TITLE: Tidings AUTHOR: Ambress E-MAIL: ambress27@mindspring.com CATEGORY: MSR, A RATING: R, I think. SPOILERS: Requiem SUMMARY: lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub THANKS: to bugs, Kari and jordan, who, although she doesn't do beta, because she sucks (and I quote), rewrote a troublesome sentence, found a missing word, and cast her vote on the worth of about five different sentences. shannono and Pebbles kindly gave me last-minute beta. FEEDBACK: oh please! ambress27@mindspring.com ARCHIVE: Okay for Gossamer, Spookies, Xemplary, Ephemeral. Anywhere else, please let me know first. Thanks. DISCLAIMER: Everybody has their own Mulder and Scully doll; this is what I did with mine. Oh, but the characters themselves all belong to Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen, and Fox. MY WEBSITE:"Unfolding Like a Flower: Ambress' X-Files Fanfiction": http://urw.simplenet.com/ambress Tidings *~*~*~* Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visits't the bottom of the monstrous world --Milton, Lycidas 157-8. *~*~*~* Somehow, at night, the phone always sounds more shrill. It screams, Emergency! Someone has died! Disaster! The sound struck every nerve in her body like a hammer blow. There had been a period of time when it had not spelled emergencies or disasters. Once, she would have assumed that it was Mulder, unable to sleep himself and wanting to communicate the dizzying peregrinations of his thoughts to her. Her phone had not rung in the wee small hours for many months now. After much lumbering, she finally made it to the hallway, and picked up the ringing phone. "Hello?" The voice at the other end might have been coming from another world, it cut into her little bubble so sharply. "Agent Scully?" It was Skinner. "Yes?" The sound of his voice threw a blanket of fear over her, thick and suffocating. She couldn't read it. He sounded emotional, even distressed. The vertigo had passed as her body had acclimated itself to the rush of human growth hormone. Now she felt it again. Perhaps it wasn't fair to Skinner, who had been kind to her, but his voice always made her stomach twist these days. Thankfully, Skinner got right to the point: "A man answering Mulder's description has been found at a picnic area in Shenandoah National Park." An infinite beat. "Alive?" She didn't want to ask, didn't want it to even be a question, but it popped out like a particularly ugly jack-in- the-box. "Yes," said Skinner. "I'll pick you up in twenty minutes." Scully had been ready to give up. It had gone on too long, and she could no longer stand even to make the attempt, only to have her hopes dashed yet again. In the dark room, lying on sheets that had been pleasantly cool when she lay down but were now hot and sweaty from restlessness, the light from a never wholly dark city intruding in her window, she had forced herself to face the facts. She couldn't sleep. Not that sleep had been easy for months, but she had passed the point of no return. It was no longer just difficult; it was impossible. She couldn't sleep on her belly, for reasons that were obvious. She fantasized about cutting a hole in her mattress. If she had a sandbox, she would just dig a hole and sleep with her abdomen in it, like a giant sea turtle. She couldn't sleep on her back. Sleeping on her back beyond her sixth month of pregnancy--she dutifully reminded herself--could press on a major vein and cause the baby to lose oxygen. Perhaps it was symptomatic of the questioning attitude she had begun to develop toward her own profession that she wondered if a loss of oxygen might not be nature's way of putting the kid to sleep so he wouldn't kick her all cursed night long. Even so, it felt like lying underneath an enormous bowling ball, so that option was out. The only alternative was to sleep on her side. Yet the weight of her belly pulled on her hip joints. She needed to turn over approximately every forty minutes, but it was no longer possible to stay asleep while doing so. Even turning over in bed was now a production. Wake from the sense of soreness in her hips, heave her bulk over, put the pillow back between her knees, readjust the one in her arms, settle, try to go back to sleep. For several months, she had managed to get to sleep with a spontaneous form of self hypnosis. She had discovered it quite by accident. At different times of the day, she missed him in different parts of her body. It always felt as though a big gouge had been bitten out of her. She wondered that everyone who saw her didn't seem to see her gaping wound. The missing pound of flesh in her traveled as she moved through her day. At work, she missed him in her head. She often felt muddy, slow, perceiving everything through a fogged glass. No sparks, no charge of synapses firing in perfect tandem. Just stale, flat and unprofitable interaction with the rest of the human race. There was no one else with whom it was even worth arguing. At other times, she would feel it as a pain in her throat, a loss so great she felt unable to speak. Her throat had been cut, and she couldn't tell anyone. When Frohike, or Skinner, or her mother, called her to see how she was doing, she couldn't do more than croak that she was fine. In her second trimester, when her sex drive had shot back up so hard it rang the bell, she had lain awake every night for a week, missing him between her