Insert Standard Disclaimer Here:  The characters in this story are,
unfortunately, not mine.  I've kidnapped CC's intruiging characters and
tried to make them my own.  However, the personalities belong to 10/13 and
Fox.

This story follows the episode "Grotesque".  I know that the episode in
question aired quite awhile ago; but I'm still trying to rid myself of my
obsession with it.
Please comment.

Gratuitous thank-yous to Valerie, who by now should be sick of this story!



"The Palpable Obscure"
by Amy Watson (99watso2@lab.cc.wmich.edu)
May 1996

	It had worsened by the hour.
	I'd thought things had gotten as bad as they could get on that
damn Mostov case.  My partner avoided me at all costs, disappearing for
days only to turn up at the crime scene; only bothering to call after he'd
been assaulted.  Then he'd bolted.
	Patterson told me I had to stand back, that I couldn't stop
Mulder from doing what he had to do.  I tried to be understanding; but
he'd scared the living shit out of me.  When he answered Neimhauser's
cell phone in that odd, disembodied voice he'd picked up after being
attacked...those pictures in his apartment...
	I'll admit, I'd had doubts.  They embarrass me now.  I couldn't
understand then; and I'm beginning to believe I never will.  That eerie
sixth sense; the faraway cast to his eyes when he says things he couldn't
possibly know. In my sister's case that talent had seemed somehow natural,
just an inherent part of her personality; but with Mulder... it's
unsettling.  Maybe the difference is that Missy had always felt at home
with her gift, never hiding how she just *knew* things, never making
excuses.  Mulder seems both seductively fascinated with and terrified by
his ability.
	Even after all these years doing what has made him moderately
famous-within the Bureau anyway- he still insists that his eidetic memory
is his only peculiarity; still backs up his supernatural leaps of logic
with perfectly natural explanations.  He won't admit he has a sort of
*sight* that most people lack.  So willing to search it out in others;
but so determined it not be found in himself.  And I'm supposed to be the
skeptic here.  I can't believe what I just proposed... my partner, a
psychic?
	That description isn't quite correct, though.  Mulder's about as
clarvoyent as the Stupendous Yappi, when you get right down to it.  I
don't know how to explain him; the way he thinks is so foreign to me.  I
was taught in medical school the art of clinical detachment.  This
detachment is essential in all fields of medicine for survival; but it's
especially important in pathology.  Sometimes I wonder if I miss things
by removing myself so thoroughly; but it's been ingrained in me to the
point where it's nearly impossible not to do so.  Especially on the cases
Mulder and I come up against.
	Where I distance myself from the facts to get a broad view and to
remain sane; Mulder completely immerses himself in them to the exclusion
of all else.  Even the slightest minutiae of information doesn't escape
him, it's all stored and cataloged for later retrieval.  He not only
manages to worm his way into the minds of the suspect he seeks; but
somehow into those of each of the victims as well.  There's something
almost unnatural in the way he can submerge himself so deeply... how does
he find his way back?
	I constantly fear that his identification with one or the other
will go too far... the Lucy Householder fiasco haunts our relationship
even months after the case was closed and filed.  I realized later how my
distance, what I'd said then hurt him; but what could I have done
differently?  Then, as now, I was struggling to keep him anchored in the
here-and-now.  I know that what Patterson had tried to give me the night
I accused him of manipulating my partner was a warning.  There's nothing I
*can* do to stop Mulder.  I can't save him from himself.  It's not my
place to even try.

	Following his confrontation with Patterson, Mulder insisted on
riding in the ambulance to the hospital.  Whether it was to make sure his
former boss made it or to prove to himself that he'd been right, I don't'
know.  I found him standing stiffly in the ER lobby, dark hair still
plastered to his skull from the drizzle outside, his face ashen.  He
flinched when I spoke his name.  His eyes were blank when they finally
met mine.
	"Come on."  I commanded, pulling him away from the emergency room
doors.
	He followed me out to the parking lot wordlessly, shivering
involuntarily as I paused to unlock my car.  I restrained myself from
buttoning his overcoat for him when he failed to do so himself.  His
obliviousness to his surroundings was beginning to unnerve me.  As if his
behavior over the past few days hadn't.
	"Get in the car, Mulder."
	The phrase clicked in the back of my mind, making an association
I was unprepared to deal with.  That vacant stare.  It was eerily akin
to his condition the morning I picked him up from Ellen's Air Force
Base eons ago.  But then he'd been drugged out of his mind.  There was
no somatic reason for it now.  He obeyed me just as he had at the Base;
only this time he didn't turn to me as we drove off, didn't make a
sound.  The silence alarmed me.
	"Mulder?" I had to repeat his name three times before those
hollow eyes shifted from the blur of the road to my face.
	"Are you alright?"
	It was an inane question that I already knew the answer to; but I
despirately needed him to speak.  He shrugged and his eyes slid back to
the road.  I risked a quick once-over of him, noticed that his hands were
trembling.  I wasn't sure he was even aware of it himself.  The hard
decision I had been mulling over during the drive was suddenly no longer
even a question in my mind.
	Mulder didn't react when I pulled into the lot of an all-night
pharmacy; nor when I returned to the car with a little white paper bag.
His stare remained fixed on the night outside.  Mulder's apartment still
wore that horrific...wallpaper; and I couldn't face it right then.  I
knew I'd made the right decision when my partner failed to even blink as
I pulled into the drive of my own apartment complex.

