Even Eurydice Had a Bride Price 
by lesaut

Feedback:  pinkpaperheart@roadrunner.com  
Classification:  Mulder/Scully, t, post XF2: IWTB; this is a sonnet to an
interstate, and to assumptions made by professors of literature; takes
place after IWTB , thus some spoilers for the film.


There is expectation in the room, and understanding, and fear. 

She is standing at the door to room 6 at the Rest Easy Motel, plastic
bags cutting into her wrists under the weight of their glass and
aluminum contents. She stays outside because the curtains are drawn
open a bit, because it's not quite cold enough to urge her inside, and
she watches him pressing his knuckles to his forehead before looking
through his wallet again, before thumbing out the twenties that the
government isn't providing this time. His eyes are wild. Inside them,
she sees that something has broken, momentarily snapped and
threaded out of place. 

He sees her standing outside, stares. He closes the curtains as if caught
in some act of guilt or shame, but really, she knows he's only just
noticing that they're open, that he ought to close them for privacy.
Really, there is innocence in these small acts.

This is what happens.

She opens the door and he's standing there in the flannel shirt he wore
yesterday, not washed because she knows for a fact she didn't bring it
with her to the laundromat today; he's holding his wallet, or a
toothbrush, or a cup from the bathroom with something in it. He
watches her as though it's been many years, and technically, her body
argues that it could be true, that the various errands she's run today
from the backseat of her car could have taken slow and painful years
to complete, and here she is, returning once more to the place where
she left him, begging forgiveness for gaps in the time-space continuum.
It would not be far off, at least not for them.

"Have we got enough?" she asks, and it's not about the groceries
she's now setting down across from the bed. He says nothing; he's still
counting the bills. 

The space beside him is empty, but it does not beg for her presence.
He carries himself in ways that no longer require her place in his wake,
and she has yet to think about whether this is an offer of equality or a
sudden disregard for her needs. She doesn't even know if it matters to
her.

She didn't want this to change them. She really, truly didn't.

"Scully," He looks up from the wallet, now closed in his palm; a tight
fist filled with worn leather. She knows how it smells, if she bent her
face to his hand. Like the insides of his clothes and the pressed paper
smell of filing cabinets. His mouth is dark in the half-light of the room,
lips parted only slightly. He mumbles characteristically, though with
less promise in his syllables. "We've got enough this time."

"Well, that's good." No, honestly. It is. It means relief, at least for a
few days. She does get afraid sometimes, even if her limbs have
stopped curving inward because of it. Immunity, you might call that. 

In the car outside the door, there are eight cardboard boxes containing
everything they decided to bring with them from the house. Somehow,
as though miracles were tangible things, they were able to manage four
boxes each. She was amazed and pleased until she saw that one of his
boxes was filled almost entirely with newspaper clippings. 

"Is that really necessary?"

He'd looked up, shrugged, and not said anything about the box she'd
slipped into the trunk that had six year old tape on it, framing the dusty
contents of blue fleece and linen with pastel W's stitched into them. He
hadn't mentioned it yet, actually.

They'd left the cradle, fully assembled, in the attic. Some things just
end up too heavy in the end.




There were a number of reasons for leaving. There was the whole
statement about escaping the darkness, but that is not recalled too
often because there is something so cliché‚ about saving each other's
lives again, about someone putting on the white armor and getting on
the white horse and blazing the other off into a blood red sunset. There
was also her resigning from her job, and his cleaning his office for
once, and their bringing home dinners that were never eaten. 

What she wanted was a spark, a sign. Something. They'd run out of
energy, forgotten how to fight, and now she paced through the day
imagining such scenarios, whispering them to herself as she slipped
from sheets to shower, stepped quietly into the kitchen and avoided
his dark silhouette by the door. What she wanted was the chance to
face him as a living person again, not in the defeat they'd grown to
accept.

So one day she'd started getting out their suitcases and analyzing for
size. He'd watched from the bed and made remarks about the
necessary and the unnecessary and she'd smiled. 

"Are you really ready to do this?"

It wasn't his place to ask, not when she was already halfway done
with her packing, but she'd responded anyway.

"Absolutely."

And she's still very sure of that. 




There was also Christian. He did die, though it was from heart
complications, things no one could have foreseen. In that way, it was
possible to dismiss his death as something that was no one's fault, that
was fate's hand, God's will, and scripture was tossed around on her
last meeting with the board, words about faith and trust and the peace
one attains upon their demise, the fact that we can all be comforted by
the simple truth that, oh, they're in heaven now. Everything's just fine.

The fact that she now disagrees so heartily with the statement (for
once in her life) is what made her finally turn in her resignation.

"I feel as if I've changed." was her reasoning for the secretary who
took her paperwork, and the woman nodded as if she understood.

