Continuum
by Stephen Greenwood

Rating: PG-13
Category: VRA
Feedback: nothingbutnet@hotmail.co.uk
Spoilers: Runs through all nine seasons and IWTB.
Word Count: 4,834

Disclaimer: Characters belong to Chris Carter. Lyrics belong to John
Mayer. At least the ideas are mine.

Written for scullyseviltwin's song writing ficathon at LiveJournal.
Despite that, this is not a songfic. Inspired by songs, yes. Centred
around them, no.

John Mayer's Continuum is available from all good retailers and
comes highly recommended.

With thanks to Beth, as always, without whom I would be lost.

* * * * *

1. waiting on the world to change

Now we see everything that's going wrong 
With the world and those who lead it 
We just feel like we don't have the means 
To rise above and beat it

And when you trust your television 
What you get is what you got 
'cause when they own the information 
Oh, they can bend it all they want

It's not that we don't care 
We just know that the fight ain't fair

They've been on the run for two years, eight months, and three days
before Mulder puts his foot down and says, "I've had enough."

It's a Wednesday and they're holing up in an internet cafe while it
rains, buying cups of coffee to have a legitimate excuse to use the
computers. They're both tired and cranky, achy from sleeping in the
car and in need of showers and a change of clothes. Neither is warmed
by Christmas cheer.

In the cafe, anorexic tinsel hangs limply around a plastic tree,
discoloured with age, and strings of lights with most bulbs burnt out
dangle around the doorframe, the windowpanes, the countertop. It's
dark even though it's only mid-afternoon. The sky remains heavy with
angry clouds and streaks of water hammer at the glass. The cafe has
become a refuge for many and the cash register chimes every couple of
minutes. Porcelain mugs clink against each other and the air is alive
with conversation and the aroma of coffee beans and cooked bacon.

Scully glances up from her perusal of a local newspaper and says,
"Had enough of what?"

"Of this. Of everything. Here, take a look."

He gestures at the monitor with emphatic disgust and glares until
she has no choice but to get up and peer at the screen. He's on a
news website. The headline states, 'Two FBI Agents Killed in Freak
Accident.'

"George," she sighs affectionately, "what is this?"

"It's lies. All of it, one big cover-up."

"It says here they were crushed by falling rocks in the mountains.
An avalanche. Can't a freak accident be just that?"

"Not when it's happened three times in five months." 

He brings up more pages, more stories about Federal Agents killed or
assumed dead or missing, all down to wrong-place-wrong-time; a fire,
a car crash, a bust gone bad. Not once is murder referred to,
although she knows that is what Mulder is implying. He always was
able to find patterns in chaos.

"Coincidence?" she tries.

He shakes his head. "They're taking out anyone who's considered a
threat. Soon it'll be unsuspecting military men and uncompromising
world leaders. Those who won't give up will be the first to go."

"What can we do?"

"Nothing," he says simply. "We've tried. Nobody will listen. We've
got seven years; let's make the most of it. Let's buy a house or a
boat, gorge ourselves on food, and drink to try and forget. We can
listen to Bach and Hendrix, read classic literature, watch Bogart and
Brando and Belushi. We can't save the world, Scully, but maybe we can
save ourselves."

She wants to berate him for saying her name, the one he isn't
allowed to call her anymore, but the weariness and defeat in his eyes
makes her hold her tongue. 

"Okay," she says slowly. "Okay, Mulder, we'll stop running."

Even if it's just for Christmas.

* * * * *

2. i don't trust myself (with loving you)

If my past is any sign of your future
You should be warned before I let you inside

His new partner intrigues him. She's five feet three inches of
science and rulebooks, as straight as an arrow and as sharp as a
knife-edge, but she is no cliche. Dana Scully mingles reason with
religion, gives as good as she gets, and deserves a lot better than
the X-Files.

This is a woman who rewrote Einstein. She has a degree in physics
and a better average at the shooting range than he does, and a mother
and father and sister and brothers. She goes out on dates with men
and gossips with girlfriends. She writes articles for JAMA and
follows him to Oregon because she was ordered to.

