Title: Bridge Author: Maria Nicole e-mail: marianicole29@yahoo.com Rating: PG Classification: X Keywords: Mulder/Scully UST (on the shippy end of the spectrum) Distribution: Sure. And (since my e-mail/Internet access is going to be sadly sporadic for the next month--symptoms of fanfic withdrawal rear their ugly head), please feel free to archive without specific permission. If you prefer to link, the full text of the story can be found at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt Spoilers: Field Trip and Folie a Deux, big time. Possible minor spoilers for anything else in US season six. Disclaimer: Not mine, not making money. Summary: Mulder and Scully deal with the aftermath of their little trip from Field Trip, and confront an old case. Bridge Maria Nicole Someone was chanting, and the sound floated upward; Scully recognized the tone before the words, and exhaled in disgust. "Mulder and Scully, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage." "More like the baby alien!" yelled someone, and there was the general sound of laughter. Mulder poked his head out of the small window on the side of the treehouse. "Clever," he called, without rancor. "Really clever. Did someone check with the kid to see if he had anything up here that's missing?" The person who answered was abruptly sober. "He doesn't want to go up there. We might get Mrs. Raines up to see, but the kid's only twelve. And he hasn't been up there for a while, anyway." "Yeah," said Mulder, and pulled his head back in. "You hear that?" he asked her. "That Mike doesn't want to come up? Or the attempt at humor?" Scully asked tartly. He shrugged, twisting around from his knees to a sitting position, legs scrunched up in front of him. "God, I feel like Gulliver in Lilliput," he groused. He looked at her speculatively, and she could tell that he was deciding whether or not to make a comment about her height and Lilliputians. Wisely, he chose not to do so. She could stand, if she hunched over. He could not. He had been doing a good job of making himself as small as possible, compacting himself like a winged insect coming out of flight, but the space was still cramped. Mike Raines hadn't been in his childhood treehouse since the age of eight or nine, he'd said, and it had stood empty until his father had come up here only yesterday. "Harry Raines was taller than I am," said Mulder. "He must have been uncomfortable up here. I wonder why he chose this place." "He was mentally disturbed," said Scully, frowning at the obviousness of that statement. "Who knows why he did anything?" Much less why he had come up here, folding himself into this place like a psychotic Jack-in-the-Box. "I'd like to know," said Mulder simply. "Did you ever have a treehouse?" "At one house we lived in, yes. When I was about six." "What'd it represent to you?" She sat down herself, mirroring his posture. She was against one wall, he against another, but their feet touched. "It was Bill's, really. He and his friends built it. Girls weren't allowed, unless he was really bored." "So it represented what, the forbidden?" "Maybe. Where are you going with this?" "I don't know. Nowhere, probably. Harry Raines wasn't a six-year-old girl. Or a typical boy who didn't want to catch cooties from his sister." She tilted her head back against the rough wood of the treehouse. "So why do you think he did what he did?" "Maybe it's the light," mused Mulder. "The pattern here is suggestive, where the light falls among the shadows. But in all likelihood, if it's what I think it is, this is a small place. A safe place. The windows are small. No one--no thing--could get in here with the trapdoor closed." "There are a lot of places like that." "In his house? No. The windows and doors are too big. And work, work wouldn't be safe, would it?" "You're assuming, Mulder," she said carefully. "You're assuming that Raines fits into the pattern of the other cases. Even if he does, you're assuming that Pincus was...what you claimed he was before." "Aside from safety, this is manmade. The triumph of man over nature. He'd appreciate that. It'd be a sort of metaphorical victory over nature, over the perils of nature." She shook her head. "Even allowing for the moment that you are correct, Pincus wasn't natural." "Insects come from nature." "Not insects that go to work as telemarketers and wear three-piece suits," she said. "And we don't even know that this is related to Pincus. Much less that Pincus was what you claimed he was. You're making assumptions." He rubbed his face against his shoulder, his voice muffled. "You're not going to give me an inch on this, are you?" "I'm up in a treehouse, Mulder, having left the hospital earlier than the doctors thought I should have, on a case that isn't even ours, that the field office here doesn't think is worthwhile because it's basically already solved, with the full knowledge that our boss is going to be really pissed off if he finds out we're on this. I'd call that giving you more than an inch." "Yeah," he said, ruefully. "All right. I'm finished here. You?" "Yes," she said, and started to move to the trap door, to put her foot on the first rung of the ladder, and then she is seven and a hand is reaching out to her shoulder to push her back away from the treehouse and her hand stings as it scrapes off of the rung and she is falling through empty air to the "Hey, Scully? You with me here?" asked Mulder, and she was back in present time, with Mulder looking at her with sympathy in his gaze. "Flashback," she explained, unnecessarily. "You know, I never thought of this as a possible occupational hazard when I was recruited." His mouth quirked. "You never thought of giant mushrooms; I never imagined giant bugs." "The giant mushroom has been proven," she said. "Just because the giant insect hasn't been doesn't mean it doesn't exist," he said, quietly and obstinately. "No," she admitted, "it doesn't. I'm not denying the possibility, Mulder. I'm saying there are others." "It matches, though. Raines talked about a creature who was hiding in plain sight, who was deadening others. Not killing them. Deadening them. The word choice suggests something, don't you think?" "It may. All we know right now is that Harry Raines came home from work one day, disturbed, and then holed up in his son's abandoned treehouse with a pad of paper, a pen, and a rifle. And that when he came down, he gave his wife an envelope to give to the newspapers, went back to his workplace where he started waving a gun around and holding people hostage, and then shot two co-workers because they were, in his words, 'already dead.' And that a third co-worker disarmed him, and in that struggle Raines was shot and killed. Yes, it's suggestive. Yes, it matches Gary Lambert's behavior. But right now, that's all." She could tell, though, that Mulder, having committed himself to one possible trajectory, was going to follow through on it. "So let's go find out more," he said. He gestured to the trap door. "Come on, let's get out of here." She watched him maneuver his long legs through the trap door. He started down the ladder, and then suddenly popped his head back in. "Hey, Scully?" "What?" He grinned. "I just want you to know, if I'd had a treehouse, I would have let you play in it anytime." *** "Make sure to check the back of their necks," he said anxiously when they had arrived at the morgue. He had the grace to flush when she stared at him. "Obviously. What do you think, that I wouldn't--" But he was staring at a point above her head, oblivious, eyes glazed. She sighed and waited until his eyes cleared and he shook his head. "Whoa," he said. "That was...colorful." He looked at her apologetically. "Sorry to zone out on you." "Job hazard," she said, accepting the apology, which she knew had nothing to do with zoning out on her. "Skinner's gonna have our asses for this," she added. "We should both still be in the hospital. Or at the very least, at home, letting the drug work its way out of our system. Not trying to prove an entity that most people would dismiss as a hallucination." "Small steps, Scully. Just see what's in the back of their necks." "While you do what?" she said suspiciously. "I thought I'd go interview the co-worker who took Raines out. And see if there's somebody at the company who looks like Pincus." "No." "What?" "Our last case, you went off on your own to check out a lead, and we both almost ended up dead--" "I couldn't have foreseen getting sucked underground by a magic mushroom," he said defensively. "If you *are* right, Mulder, then this is a threatening situation. The local field office is satisfied that Raines shot those people, it's open and shut, and while they may let me do an autopsy because it saves them time, they aren't going to want to help you out. And you're not at your best. I may not agree that Pincus was a big bug, but he did disappear, and he would be a threat to you. Especially if he's capable of disguising himself as someone else." "I'd recognize him," Mulder said darkly. "In any human guise..." "And if you have a flashback while you're there? If you take someone else for Pincus? You could kill an innocent person. Don't go off without me on this one. Or else I'm going with you to cover your back." "And to make sure that I don't do something stupid?" he asked sarcastically. "Skinner's going to have our asses for this one as is, Mulder. I'd rather not give him an extra reason." She paused. "At the very least, he's going to have your ass." "Do you have to dwell on *that* image?" he asked with a wince, but she could see that his resolve had lessened. She rolled her eyes. "Smartypants," she said affectionately, and touched his arm beneath the elbow. "I'm going to do those autopsies now. You'll stay here?" He touched his other hand briefly to his forehead in a quick, sloppy salute. "Aye, aye, ma'am." She didn't leave him, though, and they stood there for a moment, her hand still on his arm. She hasn't been sure what she's been seeing in his eyes lately, since they woke up in quarantine, reaching blindly for each other's hands. Since they almost died in the fungal mass, she has felt Mulder like a pulse, as if she had had radar installed that informed her always of Mulder's location. To some extent, she'd always felt this way, knowing when he was in danger, but it was as if the mechanism had been switched up a notch. They haven't talked about it, any more than they have talked about the flashbacks or the dreams. She walked to the door, conscious of Mulder's eyes on her, and then turned around. "Scrubs, Mulder?" she asked, and watched amazement bloom in his eyes. She wondered if she was being an idiot, bringing this up now. They kept their distance, several feet apart. His hands were fisted in his pockets, but she felt his presence like a phantom touch of those hands on her skin. "Smart is sexy," he said finally. *** Well. That had been a surprise. He leaned back against the plastic orange couch in the hallway, moving into a reclining position, and stared up at the ceiling. He felt...not quite bruised. More as if he'd been out in the sun too long, and his skin was starting to burn. But then, to him, Scully had always been closest to the element of fire. It was starting to wear off already, he knew, this abnormal closeness that had developed between them while they were trapped in the giant mushroom. In a few days, he and she would be back in their separate bodies and minds, and the memory of their shared hallucinations would fade. He had expected her to ignore the residual closeness until it had passed, until the drug wore its way out of their system. Maybe he had wanted to ignore it too. It had unnerved him when he had begun to suspect that they were sharing dreams. It had unnerved him even more when he had fallen out of a flashback to find that Scully was looking at him with bewilderment. It had scared him shitless when he had realized that the images in his mind when she had a flashback were mainlined straight from hers. Not clearly. The images were pastel and faded, not nearly as clear as his own flashbacks, and they went almost too quickly to isolate specifics, the backwash instead of the rich tide of memory itself. He'd felt her fall, earlier today, had felt her hand trying to grasp for the ladder and clutching only air, had seen the dim impression of faces and hands reaching out to try to catch her. But the feelings had been slightly removed, distant, not the full technicolor dreams of his own flashbacks. Bare glimpses into her mind. And (he felt his face burn) she had gotten a glimpse into his mind, hadn't she? A memory of a younger version of herself, standing in some unidentifiable hallway in hospital scrubs, arguing with him vehemently, and he had not been paying attention solely to her words but to her smell, to the tendrils of hair falling out of her bun, to the way her lips moved when she spoke, to his own longings and fleeting fantasies. She'd been in a fair amount of his flashbacks, one way or another. He wasn't yet sure how he felt about that. He'd been in a fair amount of hers, too. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, either. *** "Well?" He swung his legs down off the couch, and she sat down beside him. "There are definitely marks at the back of the neck. We won't know what they were injected with until the tox screens come back. And time of death is off, maybe. The bodies are decomposed more than I would expect, although not by much. " She rubbed at the back of her neck. "Pincus." "Seemingly," she said, and rolled her neck until he could hear it crack. "Seemingly? Scully, come on," he said, feeling anger rise in him. "Either Pincus or someone like him," she answered. She flexed her fingers. "Or something." "Someone like him?" He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the knotted muscles, and rubbed gently. "You're saying he, or it, might not be an isolated entity? A freak of nature?" "If he's possible, then why wouldn't another one be? Another...God, Mulder, I don't even know what to call it. Insect-man? That sounds like a bad comic book." "I kinda like the alliteration of Bug-Boy, myself. So wait, are you saying you're buying this?" His hands stopped moving in surprise. He saw her eyes close, lashes dark against her face. "As one of the possibilities? Yes. As the most probable one, even." He let his hands drop. "Why this? Why now?" "Why are you questioning this? I thought you wanted me to give you the benefit of the doubt." "Not if it's not..." He sighed, remembering his words to her in the office, what had it been, only a week ago? And remembering with equal clarity the Scully who had stood face to face with an alien in his bedroom, and how he had not accepted her belief then. "It worries me when you start believing," he told her. "It means that I have to play the skeptic then." He saw the shadow of a smile cross her face, and then she leaned back against the sofa, eyes still closed, face washed out, patches of red on her pale skin where the acid had eaten at her face. "I'm trying to follow the evidence on this. Not to leap to any rash conclusions. Mine or yours..." Her eyes met his, suddenly and sharply. "I dreamt, or hallucinated, in that fungus, that you had died, and everyone was accepting the easy explanation for your death, dismissing any possible questions. I don't want to be that close- minded. And you're right, sometimes I have been." "I never said that." She raised her eyebrows slightly. "Not in those exact words, maybe. At any