Title: Opening Author: RocketMan >lbontger@wmcstations.com< Disclaimer: Mulder and Scully belong to CC, 1013, and Fox. No fringe is intended. Summary: Journeys unfold and lives are risked as Scully discovers her own personal truth. SPOILER: FTF, the movie, some spoilers, not really directly involved, just after it WARNING: Eventual MSR, character separation, questionable characterization Notes: This will be a long one, hopefully. Scully may be different to you, because I have her acting on her own, without Mulder, so you might not like her at first. I do promise to keep it within the realm though. Read on. Thanks to Ivy for finding the poem. Dedication also goes to Deb, who encourages me to find my own truths, and to Nell, Gary, Mike, Georgia, Nicole, and Shane Smith in Independence, Belize, for showing me the power of love. The reference to John Denver's ball of war is a sort of poem/story he says on his album "Poems, Prayers, and Promises" that talks about a box all tightly bound and shut up that is labeled War. Someone opens the box and this ball comes bouncing all about, hitting woman and children and more, this deadly little ball called war. It's really rather a good story. ~~~~~ Opening ~~~~~ "I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand." --"Making A Fist" Naomi Shihab Nye ~~~~~ ~~~~~ In the End ~~~~~ She walks in and sits down on my couch without even looking to the shock and the horror and the relief on my face. She walked back into my life without so much as an explanation and all I can do is wish she would stand up and look at me. I come to sit next to her immediately, hearing nothing but my own heartbeat loudly thumping in my ears, and knowing only that she is back. She's back. I grab her roughly and shake her. I yell. "Why the hell did you leave me?" ~~~~~ In the Beginning ~~~~~ "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. . .And God saw that it was good." I glanced up at Scully, raising my eyebrows at her spontaneous sermon. She looked thoughtful as she turned to me. "When did it stop being good?" I grinned a bit. Too good to pass up. "Probably when the woman tricked all of creation into rebellion agaisnt God by eating a stupid piece of fruit." She glared at me and shook her head, as if dismissing me. I knew she wanted to talk about something, but I guess I was too scared to really let her start. Something was eating her up inside, but I didn't know how to stop it, or how to let her talk about it. I just didn't want anything more to go wrong. After Antarctica and deadly bees, I just wanted some normalcy, some silly X-File that demanded our attention, but turned out to be as harmless as those vampires in the trailer park with their false teeth and scared nature. She stood and walked to the file cabinet, psuhing back in a file I had asked her to read over for me. I supposed she was getting depressed over the cruelty of it, and wanted to talk about the 'plight of humanity' or something. "I think there are still some good things, Scully." She looked to me gratefully, her eyes turned on again, as if there was a light behind them that dimmed or brightened based on her emotions. "I have trouble finding them sometimes," she replied. "The work we do here is good, Scully. It saves lives, saves families, saves happiness and love and grace." She sat down in my chair and I sank to the top of my desk, wishing I knew where to take this converstaion, wishing I knew what she needed to hear from me. "It is good. But it's never enough." What was she saying? That a hole had opened in her life? That she needed more than just this? "How's it not enough, Scully?" She must have sensed the rising panic in me because she put her hand out and touched my arm, looking righ into me with her far away eyes. "It's good, Mulder. But sometimes I have to do things that aren't good. That go against me and who I think I am. And after those times, I'm not good." "But Scully, the things you do are always for a good reason though. I know that." I wanted to help her, I wanted to show her she meant too much in the grand scheme of things to let go now. She made a difference for the good. "Maybe. I just feel wrong." "Right now?" She nodded and crossed her arms. "I can feel something is about to happen, Mulder." I knew then that something was wrong, really wrong for her to say something so intangible as that and mean it. Scully was not a feeling kind of person, more of a concrete evidence type. "What do you mean?" "Something bad. And it's big and going to change everything." I shuddered. Big. Change. I hated to even think about what could happen next, to think that maybe she would be snatched from me by Death's sarcastic grin of triumph. I stood and went to my chair, sat down on my haunches and looked straight into her eyes with all the strength and courage I could find in me. "I won't let it hurt you, Scully. Whatever happens, you're good for me and I'm not letting soemthing bad get you." She sort of smiled and took my hand and the surreal nature of it all caught up to me and I laughed. "Nothing'll happen. Let's go get some dinner and I'll drive you home." She stood and seemed to be broken of the spell. I followed her out of the office, locking it behind me. ~~~~~ Descending the steps and coming around the corner, I noticed the faint smell of Something Wrong. I can always tell when Something's Wrong. It smells like fear. My own. Scully's. Other people's. I ran to the office, only