Dana Scully cut into a mutilated corpse because Fox Mulder asked her
to.

She's young and naive. She knows nothing of exceptions to the rules,
of cases negating the laws of time and space, and she's too straight-
laced to think outside the box. But she's a fighter, she's tolerated
him thus far, and while he argued with clocks and spray paint, she
threw scientific logic in his face and refused to back down.

Now she's lying on his bed in a nondescript Bellefleur motel room,
still reeling from the shock and relief of mosquito bites. Her second
day on the X-Files and already she's seen so much, understood so
little. But she's still here, and he thinks she ought to know what
she's getting herself into if she decides to stick around.

He rests his head against the mattress and begins, "I was twelve
when it happened."

* * * * *

3. belief

We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for

He's grown well accustomed to the looks people shoot his way when he
tells them he believes in the existence of extra-terrestrials. He has
no qualms about admitting it but it makes Scully uncomfortable, the
way he always leads with it like it's his tagline or his job title:
Fox Mulder, Believer. She smiles indulgently and listens to his
stories and follows him into the night to look for lights in the sky,
but she doesn't believe, at least not with the same conviction and
intensity that he does.

And that's what he's been fighting for: belief. For open-minded
people to give him a chance, to look at the evidence and for a switch
to be flicked, for them to think, 'Maybe he's right.' It takes Scully
to point out that instead of trying to force news of the impending
invasion on others, perhaps they could try another tack.

"I'm just saying, Mulder, that they don't want to be told what to
think, what to feel. These publications, the conventions... you're
going round preaching like a Bible salesman, and shoving your beliefs
down people's throats clearly isn't working."

"What do you suggest instead?" he asks sharply. "That I just give
up? That I sit back and let whatever's going to happen take place and
then wave my placard saying 'I told you so?'"

"It's a virus, right? One we've both been subjected to. And, in case
you forget, I am a doctor. I can study it, I can learn what it does
and how long it takes to do it, and I can create a vaccine. There is
one inside me, Mulder. The blueprints are there. If I can replicate
it, if we could take it to the right people, we could immunise the
population without them ever really knowing what it's for."

"And if it's not what we're expecting?" he asks wearily. "If it's
not a virus but full-blown warfare?"

"Then people will believe their own eyes when the battle begins. And
you can say you were right while leading the front line," she replies
calmly, "and I'll be right beside you."

* * * * *

4. gravity

Gravity is working against me
And gravity wants to bring me down

He'd always loved flying. It wasn't the action so much as the idea
behind it, the belief that man could lift off and cut through the
air, could lose himself in the clouds for a while. Earth wasn't
strong enough to hold a fellow down; human beings could pull free of
its hold, could become untethered and free, and that's what he liked
about it.

He watched the shuttle launches with the same concentration usually
reserved for new episodes of 'Star Trek'. The week after Colonel
Belt's space walk, he salvaged cardboard boxes and rolls of tin foil,
designed and produced his own spaceship with a fuel supply made from
an old, almost empty gas container he'd found in the garage. The ship
never left the yard.

Then he had a telescope and flights to England and stargazing on a
blanket with a girl who thought it was romantic. And then there was
regressional hypnosis, the results of which almost led to a permanent
crick in his neck, and more than ever he wanted to soar.

Gravity was bringing him down, was keeping him away from his sister,
from the truth, was holding him to a world that held only lies. The
thought of drifting away grew once the seed had been planted, became
almost overwhelming after the death of his father, at the worst times
of Scully's cancer, when his mother committed suicide. When he was
all alone and felt like the weight of the world was on his shoulders,
like Atlas.

Space was his escape, the place he ran to in his mind when
everything on Earth was crumbling around him. So many stars, so many
galaxies, so many planets just waiting to be discovered. And who knew
what else was out there? His fertile imagination nursed the
possibilities; his sense of reality reminded him he already knew, in
a way.

He discovered what happened to his sister. He became his partner's
lover. He was happy. He stopped looking to the stars so they looked
for him, and found him in a forest in Oregon.

