Title:  The Watching Wall
Author:  amerella
Feedback: amerella@hotmail.com
Classification:  UST, A
Rating:  PG
Spoilers:  Biogenesis, The Sixth Extinction, Amor Fati
Summary:  Cartography, he had said of her once.
Disclaimer:  Everything in The X-Files Universe owned by
Chris Carter and Fox Ten Thirteen Productions.

Dedication:  To Brenda, for the conversations.
_________

Chicago is burning down.  That is all she can think, the sun
a luminary sphere rising from somewhere deep.  Reds and
beaten golds and the remnants of the moon barely visible
beneath the smoggy upper atmosphere.

The grass beneath their feet so dry that it crackles, breaks
with the weight of a step.  Something about this frailty
makes her uneasy.  The promise of forest fires, Mulder
supplies and she agrees.  Yes.  They do not speak of Skyland
Mountain or brain surgery.  They do not speak of Africa and
the blood red Pacific.  Symbols of the beginning of the world
branded upon her retina.  Chromosomes, Muhammad, prophesies.
Humanity.

Fire, Mulder says and fire is simple.  Manifested in heat and
light, fire is simply a visible phase of combustion.  They
speak of simple things until he tumbles into sleep in the
centre of her motel room bed.  She stops unpacking her bags
and totals him up.  He is a mess of long elegant limbs strewn
in a tangle.  There are new scars beneath his hairline, white
and upraised.  She sees them when he is lying down like this.

She circles his ankle with her fingers and likes the drowsy
way he kicks at her.  Her smile feels stiff, muscles
forgotten with disuse.  She would like to tickle his toes as
the flames outside scrape roughly at the sky and at the sides
of buildings.
_________

He sleeps more often now than he ever has before.  He curls
often and waits for his senses to slip.  He dreams of
building sandcastles and spaceships.  He dreams of saving
grace.  He savours the taste of angel dust and the tingling
fingertips; the moment before awareness.  When he is awake
now, reality seems hard and bitter, drawn from the cold teeth
of the earth.

Once he had been angry and brave and unknowing.  He misses
those things.  Awareness is to be soaked in knowledge.

He tells Scully, after the ringing of the telephone has
jarred him upright, that she feels like a dream.  Her touch.
He is still lost beneath a cloak of angel dust and he does
not explain.  She can not understand.  She runs him a glass
of chlorinated water from the mouth of the silver faucet to
wake him up.
_________

In the Chicago field office there are ten framed paintings,
portraits of each victim.  The UNSUB has been sending them
addressed to the SAC for the last nine months.  The women
watch them, trapped to easel with paint and brush.  The
imprints of eyes raise the down hairs on Mulder's arms and he
refuses to turn away from them.  Foolishly, as if papery
hands would find his throat.

Beautiful colours, every detail vibrant with life that is no
more.  The fine boned woman at the end of the watching wall,
raven hared and still.  The regal woman with the damp lashes.
The paintings are in the Renaissance style.  He recalls once
he had seen a Botticelli that had reminded him of Scully.  A
small woman with carmine coloured hair and strength in her
posture.  Scully has halcyon eyes and lashes that have
brushed against his chest as he's held her and stained his
skin with mascara and sea salt.
_________

Her feet leave faint watermarks on the floor of the motel.
She puts her hair in a turban with the towel and gazes at the
Phoenix sun rising at the window.

"Freckles" he comments and she makes a slight face,
disappears back into the bathroom where she finds her
concealer.  She does not ask him how exactly he got inside
her room.  She is used to him appearing places, just being
here in her space, in her air.  He ripples it.  He makes her
crazy.  Why else would she be contemplating that aliens had
created all of this, him and her and the air and the sun?  He
has made her as crazy as he is.  She thinks of his wrists
tied down and chafed in the psychiatric ward abruptly; the
makeup slides from her wet fingers.  She catches it.

"I wrote the preliminary profile" he calls.

"Tell me."

"He wants to capture how beautiful they are.  He wants us to
understand him.  He doesn't commit the crime for the thrill
of the murder, but rather for the love of their presence.
That said, when he's finished with them they must be disposed
of.  Did you note the way he folds their arms?  It's an act
of contrition."

"Why?"

"Too early to tell.  Next question."

"Physical characteristics."

"Fifty-five to seventy.  High income.  He's in a position of
authority, divorced or widowed.  He has one child, probably a
daughter."

"The trigger factor?"