to stop dead on as I saw it. The door was wide open, smashed in with a strong, determined force. The lock was wasted, totally blown, but I could see only calm inside. I went in and surveyed the naturally ruffled appearance of our office, the new photos tacked to new walls, the two desks with their sparse smattering of supplies, the slide projector, and the one file cabinet that housed recovered files we had scrounged up after the fire. "Scully?" My voice echoed in the silence of the office and I went to the file cabinet, checking the precious ones we had left. They were full. Or as full as they were supposed to be. I walked to my desk and rifled through it for a moment, finding only some sunflower seeds missing, but I thought maybe I took those home last night. I went to Scully's desk and wondered if I would even know if something was missing. There was a single white sheet of paper balanced against her coffee cup. It was the first thought in my head. I picked up a pencil and used the eraser to open it. Written words in her hand spiraled at me and and I slumped to her desk chair, shaking. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't imagine her ever doing this to me, ever doing this period. She left. Left. Didn't want me to follow her. Busted down the door so she'd get away faster without even having to say good-bye face to face. I stood. Walked numbly to my desk. Sat down heavily. Opened a file. Tried to forget. ~~~~~ At night, I couldn't breathe right. I grabbed the blanket and pushed it down, then over my head, then to the floor, and I couldn't seem to get it right. It was like I was concentrating too hard on the act of breathing that I coulnd't do it right. I had to take my mind of the breath, the in and out of it, the conscious fact that I still lived while I didn't know if Scully did, and pretend not to notice. Pretend she hadn't left. Pretend that breathing didn't matter. I could hear buzzes in my ears and the sound of blood rushing in my veins like trains in the dead of night. I wanted to stop thinking, stop feeling, stop remembering her words written on a square sheet of ripped paper. Don't come. Like bullets into me. Like snake teeth ripping through my skin. Like hearing your one in five billion say : Don't come. Don't come. I wanted to say: To hell with you Scully! I wanted to say: I'm in hell without you Scully. I wanted to say: Where in hell are you Scully? But I laid on my couch and thought up good excuses to tell Skinner when I had to explain her sudden leave of absence. She was me, I was her. She had split, I was left saving her butt so that she didn't get fired. It was strange, it was new, it was awful. I'd been given a taste of my own medicine, and I swore to never force her to choke it down again. Waiting is hell. Waiting is agony. screams at me from my walls, leaks from my ears, tumbles through my apartment like John Denver's crazy ball of war.* I closed my eyes, screamed at my breathing, then held my breath until I could feel hot whiteness shatter over me. I blacked out. ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Chapter Two ~~~~~ "Opening for you a violet to discover the perfume of a secret woman this life rejoices in the follower exalts the man that comes with me." --"Opening" Laura Bontrager ~~~~~ I couldn't sleep all night. Once I passed out, I woke again to find my darkness had come and left me gifts at my door. I couldn't stop thinking about her. About the words, "Don't come." About her flight. Why did she run from me? What have I done to her? If I couldn't run after her, maybe I could help her anyway. I rose from the couch, slipped down the side of the wall until my toe stubbed on the computer desk. The light blinked as I powered it up, and the faint whir of the fan started, sounding loud and angry in the night. I called up my files, the copies of what we had now, the one of many copies we had now. I wasn't taking the chance of having everything destroyed all over again. I skimmed the list, clicked on the one labeled correctly and tried to recall its details as it came up for me. A woman. Twenty men murdered. She couldn't be proven guilty of the crime even with her confession. The medical examiner couldn't even decide what the cause of death had been, only that the heart had just given out. Devout Catholics. . . maybe that held the interest. I read over the report again, found the mental pictures I'd fashioned when reading it, thought again about the importance of such a case. The parents of the womann accused had called the FBI to help them out, convinced as they were that their daughter could never have killed twenty men. Being strange and a little less pressing than other cases, it had gotten booted directly to our basement office. Still the basement after all. What had she seen in this case that made her want it, made her question good and evil? Made her question us? I shook my head, grabbed for some paper and jammed it in the printer. As the sheets drifted cleanly from the laser jet printer, the expensive, government paid printer, I remembered her face as she read this case, as I told her it probably didn't merit our time. Horror. Complete and utter horror. I'd forgotten that until just now. I remembered the way she turned to me, her eyes dark and liquidy, almost like she would cry. I remembered it almost frightened me. And then I had laughed it off, told her it didn't matter. It mattered to her; I could see that