rate, we have the testimony of several eyewitnesses--albeit many of them were also mentally disturbed--that Pincus was, or at least appeared to be, a monster of some insect-like variety. We have the disappearance of several people who were supposedly turned into zombies--" He shook his head. "Not zombies, exactly. Zombification is a fairly specific process associated with voodoo. This is something else altogether." "So what do you want to call them? Little bug-boys?" "Bug-ees. Buggers. The deadened. The ungrateful dead. Deadheads. Hey, yeah...deadheads." She looked like she was struggling to suppress the smile, but it came out anyway. "All right, so we have the disappearance of these deadheads from the previous case. We have two people dead now, with some sort of puncture wound in the back of their neck. Have you considered that you were hallucinating?" "I thought you just said you believed--" She shook her head. "That Pincus injected those people, without a doubt. But what if...you've been assuming that he's a large insect-like creature who can trick others into believing he's human. What if it's the other way around? What if he's a human who can trick others into believing he's a monster?" "Why would he want to do that?" She shrugged. "We know that the ability exists from our experiences with Modell. We *haven't* ever seen a similar creature." "We've seen mutants. The fluke-guy, Tooms, the mothmen. I don't see why Pincus would..." He was stopped as she pushed her hair behind her ear, and he saw the redness of healing skin at the tip, and felt a pang of compunction. He modified his tone. "I'm not saying you're wrong, Scully, or that it isn't a possibility. But I don't know why he would be invested in producing a hallucination of himself as a monster. Surely that would just draw attention to himself, and if you're poisoning people, that isn't the way to go. Why would he?" "Why would Modell confess to those murders? Why does any serial killer commit a crime that gives clues to his identity? Because he's arrogant? Because some part of him wants to be caught? It's just a thought." She sighed and rolled her neck again. "So where do we go from here, hmm? Assuming that Skinner doesn't find out we checked ourselves out of the hospital to come here on the basis of a newspaper article. You do know that he's going to institute an order to keep you away from all forms of media during hospital stays after this." "You'll smuggle the tabloids in to me, won't you, Scully?" "Can't live without your daily horoscope? Anyway, assuming that Skinner doesn't call us back to Washington..." "I want to talk to all the people who were there when Raines went in with his gun. I've been thinking that Pincus--or whatever, if you're right and there are more than one of these creatures--was probably one of the bystanders. Because Raines couldn't have thought that he would get too far after killing two people. He probably would have tried to get Pincus in the room with them before trying anything, like Lambert did. Maybe Pincus was the coworker who killed him, even." She nodded. "Makes sense. We'll do that tomorrow, then?" She was already standing, probably impatient to get to a hotel and get to sleep. He checked his watch. 8 pm, not too late, but then he hadn't done two autopsies... "Tomorrow," he agreed. "Um, Scully?" "Yes?" "About earlier." His face felt hot. He hoped he wasn't blushing. "Mulder, if you're going to apologize, please...don't." She was blushing. "Yes, but..." "I shouldn't have even brought it up." And then she started to walk away, the Scully form of distance, of denial. He let her go, which was his. End 1 of 7 Bridge 2 of 7 If you're missing a part to this story, it can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt He was already sitting in his office when she arrived, throwing pencils at the ceiling. "I was starting to think you weren't coming in," he said. "How could I miss this?" she asked, and sat in the chair across from him, glancing up at the ceiling and then reaching across the desk for some pencils. "You're going to join me in my pencil-throwing fest?" He asked with surprise. "It's not like it's going to cause much damage." She flipped a pencil up and watched it stick, quivering, in the tile. "True. So whose psyche do you think we're in tonight, huh?" "*I* am having a dream." "We're both dreaming," he said. "We're just dreaming together. Come on, you know we are. We have been for the last few nights. You as much as admitted that you're seeing my flashbacks today." "I didn't say anything about sharing dreams," she said, and watched as a pencil slowly tumbled from the ceiling, narrowly missing Mulder's head. "So what would you do, if I asked you tomorrow what you dreamed about? Would you confess to this?" "Would you?" She questioned. "If you're so sure about this, why haven't you asked me?" He looked vaguely discomfited, which pleased her. "I didn't want to press you into believing something you weren't ready for," he said, but the words were slow. She shook her head. "That's never been a problem for you. And if so, why are you pressing me now?" "This *is* just a dream. Like you said. Even if I'm not sure if it's my dream or yours." "Admit it, Mulder, you're not any more comfortable with this whole thing than I am." "You're allowing that there is something to this, then?" She considered, taking the time to send another pencil up in the air. "In your dreams," she said finally, and he laughed, a short bark of appreciation. "About earlier..." he said, and blushed. "Let it go." "But I wouldn't want you to think that...that I don't pay attention to you, or respect you, or..." "Oh, Mulder. I wouldn't think that. I...look. You're a man, I'm a woman, we've worked together for six years, of course we're going to be...distracted, sometimes. I...I take it as a compliment. Nothing to be sorry for." "Mmm...you're dealing with this better than I expected." "What, with the fact that you have the occasional lustful thought about me or--" "Scully!" "With the fact that our minds somehow..." her voice faltered. "That our minds meshed while we were in the mushroom and haven't quite separated yet?" he suggested. "Whatever. I can't deny it bothers me. Aside from the scientific ramifications of it, I don't like the idea of someone being able to rummage inside of my head, even if it's you. Don't take this the wrong way. If I have to be..." she faltered again. "Psychically linked with someone?" "I think this is a little more occasional than a psychic link. However, my point was...I've always been a very private person." "You think this doesn't bother me?" She regarded him curiously. "Does it?" "I don't know. Not really, I guess. It was confusing at first, like stepping into a cubist painting, or a collage, you know? But if anyone's going to read my mind, I'd prefer it to be you." The words were confident, but his face seemed troubled, and she shook her head. "Sometimes I think you're as secretive as you think I am," she said. "Fox Mulder, Man of Mystery..." he grinned at her. "So what do you think we should do in this dream?" "As long as we're in the office, we could look up files pertaining to psychic links." "*That's* an exciting dream." "What do you expect, sex on the desk with Nurse Nancy? Not if this is my psyche." "You're gonna take all the fun out of this. We could actually go outside the office, see what our subconsciouses have waiting for us." He stood up, almost bouncing with impatience. "You're sure you want to see into the depths of either of our subconsciouses?" she asked, but stood. He reached out a hand, and she took it before looking down at their linked hands in bemusement. "We don't want to get separated," he said. "Trust me, you wouldn't want to wander around alone in my subconscious. Ready?" "Lead the way, Man of Mystery." He opened the door, and they stood on the threshold. "Well, it's not the FBI," he said, chewing on his lip and watching the white, flourescent-lighted hallway with wariness, as if he suspected that it might shift before his eyes. Which, of course, it could. "It could be a hospital," she said. "After all, all of our other dreams have been in places we both know. Office, your apartment, whatever. And we've both been to any number of hospitals." "So we'd both have that construct in our subconscious? Okay. I'll buy that." "Nice of you," she murmured, and wondered why they were in a hospital, and if she really wanted to step out into the corridor. "Which ward do you think we're in?" If she had to guess, oncology or maternity. Given the way the rhyme that the other agents had been chanting earlier today had struck in her mind, she would guess maternity, and wouldn't be surprised at grotesque alien-human hybrid babies. "I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't..." he said. "It's only a dream," she said. "It can't hurt us." "If you're ready, then." He sounded like a small child. They both did, she realized, daring each other to do something dangerous. Mulder, as always, was the first one to take a step out the door, and then the phone rang in the office. "Hold on," she said. "Let it ring." He tugged on her hand. "Come on, if we're going to do this, let's do it." "I need to check," she said, and pulled away from his hand, walking over to the phone. "Hello?" she said into the receiver, and looked back at him, waiting just the other side of the threshhold, arms stretched out on either side and hands braced on the doorway, the wall white, almost glowing, behind him. The phone rang, and she woke up in confusion, reaching for it automatically. "Scully." "Agent Scully." Skinner's tone was very dry, and she winced, sitting up in bed, her gaze travelling to the connecting door, and...oh fuck, she'd *left* him there. "Sir," she said, and then cleared her throat hastily and reached over to the end table for her watch. Fuck again, they'd overslept. 10:00. "Agent Scully, would you care to explain where you are, exactly?" "Uh..." she stalled. "And this had better be good, Scully," he growled. "We're...well, we checked ourselves out of the hospital." "I'm aware of that, since I called them this morning to see how the two of you were. Imagine my surprise when they said you'd checked out. Voluntarily, according to them." Damn. She could hear the undertone of worry in Skinner's voice, and knew that he must have been frantic when they'd disappeared, again. Especially since most of their disappearances had been involuntary. "We're both fine," she reassured him. "We're...in Missouri." "Because your flight stops there on the way back to DC?" Skinner asked tersely. "Because there's a case here that required our attention." "A case? Neither of you are fit to be on active duty. Neither of you should be handling a gun right now, not until you're fully recovered." Unfortunately, this was basically true. "Sir, up until now, we've mainly offered guidance. And I did two autopsies. I assure you, we won't put ourselves into any situations where we might hurt ourselves or anyone else." "You still shouldn't be out there. What case could be that important?" She let her head fall back on her pillow. "We...there's evidence that Pincus may be operating out of a small company in Missouri, and that he may be...injecting poison of some sort into--" "Pincus?" She held the phone away from her ear. "Pincus, as in...no. No. You and Mulder are not getting involved in that." "Sir, we are involved in it." "Not any more. I want the two of you back in DC as soon as possible. By the end of today." "Sir--" "That's an *order,* Scully. The two of you are not fit for active duty. Especially not on that case. If the two of you are not back at DC by the end of today, you will face the repercussions, do you understand me?" "Sir, with all due respect, Mulder and I have more background on this case than the agents here. They're content to let it rest." "Part of the background consists of Mulder trying to attack someone he claims was a large *roach* and ending up in a mental institution." "Which he was then taken out of, because someone tried to *attack* him," Scully exclaimed vehemently. "Whether or not Pincus was what Mulder claimed he was at the time, Pincus is a threat. And, if we accept, for one moment, the possibility that Pincus might have been what Lambert claimed he was, then who better to explore this case than us? After all, we're used to dealing with anomalies. While I find the idea improbable, it's not--" "Save the lecture on open-mindedness for another time. You've told the local agents what to look for, I'm sure. They can consult you via e-mail if necessary. But neither of you is physically ready for that case." He paused, and Scully heard what he hadn't said, that Mulder might not be mentally ready either. "I'm not Kersh, Agent Scully. I'd prefer not to treat the two of you like errant children. But if you're not here by tonight, I'm calling the local field office to direct them not to work with you." "Yes, *sir*," she said through gritted teeth, and clicked the phone off, tossing it to the other side of the bed and turning over to punch her pillow, a not completely satisfactory substitute for Skinner's head. "Uh, Scully?" Mulder sounded amused, and she turned back over to see him standing in the doorway between their rooms. She frowned, trying to grasp at the elusive slip of color that had been her dream. He had been standing in the hallway, in the office, and she had left him...but the memory faded, leaving only the aftertaste of loss. "Skinner," she said unnecessarily. "He wants us back in D.C." "Yeah, I heard." "I'm sorry, Mulder. I tried to convince him..." "Yeah, I heard that too. Thanks." He shrugged and came over to sit on the neatly made double bed across from hers. "When did he say? By tonight?" "Yes, tonight. And, much as I hate to admit it, he's probably right. Neither of us should be handling a gun, not when we could zone out on each other at any minute." "If we went to Raines's workplace *now*..." "Skinner will find out about it." "You don't have to go," he said mildly. "You could head home." She glared at him. "You think I'm just going to let you walk into danger by yourself?" For a moment, the words hung in the air like an echo, and she saw him cast a glance to his room, to his bed, to the rumpled sheets, and felt again the bitterness of shame. His eyes weren't accusing, though. "You don't have to get in trouble on this. Skinner isn't Kersh. He won't punish you for my decisions." "I can't let you walk in there by yourself. You should know that by now. And honestly, I'd prefer not to get in trouble over this." He stared at his bare feet moodily. "All right. I wanted to have a look at those other files anyway. We may as well go back. Maybe I can put together enough evidence to convince Skinner to let me come back." "To let us come back," she said firmly. "Right. I'm going to go pack." He padded over to the doorway, and turned around, an uneasy smile on his face. "Sweet dreams, Scully?" She met his eyes without flinching. "Sweet enough, until the end. But then, most of my dreams are." *** "I think I know who Pincus is, Scully," he said, looking up from the employee reports that the local field office had given him this morning on their way to the airport. "Hmm?" Scully was still reading the autopsy reports intently, as she had been since they had been on the plane. "There wasn't anyone who matched Pincus' description, according to the locals. But I've been looking at these employee records, at the list of people who hadn't been at the job that long. Robert Hand. He's been there since...shortly after the incident in Oak Brook. And listen to this, an employee under his command left about a month after he arrived. Fired, because he went to the boss of the company and started complaining about monsters. A guy named Timothy Warren. I want to talk to him..." "Hmm." Wonderful to know that he inspired such attention from her. "Scully, are you paying attention to me?" he asked, and was annoyed to hear the whine in his voice. She did look up at that. "Hmm? Yes, of course. Robert Hand and Timothy Warren. What does Robert Hand look like? I thought that the locals said that there was no one matching Pincus' description when you had the photo faxed to them?" "Yeah, I *know.