Title: The End of the Story
Author: RM>lebontrager@iname.com<
Disclaimer: Mulder and Scully belong to CC, 1013, and Fox. No fringe is
intended.

SPOILER:::Milagro, Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'

~~~~
The End of the Story
~~~~

I only knew what was in my mind and wished to express it clearly.
--milagro

~~~~

Laura tilted her head back to see the television screen, trying to find
the right angle where the glare of the overhead light didn't completely
mask Mulder's face. She sighed and rewound the tape, trying to decide if
he was saying 'it ends with you doing the funky chicken' or 'it ends with
you doing the naked pretzel' and personally, she liked funky chicken
better.

Pretzel.

She sighed again and tapped a key on her Mac laptop to make it wake up,
pressing play again on the remote for the VCR. A quick fast forward of
about five to eight minutes, and then she was at the 'good part' and she
blinked suddenly when the computer screen lit up.

The shots, five, she was counting.

The screams that were more like. . .like yells of intense pain.

Pain.

Laura sighed and made a mental note to look up 'pain' in her thesarus,
knowing that word would be used to death if she didn't find something new.

She was definitely sure they weren't screams, mainly because the word
'scream' had a girly connotation to it, especially with this crowd after
the whole Jose Chung thing. No, more like a tribal-death banshee wail of
terror and twisting agony--agony!--and something akin to horror.

She could see Kurtz from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness' murmuring "the
horror, the horror" and then dying, to be accompanied by the screams of
Dana Scully at this particular awful moment in time.

Laura rewound the tape once more, wanting to be certain of the look--his
panic face combined with the 'why the hell is she crying' look that made
her want to slap him silly, but she restrained herself because the TV was
her friend.

The computer sat silent before her, like a waiting tomb, waiting for her
dead stories to be buried within, only to be resurrected by a few choice
commands and a waiting fanfic list.

She called up her disk, opened to a fresh sheet of Simple Text, and began
typing.

This would be the true end, the clear and simple and well expressed end.

An end to pacify the contrasting horror and tenderness that cycled through
her as she thought about a hand reaching up inside. . .shiver. . .and the
way her tiny body just sobbed and clawed its way into Mulder's.

And she's already in love.

Ha.

As if they hadn't known that for years. But thank you, CC, for the
confirmation. Could you just tease us a bit longer with that, huh? We can
scream bloody horror for you, better than Gillian Anderson, let me tell
ya...

Laura shook her head clear of the conflicts and prayed that God would lead
her fingers across the keys, even as she hit delete twice for typing the
'l' before the 'i' in Spoiler.

Here was the end.

The only true end.