now. Something about the woman, something about this case, mattered very much to her. I scooped up the papers and turned off everything. On my couch again, coffee burning one hand and the case burning the other, I read over the details, the little things I had simply scanned before. All twenty men were known to be abusive, cheating, lying SOB's basically. All the families of the twenty men hadn't wanted to press charges, but the state of Mississippi had. All twenty men had been arrested before for beating their wives or children, or some dog somewhere. All twenty men were lowlifes. I shuddered. It was wrong for them to be killed by the hand of man, but their deaths weren't mourned. One of the men had been this woman's husband. I reread her stats again, letting her name drip from my mind, her existence permeate my every inch. Becca Jackson, married for two years to Bob Jackson, a drunkard and adulterer. She was twenty, almost twenty-one, and appreciated simple things like family and making dinner. Her husband was a Baptist, and had converted her from her previous Catholicism. Half the other victims were Catholic, half Protestant. No real method to the madness. What had Scully seen here that I just didn't? I wanted to understand this, I wanted to understand her. I wanted to know her mind, her thoughts, her reasons and motives and deep desires. I needed to know. I needed to believe that she needed me as much as I needed her. She never said she did. I said I did. I know I do. She never said . . . never said anything. If I figured this out, if I could come to her with understanding, she'll see, she'll know how much . . . How much she does need me . . . ~~~~~ In the End . . . Scully ~~~~~ I walk into his apartment and sit down, wondering if he knows, if he could possible understand. I hope he understands. I hope he's got this all figured out. Because I don't. I have no idea why I felt like I had to do this. Mulder knows me better than anyone. Knows me inside and out. Sometimes. And I pray he understands this, because it's scaring me to death. Come on Mulder, give me a good reason, explain it all to me. I need you. He sits next to me, quiet, unmoving. She suddenly grabs me, shakes as hard as he can. "Why the hell did you leave me, Scully?" I can't look at him. I cry hot hot tears. ~~~~~ In the Beginning. . . Scully ~~~~~ Mississippi was humid, hot and sticky and full of breeding mosquitos and full of simply breeding. Humans, dogs, whatever. I guess it was all there was to do in the winter and now, it was coming to fruit in the summer. Made for some moody woman, and some irritated men. And whiny kids. I walked through the little town, walked right past the ice cream store, bursting with little hands wanting more, walked past the gas station checker players with their cheap ball caps spelling out "Eat at Joe's" in once white faded paint. Everything was the same as it had always been. Small Southern towns don't change much. I remembered that from the Navy base we'd been sent to once, in Mississippi by the Gulf. A small little town that didn't exactly thrive, simply meandered through life on an economy based on the Navy business. I watched three little boys chase a dog through the Super Wal-Mart parking lot, their sticks beating the ground and never the animal, only scaring him a bit, or maybe having fun. I could lay heavy bets that this happened regularly in the summer, when the kids were out and bored and waiting for something to do. I came full circle back to the rental car, slid inside, and sort of laid my head against the steering wheel, praying I guess. I wasn't sure why the hell I had just done all that. Broken into our office, stolen one of the files, run like crazy away from him. I was afraid. I knew that. Of what? Of the things happening between us, the small changes that seemed ready to explode in my face? No, I wasn't afraid of that. Mulder and I are great together, too great together to let anything like romance or even lust get in our way. So maybe we have something, maybe we don't. It wouldn't change much of anything. But something else was changing, shaping up into something I can't even begin to understand. I was changing. I didn't want that at all. If I changed . . . what did Mulder have anymore? What did *I* have aymore? Memories of how things were, of what we could have been together. Not together like a couple, but together like a good team. Whatever had happened to Becca Jackson had been happening to me. She'd killed to stop it. She had changed just as I was now changing. How did she stop it? Did she even try? Would I kill to stop it? I shuddered and started the car, the directions to her house clutched in one hand and my own written words clutched in my mind. I had meant it. It wasn't safe for him. Becca obviously didn't like abusive men. Mulder could sometimes be like that. But it wasn't safe for me either. I could sometimes be like that. ~~~~~ "Look. Ms. Scully-" "Call me Dana." She sighed. "Dana. I confessed. I must have done it. There's no other explanation. I feel bad that I caused this. But I'm not going to jail." "I'm not here to try to send you to jail," I tried to speak softly, reassuringly. "Then what are you doing?" I didn't know myself. "Just trying to find the truth." "Here's the truth. I married Robert because I was pregnant. He hit me. The baby died and I hated him. That's the short story, okay? The long story is, I tried to love him because this