* I just said that. But he's been there the right amount of time, an employee under him was fired for psychological reasons--" "Timothy Warren?" "Yeah. And he's on the list of people who were there when Raines went off his rocker." "Off his rocker?" He'd seen that same expression on her face when she was examining an anomalous piece of evidence, but now she was examining his face. "I thought that, according to you, these were the sane ones? The ones who had figured it all out." He shifted uncomfortably under that stare. "And then they went and shot at a bunch of people. I wouldn't have done that, even if I did believe they were..." "Deadheads?" "No. Scully, these people...they were somewhat disturbed. I...can't deny that." "And that doesn't worry you, Mulder?" Folie a deux, her explanation to Skinner. Madness. He shifted even more uncomfortably. "Are you implying that anyone who sees the monster is ready for the looney bin by definition? And that therefore--" "I didn't say that," she answered sharply. "I'm saying that..." And then her eyes widened and lost focus and she is thirteen it is summer she is sitting on the back porch with the sun warming her hair and the images flitted through his mind, and then he felt the dislocation that signaled his own flashbacks and he was seventeen his body moving on the track he has to beat Ronald Miller has to beat him has to beat him the words falling into the pattern of his racing feet (she is thirteen and Ed Jenkins is passing her on the street and she is torn between) has to beat him has to beat him the stands a blur can't see anyone but that's okay because dad moved out moved out has to beat him and mom never came anyway has to beat him (calling out to him and staying there what is she wearing today and Ed likes Melissa anyway not her) has to beat him has to beat him has to beat him has to and present time. He was sitting in a plane with Scully. "Well." He cleared his throat. "Simultaneous flashbacks, anyway. We can consider that a good omen, can't we?" "A good omen for what, exactly?" asked Scully pointedly and then shook her head. "Never mind, I don't want to know. As I was saying, I would like to think about the people who have seen Pincus in his supposed natural state. Why them? Why not anyone else?" "Maybe they *were* disturbed. Maybe that opened their mind somehow. And maybe, because they weren't used to dealing with strange occurences, they couldn't handle it. They snapped under the stress. That's why I want to talk to this Timothy Warren guy. He didn't snap. He went and talked to his boss. And why I want Robert Hand brought in for questioning." "So call once we get off the plane. But remember, to them, the crime that's been committed has been solved. Raines was killed. They're not going to want to bring in a guy for questioning on your say-so." "Exactly why I want to get Skinner to let us go back there, so we can do it ourselves." She didn't look terribly comforted. "Look, I'm not going to go off and shoot a bunch of zombies," he snapped finally. "I'm not going to run back and shoot this Robert Hand person, even if he is Pincus. I'm not going to get myself locked up in the psych ward again. Once was enough." "Yes, it was. Do you think I enjoyed seeing you there?" She seemed very serious, and he tried to break the mood. "You're telling me you've never wanted to put me in restraints?" he teased. There was a flicker in her eye that warned him, a second before her comment scorched him. "Not for those purposes," she said. "Excuse me." He watched her walk down the aisle to the bathroom, her hips swaying just slightly. End 2 of 7 Bridge 3 of 7 The full text of this story can be found at: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt She kept one eye on the luggage carousel and the other on her partner, who had had his cell phone open almost as soon as they'd gotten off the plane. "He may not match Pincus's description, but that doesn't mean much... look, he could have lost weight. Plastic surgery. Whatever. If he's been poisoning people..." Mulder rolled his eyes at her. Obviously, the locals were not being cooperative. She sent him a look of commiseration. "I *know* that it was Raines who killed those two people. However, they may have been poisoned, infected, prior to their death.." She stepped forward and pulled off her suitcase, and then Mulder's, automatically checking the tags to make sure they were theirs. "No, I don't know what they were infected with!" Mulder was exasperated now. "The tox screens haven't come back yet. But if they were poisoned, it probably wasn't by Raines, okay? It might have been this Hand person. I'd at least like him brought in for questioning. Okay. Okay. Exactly. *Thank* you." He broke off the phone call and glared at his cell phone. "I'm understanding why they call it the Show-Me State now, Scully." "You're surprised they doubt you?" "That doesn't ever surprise me. I'm used to it by now," he said wryly. Humor, but it bit her. She'd been trying, dammit, to be open-minded on this case. She opened her mouth to say as much, but he had already grabbed his piece of luggage and started striding away, long legs covering the distance easily. *** He had marshalled every fact he had, every report they had, and taken them up to Skinner's office, where he had launched into an explanation that carefully elided the more paranormal aspects of the case. Skinner sat in silence, fiddling with his glasses. Without them, his eyes looked tired. "So you want to go back there when, tonight?" he demanded finally, putting his glasses back on. "Not tonight, sir," said Scully. "It's 6:30 already. But tomorrow, yes. We'd like to get to Robert Hand before he might disappear. If he *is* Pincus, we know he's capable of that." Scully was speaking crisply, as always, but Mulder knew that she didn't expect this to lead any place. Skinner would probably keep them home. He hadn't yet decided if he would go back to Missouri anyway. Scully would be furious if he ditched her, and if he asked her to go with him, she'd have to defy orders to do so. "Fine, then," said Skinner, and Mulder reflexively checked to his right to see if Scully had heard what he had. "You're letting us go?" He couldn't quite hide his surprise. Skinner's expression wasn't easy to read. "If Agent Scully feels that you're both capable of working in the field, yes. But I want you to work closely with the local office. And I'd like you to stay in the office as much as possible. Get someone else to pick up any suspects, or handle any situations that might turn violent. Act in an advisory capacity. Is that clear?" "Yes, sir. We understand. And we won't take any chances," said Scully. She was already standing; she knew how to quit when she was ahead. "What changed your mind?" asked Mulder, knowing he was probably getting himself into trouble. "You shouldn't sound so amazed when your arguments work," Skinner told him. "Check in daily. And keep the expenses down." It was clearly a dismissal, and Mulder followed Scully out the door, glancing back once to see that Skinner was already shuffling through papers on his desk. "What changed his mind?" He punched the down button on the elevator. "Maybe you're more persuasive than you know, Mulder." "Yeah, but..." "Are you having second thoughts?" she asked. "No. No, I think we have to go down there. It just bugs me when someone does something I don't expect them to. I was hoping that he'd let us go, but I expected a lot more trouble than *that.*" The elevator opened, and they stepped in, stopping their conversation since there were other people on board. He leaned down to her as the elevator dropped, muttering, "Did *you* expect him to concede?" They were standing close, and her breath was warm on his neck. "Maybe he had an ulterior motive." "What, for me to end up in the psych ward? He wouldn't want that." "Maybe he just thought you'd run off anyway if he didn't let you go," Scully said, sharp and pointed. "Um." "You didn't tell him what you really thought." "What I really thought?" "You stuck to the theory that Pincus was injecting people. You totally skirted..." She looked around the elevator and stopped talking until the last of the other riders got off on the first floor. "You skirted the issue of whether he really was a monster," she finished. It was possible, he told himself, that she did not intend for her voice to have quite that tone, as if she was chastening a small, foolish child. "I'd rather not have Skinner send me to the psych ward again," he told her. Even to himself, he sounded brittle. The elevator stopped on their floor and they got off, instinctively heading towards the office. "So you didn't tell him the truth." "I thought you didn't consider that the truth. Only one of the many possibilities. So, fine." "You believe it to be true. And you didn't even mention it as one of the possibilities. In fact, the way you were talking, I started expecting you to dismiss your own claims as hallucinations." "What's the problem?" He fumbled for his keys. "So I'm finally learning to shovel out the bullshit, after all these years. Next thing you know, I'll learn how to play well with others, and then..." He gestured her ahead of him. "You know what I mean." Agent Scully, disgruntled federal employee. She stood in the middle of the office, hands on her hips, disturbingly like a little ruffled chicken. He'd always found her sexy when she was angry, but not when she was sanctimonious. "Would you rather I tell the truth when it's a stupid thing to do?" he demanded. "I mentioned the possibility of Pincus being real this morning and Skinner didn't flinch too much." "Not coming from you. You have credibility." "And you have the integrity to defend your beliefs...Skinner's always respected that in you, at least." "I would have thought that you'd be happy that I considered the consequences for once. Remember Tooms? I told the truth at that hearing and look where it got us. It got Tooms out to kill another man." "I'm not denying that there are times when I wish you were a little more...politic about when and where and how you should express your beliefs. But that doesn't mean I want you to...dilute them, or repudiate them, because you think it's the wise thing to do." He turned away from her, striding towards the cabinets and re-filing the files he'd pulled on Pincus. "Maybe you've found ways to walk on that tightrope between saying exactly what you think and sounding like a fool, or saying nothing. But then, as I said, you have credibility." He slammed the drawer shut with a satisfying clink of metal against metal. "I have a lot less credibility than I did five years ago," she said. Not snappish, just straightforward, but it burned. "Another sin to lay at my door?" he asked her, and opened another file drawer simply so that he wouldn't have to turn around and face her. Her hand on his shoulder stopped him from slamming that drawer, too, a small warmth that seeped through the layers of suit coat and dress shirt and t-shirt. "It hasn't been because of you that I have less credibility. It's been because I've stood my ground on those things that I've considered true, and some of those things have not been easy to accept. Well. You have always given me more courage to stand my ground, but that's the only way it could be considered your fault." He suddenly, desperately wished that she would step closer, wrap her arms around him and rest her face against his back, warming all of him. "You always have the evidence, too," he said, grudgingly. "To back up your claims. So we find the evidence on this, and then present it to Skinner. Because, honestly, Scully, I'm not taking the risk that he'll be close-minded on this. Not on this one." Lying in bed, trapped, while that thing came closer and closer, screaming hoarsely for help...despite himself, he shivered under Scully's touch, and cursed himself for a coward. She tipped her forehead to rest against his shoulder, another small warmth. "I just don't want to lose you. Not to Pincus, not to any physical threat, but equally, not to Bureau rules and regulations." "Oh, well, Scully, there's *no* danger of that." She patted his back and moved away. "Good. I don't ever want you to be...to be *less* than you are." "Just different?" "Sometimes I think you couldn't be different without being less." "And the rest of the time?" He turned around and leaned back against the file cabinet. "The rest of the time, I'm awake." But she smiled at him, and he was almost sure she didn't mean it. *** If she had to dream a hotel, she didn't know why it couldn't be a nice hotel. But no, she was back in last night's hotel room, with a crack in the ceiling and a bed that sagged in the middle. Surely, she and Mulder could come up with a better place to meet somewhere in their mutual subconscious. She went over to the connecting door and knocked, feeling absurd. Never let it be said that she wasn't polite, even in her dreams. "Come in," Mulder called. The door opened without any touch from her hand. He was semi-reclining on one of the beds, watching TV and... "Mulder, there was no Magic Fingers in that hotel room." "So?" he asked. "What, I can't improve on memory?" He patted the bed beside him. "Come on over and...enjoy." He was shirtless, slouched on the bed, wearing only sweatpants. She briefly checked to make sure that she was appropriately clothed-- wouldn't put it past his subconscious, or hers, to strip her of her pajamas--and then went over to sit on the jiggling bed. He sat upright, looking slightly panicked, as if he hadn't been prepared for her to collapse the distance between them. "So what's on TV?" she asked, and reached over to grab the remote. "Uh...uh, not sure," stammered Mulder. He looked at her askance, seemed to reconcile himself to her presence on his bed, and lay back against the propped-up pillows. She shrugged and clicked the remote off. "This is really you, right?" he asked. "Not some part of my subconscious conjuring up a version of you?" "You're the one who's gung-ho for the theory that we're sharing dreams," she answered. "You tell me. As far as I'm concerned, this is my dream and my subconscious." "Huh. Well, I'm flattered to be part of your subconscious. But seriously, Scully, you honestly don't believe we're sharing dreams? I thought we settled this last night." She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. "For the sake of argument, if we are sharing dreams, how would this be happening?" "Why wouldn't we be?" "That's not a reason." "The drug, then. It somehow...opened our mind. Why couldn't it happen?" "Because it can't? Mulder, people don't just read each other's minds. They don't share dreams. Our minds aren't...networked computers." "What about Gibson Praise, huh?" "He was an exception." "Was he?" Mulder turned over on his side, propping himself up on his elbow, his face looming above hers. She could have reached out and touched his bare chest. She didn't. Evidently, even her subconscious was repressed. How depressing. "Parts of Gibson's brain were active, parts that aren't active normally. But they're *there.