"Well, you just take care of yourself, honey. You're lucky you don't
have anybody else to look after."

The radio in the car talked about a drought in effect. 

She didn't go to Christian's funeral, but she did spend an afternoon in
the one empty room in the house, the one that had no purpose except
to serve as a pause in time, in the natural events of their lives. At one
time, it must have been a child's room, because there was still some
faded wallpaper peeling in the corner near the window, yellowing
rabbits hopping from grey leaf to leaf. Their smiles were the kind of
kitschy cute that used to scare her when she was younger, but now
she gazed at them in quiet disbelief, as though it were impossible to
imagine that she was really here in this room, really wondering if this
could have ever been occupied, if the rabbits could ever have been
scrubbed away. She was timing her breaths. They seemed to thank
her for their lasting existence, for not scraping them off the paneling
and painting them over with pale blue and yellow stars, littering their
floors with trucks and baseballs and patterned carpets, covering the
windows with white. Instantly, she was crying.

He found her like that when he came upstairs. "Hey," he said, and
called her Dana for a few days.




This was about what he'd said earlier, about how many times she'd
had to bury a child. That, she thinks now, is why they finally got in the
car and started to drive. She didn't want to toss her own life into the
grave, too, not even if she knew that its place was marked beside the
rest.




She was sleeping when they turned off the thruway. Toll booths had
faded into grey and tan blurs, state lines not official enough to drag her
out of her dreams. He nudged her shoulder some time after they'd
crossed into Maryland, and she'd opened her eyes to a slow dawn,
making its tentative way over the quiet vacancies of the industrial park.

"Know where we are?" He'd asked, and given her a small smile. She
could feel that smile in the rest of the car, soaking up the dry air and
saturating on the outsides of his vowels, careful touch on the edge of
his words. She imagined that if she moved her hand through the air,
she'd feel its heat resting against her palm, snagging on her fingers like
lace.

"Maryland, apparently." The sign flashing past them advertised
authentic Maryland seafood. She hadn't realized it was a covetable
commodity. 

"Hearthrow, Maryland. Ring any bells?"

"Oh. Wait." She bit her lip. The gesture hurt more than usual. "The
phantom lights in the bay? That marooned ships. Yeah, Mulder, I
remember."

"Exactly. They call it Lovers' Leap, remember? Right over there. And
we had to spend all those hours in the leaky fishing boat and you said
that we were most likely going to come down with pneumonia working
on a case that was most likely a natural or elemental phenomenon and
I said not if we stay warm and dry. And then you almost pushed me
out of the boat." He pulled into a parking lot beside the ocean, nearly
leapt out of the car. 

"Mulder, what are you-"

"It's like coming full circle." He breathed, arms out to the side. She let
him stretch for a few minutes, let him walk down to the shore and try
to coax her out of the car with boyish gestures toward the water. "Full
circle, Scully!" he called, as if it mattered.

She watched the water turning over against the shore, green on grey. It
was more like an oval than a circle, really.




That was the night they checked into the motel. Third in a line of what
she now anticipated to be many more. Really? she asks herself, Do we
really seem that doomed? but he's snoring from the other side of the
bed and slinging his arm across her pillow until he finds her skin in the
darkness, until his hand curves instinctively over her shoulder, and she
doesn't know if she can call any of it 'doomed' anymore. Fated, is
that a word? They are fated.

Fate keeps catching up with them, pushing them along. 

She remembers a college lecture on the power of fate as a presence in
both ancient mythology and modern forms of literature. It was a filler
class, getting credit for the one requirement she'd had in that
department. She remembers how hot her legs felt against the sticky
plastic of the seat, how the professor's mouth seemed to move too
slowly at times. She remembers sweat on her wrists when she went to
take notes.

"Most often, it is the lovers of the plot that believe they can change
fate. Most of the other stereotypical characters we find do not attempt
to change their destinies; this either benefits the protagonists by not
distracting from their quest, or by allowing them the ultimate
transformation. Yet the lovers are the ones who, time and time again,
from Shakespeare to Norse mythology to modern Samoan theater,
are trying to find their own paths and thwart fate itself."

She rolls over onto her side, pressing the small of her back into the
tight angle of his hip. She falls asleep before she can remember the last
part of the lecture, the one that began:

"So. Is this the author's way of impressing upon the reader the idea
that love itself is foolish, or that those so deeply involved in the throes
of it are bound to make mistakes? Or are they acknowledging that
love makes us the bravest of all?"




She wonders why it is that they're stuck in Maryland. There is nothing
here to stay for. There is nothing here to live for. And yet they remain,
and they do neither.

She catches him off-guard when he walks in on Sunday morning and
she's packing up again, throwing out the leftovers that they've been
saving in the tiny fridge in the corner of the room, her clothes folded
and organized on the bed.