legs with a hollow ache, a sense of cavernous emptiness. Every night for that week she relived the last time they had been together. Rocking above him slowly, grinding her clit against his pubic bone and his crinkly hair, caressing her own breasts as his hands slid up her rib cage, watching his face discard its masks one by one until only the pleasure of thrusting into her was left. Sliding off his body, so that she was lying with her head on his chest. She would imagine it so clearly that she could feel the slickness of sweat on her cheek, the smoothness of his skin, his breath stirring her hair, could smell the heady potion compounded of their mutual chemistry. She could visualize the individual hair of his stubbly beard, inches from her nose. Some nights, if she really concentrated, she could hear his voice, yammering on about some existential dilemma. Unlike most men, Mulder's neural synapses were stimulated by sex, and he often lulled her to sleep with his cicada-like musings. Above all, she would hear his heart thudding in his chest, the deep hard beat of the satiated. Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. She found the imagined sound lulled her to sleep. It beat through her dreams, a steady certainty. It pulled her out beyond the rocks of the here and now to an open sea of possible reunion. Soon she realized she merely had to follow her seductive imaginings out to the sound of his heartbeat, and she would slide away from awareness, into the deep cradle of sleep. Yet, as time passed, it became harder and harder to hear, the same way it had become harder and harder to visualize the faces of her father and sister without the aid of photographs. They were far from shore--almost out of sight. She needed to get up and pee again anyway. Hoisting herself out of bed, she waddled to the bathroom. The ligaments in her pelvis had already begun to stretch and loosen, giving her a gait halfway between a duck and a newborn giraffe. Rocko seemed to be awake too. As she sat on the toilet, she contemplated the odd shape of her protuberance. Slap some tinfoil over this thing and she'd look like Jiffy Pop popcorn, about to burst. When her innie belly button became an outie, was that the equivalent of a human meat thermometer? Would she be done? Was that a foot sticking out on the left side as far as it could go? Did that mean it was his or her head pressing against her ribs? Or vice versa? "What on earth are you trying to do?" she asked him or her. Rocko undulated in response. She had given Rocko his or her uterine name for Edward G. Robinson's character in Key Largo, who had said in response to Bogart's taunts: "Yeah, yeah. Rocko wants more!" He or she always stretched the limits of his confinement in the morning, hence the name. *More room, Mommy. I need more roooooooooooooommm.* Rocko would have the whole world to stretch out in soon. All they had to do was wait. She had never known how hard it was just to wait, to relax, lie back and let the pull of time carry her. It was getting closer every day. Two nights before she had come home after a long, exhausting day, taken off her bra, and had been absentmindedly massaging her sore breasts. Tiny seeds of creamy white had appeared on her nipples. She knew it would happen, but she was still struck by it. Her body was making something other than tumors, something sustaining. The silent bathroom seemed like an otherworldly place in the middle of the night. The lit room in the middle of silent darkness. She and Rocko might have been alone in an empty city. Maybe she was hallucinating from lack of sleep. That was when the phone rang. Once she would have told Skinner that it wasn't necessary for him to come get her--that she was perfectly capable of driving herself. And she still was--she could drive--she just wasn't sure she could face the truth by herself. She had faced enough by herself already. She had driven herself to work for weeks with a paper bag between her knees in case traffic prevented her from being able to pull off to the side of the road for the morning's second wave of nausea. She had done everything that needed to be done, by herself: grocery shopping, doctor's appointments, ferreting out the truth hidden by various nefarious shadowy figures. Every night, she wished she could leave a message on his machine: "Mulder, it's me. Your child has the hiccups and holding *my* breath does no good, dammit"; or, "Mulder, it's me. It is imperative that I have lime sherbet right now--and some fried chicken." Rocko had eclectic tastes. Enough was enough, so she said all right, and hung up the phone to go get dressed. She didn't allow herself to think as she dressed. She put on stretchy black pants and one of Mulder's shirts, with a black jacket over it. The jacket wouldn't button, but it didn't matter. While she brushed her hair, she concentrated only upon brushing her hair, leaving no strand uncombed. She looked steadily at her face in the mirror. Just breathe. She finished dressing just as she heard the knock on the door. She went to open it. Skinner looked clean and damp, as though he had jumped in the shower to wake himself up. He ducked his head a bit, trying to look in her eyes. He nodded at her, and said, "Ready?" Rocko did a back flip at the sound of Skinner's voice. He loved deep voices. Every time she had a conversation with Skinner, Rocko thrashed wildly