* Maybe we all have tendencies in that direction, Scully. Maybe we dismiss it as intuition most of the time. But the drug activated it somehow, sent it up a notch. And during the flashbacks, or while we're sleeping, we're more vulnerable to it." "So why each other, only? Gibson could read any mind." He shrugged. "Physical proximity? Mental closeness? Like twins or siblings who are very close?" "It can't be physical proximity...our bodies are in different *towns.*" She frowned. "And believe me, Mulder, I don't really need another big brother. And I hope that..." her voice trailed off. "Trust me, Scully, you're not a sister substitute. But there have been cases where people who are very close have known when something is wrong with the other, stuff like that. And we've been partners for six years." "So you're saying that we can all, under the right circumstances... that this is latent in all of us?" "Maybe we're really communal creatures at heart. I don't know all the reasons why, Scully, but if you want proof...when you wake up, write down what you remember of this dream. Have me write down what I remember of my dreams. See if they match." "We could dream similar things." "You think we'd both come up with a hotel room, lying on a bed talking about psychic links?" She sighed. "No. All right. Maybe I will. Mulder, how did that dream end, last night?" The bed suddenly stilled under them. Perhaps Mulder's subconscious couldn't keep the Magic Fingers going under stress. "Nothing. You left. Disappeared, really." "Did you go into the...where were we, then? I don't remember it clearly." "Nowhere important." "Mulder." "Let's just say my subconscious isn't a pretty place and leave it at that, okay?" "I didn't mean to leave you alone there." "I usually am alone in here. Don't worry about it." The Magic Fingers suddenly started working again, and there was a blast of music. Elvis. "You weren't kidding when you said your subconscious wasn't a pretty place," she said, sitting up. Mulder, in contrast, flopped completely onto the bed, turning over to bury his face in his pillow. "Why's it coming up with Elvis, for Chrissakes?" "I think that's my alarm," he mumbled into the pillow. "I have it set to the radio." "So..." "Dammit, I want to stay here," he said, but she noticed that his body was fading around the edges. She could see the bedspread through his suddenly translucent arm. She reached out for him, and for a moment touched the skin of his shoulder, before he was gone. And then she woke, in her own bed, alone. She reached for the phone and then stopped. She could call him up, ask him what he had dreamed about. It would be proof, of a sort. She shivered with the realization that she didn't need proof. *** Mulder swatted at the fly that had landed on his arm with more than usual viciousness and then, for good measure, stomped on an ant that was innocently scurrying along on the sidewalk. Bugs. They all deserved to die. As did the members of the local field office. If he were a very large person with a magnifying glass, he would focus the sun on them until they fried. "At what time did you call Robert Hand?" asked Scully. She was enunciating very clearly, a sure sign that she was pissed off. "I see. No, he isn't here. And from a look inside the windows, I think it's safe to say that he isn't coming back. No. No, he didn't call into work today. If you called last night to...yes, I know my partner asked you to bring him in. However, I believe Mulder intended that you actually bring him in, not call him to set up an appointment for today. I'm *aware* that there wasn't...I see. You thought that... Well, plainly, he didn't feel the same way. I would suggest...yes. Mulder and I will be here, waiting for the warrant. If it wouldn't be too much *trouble*" (oh, that mild tone meant that someone was in deep shit), "maybe you could issue an APB on him. *Thank* you." And Scully had a reputation for playing nice with the locals. Maybe they were only hearing the thank you and not the tone of voice. She clicked her phone off. "I realize you're frustrated," she said, and the acid in her voice had upped a notch, "but you don't need to decimate the local ant population." He stepped on one last ant, carefully, for good measure. "What'd they have to say?" "They called Hand last night in order to ask him to come in today. Under the pretext that he might help them understand what was going on with Raines. They didn't think it was a big deal, since Raines had obviously killed those people, and Hand didn't match Pincus' description." "Dammit." "They're calling a judge for a warrant. Someone will be here very, very shortly and we can see what Pincus left." "Nothing, I'm sure," Mulder said, and slouched against the piece-of- shit rental car. "They suggested that you start thinking about where he might have gone." "Where he might have gone? Jesus, Scully, I must have missed that particular psych class. How to profile a large *bug.*" He hit the hood of the rental car, squishing a fly, and felt vaguely ridiculous as he bent to wipe his hand off on the grass. But, God, it had been a crappy day, with delays at the airport and a prickly Scully. He wasn't sure whether to attribute her crankiness to the continued flashbacks (they were becoming more rare, but Scully could be impatient) or to the fact that she was plainly having the bad hair day from hell. Oh, yeah, and their suspect had absconded. That hadn't improved her mood at all. He straightened up, and found that her mood seemed to have improved instantly. Probably at him making a fool of himself. He scowled at her. *** Mulder was not uncute when he pouted, which probably explained why she let him get away with it more often than he deserved. He had pouted indiscriminately until the agents had come to deliver the warrant--at her, at the car, at the grass, at any passing bug. Then he had glared at the agents. They had turned to her in the hope of understanding and sanity; she had made her voice as hard and unforgiving as possible. This seemed to cheer Mulder up. The house was empty. No furniture. ("Why would a bug need furniture?" Mulder had said in a low voice to her. "He'd only need an address to carry on this charade.") No discarded clothes. No food. Not quite empty. In the back of the corner of one cabinet, there was a can of bug spray. Scully almost laughed. End 3 of 7 Bridge 4 of 7 The full text of this story can be found at: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt At the end of the day, she collapsed more than lay on her bed at the hotel. God, what a day. Mulder in a mood, uncooperative agents who had decided to blame them for Hand's disappearance, a suspect who had made a clean getaway, and, maybe it had been the weather, but her hair hadn't looked worse in a long time. Completely limp. She needed to change her conditioner. Or start wearing hats. When Mulder knocked on the connecting door, she almost hollered for him to go away. Instead, she remained silent. He evidently took that for assent, and came in, although only as far as the doorway. "You're getting the tox screens on those two victims back soon, right?" he said without preliminary. No, Mulder, I wasn't trying to get to sleep. "Soon." "Maybe then they'll accept that a crime's been committed and get off their asses." "We can hope so." "The bug spray...that was surprising," he said. He sounded interested, now; he'd been furious at first, and even more furious when he'd seen the beginnings of a smile on her face. "Surprising how? He's taunting us. That isn't surprising." "I wouldn't have thought he--it--would be capable of that." "Tooms was capable of reasoning. He knew that he couldn't kill the people he lived with. He was capable of lying on the lie detector test, too." "Mmm." Mulder moved to the chair. "Tooms was capable of reasoning, but I would have thought that Pincus was of a lower order than that. And the bug spray...that's almost humorous. I would have thought of humor as a very human quality. Remember what Lambert said, that Pincus couldn't stand humanity, that he felt the need to suck the life out of us?" "Tooms was capable of setting you up, don't forget. And if the bug spray was humor, it was fairly sick and twisted--" "You smiled." "Nonetheless...you're not suggesting that Pincus is capable of humor because he's sucked it out of his prey, are you?" His eyes gleamed. "Actually, I was commenting on an anomaly, that's all. But you could be right. You really could. What if--" "Oh, brother." "What if he's somehow feeding on his prey, not only physically but psychically? He had to learn how to dissemble as a human somehow. Maybe he's been infected by humanity even as he's infected those people." "Frankly, I don't much care why he is the way he is. I just want to catch him." "Bullshit." For the first time that day, his tone was actually affectionate instead of cool, pissed off, or outright venomous. "If we catch him, you're going to be the first in line to figure out why he is the way he is." "When we catch him, yes. Although honestly, I'm more interested in getting back the tox screen analysis so that we can find out what exactly he did to those other people--I'd like to know if that's reversible. But both of those things can wait until tomorrow morning. Until then...good *night,* Mulder." "Oh...you were trying to sleep?" "Lying in bed, in my pajamas, with the alarm set..." "Your light was still on." She stretched out and turned off the lamp on the end table. "And the light off..." "I get the hint." He walked to the doorway, stepped through, and then looked back for a moment. "Good night...may you dream of handsome men." She wasn't sure if the mockery in his voice was directed at himself or her. "Don't let the bed bugs bite," she told him. In the semi-dark, his face was hard to read. "What a keen sense of humor *you* have," he said, and then started to close the door behind him. "Wait," she said, not knowing what she wanted to say, but not liking the sharpness that had been in both of their voices, ill-disguised as humor. Neither of them ever quite knew when to stop their sparring, especially when they were both out-of-sorts. "Yeah?" "I...just wanted to make sure that the burns from the mushroom... you are doing okay? They're healing all right?" "Ooh, you want to check, O doctor, my doctor?" "Mulder." "Yeah, they're fine. Sting a little when I'm in the shower, but otherwise fine. You?" "Just fine. Night, Mulder." "Night, Scully." *** Sometimes after a horrible day, she would have nightmares. But sometimes, just sometimes, after a generally-shitty-but-not-exactly- hellish sort of day, she would have a good dream, as if her subconscious recognized that she needed to be soothed and that her usual bubble bath remedy just hadn't cut it. On those nights, she dreamed of water and woke up refreshed. She stood on the river's edge, and stretched out her arms in delight. Far away, boats dotted the water, but she stood alone. The river wasn't big; she could see the other side from where she stood. She couldn't have swum the distance, but it wouldn't take too long to cross it on the bridge. Somehow, she knew that this was the last bridge, the last town, before the river spilled out to sea. Oh, she'd needed this, and even if it were only a dream, she was grateful for the smell of salt. Something nagged at her, but she pushed it away and walked down to the water, scrunching her bare feet into sand and letting the water lap over her feet, over her painted toenails. Something nagged at her, and she turned her eyes back to the shore, but there were only a few empty, picturesque houses there. She turned back to the water and...oh, of course. Mulder. They'd been dreaming together, hadn't they, and now he wasn't here. He probably just hadn't fallen asleep yet. She turned back to the water and began to walk along, breathing in the air and watching the clouds overhead shift directions. But it continued to nag at her, this sense of something missing, and eventually she turned back to the shore. "He'd better appreciate this," she said out loud to the air. "All right, take me to whatever office or hotel room we're scheduled for tonight." She stood on the shore, alone, and the scenery didn't change. Crossing her arms and blinking like Jeannie didn't work either. "Come on," she said impatiently. "If I'm supposed to be somewhere else to meet him, let's go there, okay? Or send him here." But her surroundings didn't swirl and change shape around her. She swore briefly and started heading away from the river, towards the nearest house. When she looked down, her subconscious had sensibly decided to put her in shoes to protect her feet against the now rocky ground. She went up to the nearest house and knocked at the door (the river seemed a long way off, suddenly, although the walk hadn't been that long), with some vague idea of borrowing their phone to call Mulder. But the door of the house opened not onto an entrance way or living room but into their office, where Mulder read a file. "Hey," he said, looking up. "I wasn't sure if I'd see you here tonight." "You were the one who told me to dream of handsome men," she said, and watched as the reply knocked him off balance. He recovered quickly. "How'd you know that my alternate career choice was to be a Chippendale's dancer?" "Well, shake your booty." She moved around the office, restless. "Let's go outside. It's nice out there." He grimaced. "Let's not. It's safe in here." "Your version of a treehouse?" That stung him, she could tell. "I tried going out of our office to see what else our psyches had in store for us before. It wasn't a good trip." "It's beautiful out there now. Look, see? We can go back by the river. I've already been there, it's beautiful." He came to stand by the doorway, peering out with the expression of a nocturnal lemur confronted with daylight, and then turning to regard her dubiously. "I'm not even sure I *can* go out there, Scully. I mean, that isn't someplace I recognize. So far, we've only been in places that both of us know." "I know this place," she told him. "I've dreamt of it before. Come on, hold my hand so that we don't get separated." "Yeah, but if this is your--" he sounded reluctant. When she tugged at his hand, though, he followed her out the doorway and the sky shimmered and the earth rocked and settled and beside her, Mulder fell to his knees. "Mulder!" she bent over him. "What happened? Are you okay?" "Yeah, yeah, fine." He sounded woozy, drunk. "Just give me a minute here." She watched him reach out his hands to steady himself, one on the ground, one curving around the back of her knee. "What happened?" she asked. "Don't tell me one of us fell off of our beds in real life." He shook his head. "Don't know. Hold on. Okay." He started to pull himself upright, and she wrapped her arm around his waist to hold him. "You okay?" "Yeah." His arm was tightly wrapped around her shoulder, and he wavered on his feet. "Wow. That was...wow." "Are you okay? God, you fell on your knees, they're probably scraped." "No." He waved her hand away and tightened his grip on her. "No, I don't think..." and he laughed. His eyes were full of wonder. "I don't think anything could