"The daughter was killed and he's searching for her
replacement. That isn't official, just a thought."

He comes to the doorway and leans into both sides of the
frame with his arms.  Mulder with his mad leaps of logic and
his hoarse early morning voice.  They regard each other in
the mirror.

"I liked the freckles," he says.  He smiles at her until she
is in danger of smiling in return.  Her hands roam to her
bag, where she rifles through it.  Toothpaste, a toothbrush.
He may have asked her what she was looking for or she may
have just told him.  She feels inane, talking of serial
killers and looking for lipstick.

"You can borrow mine," he says, deadpan.

Their eyes catch again, bind, as her fist closes around the
plastic tube.

"No need.  Found it" she tells him.  He looks at her and
laughs.  He follows her to dry her hair and sits in the
armchair to wait for her.  He is watching and smiling and she
turns off the blow dryer.

"What are you thinking right now?"

This is a game they sometimes play on long car trips, when
the road stretches tediously into forever.  He will always be
thinking of something that can provoke long conversations.
Black holes.  Quantum leaps.  The fate of the earth.
Infinity.

He blinks in a way that she knows he remembers.  "Now" he
says and tastes the word.  "Now I'm thinking that we're going
to be late for the briefing."

"You're even looking into the future Mulder."  She smiles
then, can't stop it.  She smiles at his mismatched socks, at
his wild tie, at him.  It is simple, this. Mulder and Scully
and eight years spent together.  She almost goes to him and
pushes his hair back to reveal the healing wound from where
his skull has been dismantled.  Almost kisses him there.
_________

It has rained here recently, and the puddles sit molecular
and sizzling.  The back of her shirt is damp when she climbs
out of the passenger seat, clinging.  Mulder has a small
barely discernible glint in his eye that says he would like
to jump in one of those puddles to shatter the stillness.
She knows he must have been that type of child.  One who
returned to his doorstep at suppertime with mud in his hair
and smudging his skin.  One who built tree houses and massive
sandcastles.

Ice cubes clink together in their glasses as they study the
menus.  She remembers glossy eight by tens, dead women and
the way he had fallen asleep atop them at the field office,
face as smooth in sleep as silk and just as veiled.

"What would I like?" she asks.  She defers to him in
restaurants the way he defers to her in the autopsy bay.  He
knows what she will like.  With his eidetic memory and the
circumspect way he takes in the world and her place in it.

"Chicken Camembert" he answers.  She orders it.  They speak
of the case and not of the vestiges of sleep that rest in the
temple he has made of his palms.  He puts the temple to his
forehead as if he has a headache and she must struggle with
her words, scientific well-known words that entangle in her
throat.  She sees that Mulder's wrists are still slightly
bruised from restraints.  Phantom darkness marring the soft
flesh there.  He has lengthy fingers that can consume her own
hand.  He has arms that have lifted to the orb of the sky as
if calling out for home.

A moth comes to the window, lunar and blue, beating its wings
with a dull thud thud against the glass.  Scully stops
talking.  Mulder moves his hands to the sun drenched glass
and listens to the delicate noise with the lines of his palm.
He darts her a quiet look and she leans over the formica.  He
lets her feel this turquoise ghost of aviation.  She has
never seen a blue moth before that she can recall, or a moth
in the middle of a crystal hot summer day.  They watch it
slow together, heavy with Chicago smog.  They watch it fall
away and curl itself on the tarmac in death.

Mulder draws his mouth into a thin line, mutters something
about flying, about wanting to fly.  Their hands pull away.
This feels like a dream, she thinks, and he jerks as if he
has heard her.  She stares at him with her heart like those
wings.  Sluggish.  She thinks she would never have even
noticed a moth without Mulder here.  It would have slipped
from this world without acknowledgement.  Something that had
never existed, a blinding indigo day moth.
_________

a dream.  collecting shells on a slender strip of white sand.
this is a different ocean than in massachusetts, where the
sand can be gritty and the fishermen have hard weathered
faces as the waves crash like furious giants.  scully is on
this beach and the shells are foreign, slippery.  she has a
beige suit jacket and they use it as a net, rosebud pink
shells and yellows.  pastels.

"Tell me about Africa" he had said once when he had still
been confined to the greyness of a hospital room.  She had
still been finding kelp in her hair, in her bed, as if she
had brought the entire continent with her back to DC.  She
told him small things, illustrated a land of locusts and
lanterns and mosquitoes.  The air was different there, she
said, it could have been because you weren't in it.

