmaze of moonlight-dotted black-greens. Clouds are tumbling overhead, blowing in from the east, cold wind diving down between trees, slicing along the street. It's unsettling, running this stretch of overgrown road in the escalating night. Her mind clears with terror. Why'd I leave it? It. It, what? The journal. The journal is its. What is it? Who is it, she corrects herself. What if-- ? Tired, she thinks. I'm so tired, so scared. So tired of being scared. I miss you, she thinks, seeing the house around a curve, set back from the road. The house is a small black blot book-ended by the cherry and crabapple trees whose branches thrash in the sharp night wind. It's waiting for me, she thinks. The back door is unlocked, and she walks into the kitchen, setting her bag on the counter. There is no noise, no movement. "Hello?" she calls out, stepping into the hallway. She walks to its bedroom door, which has been left open just a crack. Cold air drifts into the hallway like a phantom of nightmares, icy and graveyard quiet. She pushes her way inside the room. "Hello?" she asks again, the word diminished to a startled gasp on the last syllable when she sees it. It is sitting in front of the window whose pane is fractured, the glass weakened by the fickle weather and this latest severe temperature drop. The room flutters with the thieving wind, and it takes her a long minute to distinguish the wind from another softer, more haunted sound. It is sitting on the floor with its shoulders hunched and its head dropped forward and its face in its hands; it is sitting as though trying to collapse into the smallest possible shape, trying to disappear. It is rocking slightly as though hurt beyond any comfort, and something desolate, lost and terrible emanates from it. It is no larger than it was when she left. At first, all she can think is that it's dying, and she is surprised to discover that the thought scares her. She moves to it, placing her hand lightly on its shoulder. Her fingers graze beneath its t-shirt collar, where it is warm. Warm. She kneels on her suddenly shaky legs, kneels beside it and draws her hands up its bare arms. Something like a cry lurches inside her lungs when she sees its face, its clenched-shut eyes. Its lashes are wet and black. She moves closer, cupping its jaw and smoothing her thumb over one wet cheekbone. It opens its eyes and the fear in them is wracking and unbearably sad and, Oh, God, she thinks. Oh my God. He whispers, over and over, "It's me, Scully. It's _me_," and his voice is so soft and frightened the words seem dissolved by tears. She cannot wrap herself around him quickly enough. He pulls her into his lap with such trembling strength she's unable to do anything but let him. His face is turned into her hair and his hands are gentle along the length of her spine and he's warm, warm, he's him, alive, and she holds him, trying to keep from sobbing her reply. "Mulder, it's me," she whispers brokenly. "It's me, too." - - - An end. - - - "And pain's derisive hand had given me rest From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing." - Louise Bogan - - - Improv Elements (Thanks, guys. ) * Mulder losing his gun (again) on a case somewhere snowy, and defending himself with snowballs instead. From: Lori Daul * A tango. From: Ambress * Scully wearing a pair of Frohike's fingerless gloves. From: Maria Nicole * Scully having a call waiting and it turns out to be Richard Gere who she met while on set. From: X-File_Addict * Mulder getting a pedicure. From: Prianka Nandy * Mulder, Scully and Skinner in a hot tub. Suits are optional. From: dksm (Hey, they said I could use the elements any way I chose. ::blinking innocently::) - - - End Part Three of Three