hurt me, here." *** They walked back to the river, his arm still tucked around her. "I like this place," he said softly. "It's very peaceful. You said you've dreamed of it before?" "A few times. When it's been a bad day. Not when it's been a really awful day, but when it's the kind of day we had today, where all sorts of little things go wrong." "Pincus is a lot of things, but he wasn't little. Pretty damned big, for a bug." "No one died; neither of us were hurt. We were only in bad moods." She felt tension collect in his muscles, and patted his side to let him know it was okay. "And the bad hair day didn't help," she added. "I wish that the bureau dress code included hats." "Your hair looked fine," he said, and if she didn't know the sound of his voice when he was lying she would have almost bought it. God, her hair must really have been bad if Mulder, who alternated between ignoring her physical appearance and looking at her with uncritical adoration, had noticed. "I notice there are no bugs here," he said. "Nice of your subconscious to do that." "I'm a lucky girl." "You are indeed." They had reached the water, and she toed off her shoes, motioning for him to do the same before she walked into the water again. "We're near the sea, here," she informed him. "And it's going to be sunset soon. Sunset over the water is always incredible." He joined her in the water, pants legs rolled up. "So what do you do in your dreams, when you come here?" "Walk in the water. Watch the sunset. Start going over the bridge." "What's on the other side?" "Don't know. I've never gotten there." "Hmmm. You don't ever get lonely?" "No," she said baldly. "Most of the times that I've dreamt this place, it's been on days when humanity doesn't look very appealing." He flinched away from that, wading deeper into the water. "I wonder if other people do this," he said. "Play on the beach?" "Dream the same dreams. Maybe without even realizing it. I mean, most people forget their dreams. Even if they told their dream to each other, enough details might have been forgotten that they'd simply say, 'Oh, funny coincidence, I dreamt something similar.'" "You sound like you'd like that to be true." "There's something appealing to that idea, don't you think? People meeting again in sleep." "You're really getting into this idea that we're communal creatures at heart, aren't you?" "At heart, at soul. Think about it, Scully. Even your own religion-- your God is three persons distinct yet somehow so close that they're one God. What is the Trinity, except a representation of community? Maybe a representation of something we lost, or something we're striving towards." She shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself. "Don't." "Don't what?" "I know that to you Christianity is nothing more than another nice set of myths to be dissected, but...don't." "You dissect my beliefs all the time," he protested. "Because you ask me to! Because you ask me to believe in them. I'm not asking you to believe in God, or to prove or disprove His existence. I'm asking that you accept that I *do* believe." He held up his hands in surrender. "Okay, we'll stay away from religion and politics, like my mother always told me too." She was not surprised, looking up, to see that the sky was suddenly overcast. He looked up too, and then looked guilty and forlorn. "Sorry, Scully." "It's okay." "I didn't mean to," he gestured at the sky, "rain on your parade." She smiled reluctantly. "It's not raining." "Not yet. You know, I don't have to stay here. I mean, just because we *can* be in the same dream doesn't mean we have to be." He was already moving from the water to the wet sand. "Don't be ridiculous. If this *is* a paranormal phenomenon that's going to go away as soon as the drugs wear off, then we certainly shouldn't waste it." "But if this *weren't* a paranormal phenomenon, a weird occurence... what if this were a daily thing?" "Mulder..." "You wouldn't want it to be, would you?" His face fell. "Honestly? No. My dreams are one area of my life that are my own. I'd like them to stay that way. That said...I didn't have to go and find you tonight. I didn't have to invite you here. And...religious arguments aside...I'm glad you're here tonight, okay?" "Is that the nice way of telling me to stop sulking just because you wouldn't want to be in a mind-meld forever and ever?" "Yes." "Oh." He made an arc in the sand in front of him with his toe, and then smoothed part of it out before he looked up and grinned suddenly. "Okay, I'm de-sulked. Want to build a sand castle?" The sand was wet under their fingers, and it packed well. They were haphazard about the castle, though, and without buckets or any substitute to act as a mold, the castle turned out lopsided. "We should have tried to build the Hoover building instead," said Mulder. "A big square?" "We could have handled that." He smiled at her again. The breeze had tousled his hair, and his collar and tie were loose. She liked seeing him like this, relaxed and healthy, even if only in her dreams. When he looked away from her to squint at the sky, she examined the golden sand sifting between her fingers. "My worst nightmares," she told him, "they aren't of the things that have happened to me, or of the crimes we've studied. They aren't of monsters and bogeymen, or even of something happening to you. All of those will wake me up in a cold sweat, but the worst one, the one that I can't shake off in the morning and it keeps me up for a week..." "Yeah?" His hand covered hers on the sand, his fingers much darker than hers, and as warm as the sand. "I dream of sand, but no water. And I'm completely alone. No houses, no boats, no sign of any human except myself for miles around, and no water." His fingers, still slightly sandy, touched her chin, lightly. Not forcing her face up to look at his, simply touching it gently. "You're such a Navy Brat." The softness in his voice came close to breaking her; she laughed, and it sounded almost like a sob. "So next time you dream that, give me a call, we'll do a little weed, and when you go to sleep I'll be there." She laughed again, and it sounded more like a laugh now, and punched his arm lightly. "And you a Federal Officer. I'm appalled." "We'll both take really big doses of Nyquil?" She stood up and brushed off her knees. "I haven't had that dream in a long time, anyway. So now that we've built the requisite sand castle, what next?" "I don't know. This is your psyche, not mine. We could make like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, but--" "Let's save anything along those lines for when we're both fully conscious, Mulder." "That a promise?" "Possibly a threat," she said, and reached out her hands to him to pull him up. "Come on, let's walk on the bridge for awhile. You may as well see the scenery." He was amenable to that, and they started up the great arc of the bridge. "When I was a kid, the playground at our school had these great rumbly bridges that you could jump up and down on," he mused. "I loved bridges, when I was a kid. I'd run on ahead of my family and look through the cracks to see the water beneath." "My mother hated to drive across them, though. One of her phobias. She was afraid they'd crumble beneath her. She'd drive miles out of her way, to avoid a bridge." "The element of risk," she said. "A lot of people get scared." "And that was what you liked about them," he replied, certainty in his voice. "Yes," she admitted. "Yes, it was. You suddenly become aware of how close you are to nature, and how far you are from it at the same time, and how close you are to falling back into it." "How close *everything* is to falling apart," he said, and she remembered that he had lost a version of his sister on one bridge, and had almost lost her on another. They had reached mid-point now, and as always, the other side did not seem to be getting any closer. "I always wonder what it would be like to jump off," she said. "You want to?" "What? No, I...you wouldn't be afraid of being hurt?" "I told you. I don't think anything could hurt me, here. But why haven't you tried before?" "I don't...I think I usually wake up." They both waited a minute, but the sky didn't blur to bring them to wakefulness. "And I don't like falling," she blurted out. "This isn't falling: it's jumping." "The landing part stays the same," she said, and remembered how she had fallen from the tree when she had been seven, the freedom of flight before the breath had been knocked from her by the ground. "Probably not here," he answered. "It is only a dream," she said. Overhead, the clouds seemed to have stopped moving. She held her breath. He grinned at her suddenly. "Double dare you," he teased, and she thought briefly that of all the people in her life, only Mulder had ever really understood that she could never resist a direct challenge. "All right, you're on," she said, and suddenly they were both scrambling to stand on the rail, teetering. She reached out for balance and caught his hand, their arms spanning the distance between them. "One, two, threeeeeeeee." The fall was an instant, and an eternity, the plunge into the water a shock as if she had been thrown into a washing machine with the spin cycle on, a blend of a million different shades of greens and blue and then their feet touched bottom. "That was fun," laughed Mulder, and she looked over to realize that he was dressed in a wet suit. And (her subconscious must have certain ideas about appropriate underwater dress) so was she, although they had no snorkeling gear or breathing apparatus. "Mulder," she said. "You can't talk underwater." Bubbles floated away from her mouth. "So pretend you have gills," he said. "Jesus, look around you." She did. Oh, my. Above the water had been beautiful, but underneath, the water was full of deeper, richer colors, lights and shadows, and flashy, bright fish. They swam for an endless time, through plants whose fronds billowed in the water, near coral that Mulder touched with the backs of his fingers, the way that he would sometimes touch her face, just as lightly and with (she admitted to herself) just as much reverence. "I think I got half the decor in here from a fishtank that my brother had when he was five," she called to Mulder when they approached what looked like a large sand castle, ornate and carefully sculptured. "I hope my fish are this happy," he called back. When she swam upwards, he followed like her shadow, and they surfaced into light. The land was distant; they had drifted out to sea, and the sky was red and gold around them. She leaned back in the water and kicked her feet to stay afloat. He did the same, hair plastered to his head sleekly. His eyes looked dazzled. "What?" she said, when he stared at her with those light-struck eyes. "You have..." he cleared his throat. "You have a very beautiful soul." She laughed and leaned back in the water. "Tomorrow, we visit your subconscious." "Oh, Scully, compared to you, I'm dull earth and rock." "Earth isn't dull," she said. "Lots of layers, and veins of gold and silver shot through it." She leaned back into the water, letting it take her where it would, and after a moment she felt his hand secure hers again, as the water carried them out to sea. End 4 of 7 Bridge 5 of 7 The full text of this story can be found at: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt He woke up in a tangle of sheets and emotions, part of him mourning the loss of communion that he'd forfeited simply by waking up, most of him giddy, and exhilarated. He felt as if electric impulses still fizzed around in his brain, sending tremors through his body. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and ended up doing a little of both. If he could see his laughter, it would look like the bubbles they'd exhaled underwater; his tears were the remnants of the sea leaking out of him. Oh, God, he'd always known that Scully was treasure beyond price, but that, after all these years, she had such richness in her...he had thought she was fire, and part of her surely was, but fire didn't cleanse and cool like the touch of her soul, fire didn't fill his lungs until air felt thin. He would be searching for her in his dreams forever. *** "You got laid last night, didn't you?" said Agent Ripley with a tone of camaraderie. "What?" Mulder turned in surprise to the man beside him, one of the two who had helped them explore Pincus's house yesterday. He couldn't remember the man's first name, and had barely remembered his last name when they had met again this morning. "Yesterday you were a total son-of-a-bitch...no offense. Today you look like you might break into song any moment." "I've never really wanted to play the lead role in a musical," said Mulder. Although he had been humming in the shower this morning. Snippets from the Brandenberg Concertos, which reminded him both of the quest for alien life, and, because of Bach's liquid, dancing precision, of Scully. "Are you sleeping with your partner? She is a nice piece of--" the other man stopped abruptly at whatever he saw in Mulder's face. "No offense." "I am not," he paused and considered. Well, he *had* been sleeping with her, actually. "Scully and I aren't having sex," he concluded. "And even if we were, which we're not, I wouldn't be telling you about it." "Yeah, sure. So if you didn't get laid, what are you so cheerful about?" "Why wouldn't I be cheerful? At the chance to work at this fine, fine office?" He put on his best manic grin, and Ripley edged away. "What was that all about?" asked Scully, coming up to join him. "Just expressing my joy at being here," he said. She watched her process that one, working out if he had meant that as sarcasm or not, as his voice hadn't been quite as ironic as usual. She dismissed the question in a blink, though, and waved the file folder she was holding. "Tox screens." "And?" "And..." She held the word out, building the suspense, and he privately grinned. She'd been playful today, and their usual banter had been freer, if less barbed, than usual. "And...you're going to appreciate this." "I'm waiting with bated breath." "All sorts of weird things came up." "Is that the scientific terminology for them?" "Basically, the substance is not dissimilar to that found in some... well, snakes, actually. I've requested that a sample be sent to the FBI labs, and they may be able to tell us more about the exact chemical makeup. I'm wondering if there's a way to reverse the effects." "You think there might be?" "I don't know...the effects of the substance that's most similar would be delirium, possible fever, decreased respiratory functioning. In large quantities, it could probably kill. Children, especially." "But Pincus doesn't kill. Not exactly. But if there were delirium or hallucinations...damn. I wish we could find one of his deadheads and see for sure what it does to them physically. But I can't help but thinking that there's a mental aspect too. He was able to somehow get them to do what he wanted them to do. Snakes don't do that. How could the toxin do that?" "No. I've been thinking about that. The mental aspect." "And?" He really was waiting with bated breath now. "Maybe it's not the bite that does that. Or it does, but...look at it this way. We've discussed this before, how drugs might affect a person's brain." He couldn't remember, for a moment, whether they'd discussed it in dream or memory. But she was already sweeping on, as if she wanted to get the theory out on the table without examining it too closely. "The venom...it's a type of drug. Maybe it--" "Lowers mental inhibitions?" "I'm sure it has physical effects. Blood circulation, if nothing else. That nurse that I saw...she was *pale.