was my one shot. I'm a firm believer in the Bible, Ms. Scully, and I was going to make this work. Robert didn't want this to work." "He didn't want your marriage to work?" "No. He wanted out as soon as I miscarried. I told him no way. I told him why. I think it was the only reason he slept with that woman." "Why's that?" Becca blinked and looked at me strangely, her eyes so brown and dark, and her hair reddish brown with the sun. She almost reminded me of Mulder. Mysterious at times, above the world in thinking and attitude. "Why's that, Becca? Why do you think he'd cheat on you?" "So I'd have a reasonable excuse for a divorce." "Divorce?" "In the Bible, it says let no man tear assunder what God has rendered one, unless there is intances of adultery." "So he cheated on you simply to let you get out of marriage?" Becca blushed and hid her eyes. "I'd like to think that, hunh?" I softened and stopped pressing it. She needed to make herself feel better about him. "How'd he die, Becca?" "The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective." "What's that?" "James 5:16. I learned it as a little girl. I believed it. I believe it now." "Are you telling me you prayed for this?" I said, my eyebrows lifting high and in much speculation. She prayed for the man to die? "I didn't pray for him to die, Ms. Scully." "Then what?" "I prayed that God would take care of me, that God would keep me safe." "Did you feel threatened?" "Yes. Robert wasn't exactly a saint. Like I said, our baby died because of his abuse." "Did you let it happen, Becca?" I thought I'd hit it right then. That was where her guilt was coming from. She felt she had somehow allowed the baby to die, therefore getting her out of a nasty situation. "Look. I was a moody kid. I was eighteen and thought I was in love with Robert, I was in love with him actually. I didn't know he was like that. The first time he hit me, I thought it was an accident. The next time I thought he was joking around. The third and fourth and fifth times I cried for what I had gotten myself into. I asked God to save me. I asked Him and He heard me. So maybe it is my fault my baby's dead, and maybe it is my fault that Robert's dead. All I know, Ms. Scully, is that my baby is a lot better off, and I'm a lot better off." I stared at her, watching her lips quiver and her whole face alight with her pain. She was trying very hard to cope with this, to reconcile herself to the possibility that her child was dead because of her prayer. "Do you think prayer is like that, Becca? Do you think God is like that?" She looked at me and her eyes were wide, dark, swirling in her own private hell. "I think God's powerful. I think people forget that. I think most people have skimmed over the gory details of God." "What are the gory details of God?" "He killed a man for trying to save the Ark of the Covenant because he touched it. He struck down a couple for lying to the church. He burned a city that held women and children who didn't know any better. He turned Lot's wife to a pillar of salt because she looked back. Ms. Scully, God's big; I'm not. I'm not looking back, understand?" I breathed out, slowly, thinking. She seemed convinced of her faith, of her God. Was that my God too? Was I changing into a woman who believed like that? Not simply about God, but about the way things were? I had one shot. She had one shot. "Ms. Scully?" I looked to her, surprised at how timid she now seemed. I remembered she was only twenty, only a child really. "Yeah?" I said, taking a better look at her. "The other men that died-they were all bad, you know? I prayed that the bad men would all go away, and they did. I prayed that I would be saved from the situation I was in, and I was. But people died. A little baby died. Do you think I should stop praying?" I didn't know what to say to her. She was afraid of herself, of her God, and I didn't know how to reassure her. I didn't even know why I was there. Only that I was finding my faith again, little by little, and she had hers solid and strong. And that she had changed, as had I. "I don't know, Becca. I don't think you should stop praying. But maybe you should refigure what your God is. Maybe He's really not like that." "But if this is happening, He must be." I shook my head. "I don't know what to tell you. If these men died because God wanted them to, then there's nothing we can say about it, you know? God takes people all the time." Becca nodded and stood up, her long limbs gracefully unfolding. Opening like a flower. I didn't know what I was doing this for, I didn't know why I had come all this way, but something in me was answered, something in me had changed. For the good. Maybe God had used me to help this woman come to terms with everything. Maybe God had used this woman to help me come to terms with everything. "Becca?" She stopped at the door, her hand on it ready to let me out. "Yeah?" "Did you ever feel completely hopeless?" Why had I asked that? "Hopeless? Yes. I still do. There were only two things in my life and that was my family and my God. And I don't have one, and I'm not sure about the other." I gave her a sad smile, letting her see that I was satisfied, that I would not be coming back to hurt her more. As I walked down the front lawn, I heard the door open again. "Oh, wait! Dana!" I turned, surprised she had used my name, and saw her there, in the doorway. "Look. I have to tell you this. Things are rough. A