	"What are these?"
	The first words he'd spoken since I picked him up from GWU over
an hour ago.  I'd managed to strip him of his suit coat and tie; and had
handed him a glass of water and the small pills just before he spoke.
His voice was disturbingly distant, as if he was speaking to me through a
thick fog.
	"A sedative."  I said simply, my even gaze compensating for the
doubt I was beginning to grapple with as a result of my boldness.  Mulder
would never agree to it, I had told myself while waiting for the
prescription to be filled.  But this man before me wasn't quite Mulder
anymore.  Mostov and Patterson and those fucking gargoyles had stolen
something from him.
	I found myself silently willing him to hurl the pills against my
wall; to at least show a hint of indignation at my presumptuousness.  I
wanted him to be furious with me; at the very least he could attempt to
crack a lame joke about the whole situation.  He did none of those
things.  Just stood there staring at the medication.
	"Oh." he finally replied.
	*Oh?* I sighed heavily, sinking down onto my couch.
	"You think I need to take these." he stated tonelessly, still
focused on the pills.
	"Yes, I do, Mulder." I answered more tersely than I'd intended.
When he didn't respond, I abruptly stood and paced the living room, began
babbling nervously.
	"You obviously haven't slept since this whole thing started.  You
look like you're on the far side of collapse.  You need some rest, Mulder."
	He finally turned my way and really looked at me.
	"And you think these will help?"
	Somehow I forced myself to hold that hollow gaze.
	"Would you sleep on your own?"  I asked pointedly.  His failure
to respond was all the answer I needed.
	"You've never done this before." he stated flatly after a long
silence.  I shook my head.
	"Even when you knew I wouldn't sleep, you haven't done this
before."  His voice didn't hold enough expression to be accusatory.
	"No," I agreed quietly, "I haven't."
	He refrained from taking the next logical step- asking why.  I
don't think he wanted to hear the answer, even if I had an answer to give.
	"If I don't take them?" he asked nervously, as if in the dark as
to what my reply would be.  His hand curled into a fist around the little
pills.
	I sighed wearily, flopping back onto the couch.  My partner stood
rooted to the same spot he'd occupied since I'd handed him the drugs.
	"You're a grown man, Mulder; never mind the fact that you're
twice my size.  How could I possibly force you to do anything?  Sick my
dog on you?"
	I rubbed my eyes tiredly when my stupid attempt at humour slid
unnoticed past him.  He looked down at me again, and this time I could
have sworn I saw a glint of fear in the back of his eyes.
	"But you think I should."  He repeated raggedly.
	I suddenly caught a hint of what was going on here; although I
still had the disoriented feeling that  my partner was reliving a
conversation he'd had with someone else in another time.  I wasn't sure
how to answer anymore.
	"It's just a mild sedative, Mulder.  To help you get a full
night's sleep after..."  I paused, floundering, "I'll probably take one
myself."
	He shook his head slowly, eyes darting around my living room
before settling back on my face.
	"Look, you don't have to take them-"  I started, misunderstanding
his actions.
	He backed away from me a few steps, then carefully took a seat on
the edge of an armchair.  I fell silent, waiting to see what he'd do.  I
half expected him to bolt again; to walk out of my apartment without his
coat, without another word to me.  But he was no longer even the Mulder
who not so long ago had stalked away from a shocked paramedic outside
Mostov's hideout without a word of thanks.  I had no idea who this man
sitting across from me was, and that frightened me more than his bizarre
actions of the last few days.  Perhaps this was a Mulder who had existed
before I was assigned to the X-Files.  The tarnished Golden Boy.
	Whoever he was, the Mulder in my living room that night gave me
one last searching scrutiny and then swallowed the pills.  Dry.  Just
like that.  Whether he did so because I wanted him to or because of some
private motive, I'll never know.  I didn't dare ask.  Because maybe this
time he would give *me* an answer.