* But it also--" He could see what she was trying to say, dominos falling into place. "Has a physical effect on the brain, on the brain's electrical impulses, just like that mushroom did, right? And that opens the person up to being influenced by Pincus?" "Possibly. Although what puzzles me is, why snake venom? I had them compare this substance to that found in some insect bites, and it didn't match. Why snake venom? Much less...Mulder, you know I have a hard enough time accepting telepathy in humans. But a mind-meld with a large *bug*?" "He wasn't a bug, exactly, more like a big bug-like monster," he said absently, turning her words over in his mind until they clicked. "But you're right. That doesn't make sense. Scully." "What?" "I think maybe you were right." She raised her eyebrow, looking startled. "What about?" "What you said yesterday. Yesterday? No, the day before. That Pincus was a man trying to be a monster. What if you were right? What if--" "But what about what you saw? What all of them saw?" "Imagine..." he paused, formulating it in his mind. "All right, start with a basic assumption. Telepathy, psychic linking, mind-melding, whatever you want to call it, accept that as a given. It's not just an anomaly; we're all capable of it to some degree, of reaching across the gap between bodies and minds. Some of us a lot more than others. Certain substances can help increase the probability of it. But let's say that there are a few people who can do more with it than others. And that instead of just...sharing mental space for the span of a dream or a thought, they use it to *interfere* with the mental functioning of others. Modell. Linda Bowman. They could somehow reach into other people's brains and make them see the version of reality that they wanted them to see. Let's say Pincus has a mind like that. Maybe not as fully developed, but like that." "But he's fully human." "Fully. And then let's say he has a version of reality that he falls into, a myth of himself that he wants to belive in, a version where he's not a powerless telemarketer being hung up on by irate customers but a powerful entity." "A monster. A large bug? Why would he want to be that?" "He'd been reading too much Kafka. I don't know. He imagines himself as a monster, and then somewhere along the line, he finds out that others can see this reality if he tries hard enough." "Or if they're drugged." Scully said. Her forehead wrinkled, a thin vertical crease appearing between her eyebrows. "He's walking along to work one day, having his bug fantasy, and someone whose mind is opened by drugs sees him as he wants to be, and he learns it's possible. And he starts injecting other people, so that they'll fall into his version of reality." "Seeing him as their all-powerful controller, and themselves as his subjects. And a few other people see him as he sees himself, too..." he stopped abruptly. Damn. He didn't like where he'd taken himself. "People whose minds were open in some way." "Folie a deux after all, Scully. But not between you and me, or myself and Lambert. Between Lambert and Pincus, or Pincus and myself. But he can't anticipate that, and those situations turn out wrong. They aren't hapless subjects under his control." "How'd he get down two flights from your room? I saw him *fall.* If he was just a man, how did that happen? He couldn't have gotten up from the pavement that quickly." "I don't know. Maybe he projected an illusion of not being there, when he really was recovering on the ground." She nodded slowly. "Okay. Okay, so when I saw the nurse in the hospital, when you saw Pincus crawling across the ceiling of your room, we were somehow seeing what he wanted us to see, what he wanted to believe he was. And when someone got close enough, he'd inject them, not a bite at all, so that they'd stay in his illusion." "Yeah. Wait. Time of death. That's a problem. If these are normal people accept for the drugs, why would they decompose more rapidly?" "These last two bodies weren't off by much. They were on the far side of the normal range. And the first one, Mark Backus, from the last case...inadequate refrigeration during shipping? I don't know. Time of death is notoriously hard to quantify, I've told you that before." "We *know* the time of death, though." "What I mean is, if we get time of death wrong when we guess at it, that indicates a wide range of possibilities. That can be explained. But you...you're accepting this?" "It makes sense, right?" He felt the certainty that had gripped him lessen, the momentum of sharing a theory with Scully letting him go. "We've seen these phenomena before, at least. We know they exist. They make sense of what happened." She nodded. "I think so, Mulder. It's easier for me to believe than a large monster, anyway." "Yeah, of course. It'd be easier for most people to believe, I'm sure." He shifted his eyes away from hers for the first time since he'd fallen into the rabbit hole of his own theory, his own voice. "Did you want it to be that?" "I don't know. Some people saw Pincus as a monster and themselves as zombies because he'd injected them with drugs. Others because they were mentally disturbed. Why did I see him? That *can't* be good." "Because you had compassion for Gary Lambert, Mulder? Because you actually entertained the possibility that he was right and not crazy? That he was on to something?" "And fell into Pincus's madness instead." He was looking down at his shoes when her hand came into his view, reaching out to tug on his tie to get his attention. "And I saw the nurse, because for just a moment, I considered that you were right, and that left me vulnerable to Pincus. I'm sorry, Mulder." "Sorry that you believed it too?" "Sorry that I didn't consider the possibility that you had something. I think...I was so resistant to the idea of a monster that I refused to believe that something else might be going on. We might have come up with this theory a year ago, if we hadn't ended up so polarized by my disbelief." "No. I probably would have insisted that seeing was believing. Don't beat yourself up for playing the skeptic then...you were right." "Don't beat yourself up for believing, Mulder. In some ways, you were right, too." She let go of his tie, and then reached out again to smooth it back into place. "So how do we catch him? If he's like Modell, he's dangerous. Maybe most people aren't vulnerable to him unless they're drugged, but we don't know who might be. And both of us...our minds are more open than usual right now." "Not only how do we catch him. How do we *find* him?" She frowned off into the distance, absently tapping the file folder containing the tox screen results with one hand. His eyes focused on the file folder, and he saw hers focus as well. "The snake venom," she said, an instant before he did. "How'd he get a hold of it? Where from? If we find out where he could, and then contact them..." "And see if anyone has tried to get more recently..." "Let's get that started." *** "Why snake venom anyway?" Scully stretched her arms up to the ceiling as she spoke, and he heard her back crackle as she stretched. "Why not?" "Well, if he's trying to set up this illusion, why not do it right? Why snake venom instead of say, spider venom?" "Maybe it's harder to get. Or maybe he thought that snake venom was good enough. He probably doesn't feel that he has to be consistent." "Hmm." She closed her eyes and rotated her neck, and then melted into her chair. "Did you find anything?" "Some possibilities. I'll fax them a picture of Pincus tomorrow. There doesn't seem to be any of Hand, and the descriptions of him from his co-workers are vague, in the extreme. Ready to call it a night?" She opened her eyes and glanced at him. "I don't believe it's only eight o'clock. I used to be able to work until midnight without noticing it." "We're still in recovery," he told her. "Of course you're tired. I am too. We could go to sleep early..." He thought that it was probably the first time he'd ever volunteered for sleep. "I'm not sleepy, my eyes are just tired from reading," Scully said. "Let's head back to the hotel, though." By common assent, they let the subject of Pincus drop in the car, and on the way up to their rooms. They stopped outside their respective rooms. "So, I'll...see you tomorrow, Scully." She raised her eyebrow. "Unless I see you before then. Night, Mulder." In his room, he paced around restlessly for a bit, flipping channels as he did so. He wasn't at all tired, and she probably wouldn't go to sleep for another hour or two yet. This would probably be their last night of shared dreams, he knew. Their flashbacks had been cut to a minimum today, and they had been faded. Of course, much as he would miss her in his mind, he had Scully in real time, real body, sitting in the next room over. He hesitated and then went over and knocked on the connecting door. "Yeah, come in." She was small in the middle of her bed, lying on top of the covers, reading a book through those glasses that made her look somehow younger and more vulnerable. "What are you reading?" She held it up for him to catch a glimpse of the cover. "It's called The Women's Decameron. It's by a women named Julia...Voznesenskaya." She pronounced the last name carefully. "It's about ten women in the Soviet Union who are all in the maternity ward at the same time, and they tell their stories. I found it in a used bookstore." "Any good?" "Yes." She took her glasses off. "What's up, Mulder?" "Nothing. So I Married an Axe Murderer was on, and I wanted to know if you wanted to see it with me. But you're reading..." "No, that's the beauty of it, it's in stories, so it's easy to break off. Tell you what?" She grinned at him. "If you go down to the vending machine and get me a twinkie while I'm finishing this chapter, we can have a junk food fest." "One twinkie does not make a junk food fest." "Get some of the Hostess cupcakes, then, too." "Such a chocolate fiend you are. I'll be right back." "Don't get yourself blown up," she called after him, and he grinned as he walked back through his room to the hallway, counting out change as he went down the hallway. Heading back to her room, arms laden with choice junk food, he heard an unpleasant skitter and turned around, heart suddenly beating faster. That had sounded like... No, he had bugs on the brain. He opened the door to his room, juggling his key card with the food. A shadow rushed past him, and he whipped around, but it was gone. He did have monsters on the brain. But the bug spray...that had been classic taunting behavior. And Pincus had once come after Mulder in a mental institution. He might think it a special treat to overcome two FBI agents. If he wanted to, Pincus could probably produce the illusion of invisibility. He dropped the food on the bed and looked around uneasily. "Mulder, I want my food," called Scully from the other room, through the open door, which suddenly... swung wide. Oh, fuck. "Scully!" he yelled. "Get your gun! Pincus!" He grabbed his own gun from the table and charged through the door. "What?" she said, rolling off the bed and starting over to the table where he could see her holster and gun. "What do you mean, he's here?" "I heard a sound, and then the door..." And then the shadow dropped from the ceiling, on her, and he heard her cry out in pain. He yelled out loud in wordless anger and disbelief, running towards the shadow, which had resolved itself into a darker, more solid shape, he couldn't shoot not with Scully there, but he could rip that thing off, no, it wasn't a thing, it was a person, don't believe your eyes on this one. He grabbed and felt flesh, felt bone through flesh, and felt as he did so his world fragment he saw through several sets of eyes, several perspectives a small round man reaching for Scully, a needle in his hand, struggling with her a monster, gaping mouth open to bite Scully's neck got to get my gun stupid to leave it across the room dammit how did he get in here take that you bastard Scully, all adrenaline and determination and courage not flesh and bone beneath his hand some other substance the monster turning rising above him and the dizziness of falling the floor hard underneath him crack of pain in his arm and the gun fell free "Scully!" the first flash of fear from Scully's mind, because the monster had turned on him himself, with the monster looming over him, with a small man reaching for him and he felt it through her arm as she reached out, scrambling for his gun can't move can't breathe fear terror every monster of his dreams pincers holding him tight Mulder he's just a man, just a man, don't believe what you see her mind's touch a blazing arc of electricity that he held onto, trying to see with her eyes, to force Pincus's mind out of his own Scully, throwing him a rope of clarity to cling onto blurring the scene shifted before his eyes before her eyes and somehow he knew she was seeing through his eyes too he was muddying her mind with Pincus's delusions folie a deux no she needed to be free of this to capture Pincus forgive me Scully he let go it slobbered on him its breath hot pain burning in his neck "Scu..." save me black End 5 of 7 Bridge 6 of 7 Full text of this can be found at: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt His mind ripped away from hers with a pain like skin being scraped away. The shock scraped Pincus's illusions away as well, and her mind snapped back into its usual state even as she finally, finally reached Mulder's gun. "Get the hell away from him," she rasped at Pincus, who was now only a small, round man standing over her fallen partner. He sat back on his heels and looked up at her in fear. His hand, gripping the needle, was poised still at Mulder's neck. Mulder lay passive, unresisting. "No," Pincus said. "I have a gun on you. Get away from him." "He belongs to me now." "He'll never belong to you." "Put your gun down. I'll bite him again, I *will.* And too much of it can kill him." "You won't bite him, Pincus. You'll inject him. With the needle. You're not a monster any more than I am." "How can you be so sure?" For a moment, her vision wavered again, and she saw in double, the man and the monster. "How do you know what's true?" he asked. He laughed, a little, as if he were a man uncertain of the meaning of a joke at a party. "How do I know?" "I know that if I shoot you, it will do you damage, either man or monster. Let him go." "No." He shook his head. "No, no, no. I...I need him." "You don't need him." "I created him. He belongs to me now." "You didn't create him." Her arms trembled from the tension of holding the gun upright, of not shifting position. She could feel sweat trickle down the back of his neck. He wasn't sweating. He appeared utterly calm. Had she met him at a cocktail party, she would have categorized him as nice, dull, and harmless. She had classified him as nice, dull, and harmless, when she had met him after the hostage situation. She had dismissed him as any sort of threat at all. And for that mistake, Mulder was lying on the floor, eyes open and staring, body limp. Focus, Dana. Save the guilt for later. "I did create him. It was...me." He rocked back on his heels again, but his hand holding the needle remained steady. "I used to be a man, you know." "You still are. And we can work this out, you just have to put the needle down." "There's no needle," he informed her calmly. "You're still a man, Pincus. You're not a monster." "But I am." He gazed up at her with serene eyes. "And I'm going now." He lifted the needle an inch from Mulder's neck, and tugged on his shoulder. "Come on, get up." And Mulder obeyed. "Stay between me and her," said Pincus. "You can't take him," Scully said. "You won't get away with it if you take him." "You'll shoot me if I don't." Mulder stared at her blankly as he got up, as he stood between her and a clear shot at Pincus. "Mulder, move," she said. "He's not dangerous, Scully. Put the gun down, it's okay," Mulder replied, and his eyes were empty. "Mulder, move out of the way. *Don't listen to him.