Her lips were chapped with that air and her shoulder was oil
stained.  She didn't want to tell him more, and he would not
force her.

Scully has held dying men and women in her arms, her pulse a
steady clock.  She is a healer, with healing hands.  He has
come to believe that her touch is an incantation.  She is a
goddess who has come back from The Ivory Coast with holes in
her pockets.

Now.  Her room, false yellow streetlights glaring.  She is
real.  Her arms are above her head in the manner of a saint
in a dusty shaft of light.

"Scully."

She opens one eye.  Sleepy.  "Mulder."  She is querying,
wants to know what he's doing here.  He does not answer,
smiles to let her know he's okay.  Her nails bite the cotton
sheets.  Dig there.  She is trying to be angry with him and
his intrusion, sweat slicking her hair to her cheeks and her
neck.  He turns on her air conditioning, listens to the
preliminary hiss fade into background noise.

She says:  "Now."

"I'm thinking that I wish I could have been there with you."

She does not ask what he means.  She closes her red lashes.
She has freckles again, is scrubbed clean.  "You would have
liked it there."

"We could have collected seashells."

"Made sandcastles" she answers.

He forgets to breathe.  I dreamed that, he wants to scream.
There is nothing like having someone know you this way.
There is nothing that could ever be like this.  He sits on
the floor and props himself up against the night table,
listens to the low rub of silk pyjamas against cotton.  Her
face appears above him at the edge of the pillow, planetary.
He is circling in her orbit and it is all he wishes to ever
feel.
_________

The next painting arrives.  She has blond hair and pearls at
her throat.  He slaps his flat palm to the tile wall in the
men's room.  There are reporters at every door and flashing
cameras and he with the brain matter that has been
deconstructed and studied; he is their saviour.

Scully finds him there.

"Where angels fear to tread," he says.  Manages to grin.

"Let's go Mulder."  Scully has a clear exact voice.  Her
precision was the first thing he had ever noticed about her.

They escape as if they are eloping.  Out of the back entrance
and he takes her elbow.  As he had taken her shoulder once in
Antarctica, his frost bitten touch.  He had tugged her loose
hospital gown back up over her shoulder and known she was
taken.  His.

"Number eleven" one of them says.  They sit in the car and
look at each other.  The seatbelts are as hot as an iron, the
colour of mercury in a blaze of ozone.

"Don't doubt yourself," she warns him, "This is what you do
best."

Get inside of murderer's minds, he thinks bitterly.  She
seems apologetic.

"It is the daughter.  He's looking for a daughter."

"How does he find these women?"

"Through his profession.  He works with the law."

There is yelling outside.  They have been spotted.  She sends
the car careening backwards, smudging the asphalt with tire
marks, as if she has been taking driving lessons from him.
He turns to watch the mob of reporters taper off,
disappointed ants as Scully takes a corner.  She slows when
they are out of sight, pulls over to move the seat up to fit
her much smaller stature.

As tired as he is, he remembers another time, in Comity,
telling her he was never sure her little feet could reach the
pedals.

Her often taciturn head raises and her lips curve upwards.
She calls him:  "Macho man."
_________

In the glowing night tent in Africa there had been a book
with tattered pages.  The title, Moeti oa Bochabela, she was
told, meant: The Traveller of the East.

Some of the men had spoken the language.  Afrikaans, also
known as Cape Dutch.  They pointed out the words that they
could translate.  Nothing would fit on her tongue properly,
exotic and interloping.  The only words that she knew were
the holy pieces of a puzzle that sat silent and mystic on the
sandy ground.  Bible was Bybel and God was God.

She went to the ocean and let it lap at her feet and tug her
along with the moon.  She felt nomadic, but world-weary.
Mulder was the Journeyman, not her.  He was the type of man
that stories were written about, the noble, the tragic
drifter.  But he was caged and dying and miles lost to her.
She stood there and tore the pages of the book into wings
that crashed into the surf and sank.  The Traveller was
drowning.