	After swallowing the medication I'd given him, Mulder sat
motionless for so long I nearly drifted off.  Then he suddenly bolted out
of the chair and began pacing the room, his movements jerky and
agitated.  I began to think the sedative was going to have no effect on him.
	"Sometimes it was like I was a ghost.  For so long I was a
ghost.  Until I began to prefer it that way.  It was so much easier."
	The words tumbled out was he paused at my window.  He yanked the
curtain aside to peer out at the night and then abruptly resumed his pacing.
	"It was the constant barrage of anger...they were so silent; but
it was there.  Kids can sense stuff like that.  And I always had a knack
for sensing things."
	His hurried voice took on a bitter tone.  His elbow slammed into
the corner of a bookcase but he kept on walking as if he hadn't felt
it.   I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about.  I was too busy
berating myself for not choosing a stronger drug to bother deciphering
his monologue.
	"I think that's what pissed Patterson off the most.  Even back
then I sensed what was happening to him, at least the seeds of it.  I
didn't see it in myself until it was almost too late."
	I had no way of knowing whether Mulder was speaking to me or just
talking aloud to himself.  He'd given me no indication he even knew I was
listening.  He perched on the edge of my desk, briefly silent.  I watched
warily as his eyes flickered nervously to the dim corners of the room.
His hands had started quivering again, and this time he did notice.  He
shoved them roughly into his pockets and glanced sharply in my direction
to see if I had caught it.  I didn't try to hide my concern and fear for
him when I met his gaze.  He flinched and quickly broke eye contact, as
if the sight of my unveiled emotions had been a slap in the face.
	He hopped off of my desk and his pacing seemed to grow more
frantic.  He could no longer hold back the naked terror that filled his
eyes and tempered his voice.  What was he so afraid of?  Sleep?  I had always
suspected that he suffered from recurring nightmares under normal
circumstances; but he'd never behaved this way.
	"I realized during one of my last cases with Patterson's unit
what was happening to me.  It was like a drug addiction: in order to keep
up the 'spookiness' expected of my profiles, I had to go deeper and
deeper; and with every case solved there was less of me left to drag
back."  My partner bit his lip, caught momentarily by some recollection.
	I was beginning to follow his fractured soliloquy; although his
thoughts seemed to skitter away from him even as he forced the words
out.  His stride gradually slowed until he stood in the middle of the
floor once more.
	"I was terrified of fading any more, of becoming a ghost again.
It would have been so easy to just let go... Patterson never understood
that."
	Mulder's voice was suddenly weary.  He took a staggering step
toward me and then halted.  Although drooping heavily with fatigue, his
eyes focused steadily on me.
	"It frightened you, didn't it?"  He asked softly.
	I raised my head, bewildered.
	"What did, Mulder?"
	He sighed, rubbing his forehead as if it ached.
	"This case."  He looked away, toward the windows.  "I frightened you."
	I considered this carefully.  After the rambling diatribe of the
previous few minutes I was unprepared to discuss the reason I'd brought
him here in the first place.
	"Your behavior disturbed me."  I admitted uneasily, "Many of your
actions were out of character..."
	He turned away for a moment, as if searching for support among
the trinkets on my bookcase.  I fumed silently as his gaze skimmed over
glass figurines and gilt picture frames.  Didn't he realize that this
case had left me thankful that I hadn't yet acquired a streak of white
hair a la Bonnie Raitt?  Twirling a short lock distractedly, I caught him
gauging me covertly.  Though his expression was still closed to me, I
could read the minute hints of his thoughts reflected in his eyes.  Despite
the withdrawn, downright disoriented aura my partner had projected
throughout this case; I realized he'd known exactly what me suspicions
were.  The *bastard*.
	Mulder resumed his quiet perusal of my bookcase as my eyes
narrowed in a sudden, bewildered anger.  I rocked forward, planting my
elbows on my knees; but before I could give him the verbal scalding that
had been bubbling up inside me for hours he whirled to face me again.  A
small porcelain statuette of the Virgin Mary lay cradled in Mulder's
palm.  It had been crafted to hold a tiny vial of holy water from some
shrine my great-grandmother had visited in Ireland a half-century before
my birth.  The water, however holy it had originally been, had long since
evaporated.
	"Have you ever seen 'The Exorcist'?"  he asked, absently
fingering the empty glass vial.
	Somehow I held back the shudder his question invoked.  I wondered
if Mulder- a non-Catholic to say the least- knew what horrors that movie
was capable of inspiring in someone who had grown up in the Church.  I
nodded.
	"I never want to see it again."  I replied forcefully.
	*Now* where was this conversation going?  My partner's eyelids
slid shut and I watched him physically struggle to drag them back open.
The drugs had to be hitting him pretty hard by now.
	"Patterson thought I could exorcise him."  Mulder said grimly,
gaze fixed on the Virgin.  "I couldn't do it without..."
	He swayed ever so slightly with exhaustion and reached for the
bookcase to steady himself.  Crossing to him, I gently pried the Virgin
from his hand and returned her to her place on the bookcase.
	"Not without falling... into the trap he never even saw."
	I found his eyes, and they were no longer void of life.  The
flat, alien grey of the past few days had been replaced with a drained
hazel, cloudy with weariness and muddied by the sedative; but familiar
none the less.
	"I know."  I said softly.  And I did, in some way.  While I
can't pretend that I'll ever completely comprehend this dark, nearly
self-destructive journey my partner is compelled to undertake on these
cases; I think that night I sort of came to grips with it.  I couldn't
tell you why.  Mulder was more cryptic even than usual; it took me days
to digest and decipher what he'd said in my living room, to make any
sense out of it.  That's the thing about Mulder that rattles just
about everyone he comes into contact with: no matter how disjointed, how
abstruse whatever he tells you is, it always makes sense later.
	"He'd listened To it so long he couldn't tell the difference
between it's thoughts and his own."  Mulder said.  I wasn't sure whether
he was referring to Patterson or to himself anymore.  From a foot away
the barely healed scar that marred his face melded with the other lines
deepening around his eyes.  Lines.  Mulder was all angles and lines,
holding himself rigid by sheer stubbornness to keep himself standing.
	"You're tired, Mulder."  I said gently.
	He nodded once, a slow jerk of his head.  It was an admittance of
some kind; and by that point I was thankful for even that small gesture,
for any evidence that my partner was still aware of the demands of human
flesh.  Mulder shifted his weight, swaying closer to me.  He looked down
at me with glazed, heavy lidded eyes, tracing the lines in my own face.
	"Don't think I could drive home."  He slurred sleepily, gaze
sliding from me.
	"Even if I'd let you, Mulder, your car is back at the
warehouse."  I pointed out mildly.
	He muttered an acknowledgement and began to drift toward the
couch.  I intercepted him, steered him toward the bedroom instead.  He didn't
 question me.  Figuring I only had a few minutes left before this all
became way more complicated than I could handle at 4 o'clock in the
morning, I prodded my stumbling partner on before me.  I hadn't
exaggerated when I'd said Mulder was twice my size; and experience told
me sleeping on the floor would not exactly provide the rest I'd intended
for him.