lot of times, life's awful. But there are things and there are people that make it worth it, make it good. My parents made it worth it to me for a long time. Then Robert and the baby. I don't have that anymore. I barely even have my parents. I guess what I'm trying to say is . . . don't forget the people that make this worth it." I stood in the green grass, summer licking at my body with heat and cascading down with sweat, and I couldn't see past her face, couldn't look beyond that moment. >From now on, her life would be ruined. She might build it back, but she'd always be watching herself, always wondering if the strange power of prayer would kill something else. She'd had it bad with Robert, but if she had just gotten out, gotten safe, she'd still have some things. Her God, her baby, her life. I slowly got back in my car, buckled my seat belt, and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My eyes were afraid, my body tired, my hair dry and guilty. At that moment I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to my office and put the file back and fix the broken lock and then, then, go to Mulder. Where it was good. ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Chapter Three ~~~~~ "we sat stiffly although the barren moon climbed her wrinkled fingers through our wind-tangled hair and breath was death . . ." --"stargazing" Laura Bontrager ~~~~~ I sat in the car for an hour wishing I could leave and wishing I hadn't come, but never found the energy to pick up my hand and turn the keys and get out. Things crushed me from the inside out. The feel of family and the feel of death hovered near by and all I knew was that I didn't have that sense of security in life that I wanted. I had beaten death so many times that death was numb to me . . . or I was numb to it. And it wasn't death that frightened me anymore. It was the not living and yet breathing and driving to work and seeing Mulder and solving cases and still . . . still not living. It's what I had been all along. All along. Nothing was good. Work was work. Sleeping was sleeping. Love was nothing. Family was nothing. Family was even bad, a hurtful reminder that I would never be the one to hold a grandchild for my mother, never be the one to ever feel a part of a family again. My family was half dead. I was half dead. But something had told me that I needed to find out where the good in me had gone to. Something had pushed me to talk to this woman, to understand why her prayer, why her desperate plea to God, had ended so badly. Ended without goodness anymore. I had heard as a child a simple memory verse over and over, one that stuck because it seemed so right and so loving a thing. All things work for the good of those that love Him. Back then, it seemed true. Two years ago, three, it was hell no. It almost never did. That was in the Bible, and I thought it should be right, it should be true because the Bible was always true. Right then, I thought it never would be good. Until I realized the words didn't say that everything would be good. It said that in the *end*, things would be good. In the end. When I died. It seemed to be almost a trick. A sneaky God thing to do. I'd missed all the gory details of God. It wasn't even that anymore. I'd missed alot of things. I'd missed how it feels to wake in the morning and know that I was allowed to have breath; missed the knowledge that life was over too fast and I still had mine; missed the immortality felt by a child surrounded with love. I had goodness in my life. I had just taken it at all for granted so much that I couldn't see it anymore. Things always had to be black and white for me. Either good or evil, right or wrong, heads or tails. Mysteries are things I can't accept because they don't fall into any catagory. God was a mystery, love was a mystery, Mulder was a mystery. Mulder had hit me hard when he classified us as unclassifiable, not easily referenced. I wanted something easily referenced with us, I wanted something I could look at and say without a doubt, that it was good. In the beginning, God saw things were good. In the beginning, so did I. Maybe Mulder did too. I thought in that car, and watched parents wheel their kids to the sidewalk and run behind them as they tottered on training-wheel-free bikes, and saw dogs get a healthy paced walk around the block, and some mothers call out that it was too dark to play anymore, and watched as lights flickered from television sets. I watched life play out like Shakespeare's stage analogy and waited for that something in me to kick in and make me move. All I could do was look at it all and think quite surprisingly-- I don't want this. I don't want to call out to three little boys of mine that they'd better come inside Right Now, and I didn't want to set off down the block in Walkman and Reeboks jogging an overgrown puppy, and I didn't want a husband pulling into the driveway after a long day at the office with a scowl of misery on his face. I wanted my unclassifiable, not easily referenced, sometimes good, sometimes bad, never defined relationship with a man who thought aliens were out to get us, who had treked across a frozen wasteland to give me an injection from a man he didn't trust - all because he *couldn't do it without me.