"What are you doing?" and his voice breaks a little, and she wonders
what the hell he really thinks he's doing, keeping them both imprisoned
here. It's not like she's going ot bolt should they get back into the car,
drive up the coast until they run out of gas or money or air or
something, because she's perfectly fine with the off chance that they
don't make it to wherever it is they don't know they're going. She
wants to end it somewhere, but that somewhere is not here. 

He knows she doesn't like being stranded. Jesus, she thinks, he
knows that.

"Packing. You should, too."

"Are we leaving?" He sits down beside her, running his hand over one
of her shirts, unfolding its edges so that the sleeve lies limply on his lap,
outstretched and lifeless arm. 

"Aren't we?" She doesn't look up at him. She doesn't want to be
read by his eyes, have to do some reading herself. He's not easy
anymore, at least not on purpose. "This was not our final destination,
and it's not like we're waiting for anything. We can move on whenever
we want to, and I think we want to now."

"Can't we wait a few more days?"

"Mulder." She sighs. It's not like things have changed all that much,
not since the handshake and the identical smiles and all of that. "What
difference does a -"

"Trust me. Just...a few more days, Scully. Then I promise we can go
anywhere, anywhere you want. Arizona or New York or Iceland or
Hawaii or whatever. Just give me a few more days."

She doesn't question him about this kind of thing anymore, and that
might be the one thing that has changed. She's learned to trust the
parts of him that even he doesn't have completely figured out. Irony is,
by this age, he probably never will.

"Fine."

He smiles, folds the sleeve back up.




There's a chapel on the beach. She walks there everyday, sometimes
right before the sun sets, and sometimes after it's already started to
fade. It reminds her that she functions best with habits, that her life was
about habits for years and years, and that the strangest things become
habits as a result of your own will to simply do them again and again,
without trust or faith.

Only once is someone else in the chapel. It's toward the later end of a
twilight hour, and she pushes open the front doors, dips a cold hand
into the fount. She's a few steps away from the dusty gold of the altar
when someone steps out from the three rows of pews, bright eyes
meeting her own with steely resolute. A young man, his hair
disheveled, clearly unshaved and needing a bath. His eyes, strange and
terrifyingly honest. He hurries past her when she moves towards him,
and that is that. He leaves only sand on the stone floor. 

"That's Jonah." Someone will tell her later on, a volunteer custodian
who catches her sitting there one late afternoon. "I think he's about 19
now. Parents kicked him out because of his drugs, and then the shelter
kicked him out because he almost killed someone. Not much for
options, so I think he sleeps here most of the time."

"And you don't mind?"

The man gestures to the ceiling, smiling sardonically. "If God doesn't
mind, neither do I." He rests against his broom. "Besides, you've got
to feel for a kid like that. His head doesn't even work anymore.
Keeps stalking around like that, muttering about God knows what.
Only thing he's ever said to me was something about the apocalypse.
Says we've got four years left."

She doesn't mention it to Mulder. There are only so many omens you
can take, and only so many you can try and forget.




They are sitting on a bench in the fog, and he's got his arm around her
shoulder, but the gesture is strange and somehow unfamiliar, and she's
trying to figure out if it's all the pressure he's putting on her hand or the
rub of his jacket against her thin sleeve that is causing her to shy away
from it. She's figured out that not everything she's afraid of is based on
fear, and not everything she finds uncomfortable is meant to hurt her.
For all these reasons and one more, she leans back into him.

"I found him." He says, and she watches his breath form, mingle with
the mist that's been settling in her hair.

She doesn't need to ask. She just needs to not cry.




The house is white. It's not where they left off, but people move.
That's what happens, when you live a life and you do normal things
and nothing hurts you after all. You move around, and switch schools,
and meet new friends who like your new backpack as much as you
do. You move. That, she thinks, is a glorious and scientifically
satisfying thing.

They don't speak for an hour. She doesn't make a comment about
how maybe they should get out of the car now, and he doesn't tell her
to stay, just stay, something will happen eventually. She doesn't glance
over because he's said something about a feeling, and they don't talk
about nonsense to pass the time. They watch.

The front door opens. A dog first, small and loud. A girl, too young.
And then red hair, and his sneakers are blue.

She won't move. Not for hours.




"You want a coffee?" when the rest stop is suddenly in view, and he's
nudging her shoulder as though she'd been sleeping, when really she
was staring out the window and thinking or contemplating or whatever
deep word means such a deep place. He knows she wasn't sleeping,
but she can feel in his skin that he just wanted the touch. It's in his
voice, too, and for that, she reaches over and squeezes his palm.

"No, I'm fine."

This could go anywhere, really. Once they pull out of the parking lot, it
could go anywhere at all. And that, she knows, is suddenly a good
thing.