in his tidal world. "Yes." She wasn't sure it was strictly true. There was no point in attempting to explain that to Skinner, though. If she just kept answering yes, sooner or later yes would be the answer. They walked together out of her apartment building and across the street to where Skinner had parked his car. His hand was light on her elbow. Skinner held the passenger's door for her, and she carefully lowered herself into the car. She was profoundly glad that Skinner hadn't had a mid-life crisis that had driven him to buy one of those low slung vehicles. She would have needed a crane to get back out of it. They had made a trip like this twice before. Both times the tall dark-haired man had turned out to be just another tall dark- haired man in a place he shouldn't have been. They had had that in common with Mulder, too. The drive gave Rocko the hiccups. Sitting still for any length of time gave Rocko the hiccups these days. It was like having someone flick her with an index finger, over and over again, in the same spot, from inside. It was as painful as her own heart thudding within her chest. Lub-dub, Lub-dub, Lub-dub. She was at the very top of the Ferris wheel, darkness everywhere, and the gondola swinging. Skinner didn't attempt to make small talk, for which she was indebted to him. One more item on a long list. What could he say that would be of any importance, other than "It could be him," or "It might not be him." She looked out the window at the bars of shadowy trees moving by, outlined against a plum dark sky. It was almost dawn by the time they reached the park station. An earnest-looking ranger came out to the car to greet them. His brow was pulled into a frown, and his mouth turned down. They got out of the car and walked to meet him. "Are you the people from the FBI?" he asked. "Yes," Skinner answered for both of them, showing the young man his badge. She was afraid of what would come out of her mouth if she opened it to speak. Adrenaline--that poisonous aphrodisiac-- was burning in her chest, her armpits. She pulled out her badge and flipped it open without speaking. The young man offered his hand to Skinner. "Matthew Chase." He had bright blue eyes, and pale strawberry blonde lashes. His mouth was a thin, straight line. He glanced, not at Scully, but at her middle. She straightened her shoulders. She couldn't get used to the way she had become something other than Scully in other people's eyes. Everyone who looked at her defined her by her pregnancy. "Agent Scully." Skinner introduced her with a gesture of his hand, and dived in. "Tell us what's going on." "Well, earlier tonight, several campers caught him rummaging in their packs, which they had set down to, uh, admire the landscape. They ran one way when they saw him, and he ran the other. They informed me, and I remembered the bulletin you had sent out about this guy." "Is he all right?" she choked, unable to stop herself. At her question, Chase finally looked at her face. His words came out fast and unrelenting: "He seems lost and pretty confused. He's up at the Visitor's Center. He's in the rest room and he won't come out." The young ranger was sweating, even on a cool March night. Whatever he had seen had disturbed him. "We haven't been able to really get a good look at him, but I think he's your guy. We weren't sure how you wanted to handle it. We didn't want to scare him any more than he's scared already." He paused. "He's an FBI agent?" he asked, as though he couldn't quite believe it. They climbed--Scully laboriously--back into the car to drive up to the Visitor's Center, and followed Chase in his SUV. Two more rangers were waiting for them outside the Visitor's Center, both anxious. "He still won't come out." The older one--salt and pepper hair and an enormous nose--spoke to Chase. The bathroom smelled like most public toilets, a distasteful mixture of disinfectant and bodily functions. The yellowish cast of the tiles mingled with the unearthly blue of predawn light, and made the room glow green. "Where is he?" She was conscious of the wobble in her voice as she glanced frantically around. Had he gone? "Over there." Chase shone his flashlight into the far corner. Crouching, naked, frightened. It couldn't possibly be Mulder. Too thin. Too bent. This cornered animal? For a brief moment she hoped it wasn't him. When he stood up, turning his head away from the flashlight's glare, the bluish light coming through the high narrow bathroom window cast a nimbus around his head. His face was shadowed, but she recognized the shape of it. Her breath caught, hard and hot, and she made an involuntary sound of pain. Nothing to spare, his flesh was tight over his bones. She inhaled air like liquid nitrogen--sharp and burning cold. "Get it out of his eyes," she snapped, already moving toward him. No longer caring that they were watching her--that her behavior was only confirming the assumptions that her belly was leading them to--she reached out her hand to him, stopping inches short of his arm. "Mulder, it's me." His white face turned in her direction, his eyes hollow. He turned not in recognition, but the way a sunflower turned toward the sun, or the way a cat's ears will swivel toward a sound without turning its head. It was a fishhook in her heart. Had they sent her back a simulacrum, emptied of everything that was Mulder? His eyes didn't see