Jellyfish had woven the light with a quiet luminescence, she
remembers.  Jellyfish are on the menu in Chicago.  In
Afrikaans, she tells Mulder, food is either kos or voedsel.
Her mouth feels misshapen, but he leans close across the
table in that way he has of sharing her air.  She smells soap
and smoke and red wine.  Alien is teenoorgesteld or vreemd,
she continues.  Love is mal weesoor, or liefde.  That is all
that I learned of the language.
_________

An autopsy bay has a specific order, metallic and precise.
That is what she has always craved.  Order.  Mulder sits on
the counter, swinging his legs, unable to keep still.  She is
hungry to fix his crooked tie, his messy spiked hair.  There
is nothing orderly about him, and she has asked herself why
they fit the way they do.  She has broken into military bases
with Mulder at her side in a mutual front and felt
invincible, like a teenager with a stolen bottle of Daddy's
malt whiskey.

She does not talk to him as she slices open the chest cavity,
but rather to her tape recorder.  It is strange.  She is
comfortable with him in nearly every aspect of life, but not
this.  Not death.  She is comfortable with anyone besides him
in this room.  He has held her hands and kissed them with
tear damp lips.  These hands that work with the deceased.  He
has said looking at her hands is cartography.  He has traced
the lines of her palms.  When he has been weak he has hid in
the circlet of her arms.

It is he who speaks.  He has been flipping through the pages
of a book and he is quoting from it.  She is barely listening
today and he is barely taking to her, voice low.

"Hog Butcher of the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and The Nations Freight Handler;
Stormy, Husky, Brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders."

She turns off her tape recorder and pulls her facemask off,
the beginning of annoyance heating her cheeks.  He slides
from the counter, soundlessly agile.

"They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have
seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm
boys."

She tears her bloody gloves off, her second skin.  All
moisture has left the inside of her mouth.   "Mulder, what in
the hell is that?"

"Chicago Poems.  Carl Sandburg.  1916."

"And?"

"And nothing.  I remembered reading it in England and dropped
by the library before you got up.  The killer's probably
never heard of it, but listen to this."

"I'm listening."

"I am the Law
Older than you
And your builders proud."

"I am the Law" she murmurs.

"Josephine Cesna, victim number eight.  Her brother was tried
for murder in '95.  He walked.  The presiding Judge was
Richard Wells, Chicago's finest."

She stares.  "Mulder, you can't accuse a man of being in the
league of Ted Bundy because he's suave and law abiding.
You're grasping at straws here."  At his blank look, she
loses any semblance of patience.  "This man is a judge,
Mulder!"

"Who happens to have lost a daughter in 1992.  She was a
painter, drowned in the family swimming pool.  Twenty-three
years of age.  Josephine Cesna worked as a stripper to make
her way through college.  She was arrested for possession of
marijuana.  Any guesses who she turned to?"

"You've been doing some digging, you must be proud."

Mulder looks down at her.  They have somehow invaded each
other's personal area.  He has a fever gleam in his eye and
he hasn't shaved.  She feels sarcastic, nasty.  He is
constantly doing this.  Constructing information out of
ether, as if he can read minds.  This thought makes her tilt
her chin, look away, at the dead woman.  Carol Young, she
corrects herself.

"I haven't seen any correlation between him and any of the
others Scully.  But I think that it's enough to follow up on.
We need to watch him."

"No Judge will sign off on this.  We have no concrete
evidence.  We certainly won't be granted a search warrant,
and surveillance. . ."

He blinks, long and hard.  His jaw has a tight set.  "Will
you be my partner in crime?"

"Will you act like I have a choice?"  She glares, but he is
standing there with a book of poems trembling in his grasp,
and she has been his partner in crime as many times as he has
been hers.  "We'll stake out the house Mulder, but we are not
breaking and entering."

"Yes ma'am."

They rest in silence for a moment, Mulder and Scully and
Carol Young.  She has yet to sew the chest cavity back
together.  He sits back on the counter and waits for her,
reading.  When she has slid the corpse back into the freezer,
she comes over and grabs his gently swaying foot.

"Hey," she ducks her head to see him better.  "This doesn't
seem too easy to you?"

He sighs, a barely discernible lost sounding noise.  "I know
something has to be."
_________

There is thunder without rain.  This has always made him
edgy, jumpy.  He goes to her door, dressed in black and
leather, feeling wild with the night and her voice sounding
through the wood.

"Are you scared Mulder?"

"If I am will you kiss it better?"

"No."  She opens the door for him anyway.  She has pulled her
hair back into a ponytail, tendrils of cerise curls in her
line of vision.  She shoves them away, her fingernails
seeming to gleam with a flash of lightning.  He waves his
badge in her face.

"F.B.I."