*" "Don't point that gun at me." "You've got to get out of the way." She moved towards the doorway, and he backed up before her. She could hear Pincus moving towards the door as well. When she got to the door, he was there blocking her way. "Get the hell out of my way!" Pincus was getting away, dammit, she could hear him. "What are you going to do if I don't, shoot me?" Mulder said--Mulder's body said--mockingly. She pushed past him, trying to shove him aside to get to Pincus, and his hand grasped her wrist, her gun hand, tightly; his body pressed her into the doorjamb. She saw Pincus walking down the hallway, walking backwards so that he could look back at her. "I created him," he said. "You did *nothing,*" she spat back, and pushed against Mulder's chest, trying to get away from him without hurting him, without shooting the gun at either of them by accident. "I belong to him," said Mulder. "You belong to me," she snapped back, and succeeded in pushing away from him, in wrenching her wrist away from her hand, even though he still blocked the doorway. He started out the doorway. "Where are you going?" "I need to follow him." She caught up with him and blocked him this time, physically forcing him back into the room even though he struggled. He was bigger than her, and stronger, and not concerned about hurting her in his rush to get away, but she had spent years at the Bureau practicing exactly this situation, and she was prepared now as she had not been a moment ago. And she had had to hurt him to save him before; twisting him arm around viciously behind his back was nothing compared to a gunshot. "Let me go, let me go, let me go," he was chanting, as she brought him down hard to his knees, than to his stomach, on the floor by the bed, half-kneeling, half-lying on top of him. She pulled his handcuffs from the back of his belt, mentally thanking God that he hadn't changed clothes after work, and snapped one cuff on him, the other on the bottom of one bedpost. He bucked underneath her, and she let him shake her off, staggering to her feet and running out into the hallway. Pincus was gone, of course. "God *damn* it," she said out loud, and ran down the hallway to the stairs, taking the stairs themselves cautiously, gun held ready. But he was gone there, too, and when she reached the lobby no one had seen her. The clerk at the desk almost burst into tears when she wasn't able to help, and Scully realized that she was wild-haired and wild-eyed, her gun still out in front of her. Wearing pajamas. Jesus. She was calling the police on the lobby phone when she realized that Pincus might have doubled back to get Mulder. She broke into a flat run on the way back to the stairs. Pincus wasn't in her room, but she didn't even have a chance to breathe a sigh of relief; Mulder was on hands and knees, pulling against the handcuffs, making gutteral, wordless noises. Had he been thinking, he could have simply lifted the bed enough to slide the cuffs down and off the bedpost, but his eyes held no thought, only blank, animal, instinct. She set her gun--no, his gun--on the table and hurried to him. "I need to go need to go need to go need to--" "Stop it, Mulder. Just stop it." She stilled his arms with all the strength in hers. "You've got to listen to me. What he's doing to you, it's not real, you've got to get him out of your head, you can do that." He stopped fighting against her hold abruptly, collapsing against her. "I--I don't--" His voice was hoarse. She rubbed his back. "You've got to listen to me instead of him. You're strong, Mulder, you can do this. You don't have to listen to him." *** She rode with him in the ambulance, wincing whenever she caught sight of the red, raw skin of his wrist. He seemed more lucid, now, but still confused, and his forehead heated her cool fingers. "Almost there," said one of the parademics cheerfully. "And then we'll take care of that poison, okay, Mr. Mulder? You lie still now." Mulder tugged at her arm instead. "Scully, don't let them...don't let them put me there." "You need to be at the hospital, okay? They'll be able to get an antitode to the venom, and you'll be okay." "Not the hospital...don't let them put me *there*. I'm not crazy, I'm not." She bent over him. "I know that. You might suffer from fever and hallucinations from the venom, okay? But whatever's happening to you, it has a physical cause. And whatever you may believe, it's coming from outside of you. You're just fine." "Don't let them put me there." "I won't." *** "He's doing, fine, sir. He's sleeping now, and he's not in any immediate danger. They're taking care of him. And we have the local field office doing everything they can to locate Pincus." They were taking it seriously enough, now that one of their own was in the hospital. "So you're saying that Pincus *was* injecting those people?" Skinner asked. "Nothing paranormal about it at all." "I believe...we believe...that he may have some ability similar to Modell's, actually. But no, we have concluded that he isn't a monster." "That's good." Skinner's tone was dry, and it infuriated Scully for some reason. To be fair, anything would have infuriated her then; she knew that she was not at her best as she was, still dressed in pajamas, with a coat and shoes hastily thrown on. "It doesn't make him any less of a threat than Mulder said he was," she said. "No. He'll be okay?" "He'll be fine." "I want you both back in D.C. I shouldn't have let you go down there in the first place." "But we..." "Don't argue on this one." "Yes, sir." *** His eyes were gummed shut. He rubbed at them and opened his eyes blearily, blinking the world into focus. White ceiling, pale yellow walls, white sheets. Scully, a splash of color in reds and blues. She sat curled up in a chair, reading what looked like yesterday's newspaper. "No aliens invaded while I was out, I hope?" he asked, and she looked up and smiled at him, letting the newspaper fall and rest in her lap. "How are you feeling?" "Uh...fine." He struggled with the covers and sat up. "What'd I do this time?" "Well, you *didn't* head off to Bermuda again, fortunately. What's the last thing you remember?" "Um...Pincus. We'd been looking into Pincus." "Do you remember him being at the hotel?" "He was at the...?" Then he did remember, although hazily, and reached to touch the side of his neck, encountering white gauze. "What'd he do to me?" "The same thing he did to the others. Injected you. Not with a large quantity of the substance, but enough to raise your temperature, to give you fever dreams. I think that once he wasn't there to...override the effects of the toxin, it hit you physically. You should be doing better now." "Did you...you ran after Pincus, I remember that. Did you catch him?" She shook her head; he felt the heat of shame in his face and neck. He'd blocked the doorway. "They're looking for him now. All out manhunt...that's Bureau loyalty for you." "I thought we didn't rate Bureau loyalty." The expression on her face looked uncommonly like a smirk. "I may have yelled a little, too." Then her face grew serious again. "In the last..." She craned her head to look at the clock on the wall behind her. "The last ten hours, they've found out a lot about Pincus. He had a cousin who worked for a reptile research facility. It seems that Pincus had visited him quite often at his job." "Did the cousin know what Pincus was doing?" She half shrugged. "He says not. The Bureau's pressing him. And..." Here here face grew not just serious, but sad as well. "The family had a summer house, a cabin. They went out there." "They didn't find him?" "No. They found bodies. It'll take a bit to identify them, since they're decomposed, but I'm guessing from clothes and height that they're the people who disappeared from Oak Brook last year." "Dammit. How did they die?" "It's difficult to tell yet, with the state of decomposition." "Do you have a theory?" he pressed, since her face said that she did. "I think...the venom that's in you, in small amounts, would do little harm in your bloodstream. But too much of it, in a short time, could. If he felt his hold on them was slipping, he might have tried to reinstate it." "And poisoned them instead," he finished. "Yes. But, of course, that's just a hunch. We'll have to wait for the autopsy--" "You're still in your pajamas," he blurted out, suddenly realizing it himself. "You've been restless. I didn't want to leave you here." "You should have sent someone to get your clothes." "Agent Ripley offered." Her nose scrunched up, a delicate expression of distaste. "I didn't want him pawing through my underwear." "You can't blame a man for trying." She rolled up the newspaper and whacked at his feet under the covers. "Anything else happen while I was gone?" She shook her head. "Not much. Skinner ordered us back to DC. Big surprise there. And there's some interesting stuff in the news--" "I'm sure he was glad to have it confirmed that Pincus wasn't a monster after all...confirms his decision to snap me into the psych ward." "He was wrong to do that. He sounded like he regretted it." "How long am I going to be in here?" "Not long. They'll probably let you out now...there's not much they can do for you after they gave you the antitode. And if Pincus tries to come after you here...I'd prefer to get back to DC as soon as possible." She looked down ruefully at her pajamas. "I'd prefer to get back into clothes as soon as possible." "Where's the fun in that?" She only yawned in response, and he felt a pang of guilt. She'd probably been awake most of the night... "Did you sleep at all?" "Slept a few hours here or there." Her face took on a touch of wistfulness. "Didn't dream. Mulder, in the hotel...why did you?..." "How could I not, Scully? I didn't think you'd fall prey to Pincus's illusions, not if you knew they were only illusions. Except maybe through me." "So to save me, you--" "To save both of us. To give you a chance to save both of us." He gestured to the hospital bed. "It worked, didn't it?" She rolled her eyes and looked away from him. "I did see that nurse, that one time. You weren't the only one in that room who could be influenced by him." "Yeah, but I think that, for whatever reason, maybe because I'm more willing to believe in things, or who knows, maybe there's something physical in the structure of the brain...I'm more susceptible to him. Maybe I'm more susceptible to phenomena like this in general. Modell. Bowman. John Roche, even. You aren't." "You were taking a hell of a chance, you know. Laying it all on me." "I trusted you." *** They were at the airport when Mulder stiffened beside her. "Scully?" "What?" She looked up from the newspaper she was reading. "Did you see this article on Senator Wilkins daughter--" His hand on her arm stopped her. "Scully, I think..." His head was cocked to one side, and for a moment he reminded her of a hunting dog, a pointer about to bound off eagerly after a scent. But the look in his eyes was one of dread. "I think...I think we'd better inform the police," he told her. "Pincus?" she said, and felt dread start to form in her own stomach. "Yeah, maybe. I think so. Yeah. He might have thought to come here if he wanted to get at me, wouldn't he? Or to escape, himself." "Come on," she said, and wrapped her hand around his arm. "We'll go together." Damned if she was going to let him out of her sight. Someone began to scream, and the sound of the gunshot followed, and both of them started to run. When they got there, the police officer was having his gun taken away by two other police officers. "He was a thing! He was, I swear it! He was evil!" cried the officer. The others were trying to lead him away, but he twisted his head around, trying to see behind him, to look at the floor. Their gazes followed his to the body sprawled unnaturally on the floor. A small, short, round body in a suit, face down, the blood spreading on the white tiles of the floor. "You killed him!" The shrill, feminine scream that had summoned them to the scream suddenly shifted into words. "He wasn't doing anything, he was just standing there, a harmless little man...." Mulder wavered, beside her, and Scully caught at his arm again to steady him. "Caught by his own fantasies," said Mulder. "You killed him! Are you crazy!?" screamed the woman, and the security guard looked around at the faces of the bystanders, who had formed a loose circle around the body. "Didn't any of you see?" he cried. "He was right out there, right out there in the light for anyone to see..." The officer holding one arm hushed him. End 6 of 7 Bridge 7 of 7 The full text of this can be found at: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Derby/5520/bridge.txt "So he was just a man? An ordinary man?" asked Skinner two days later. "Well, there were parts of his brain that were abnormal in nature, but it's hard to pinpoint how, exactly, they might have functioned without actually seeing them at work. Which is, of course, impossible now," said Scully. "We know that Pincus killed several people, that he injured Agent Mulder, and that..." "That it was his influence that caused an airport police officer to shoot him," finished Mulder. "A shooting which he is now being questioned for." Skinner nodded. "How does it look for him?" "It could be worse," said Scully, but her eyes were troubled, and Mulder knew that, of all that had been difficult on this case, this bothered her the most. "He did apprehend a criminal, after all." "But a criminal who he didn't know was a criminal, who wasn't an imminent threat," said Skinner, and sighed. "There's a history of Pincus causing such incidents," said Mulder, who had remained fairly hopeful. "And the police there are supporting him to the fullest. And he has a very good lawyer." A lawyer Mulder knew, and had talked to recently, about...a few other matters. He glanced at Scully again, and wondered how she would react. "Let's hope that the lawyer does good," said Skinner. "And the two of you? No ill effects?" "Even the lingering flashbacks from the previous case have left. We're doing fine, sir," said Scully. "Good," replied Skinner. For a moment, the expression on his face was unfamiliar, until Mulder realized that he had seen it on his own face, in the mirror. Guilt. "I'm glad that neither of you came to harm over this." "Even if we had," Mulder said cautiously. "It would have been our choice to go to Missouri. Our fault if we came to grief over it." "I let you go," said Skinner. "On a case that I permitted. If you'd been permanently hurt on it..." "We weren't," said Scully. "And I'm sure you were glad we weren't here for the Wilkins thing," added Mulder, and Skinner's face shuttered tightly against him. "The Wilkins thing, as you call it, isn't your concern." "The daughter of a senator