Ironic, that he'd dreamed of space all his life, and now he was
there he wanted nothing more than to go home.

* * * * *

5. the heart of life

You know it's nothing new
Bad news never had good timing
Then the circle of your friends
Will defend the silver lining

Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
No, it won't all go the way it should
But I know the heart of life is good

She is in pain most of the time now. A month ago she still had more
good days than bad ones but recently the tumour has been keeping them
at bay, standing sentry against codeine and then oxycodone. He tries
to make her laugh because he remembers her once saying something
about endorphins acting as natural painkillers, but even his attempts
at humour fall flat where once they would have soared, and they both
loathe how this disease has come to change and define her.

He still visits her every day, starts bringing flowers without
excuses, packs of playing cards and a chessboard in case she feels up
to a game. Sometimes they'll sit in comfortable silences for hours,
pondering next moves and potential checkmates. Other times, more
often now, he'll dim the lights and sit by her bedside as she
squeezes his fingers and her eyes against the pain, eventually
falling into an uneasy sleep.

Despite his presence, the tumour continues to grow, and therefore so
does the ache between her eyes. Chess becomes almost impossible.
Instead, he reads to her in hushed tones from books he picked up from
her apartment and others he went out and bought because he thought
she might like them. He fetches CDs and throws and pajamas. In small
increments, he brings home to her because she cannot go to it.

It's difficult to focus on the positives, even for an eternal
optimist like him. She's still breathing, still able to communicate,
still remembers his name. But she struggles to remain conscious for
long, can't walk the few feet from her bed to the door unaided, finds
it hard to keep going through yet another battery of tests. The white
of the walls aggravates, keeps the headache pulsing, and sitting to
look out of the window is barely worth the effort.

But then Mulder arrives, jacket flung over his arm, shirtsleeves
rolled to the elbow, tie askew, and she discovers she can spare a
smile for him. He flops down into the chair at the side of the bed
and, after asking how she is, begins a story about his encounters
with fellow bureaucrats.

She isn't paying much attention to his words but to his expressions,
the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes. He's a good man, the
best of men, and *this*, she thinks, *is what I'm living for.*

* * * * *

6. vultures

Wheels up
I got to leave this evening
Can't seem to shake these vultures off of my trail
Power is made by power being taken
So I keep on running
To protect my situation

Things have changed since his sister's disappearance. Not just that
she's gone and there's a huge fucking Samantha-shaped hole in his
life, but in other ways, too. His mother sleeps a lot and his father
spends most of his time behind closed doors. Friends don't stop by
the house anymore. People are uncomfortable around him, treat him
like they would a sick relative in the hospital. Nobody knows what to
say, how to act, and there doesn't seem to be a happy medium: it's
either eyes down as he passes in the hallway or guys getting in his
face, taunting and mocking and provoking.

Life goes on like that for six years.

Tonight, it ends. His suitcase is packed, passport in his hand
because this is his ticket out of here and he can't afford to lose
it, so it stays with him at all times. He's determined to leave the
Vineyard today; Oxford's calling, and the appeal of a good education
is strong, but his delight at the institution being thousands of
miles away from home is stronger. This isn't home. Hasn't been home
since he was twelve years old, playing board games on the floor in
front of the TV with his sister.

He checks his watch, wills time to go faster. The cab should be here
any minute and he reluctantly leaves his perch by the doorway,
knowing he can't put this off any longer.

The door to his mother's room is closed and, when he pushes it open
a crack, he finds the drapes are, too. It's so dark he can barely
make out her form on the bed but he manages to kneel beside her
without tripping over anything.

"Mom?" he says softly. The only movement is the slow rise and fall
of her chest from the pill-induced sleep. "Mom, I'm leaving," he
whispers, half-hoping she'll wake, half dreading it if she did. She
doesn't. "I gotta go. I might be back for Christmas, I dunno yet, so,
um... take care." He waits for a reaction, finds none, and drops a
soft kiss to her forehead.

He turns back when he reaches the doorway and says, "I love you,
mom," even though she doesn't hear.