She grins unexpectedly, one of those rare Scully grins.  He
files it away in his mind.  Wonders if it is possible that
she could be feeling as agrarian and feral as he is just with
the idea of being in a velvet dark car alone with her
partner, doing something they should not be doing.  Spying.
Big Bad Federal Agents armed with their binoculars.

"Lets go G-man."
_________

"Tell me a story."

It is early in the night and they are parked with the windows
fogged with muggy heat as if they are lovers.  He has rolled
down the window and had recently been hanging outside of it,
gazing upside down at the first three stars in the sky and a
flickering satellite.

"Oh, covert," she had said.  "Inconspicuous."

He came back inside, moved the window to half closed so that
they would be hidden.  He tells her stories about whales.
The Haida have a legend about evil ocean men and women, who
use killer whales as canoes.  They found a way to turn a
Haida chief into a killer whale and he now protects the Haida
from assault.  In a Greek myth, Orion is transported on the
back of a dolphin to the heavens.  The God's give him three
stars.  The constellation Orion's Belt.  He points out Orion
to her.

"More" she prods.

"No more.  That is absolutely everything I know about whales
and dolphins.  You want to hear about Flipper?"

She ignores him.  "In reality" she says, "Jonah could never
have survived in the belly of a whale for three days.  He
would have been asphyxiated nearly immediately.  It's
scientifically improbable."

"But not impossible.  There are stories of men who have been
found alive in the stomach of a whale after the creature has
been killed mere hours later."

"Hours" she repeats.  "Not days."  Glances at him sideways.
"I thought you didn't know anything else about whales."

"How come you never tell me stories?  All I get is facts.
Tell me about Moby Dick Scully."

He is carefully not looking at her, watching the silent house
where perhaps a man has plotted to kill eleven women.  Scully
can see the side of the pool in the backyard.

"You've already read Moby Dick Mulder."

"So?  Give me a passage.  I like the way your voice sounds."

She swallows.  He does not give any indication that he has
even said what she knows he has.

"For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it
at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than
the moon would to an Earthman.  With the landless gull, that
at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between
billows; so at nighfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of
land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his
very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."

He looks over at her now and stares for so long that her eyes
grow dry from the air.  He has that intensity about him
tonight that she both loves and hates.  It makes her heart
thrum like a hummingbird.

"An Earthman on the moon.  Is that what it felt like to you
Scully, on The Ivory Coast?"

The Ivory Coast.  Even the name sounds extrinsic, a soil trod
upon by elephants, their massive tusks glorious and ancient.
She isn't ready to talk about Africa, and he needs to.  That
is their way.  She finds a little something to give him from
somewhere, a crumb.

"Yes, Mulder.  That was exactly what it was like."

She thinks, I want you to know that that was my father's
favourite passage from Moby Dick.  He read it to me in the
rocking chair with the engravings of the narwhals on the
armrests.  It was rich mahogany, that chair, as rich as his
words.  I want you to know that I would never recite his
words to anyone else.
_________

There is something monotonous about rain that she enjoys.  It
is safe and she is sheltered.  They have returned empty
handed to the motel and he is moody.  He doesn't like rain
and he doesn't like storms and he doesn't like losing.  She
tells him action only happens quickly in the movies.  We'll
go back tomorrow.  He frowns and kicks at the water on the
doorstep, muddying the tips of his shoes.

"Get out of the rain and I'll let you raid my minibar" she
says finally, exasperated.  She gets them towels and he helps
himself to a carton of milk.  He pours it into a glass that
his slick fingers wrap around and she sees the whiteness
disappear into his throat, cool liquid on a hot morning
before the sun has risen.  The light of the small fridge is
all over him, a helix, twisting around his neck, paling him.

"Mulder" she mutters.  He looks supine and vulnerable on her
floor, long awkward limbs.  She decides they are both too
damn tired.  She kneels and dries his hair for him with soft
fleece, letting the frosty air of the fridge chill them.  He
offers her the milk.

"I'm.  Not.  Letting.  Anyone.  Else.  Be.  Taken."

Her heels ache and she relents to them, positioning herself
at his shoulder.  She takes the milk from his tense fingers,
folds her own around the imprints his skin has made on the
glass.

"Tomorrow" she whispers.  "We'll go back tomorrow."  He still
needs to shave.  He looks so ragged like this, rustic, a man
from another time.  The power flickers and she knows that in
candlelight he is golden, tawnier than a sunset.

