Date sent: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 02:19:34 -0600 From: TwoSpooky Subject: NEW: Fealty (1/1), by Birgit Mueller TITLE: Fealty AUTHOR: Birgit Mueller EMAIL ADDRESS: rm12908@navix.net DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Yes, please. :) SPOILER WARNING: Up to and including "Kitsunegari" RATING: PG-13 CONTENT WARNING: MSR CLASSIFICATION: V, R, A KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully romance SUMMARY: A sequel to "Flesh of Clay." DISCLAIMER: CC and 1013 own them. I don't. I am poor. They are rich. Nuff said. This is for everybody who asked me not to leave it like this. It won't make sense unless you are aware of the events in "Flesh of Clay," but that vignette is so short I've simply repeated it here for the sake of sanity. Scroll down to the new story immediately below the old one. (I'm working on a longer story, but I'm working out a case of writer's block, so here is the result... be afraid... :) ================= Flesh of Clay by Birgit Mueller (rm12908@navix.net) ================= He drove me home this time from the airport. I did not ask him why. I can barely speak to him now. I know what he wants. Faith. Trust. Comfort. Rescue. Rescue from the precipice we once again came so close to pitching forward over, tumbling into, open-eyed and blind. Rescue from the darkness. The look in his eyes is too much to bear, and I close the door before he can ask to come in. Before I want to let him in. He loves me. I know it now. I see it. If I could feel at all, I am certain I could feel it. If I could feel anything, I would choose to feel this. I want to feel this. I should be frightened, but there is only the hiss of dead air in my head, a deafeningly silent void. Empty space. It startles me to realize I have pinched my forearm hard enough to raise a welt against my freckled skin. The pain is a dull throb, the only reminder that I am alive. On my deathbed, I dreamt of him, crying silently, his face pressed into my hands, a prayer, a supplication. Then he told me he had come to me in the night, corporeal, blood and bone, and that was the instant I truly knew. He loves me, and if I could have felt anything then, I would've chosen to feel that. But my heart was wrapped already in shrouds and linen, a weak and distant light against the pale horizon, and though I smiled, my flesh was clay and I could not feel it. I am in the shower now, somehow, shoes and all, and the blast of icy water hits my face in a stinging slap that makes me gasp. Cold. Alive. I want to be alive. I want to feel it. He would die for me. He would kill for me. Maybe he already has. He loves me. I want to feel it. I thought I had been redeemed with one sweet word. *Remission.* I don't know if it was Mulder's gift to me, but I knew that he had tried with a singular tenacity to champion my cure. And I have been cured. Someone poured the life and the breath back into my tired and aching psyche, and I could feel it. That, and that he loves me. I felt it then, along with the promise of time like grace from the heavens. All the time in the world. I think I felt that I loved him too. I want to feel it again. A tiny casket and a cross in the sand can change so much. I'm shivering. Cold, only cold. I want to feel again. I reach for the phone in my pocket. The water is still flowing over me in frigid streams, raising ripples of gooseflesh in its wake. The phone still works. It rings. In the warehouse, I saw him slumped over Linda Bowman, and I knew. I knew he thought that it was me. He touched her forehead, a small caress, and if I could feel at all, I would have felt it then. He loves me, and I want to feel it. I need to feel it. He answers. "Mulder." Silence. Dead air. I can't. I have no voice. I push 'end' and drop the phone numbly into the swirling turbulence at my feet. All I have is the chill of the water. The water, and shrouds and linen, and flesh of clay. *END* ================= Fealty by Birgit Mueller (rm12908@navix.net) ================= I am cold. So cold. The water beats down on me like tiny needles, pushing me off balance, raining down on me as I sit and immerse myself in the bathtub's roiling foam. It is so easy to give up, give in. I am vanquished, fetal, lost. Minutes pass. The water thunders its hypnotic, insistent cadence against my flesh. And then I hear him. "Scully?" His voice, rising above the water's potent, inexorable hum. It startles me awake. He sounds unnerved. My voice has no answer for him. Damn him for coming back here. For knowing. For not coming sooner. I want to kill him. I want to throw myself into his arms like a child. I want him to disappear. I want a promise that he will never leave me, a