His father is ensconced in his study and Mulder hesitates before
rapping his knuckles against the door, opening it and poking his head
through. The room reeks of smoke and guilt. His father is at his
desk, shouting down the phone, and he pauses long enough to cover the
mouthpiece and say, "Not now, Fox. I'm busy," before returning to the
argument.

Mulder shuts the door quietly and rests his forehead against the
casing. He's hard-pressed to remember a more meaningful conversation
with his father in recent years. He finds it fitting that it should
end this way.

Outside, the cab driver sounds the horn impatiently. Oxford's
calling.

* * * * *

7. stop this train

Stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't but, honestly, won't someone stop this train

She tells him she's pregnant on a blistery day in March. There is no
preamble, no 'I've got something to tell you,' just two words that
spill out of her mouth as soon as he shuts the door. Outside, the
wind howls and cackles, and for a brief moment he thinks a tornado
must have taken him away from Kansas and dumped him in his worst
nightmare. In that case, he figures, he must be the Cowardly Lion,
because he wants nothing more than to run away.

She can't be pregnant. He can't be a father. He's too young and
naive - although he professes to know the way of the world he knows
little about the ways of women - and now... now it's all he can do 
not to panic. He looks like a startled hedgehog, wide-eyed and
flustered, by both the elements on his walk back to the apartment 
and her revelation upon arriving, and curling into a tight ball on
the floor has an allure to it he doesn't want to ignore. 

But he has to. This is the kind of thing that separates the men from
the boys, turns the latter into the former, and Mulder has never had
a shaky moral compass. She knows that. She also knows she can talk
him into doing anything as long as she pouts and smiles and promises
to reward him handsomely later. For a split second he wonders if this
baby was born out of bribery, and then decides that's not a good path
to travel down; best to stop before he reaches the fork in the road
of illegitimacy. The kicker is that he was going to end things as
soon as he could find the right words. 

He decides he must have been a real bastard in a previous life.

This is atonement. So instead of collapsing or turning tail, he
smiles. It's shaky but it's a smile, and she either ignores the fear
radiating off him in waves or just plain doesn't notice as she takes
his hand and leads him to the bedroom. This could have been where it
happened and he pushes aside the twinge of regret. What's done is
done. Bed's been made, Fate says, now lie in it. 

Besides, he reasons as he takes her in his arms and lowers his lips
to hers, pretending that what he feels for her is love, it could just
have easily been the couch. Or the car. Or Conan Doyle's tombstone.

* * * * *

8. slow dancing in a burning room

It's not a silly little moment
It's not the storm before the calm
This is the deep and dying breath of
This love that we've been working on

In the end, it doesn't take much to break them apart.

It dies with screaming and shouting and formerly concealed, harshly
revealed regrets. After knowing each other so long, both know exactly
where to push, when and how hard, and the result is an anger that
rivals only their old passion in its intensity. She holds the upper
hand: she can leave the house without looking over her shoulder, can
hear police sirens without believing they're for her.

He's still an outlaw and she's all he's got; all he used to have,
really, because she's been drifting away for a while now and he's
been too absorbed in newspaper clippings to notice the sinking ship.
She has a life outside of these four walls. He isn't allowed one.

It's his apparent lack of interest and her newfound freedom that
drives a stake through it. She's working a lot of extra hours at the
hospital; is she seeing someone else? He practically lives at the
computer; just what has he been posting on those internet forums?

They both discover that trust takes years to earn and mere minutes
to shatter. When she packs her bags, it is with a finality that
should hurt but doesn't. He seethes from the doorway, eventually
stalking to the kitchen and grabbing a beer from the fridge; in his
anger, alcohol seems like the best solution.

She lugs her suitcase from the bedroom and heads for the door,
shooting daggers as she goes. She looks like she wants to say
something - fire a parting shot, maybe - but just can't find the
words. He meanders over to the couch and picks up a magazine from the
coffee table, feigning disinterest.

"Don't tell anyone where I am," he says gruffly, without looking up
from the journal. "You owe me that much."

She pauses and stares at him. "I owe you nothing," she says, and
leaves.