her, didn't register her presence, or the oddity of her changed appearance. The sensation of his fear struck her like a strong surf, buckling her knees. "Somebody get him a blanket," Skinner barked. The earnest young ranger hurried to the park vehicle. She stood and stared at Mulder. Scully took the blanket from Chase when Mulder started back as Chase approached. "It's okay," she said. She put the blanket around his shoulders, moving slowly, trying not to startle him. She took his chin in her fingers and looked in his eyes. Pupils equal, and certainly reactive to light. She felt the pulse in his neck. It beat under her fingers like Rocko's hiccups. Skinner cleared his throat to get her attention, and she became aware of how long she had been standing there, gazing up at Mulder like a foolish adolescent. "We should take him to the hospital" Skinner was looking at Mulder with helpless horror. She felt a flash of anger that he should look at Mulder that way. Her hand was on Mulder's arm, and she could feel him trembling. A tidal wave of resistance rose up inside her. "No. I won't have him subjected to any more tests." She saw he was about to argue with her, to say something about not destroying evidence. She didn't honestly believe they would have let Mulder go, if they had left any. Whatever guilt was driving Skinner, it was less important than protecting Mulder. "Not tonight." Skinner opened his mouth, and moved infinitesimally closer to the two of them. He glanced at the three other men. He nodded sharply. Scully had to wheedle Mulder into Skinner's car like a starved alley-cat--with a gentle tone and persistence. She saw that he was limping as they moved to the car. Scully thought she would crack in two when, in the car, Mulder put his head down on her shoulder. She had sat in the back with him without thinking about it. At first, she thought he was asleep, but then she caught the flash of light reflecting off his open eyes in the rearview mirror. He was watchful, prepared for fight or flight. She took his hand from his lap and rubbed it between hers. It was so cold. Skinner came with them up the stairs to Scully's apartment, in spite of the undeniable fact that Mulder kept his distance from him, and wouldn't allow the other man to touch him. At the door, Scully turned to face him. "Thank you," she said. Her message was clear: I can handle it from here. "Are you sure?" He responded to the statement she hadn't made aloud. "Yes. Thank you for all you've done." She felt guilty for shutting him out, but stronger than guilt was the need to be alone with Mulder. In her apartment, she coaxed him to the couch. Turning on the lamp beside it to get a better look at him, she winced herself when he recoiled from the light. Shadows like fading bruises ringed his eyes. His hair hadn't been cut, and it lapped around his neck in snakey locks. She tucked her afghan around him, and went to run him a bath. To say she was glad to see him was an understatement, but it was a truth that could not be denied--he smelled bad. When she came back, he was still sitting in the same spot, perched on the edge of the sofa as though prepared to flee. He didn't look around him at all, as though he were afraid of what he might see out of the corner of his eye if he were careless. "Do you want something to eat?" she asked him. "You must be hungry. When was the last time you ate?" He blinked at her, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Going to the kitchen, she made him a sandwich and poured him a glass of milk. He gobbled the sandwich like a Labrador. "Drink it slowly," she told him when he lifted the glass to his mouth. When he finished, she took his arm at the elbow, and he rose up and went with her without resistance, or much interest. She led him to the bathroom. She helped him into the bathtub--first one leg up and over, and then the next--and then sat down on a stool beside it. "What did they do to you?" she asked, not expecting an answer. A shudder ran through him. What could they have done to him that could be worse than he had done to himself over the years? She kept talking, anyway, in spite of his failure to respond verbally. That, at least, was a relief. "I suppose you'll want your desk back," she said. "Not that I am capable of fitting behind it now. For that reason, and that reason only, I will indulge you. I want my game of Battleship, though." No answer. She grabbed a washcloth from the low shelf, dunked it in the water, and rubbed a bar of soap over it. She ran the soapy washcloth around his neck and over his collarbones. She pressed her fingers behind his ear with her other hand. "Good strong pulse." She ran her fingertips across his jaw, turning his head from one side to the other. She took his hand and stretched his arm out, and turned his hand from front to back. Bruises, as if from an IV needle there too. He had fresh bruises on his forearm and rib cage. Probably from his jaunt to the woods. No telling how long he had been out there. He was so thin. She scooted her way down the side of the tub, and lifted up the foot he had been favoring. She ran her fingers gently over the sole. He flinched and she hit a sharp bump at the same time. "Ah, a little splinter," she told him. "Hang on." She pushed herself off the edge of the bath and went to the medicine cabinet. Returning with tweezers, she lifted his foot back