"I am the Law
Older than you
And your builders proud.

I am deaf
In all days
Whether you say "Yes" or "No."

I am the crumbler:
To-morrow."

The power leaves them on the last note of his voice, flat,
and she remembers that she has no candles.  She puts down the
glass and feels for him. Their hands connect, rain water
dripping down her sleeve.  Her eyes have not adjusted yet and
all she knows is Mulder and the rain.  He curls his hand
around her wrist in a bracelet.  Releases her until they are
palm to palm and miming in the dark.

"I never could save anyone."  I couldn't even save myself.
He does not say it, but she hears it.  His articulation is
slurred in the way it does before he cries.  She senses he
isn't crying.  Just very tired.  Okay.  She puts their
foreheads together and meets with that new unfamiliar wound
there.  She feels fiercely protective.  Her universe has
fallen and he has almost been killed.  For the first time
perhaps, he has known mortality.  It hits her like a wave.

"Don't say that" she admonishes.  "You save me all the time."

He laughs a laugh that is not a laugh and they jointly fumble
to stand, blind and unsteady.  Tripping onto her bed.  She
can make out his outline and the moon is peeking out from
behind a cloud.  He is laughing a real laugh now.  They sit
in the Cimmerian blackness and laugh at the moon.

"You don't have a lighter, do you?"

She hears a small click, a blue flame turning white and
lovely, slipping upward.  Staining him golden.

"You have got to be kidding me," she says.

He smirks.  "All you had to do was ask.  I'm very
resourceful.  It's a Boy Scout thing."

Laughter has hurt her stomach.  "Stay" she says, before she
can think about it.  "You'll fall down if you try to make it
back to your room."  She is dizzy and drunk on tiredness and
milk.

"You look like someone who would steal the covers" he
accuses, grinning madly.

"You get this side of the bed" she counters.  He flicks the
lighter off and in the dark; she slides from her suit and
shoes.  She hears him unzip his pants.  Here I am, she
thinks, wearing only my shirt and underwear.  He had left his
leather jacket in the car to keep it out of the rain and is
completely soaked.  She wonders with early morning sleepiness
if he is naked.  She wouldn't know.  They don't touch, but he
falls under the spell of Morpheus first and his arm brushes
hers, branding her.  Skin upon skin.  She has become used to
him being her significant other.  She has become used to this
unnameable thing that they have, not based on sex or physical
attributes or any of the things that have always mattered in
other associations she has had, whether she wishes to admit
it or not.  Still, she is thirty-five years old and half-
naked in bed with this golden man.  His arm brushes hers in
sleep and she thinks if she checks that she would glow there,
a mellifluous Mulder glow.
_________

A city has it's own life force.  Chicago is muscular.  It's
broad blunt Atlas hands spread to the sky and touch the
clouds and the hazy taint of factory exhaust.  He has been
many places.  He has been to The Eiffel Tower and been where
the birds fly.  London, Antarctica, The Bermuda Triangle.  He
has been to Nantucket, the land that Scully had spoken of as
she recited Moby Dick.  He has been there and run through the
dunes with his sister and built sandcastles that were stolen
by the sea, taken into her womb.  He had seen whales there.
He had found a beached narwhal that had still been struggling
with vitality.  His mother had told him it had a horn like a
unicorn, but he didn't see the resemblance.  He thought it
was an odd looking creature, but he had sent Samantha up the
hill for his father anyway and he had sat with it and he had
wept when it died.

On the day of his first glimpse of death.

The trill of the alarm jars him.  Scully is reaching above
and atop of him for it and slapping it off viscously.  Her
hair wisps across his neck.  Sometime in the night it has
fallen out of the elastic.  She collapses at the edge of his
shoulder and makes a small growl before she is entirely
awake.

"Good morning, Agent Scully."

"It was morning when I went to sleep Mulder.  Three hours
ago."

She is angry and without her caffeine fix, but it doesn't
matter.  Scully's hair is billowed around her head and when
he braces himself up on one arm she is looking up at him with
heavy lids.  He was searching for something easy and this is
easy.  Mulder and Scully in the morning.  He smiles at her
and she narrows her eyes into slits.

"You're not naked under there, are you?"

He isn't.  His smile widens and he lets her think he is.
_________

Scully treads over shards of glass scrupulously, the ginger
sound of her heels.  He grinds his wingtips into the sparkle
of the shattered window, deliberately not looking at her.  He
has not thought of an alarm system until he sees it sitting
inert.  Wells has not turned it on, has planned on being back
soon.