	Sleep failed to come for me after it consumed my partner.  As I
padded through the dim apartment double checking the locks, my eyes fell
on the abandoned bottle of pills.  It would be so easy.  I swept up the
bottle and its white bag and stared at them for a long time.
	It was probably just a case of the old Spooky paranoia rubbing
off onto me and the late hour; but the thought of both of us locked in
drugged slumber didn't appeal to me.  The door was so thin, the windows
too... fragile.  I buried the sedatives in the back of my medicine
cabinet and stole back into my bedroom to grab some pajamas.  I'm not
sure why I took such pains to keep quiet;  Mulder wouldn't have woken if
I'd been a rampaging bull.  Pausing in front of my dresser, I removed my
discrete gold studs and dropped them into my jewelry case.
	Something glinted silver in the filtered moonlight, and my
fingers searched it out curiously.  Untangling the delicate chain from
costume jewelry, I weighed its thin oval pendant in my palm.  My soft
smile was barely visible in the mirror over the dresser before I turned
to the sleeping form on my bed.
	Very cautiously I bent over my partner, my movements slow and
steady so as to not startle him awake.  When his even breathing didn't
alter at my touch, I boldly continued.  Lifting his head slightly from
the cradle of the pillow, I slipped  the chain around his neck and
secured it awkwardly.  Mulder sighed, his brow furrowed momentarily; then
he relaxed.  I drew back in relief, hovering in the doorway briefly as he
slid back into the darkness.  The silver charm shone dully where it lay
among the sheets wadded loosely in Mulder's lax hands.
	Another remnant form my girlhood, a gift from Ahab.  I don't
remember now when I abandoned it in favor of my mother's cross.  The
cross was more neutral, it didn't press your beliefs on innocent
bystanders the way the medallion did.
	Maybe I'll try to explain it to him if he ever asks me; but I
don't think he ever will.  Even though he doesn't believe, he'll know its
significance.
	St. Christopher protect us.

				Finis




*The title was taken from a quote by Milton.

"The Exorcist" belongs to *someone* with a very evil mind. I don't
remember offhand who.  Not to be viewed on a full stomach.



"Beneath these unloved crimes
 Relief is a gentle sigh
 Dissolve these eyes so I may cry..."
		-Siouxsie and the Banshees