up, and rested it on the edge of the bath tub. "A little piece of glass." She showed it to him when she pulled it out. "See? Now you'll feel better." It was brown, like a broken beer bottle. He had probably picked it up at the park. She washed him gently, lifting his arms, his legs apart. She admitted to herself a surreptitious joy at being able to run her hands over his flesh once more, although it was tempered by guilt. She dampened his hair with the washcloth, lathering the shampoo into his scalp. When she tilted his head back to rinse his hair, he flailed in panic, slipped, and went down, gasping for breath. She grabbed his shoulders, pulling him up, into her arms as she balanced on the edge. "Itsokayitsokayitsokay," she soothed him, and herself. Heart pounding again. Her fingers in the wet tendrils of his hair, she whispered it into his temple. "I've got you. I've got you." She held his wet, slippery shoulders, stroking him, as he breathed ragged hitches of air into her neck. She could see him at the bottom of a deep well. He was up to his neck already and the water was filling the space. She would reach her hands out to him. She would pull him in with all her strength, if only he would reach for her. She turned her face into his hair and gasped for control. "Come on," she said when they both had recovered. "Let's get you dried off." She wrapped her biggest bathtowel around him, and let him lean upon her again as he stepped out of the tub. She had his pajamas at her apartment. Okay, to tell the truth, she had been wearing them. Rolled up a half a dozen times and the drawstring let out as far as it would go. Now she helped him into them, and then into her bed tucking the blanket around him, realizing the ridiculousness of it as she did it. He sat up in her bed, looking like a baby owl, ruffled and blinking. "Okay," she said. "Will you be all right?" She moved his hair off his forehead. He looked panicky, seeming to realize that she was going to leave. "You need to sleep," she said. If anything, her words made his expression more panicky. She paused. Considered. She came to a decision, and told him: "I'll be right back." She went to the closet and pulled out her black bag. It was not a part of her normal equipment, but she had borrowed the dobtone--a portable ultrasound device that amplified sound waves--from a friend for the duration. It looked like a small cylindrical kitchen gadget, one end rounded and the other, placed against the skin, flat, with a membrane stretched tight across its drum. Sitting back down on the bed, scooched up to the headboard, she squeezed a small amount of KY Jelly across the membrane, and pulling up her shirt, she moved it slowly over the expanse of pale flesh rising before her. If the bladder-masher was his or her feet, then. . . "Mulder, I want you to meet someone." Loud in the room it came: lub-dub-lub-dub, lub-dub-lub-dub, lub- dub-lub-dub. Almost twice the rate of hers. As though Rocko were in a state of unbearable excitement. *Here I come! I'm on my way!* The rapid pulse swished under the dobtone, the vibrating ebb and flow of their inner dark sea. "Mulder, Rocko. Rocko, Mulder." She wasn't even sure that he was listening, but he sat very still. After a while, his eyes began to blink. Once, and then twice, a little longer each time, until they remained closed. After a few moments, his breathing deepened, and after another, he emitted a short half-groan, half whimper, which sounded as though he were calling to her without words from the other side of a vast expanse. He fell asleep. She sat watching him for a long time, happy to be breathing the same air that he breathed. His lashes--flirtatious fans during the day--rested against his face. His mouth was slack and relaxed, pink and ripe as a piece of fruit. The color of his eyelids was the inside of an oyster shell. He seemed younger in sleep, the wear of fear, of pain, anger and grief, fallen away. Finally, she dozed herself, sitting up against the pillows, her head back at an awkward angle, Mulder's head against her thigh. It was the most satisfying sleep she'd had in a very long time. The sun was shining in her window when a noise made her open her eyes. In the first moment of consciousness, the knot in her chest pulled excruciatingly tight, as it had every morning for months. But now, this morning, after a moment, it loosened again. He was here. She turned her head, amazed by the grace of it. Lost and found. His grumbling was the noise she had heard. He looked up at her, and his face became more clearly discernible. The confusion poured off of him--his own face, his own self, his consciousness, oh, Mulder!--breaking through. He emerged from the depths, a whale breaching, impelled into ecstasy by unknown primal forces. He sucked in the morning air with a huge, grateful gasp. Turning his face up to her, he seemed to see her for the first time. His eyes, clear and true, found hers without hesitation. "Scully?" *~*~*~* "Fear not: For behold, I bring you tidings of great joy" (Luke 2:10). *~*~*~* The End Feedback to ambress27@mindspring.com "Unfolding Like a Flower": Ambress' X-Files Fanfiction http://urw.simplenet.com/ambress -- Happy Premise #1: There are no aliens. Happy Premise #2: There is no giant foot trying to squash me. Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite--I probably won't. --Kit Ramsey, "Bowfinger"