Overweighted
Chapter Eight
By RocketMan

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Dedicated to John Moore, for his enlightenment.

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"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
-- John 20:29
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Life comes back to me in shifting waves of thought and feeling.

Cresting over my consciousness, first comes warmth, like liquid fire
banked for the long journey.

Troughing and sputtering, then come my remaining senses: taste, touch,
and smell.

There is dust and thick socks in my mouth and a layer of salt tears
covering my tongue.

There is rough wood and a body and a wool blanket and someone's breath
like a mother's whisper across my neck.

There is cologne and him, and sea breezes and her, and then the scent of
Pine-Sol and floorboard and dustmotes.

I reach out a hand and my dark room expands and my mind's eyes see this
place with frightening clarity, as if everyone has released some great
tidal wave of emotion.

I am oriented.

I feel him there with me, about a foot away, his chest rising and
falling. I meet an arm and it is her: she is loosely holding him, as if
she is content in the knowledge of him.

Things begin moving and life begins taking place again.

I don't want to have to help it out. I want to go back to the silence.

There's too much . . . just too much.

I feel the ocean crashing into me: ocean waves of nothing churning out
my fear.

~~~~~

Mulder came awake in a panicked moment of confusion.

Arms and warmth and three bodies when there should have been one -- his.

He relaxed when he smelled Johnson's baby shampoo and Tide detergent,
smells he had never before realized were there until Helen had pointed
them out to him.

He felt something too.

An arm, snaking around his chest and a face buried into his back.

He turned and his whole body hitched.

". . . Scully . . ." he whispered and it was like God had given him back
something more important than sight or hearing, some other sense he had
never used. As if belief was a sense.

He laid back and closed his eyes, trying to imprint every detail of her
into his senses. Helen had taught him to appreciate the smell of someone
you loved, the taste of something you took for granted, the touch of
skin gliding across yours in the briefest of gestures.

First it was the touch that came to him.

Her bare arm was warm, pulsing slightly with the blood forcing through
the partially blocked pressure point. Parts of her skin were cool, as if
the blood didn't quite reach. Each hair on her arm was soft and small,
tiny antennae that whispered to his chest and set his nerves alive. Where
her fingers touched him were electrical points of conducting electrons,
jumping from cell to cell like dancers to good swing music. The dance
crept up his chest and to his throat and made a space there to stay,
throbbing and pulsing like a second heart.

Then the smell of seashores and summer and sleep all mixed with
something that he could never analyze but was always Scully. Lakes and
rocks came to him, long talks with intellectual words used to hide true
meaning, late night motel room visits with candles or computers or
cases, and a certain silent strength that both bended and yielded but
never broke.

His lips ached to taste her, to have this memory, this sensation also.

When things were still and he was certain she was asleep, he turned and
managed to catch his lips on her shoulder.

He breathed.

It was mainly soap and sweat, with skin and something else. Maybe
something that was also distinctly her.

He did not know yet.

With these three satiated, he listened.

Listened for Helen because she could not, and listened for himself
because he could.

There was no way to describe the sound of love breathing next to you, in
your hearing, wanting to be there.

The floor felt like it was spinning away in a dizzying downward hurtle
and he gasped and opened his eyes.

Dana Scully, sleeping beside him.

She was beautiful, to every sense he had.

And some he didn't.

~~~~~
end chapter eight
adios
RM