is kidnapped, with servants claiming a bright light was hovering about the house, and that's not our concern?" asked Scully. "It's been in the paper for days...I was surprised that you hadn't mentioned it to us." "Given that you found out about Pincus through the media, I didn't think you needed my help to read the newspaper and see something that interested you. And word on that is that nothing paranormal is involved...they received a ransom note yesterday, as I'm sure you read. Unless your aliens have learned to write good English and use common stationery, I don't think it's them." Mulder almost opened his mouth to reply that if a senator's daughter was involved, the military or anyone else might think to cover up a possible alien abduction by formulating a ransom note, but Skinner was continuing. "And this is very highly political. Don't even think about getting involved." "It's too late now, anyway, sir," said Scully. "Any cover up would already be fully in place, by now. Maybe not the first day, the day we went back to Missouri, but by now..." Mulder wondered at Scully's subtle defiance, at Skinner's sudden edginess. *** "You don't think he was trying to keep something from us, do you?" Mulder asked her when they were back down in the office. She stopped her filing to look back at him, sitting behind his desk and chewing on a pencil. "Do you think that?" "No, I trust him. But you were...you sounded like you were angry at him, up there." "I think...maybe he didn't want us on the Wilkins case, is all. I don't know. Us being out of town was very convenient." Mulder seemed to chew on that idea even as he chewed on the edge of his pencil. "Well, yeah, but it wasn't like we couldn't have read about it on our own and gone there. He's not responsible for finding our cases for us." "No, I know." She closed the drawer gently and leaned against the cabinet. Skinner had supported them, he had come out to rescue them from the magic mushroom, he had told her that he should have been on their side...but ever since he had refused to let them investigate his mysterious illness, she had felt frustrated around him. "I'd buy that he was glad we weren't around for this, but I don't think he would cover anything up. Not Skinner," said Mulder, with that complete confidence he had in the people he trusted. "Besides, he was just his usual grumpy self. He didn't have that constipated look he used to have when Cigarette Man had been in his office, telling him what to do." "You're the one who took a long time to trust him in the first place." "Well, yeah, Scully. I mean, the first time he called me by myself into his office, he gave me this weirdly paternal speech and called me Fox. It was obvious some damn thing was going on. God, I'd prefer gruff any day, over the use of my first name." "What are you saying, Mulder, that if he calls me Dana I should run like hell?" she asked tartly. "He's on our side now," said Mulder. "Maybe not all the way, and he's for damn sure not happy about it, but..." He abruptly segued into a different topic. "Are you doing anything later this afternoon?" "It's 4:00 already. How much later?" "6:00. I have a meeting with my lawyer. I'd like you to be there." She regarded him in suspicion; he met her eyes steadily. "Please tell me that no one is suing you on the behalf of a vampire again." He grimaced. "Not the Bureau lawyers. The one who was in charge of my father's estate." Her mood shifted abruptly to concern. "Is everything okay?" He nodded. "I've just been thinking, the last few days." His mouth quirked up on one side. "I haven't been sleeping well." Neither had she. Her dreams had only left her more restless. "Thinking about what?" "The myths we create for ourselves. Roche wanted to believe he was saving those girls, Pincus wanted to believe he was an all-powerful monster. We all have versions of ourselves that we want to believe in. Just because most of us don't push those visions onto other people doesn't mean they don't exist." "And you're seeing your lawyer because?..." "I think..." he ducked his head. "You asked once why you didn't have a desk. And I guess, the reason why, is because one of the myths I have of myself is of..." "The Knight in Shining Armor?" she suggested, and he looked up, wounded. She moved to lean against the side of his desk in apology. "I have my own office now, anyway," she added. "Yeah, but that's not the point. The point is, this image that I hold of myself as a lone wolf, as myself against the world...Jesus, I sound like bad James Dean now. I don't like the version of myself that doesn't have you in it, Scully." For a moment, she had a brief, completely paralyzing fear that he was going to take her to meet his lawyer so that they could get married. "And this has to do with your lawyer how?" she asked, reservation in her voice. "I know I told you once that my father left me money." She nodded. It had come up once or twice, after he had found out and again, later, when she had had the cancer...she frowned at the memory. "I don't use it for my ordinary expenses. I--it doesn't feel right to do so, to use what's probably blood money to get my hair cut or buy a new suit or go shopping for gourmet fish food." "You've told me that," she said. "But it's there, Mulder, and surely you plan to use it for something." "I always thought that maybe my mom might need it someday, if she had another stroke and needed long term medical care. She came from a wealthy family--he didn't, but she did--and she has enough money, but just in case, you know? And if Samantha did come back." His head ducked down again, and she reached down and put her hand on his, clasping it firmly. "If Samantha did come back," he said evenly, "I don't know what state she would be in, physically or psychologically. And I would want her to have the best care possible. The best people, ones who could be trusted. I guess, to me, it seemed appropriate that that money should help the people who have suffered because of what my father has done." "That makes sense," she said, and briefly wished that he would use some of it for suits or fish food or baseball games. It was very like Mulder not to count himself as one of the people who had suffered because of his father's sins. "And I've used it for emergencies. When I needed immediate money to go to Antarctica." "You didn't tell me that," she said, startled. "I thought the Bureau picked up the expenses." "They reimbursed some of it later, yeah, but I wasn't going to go to them for the money. They might have stopped me. I took it from my dad's account. And a few other time. It's always been a sort of emergency stash that I know is there if I need it, for the quest with a capital Q. But I was thinking about it, and it's not just my quest anymore, is it? And what if I'm incapacitated for whatever reason and can't draw on that money? I want you to put your name on the account." She gaped at him. "But...that's..." "Only fair." "Well, all right, if you're sure that's what you want. How much money are we talking about, anyway?" "About a quarter of a million." She nearly fell off the desk. "About a...what?" "A little less than a quarter of a million. He made some really good investments after he retired, and the accountants have kept them going. It's been growing slowly but steadily, the past few years." She stared at him, and he shifted uncomfortably. "I did tell you once that we could use my dad's money if you needed any experimental treatment that insurance didn't cover, that money wasn't an object. What'd you think, I was talking about a few thousand?" "Tens of thousands, maybe, not...Jesus, Mulder, I can't put my name on that much money." She propelled herself away from the desk and walked restlessly to stand in front of it before she turned to face him. "Why not?" "Because, because...are you kidding? Surely your lawyers must have cautioned you against this?" He smiled a little. "They do think I've gotten myself involved with a golddigger, and told me that even if you were my wife, they'd recommend a prenuptial agreement." "But what if?..." "What if what? You decide to spend my money on expensive jewelry and furs? Are you going to do that?" "Of course not!" He considered. "Although you have ruined a lots of shoes and suits in the course of work. I guess you could take money out if you wanted to reimburse yourself. That'd be fair. I'd ask you to keep the expenses down, but, really--" "Mulder, stop." She ran her fingers through her hair. "That's your money, it should stay your money. You should use it for whatever you see fit." "I see fit to share it with you," he said simply, stubbornly. "What if...what if someday you marry and your wife's name needs to go on the account? She'd be upset." He looked at her steadily, and she flushed and dropped her eyes. "One could argue," he said gently, "that you deserve the money for putting up with me all these years. More than any hypothetical unknown woman." "I don't need to be paid to be your partner." "This isn't in the nature of a payment. This is practical. You might, at some point, need a lot of money to go somewhere. I might not be in the position to provide it. This gives you access to it. Your own honor would prevent you from using it when it isn't necessary." "My honor." She exhaled noisily and gestured at the back of her neck. "What about this, then, hmm?" He looked up at her quizzically, and touched the bandage on the side of his own neck. "You think that I'm still under Pincus's influence?" When she shook her head, he went on, "Then what? You're afraid that a fake monster might inject you in the back of the neck and use you to steal the money?" "I'm more afraid of what real monsters have already put in the back of my neck," she said, teeth gritted, and he had the grace to flush. "I hadn't thought about that," he said. "I can't forget very easily," she spat out, and they both recoiled slightly at her words. "What if I'm called again, by this thing in the back of my neck, and decide to get somewhere any possible way, and use your money to do it?" "Scully, don't be ridiculous. If you're called again, the money will be the least of our worries." "You say that you rely on my honor. But how do we know that honor can't be compromised by them? That they would have me betray you in some way through my own body?" "Scully. Listen to me. The reason why I didn't think about the implant was because...shit, if we're doing what ifs, what if they tried to destroy us both by having you pull out your gun and shoot me dead?" "Don't." "Do you think that that possibility never crossed my mind? When you had the implant put in, or after the mass incinerations? I put my life in your hands every *day* on the job. I trust that you won't slip up on the job when you're supposed to be covering my back. I trust when I hie off to Bermuda or some other place that you'll come and get me if I need it. I trust that you'll be honest with me about your thoughts on a case, and probably save us both." He got up and she watched him circle the desk and approach her. His hands were heavy on her shoulders. "If I can trust you with my life, how could I not trust you with this?" She reached up, her own hands impossibly heavy, and held on to his forearms. "I don't ever want to be the one to betray you." *** "All right, I'm done," she said, and he moved only his eyes to look at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, and the papers were in tidy collections on the coffee table in front of her. "Questions?" he asked. "Not right now. Maybe tomorrow. We should both probably get to...oh, Mulder, I didn't even realize how late it was getting. I'm sorry." "Not a problem," he said. "You needed to know where the money came from, what investments it's in, all that." She had pored over the documents relating to his father's account for the last several hours, following the paths of investments and stocks and dividends diligently, while he had sat (then slumped, then lay) on her sofa, changing television channels over her head. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "You can stay here tonight if you don't want to drive." She leaned back against the couch. "No, I'm okay," he said, although he didn't make a move to get up. Instead, he reached a hand out and rested it on the back of her neck, moving his thumb gently. She let him rub her neck in a haphazard massage, leaning back slightly into his touch. "I've missed you," he told her eventually. "Me,too." "Really?" He was surprised at that; Scully valued her privacy so jealously. "I don't think I would have wanted the effects from the mushroom to be permanent, but it would have been nice if they'd had a chance to wear off gradually, not so abruptly." He remembered the sheer, blank terror he had felt when he had locked himself out of her mind. "I think it'd be interesting if it was permanent." Her hair brushed his hand as her head swiveled. "If it were people I knew, people I trusted, people I...loved, perhaps, but can you imagine sharing dreams with someone like John Lee Roche forever?" "Perish the thought." He let the conversation lapse into silence, focusing on the way his hand moved on the back of her neck. For a second, the small patch of skin became a palimpsest for all their years together. The softness of her skin the same as the first touch of his hand on her lower back in a hotel room in Oregon. The vulnerability of her bent head the same as it had been in Icy Cape. The implant under her skin like the implants that had directed Duane Barry. The base of her neck the same place as they had once tried to shoot an alien, to save Scully and the woman who had not been his sister. The raised bump of the implant scar under his touch like the time he had placed his hand on the scar on her stomach, after Peyton Ritter. The patch of almost-healed skin from the giant mushroom that had given him insight into your dreams. Impulsively, he leaned forward a little to wrap an arm around her shoulders from behind, pressing his face into her hair to inhale her scent. "Scully?" "Yeah?" "You do know that even if I get frustrated with your skepticism sometimes...and probably will again...that I don't want you to change." "I'm sure you will again." "Scully..." "And even with all my skepticism...and I know I come across too harshly sometimes, Mulder...you know that I wouldn't want you to stop believing? To stop throwing yourself into each case?" "So we just continue the same old way, huh?" "Together," she said. "Okay." He pulled back, but let his hand stay on her shoulder. They watched TV like that, neither speaking, neither moving. He let thoughts of the case float through his head, letting them fall where they would. "Hey, Scully?" he asked finally. "Mmm?" she sounded half-asleep. "You know that tree out front of your apartment building?" "Yeah." "Want to build a treehouse?" End Thanks for reading. Should the mood strike you, I never reject feedback of any sort at marianicole29@yahoo.com (and please remember to keep the 29 in the address...there is some poor soul at marianicole @yahoo.com, apparently, and she has learned a little more about the x-files then she ever wanted to know ;) The Gossamer Project Author - Title - Date - Spoilers - Crossovers - X-Files - Adventures - Stories - Vignettes Download Other stories by Nicole, Maria /Please let us know if the site is not working properly. Set story display preferences . Do not archive stories elsewhere without permission from the author(s). See the Gossamer policies for more information. /