"What are you looking for and where should we look for it?"
She seems rigid, formal.  This is the way she speaks to
strangers.  Scully and her uncompromising morals.  He chances
a glimpse of her and feels vaguely criminal.

"Scully."

"Did you honestly think I'd let you ruin our careers alone?"

He does not speak again. They find the painting room in the
basement.  They find the paintbrushes and the watercolours
and the half-completed canvases.  Painted women.  There is a
chair bolted to the floor and handcuffs, uninhabited.  He can
smell oil paint and fear and the musty essence that all
basements possess.  He watches her go to the chair, lean
there.

"Blood" she tells him and seems weary with wisdom.  Her eyes
are slivers of azure ice, the three barely discernible
freckles at her throat visible in the quiescent air.  Three
stars.  Orion.
_________

The world is ignited and potent with pyre.  She is nearly
completely certain that the evidence they have found will not
be permitted in court, but other connections have been made.
Carol Young had been a waitress, and Wells had been on the
surveillance camera as a patron.  Darla King's sister had
been a secretary for the DA, and acquainted with Wells.

Richard Wells, The Honourable.

The rain has left fog but today burns it into extinction, a
memory.  Scully does not have enough energy to be angry.  She
goes to the door and watches Mulder jump into a rain puddle
like an overgrown child.  His coattails stream in the
atmosphere in banners, his arms wide in a wingspan.  There is
dirty water dampening his hair.  He looks dark.  He has been
to the darkest places and seen the brightest things.  Mulder,
the child in the man.  She sees him jump in the puddle and
wishes for that type of abandon.

"My name is truth and I am the most elusive captive in the
Universe."

She hadn't known she'd been noticed.  He stands there,
drowned and radiating with explosive energy.  Reciting poetry
and standing maniacally in a puddle.

"Chicago is over Mulder."  She has bare feet and the tar
stings them.  She avoids the puddles on her way to retrieve
him.  Finds his slippery wrist, wet, tugs at his sleeve.  He
relents, follows her back to their rooms to pack their bags.
A grown man who jumps into mud puddles, a child who had
shaped sandcastles.  Impossible, she thinks.  My
impossibility.
_________

He says:  "Our moth was a butterfly."

She does not know what he is referring to, which is neither
unusual nor novel.  Washington is familiar, the oil slicks on
the Potomac and Mulder's disordered den of an apartment a
comforting chaos of Navaho blankets and gold fish and clothes
strewn on the carpets.  He is in the bedroom, muffled there.
She hears the ruffling of pages and decides he must be
decent, pushes the door open with her foot.

He looks up.  "The butterfly, Scully." he explains patiently,
"The one at the restaurant."

Of course.  The spine of the book rests in those palms that
had cupped themselves to a creature of the sky.  Appendages
for flying, the title reads.

"You have books about butterflies Mulder?"

"I have books about everything."  His mouth quirks.  It is
true he is well read.  He has quoted literary masterpieces to
her.  She has memorised Newton's Laws, as he knows all the
words to Jabberwocky.  Her sock feet are mute against the
floor and she leans down to glimpse a few more of the books
in a haphazard pile beside his bed.

Area 51, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities, The
Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, a volume of the poetry of Black
Elk.  The Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.  Cuisine.

"Cuisine?"

"My mother decided I needed to stop living on fast food."

"You bought this yourself, didn't you?"

He disregards her, a flash of teeth.  Points to the paper in
his hand  "This is the butterfly."

She presses the digit of her smallest finger to the page as
the low wind at the window threatens to tear it away.  It is
much colder here than in Chicago.  "It certainly looks it."
Sapphire sails, delicate blue dust wings with black tips, as
if sun scorched.

"It's from the family Lyceanidae" he says.  He is soft.  He
folds his hand atop of hers and she is startled with the
physicality.  They do not touch without reason.  Mulder and
Scully are inflection of voice and motions to the heavens.
He tightens his hold and then puts his cheek in the halo of
her hair.  He breathes there.  Cartography, he had said of
her once.  Touchstone.

The words blind her, black ink on glossy paper.  The caption
beneath the butterfly reads:

Places of Origin- Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cameroon, The Ivory
Coast.
_________

Fini.



http://xfktf.homestead.com/files/fanfic/TheWatchingWall_Amerella.txt