~~~~

"There can only be one end to the story. . .It almost writes(rights) 
itself."
--milagro

~~~~

She leaned heavily against his couch, shivering, clutching the blanket
closer around her shoulders to ward off the shock that had already claimed
her. She stared at the blood beneath her fingernails and remembered the
scrape of the stranger's hand along her lungs, like needles piercing
straight into her.

It hurt to breathe; it hurt to think; it hurt to have her heart beat.

She was fine.

Ha.

In every physical sense of the word, she was fine, would be fine, have no
internal or external injuries because of this. Except for a half moon
imprint as she had swiped for the stranger's wrist and managed to claw
herself. And the angry red marks from her tears, but those were fast
fading too.

Mulder talked softly with the police officers who wanted her statement,
and she pretended that she didn't know they wanted it. Mulder was doing
her a favor, keeping her safely under wraps for tonight.

She wanted to be wrapped up tightly.

She still felt that hand. . .

Like an eager child's fist in the cookie jar, fishing around. . .

She gagged and Mulder's head jerked up, his body rigid and at attention. 
Shaking a hand in his direction, she calmed his tight tight face with an
attempt to smile. 

Soon the police officers were heading back to the boiler room, hoping to
catch a glimpse of the slick and bloody heart before the medical exmainer
got to bag the body.

Mulder came to sit beside her, the door now closed, the sounds of
investigation far away. She cleared her raw, dry throat and looked up at
him.

"I didn't hear anything but those five shots," he said.

She nodded. He didn't need nightmares of her tortured scream.

"I shot. . .nothing."

He nodded at her half attempt to explain, to guess.

"I found five slugs in my wall."

She shivered. "Point blank. . .shaking, but point blank."

"I don't doubt you," he said, suddenly very serious.

She nodded. But her heart eased from its clenched, tight position way up
in her throat, where it had fled to once the stranger's hand had started
digging for the buried treasure.

"I'm glad," she whispered and managed to direct her slump into his arms.

He held her for a moment, then smoothed his thumb along her clavicle. It
swiped through the drying blood, disconcerting as it was, and then made a
trail up her neck.

"You want to clean up?" he murmured.

She shook her head, then changed her mind, shivering.

"Yes, please."

He was surprised. Please. She never asked.

"I'll get you one of the T-shirts I shrunk the other day," he said, hoping
to make her eyes light at least, if not her face relax. 

She kind of twitched and he saw something spark back in her soul.

He led her to the bathroom, since she seemed to be having so much
difficulty, then pushed open the door and grabbed the cleanest washcloth
to hand it to her.

She looked at him as if she were lost, and had no idea where to even
start, let alone how to start. Her eyes were cast over in misted dreams,
far from the blood and the hand that had wanted her heart.

Mulder ran hot water in the basin for a few moments, letting it fill and
churn and steam, then soaked the washcloth with the water. He turned to
her and foudn her staring idly at the water lapping the sides of the sink
bowl, and he wondered if she had lost too much blood.

Carefully, moving slowly, he unbuttoned her white dress shirt, the silk
sticky with her blood. He remembered flashes of the man's book, of the
stranger's hands making love to her in her fantasies, but he shook that
off.

'she's already in love'

He'd been mistaken.

Mulder slid the shirt off her thin shoulders and tossed it into the corner
of his bathroom, then picked up the washcloth. She was glancing oddly at
his hands, and when he moved to clean her, she flinched.

He sighed.

"It's all right, Scully," he said and came closer with the ratty blue
cloth.

She shifted her weight and suddenly her eyes pierced right into his.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded and gently began wiping the blood from her neck, washing it
clean from her thin throat, then down between her breasts, under the
clasp, and down to her belly. She sucked in her stomach with a quiver of
breath and he gave her a gentle grin.

"Ticklish?"

She shook her head and proceeded to wince with his touch, trying to keep
in her laughter that was closer and closer to tears.

Mulder wiped the blood from her body, having to almost scrub in the places
where it had dried completely, afraid he would be opening up some new
wound, but not finding any. He felt his knees tremble when he noticed the
still slick pool of her own blood quivering in her belly button, like a
last tidepool on the rocky shore.

She glanced down and saw his distress, and held his hands with her eyes as
he finished cleaning her of her own blood. 

She took the blue cloth from him and ran it along his ear, where her
frantic first awakening had made her hand scrape alongside his face before
burrowing into his sweater. She wondered if her blood would stain his
black pullover.

It used to be her favorite shirt of his. She used to sometimes wear it
when he left it at her apartment. He used to take it back freshly washed,
smelling of her.

He gathered her back into his harms, pushing away the sudden frailty to
her eyes with his tight tight hug.

She smiled and felt goosebumps rise on her arms.

"Where's that shirt you promised?" she said.

He grinned and backed away, heading for his dresser drawer to find the
light blue T-shirt with the navy blue Kool-Aid man on the front. It was an
old favorite and he hadn't been able to wear it since he'd been thirteen.

Sam had loved it too. Scully looked young in it.

Scared. Fresh faced. Tired.

Mulder led her to his bedroom and made her stay, not wanting her out of
his sight for more than a second. She lifted an eyebrow at his mirrors and
laughed, holding to her stomach with the little tendrils of pain that sort
of spread their lazy tentacles through her body.

Mulder sat beside her and leaned forward to kiss her nose.

He missed and got her eyelid, so that she felt each individual lip
pressing against her eye, imprinting into her vision. She opened her eyes
when he pulled back and fingered the hem of his childhood shirt.

"Thanks, Mulder."

He nodded nad tucked her in bed, knowing she wanted to be treated like a
child, pampered, maybe, pitied, looked after for just this one night.
Tomorrow everything would be somewhat normal; he knew that.

Except he felt a new fluttering in him, a kind of extra push to his blood.
Her heart, given to him, beating rapidly or slowly, opened for him,
bursting into sacred fire for her holy love.

Mulder wondered if she felt his heart within her, beating, pulsing,
restoring blood to her pale body, taking upon it all the misery and ache
and loneliness.

He slipped from the room once she fell asleep, and only came back in to
check on her once.

When he did, she was lying still in his bed, one hand pressed over her
chest, resting on his heart.

~~~~

end
adios
RM
--i just had to do it--