* I wanted that. I laughed. Smiled. Wished I had figured this out in my nice warm apartment with strains of Bach to keep me company and my telephone right there when I had this urge to call Mulder and laugh. I started the car and turned off the street and onto the highway and thought only about getting home. Getting back to excitement and living and mutants and aliens and informers and most of all, Mulder. Mulder. No matter what we were or would be or had. Mulder. And I looked at it all, from beginning to end, and I saw that it was good. ~~~~~ In the End . . . Mulder ~~~~~ She laughs at me. Takes my hands and squeezes them so hard that I think she'll actually break some bones. "I'm sorry. I don't know why. I don't even know how to explain it, or even what I figured out that made me come back." She's got to be nuts. "Scully, are you sick?" I raise my hand to her forehead and check for a fever as she smiles broadly. This isn't my Scully at all. Although, the way she's beaming at me, the way she's looking me over, I could get to like this Scully real quick. Real quick. "Mulder, I . . . well, I had to sort of think. But I didn't even know I had to think, otherwise I probably would have stayed at home." Is she rambling? "But anyway, I went to talk to-" "Yeah. About her husband's death? And the other nineteen?" "Yeah, and she told me the whole thing, about her prayers and the power and I sort of got on this tangent and I-" "Scully." "Hunh?" "Breathe." She seems puzzled for a moment, then gives me a grin. "Yeah. I'm different Mulder. I don't know what happened, but what was in that file . . . what it said about her and how it had happened. . . it hurt. I don't know why, but it did. And I had to fix it." "That's the doctor in you, Scully. When those urges come up, let me know and I'll try and break a finger or something." Her grins have got to be lighting up the world by now. She's not even too mad that I joked around instead of really listening. "So I left. I talked to her. I found something that made me put a lot of this behind me." "A lot of what behind you?" What was she talking about? What did a woman's prayer have anything to do with what we'd been through in the last few months? "Us." "Oh. So I'm behind you now?" Is she trying to tell me she's quitting again? Whatever happened to "If I quit now, they win?" Well, there's that same look as when she said it. That smug, I'm-throwing-your-words-back-in-your-face-to-prove-a-point look. "No. You could never be behind me. You know what I mean." I shake my head. I truly have no clue. She's so way off this time, that I don't even think *she* knows what she's talking about anymore. "Just that we've been tested a lot, Mulder. Our trust and faith and love has been screwed over by so many people and so many things, that I was . . . insecure, I guess." I raise my eyebrow. "Insecure? After everything we did, everything I did and said to you, you still didn't know?" I can't believe this. She's . . .she's nuts. She's so - "Mulder. Not about you. About me." "So what are you telling me, cause frankly, I am truly and completely lost and I have no clue how to even start to make you understand what you mean to me." I gaze at her helplessly, the only words in my head are the ones "insecure" and "love" and all I can think is that I should have kissed her before that stupid bee. Or even after. Even if she was gasping for breath and trying to relate to me her symptoms. She shakes her head. "Just know this. I'm here. I'm not ever leaving. You're good for me." I sag down to the cushions of my couch, closing my eyes and forgetting everything for just one moment. She said it. She said it back. It's almost better than hearing I love you back. Then my usual personality kicks in. I wink at her. "I'm only good for *you*, Scully. I give everyone else hell." She smiles and shakes her head. "I think I'm going home, Mulder. I need to get to bed." "You are home," I say softly, maybe hoping she'll hear me and mostly hoping she won't. She turns back, eyes bright, lips parted as if she was about to say something more. "Yeah. I am. Thank you." She leans forward and snags my mouth with her light light brush of lips. She's somehow shown me so much of her this night, and here's even more. Even more she gives me, even more she lets me take. ~~~~~ In the End . . . Scully ~~~~~ The world still hasn't come into focus. It's me and Mulder and being home again. I want to sleep, to let my body relax into the pleasure of darkness and warm fingers, but it's still too new, too fresh and *good* to let go of wakefulness. His arms are tight around me, his face snug into my cheek, almost like he wants to pull me inside of himself, he's so close. My eyes are closed. But I'm open to him. I have nothing hidden from him anymore. He knows my love, he knows my fear, he knows that it's him I want. My mother always said that some girls were late bloomers. My flower has just opened, spread its petals and let him smell and touch the goodness. The opening was hard, the growing was a struggle, and I don't think I'm all the way fully stretched toward the sun, but I am here. I am here. And he's right here with me. No matter what happens, no matter how we travel, what road this takes us, or where we end up, I have him. All things are working for the good because I love Mulder. It's not black and white and it hasn't been something we've shouted, yelled, explained or even really said, but it's there and it's right and it's ours. It's here in all the little gory details, and in all the good. Now why in hell did it take me so long to figure out? ~~~~~ end all adios In Him RM