whispered, soulful oath of fealty. I want him. I want the distance between us and the chill in my bloodied soul to disappear. And yet I cannot speak, and I cannot feel it. "Scully?" Again, louder. His shadow cuts a black swath across the shower curtain. There is real fear in his voice now. I can only wait, one forever beat, two, before I hear a hesitant *clink* above my head and feel the frigid draft from the open bathroom door as the curtain slides away. He sees, and I can only wait. For an instant nothing moves, and I wonder if he is just illusion, a trick of the light and the mind. Then, suddenly, his presence is there with crystal lucidity, breaking through the surreal, wordless bubble and lancing into my consciousness, stabbing into me, hurting me with its jagged, intense edges. "Jesus Christ, Scully!" He jabs at the knob and stanches the flow of frigid water from the shower, then yanks the curtain fully back with a swift, clean jerk. I hear a rustling as he pulls the suit jacket from his own shoulders and moves for mine. I shrink from his touch. I suddenly fear it will shatter me with its gentleness and break open a thousand tiny wounds that will pour out my life's blood to pool like dark, red wine in his hands. My voice returns with an instinctual growl. "Go away, Mulder." A pause, and he pulls back, bewildered and unsure. I am the one who heals him, filling in the cracks and the holes with the warmth of my hands. He is the one who breaks. Not I. "Go home," I say again. Leave, Mulder. Stay, Mulder. From the corner of my vision, I see him shake his head. Deciding. "No," is all he says, one quiet, even word. And then his feared hands upon me, touching through the soaking fabric, lifting. The water swirls, protesting this injury to an inertia unwilling to give up what it has claimed. I am shaking. Something cracks. Anger. Real. I grasp at the feeling, the life of it, the energy. I shove him away abruptly, sharply. "Let go," I snap. He does. The water reclaims me. I grope for comfort through a fiery magenta haze of sudden rage. Damn you, don't let go. Silently, he hands me a towel. My gaze reaches involuntarily upward and I look him in the eyes for the first time. It is there, that labyrinth that is Mulder trapped in lambent hazel-green. I'm frightening him. I'm frightening myself. "What the hell are you doing here?" It is a snarl I hardly recognize as my own. He clears his throat, hesitant but unmoving. Then a sigh, and he looks at the floor. "Six times, Scully," he says. "That was the sixth time you've hung up on me." I am so stunned I drop the towel. Damn him, how does he know? How does he reach in and emerge with such revelations? How does he see into me and capture the truth about these things of which we so often never speak? But he is speaking now. He is asking now. "Why?" Speechless. Bastard. Because I need you. I need to feel it. He kneels beside me on the bathroom floor, his toes pressing patterns into the bath mat, and looks at me with a careful but unabashed tenderness. I see his lips move, and I hear her name again, one last funereal incantation. "Emily?" Anger, fury, a building vermilion crescendo inside me. I hit him. I hit him hard. My fist connects with his chest and he falls back onto the tile floor with an involuntary gasp and an expression of stunned shock. I cannot hear my own voice over the roaring in my ears. "Get *out*!" He hesitates, still gasping, looking at me with some indescribable union of raw emotions whose disparate threads I cannot unravel. The roaring dies as swiftly as it had come. I didn't want to hurt him. I hope I didn't hurt him. "No," he whispers. I see gentleness catch fire and overpower everything else in his eyes. "No." And he is back beside me on his knees as if never moved. He loves me, but I cannot feel it. I need to feel it. "Why didn't you tell me?" is all I can say. We've spoken of this before, but never like this, never here, never now. His eyes cast about as if grasping for something to hold on to. His mouth moves without words until finally, "Too much, Scully. I just... I just couldn't." He looks at me, and I feel his fingers brush against my arm, and I see the truth in his eyes. And I shatter. I shatter but I do not bleed. I burst forth from the ruined shell in a blaze of pathos mirroring the sun. Strong arms envelop me and pull me at last from the polar and unforgiving water into the unbounded resurrection of his embrace. I am reborn in infinite sorrow and a wash of blinding tears. I feel his hands moving through my damp hair and pulling me against him, into him, and I know I hear him whisper, "Because I love you," mingled with the sound of his heartbeat against my cheek. And I feel it. *END*