* * * * *

9. bold as love

All these emotions of mine keep holding me from
Giving my life to a rainbow like you

What does he know about being a father? He certainly doesn't have
kids - never gave much thought to ever even wanting any - and there
are no nieces or nephews to look after. No friends with children,
either. He literally has nothing to go on, and he thinks he ought to
know better than to attempt to build on the remnants of a broken
home. 

Yet he's considering doing it anyway.

Of all the men in the world, she chose him. Dana Scully chose Fox
Mulder over a guy with a smaller nose and the ability to distinguish
between red and green, without a martyr complex and a stubborn need
to know the truth. She could have picked an anonymous donor but she
didn't, and that has to mean something. She must think him capable,
even desirable, at least in terms of genetic material. But he doesn't
know the big picture: will his contribution end once he's jerked off
into a plastic cup or will he be taking his kid to school and Little
League games, helping with toilet training and homework and driving
lessons?

Mulder has never been afraid of the unknown but this terrifies him.
This has the potential to change everything. His relationship with
Scully would never be the same again and if there's one thing he
knows amid this storm of uncertainty, it's that he can't risk losing
her. He needs her scientific logic and the quirk of her eyebrow, the
daily challenge and camaraderie, the challenge and the joy that comes
with being her partner and her friend. Joy he could help bring to her
by agreeing to her request.

This is everything to her and she is everything to him, so when he
stops thinking he finds the decision is already made. He grabs his
jacket and heads for her apartment before his mind convinces him that
this is a leap of faith too far. Some things are worth taking a
chance on.

* * * * *

10. dreaming with a broken heart

When you're dreaming with a broken heart 
Then waking up is the hardest part 
You roll outta bed and down on your knees 
And for a moment you can hardly breathe 
Wondering was she really here? 
Is she standing in my room? 
No she's not, 'cause she's gone, gone, gone, gone, gone

It's hot in New Mexico and although the desert cools at night, the
inside of the trailer doesn't. The metal box retains heat, keeps the
air humid and stale and uncomfortable; he feels like he's
suffocating, one breath at a time. The air-conditioning unit
splutters and spits out a chilled breeze in fits and starts but never
for long enough, rarely at times when the temperature is caressing a
hundred and four and he's standing in front of the open refrigerator
in his boxer shorts, still sweating and convinced his skin will melt
clean off his bones if he has to tolerate another minute of this.

But there's nothing else he can do. He's a fugitive now; he can't
venture outside yet, isn't willing to risk it, and the TV fights
valiantly to pick up a signal, only occasionally emerging the victor.
He's flicked through Gibson's magazines, read Stephen King novels
that he could relate too much to for them to be scary, and filled in
so many crossword puzzles out of boredom he saw black and white
squares for days. So that leaves sleep, and even that doesn't come
easily. The oppressive heat makes him drowsy but his mind remains
alert and won't let him drift off until he's been lying there for
hours.

When he does sleep, he sees her in his dreams.

They're so real that he sometimes thinks them fevered delusions,
sometimes goes one step further and believes she is right here,
crawling into bed beside him, taking him in her arms and into her
body. She tells him she misses him and that he should come home; he
tells her that he wants to, needs to, because this is Hell in a
pitiful disguise, and he's been on the lookout for his first glimpse
of a pitchfork.

In his dreams, she doesn't grow solemn and remind him that they've
seen the Devil in a thousand costumes already, masquerading as
businessmen, as housewives, as government officials. In his dreams,
she smiles instead and kisses him in lieu of telling him to shut up,
and he gets to hold her through the night and she's there in the
morning.

When he wakes, the scent of her doesn't linger on the pillow. His
arms are empty and her side of the bed is cold.

* * * * *

11. in repair

I'm in repair
I'm not together but I'm getting there

He thinks it's all one big mistake, one of those clerical errors
that happen from time to time because humans aren't infallible. It's
a typo; someone checked the wrong box and that's what it can be
traced back to, a blip on the records and a black mark against her
name, right where it shouldn't be.

The drugs worked like they were supposed to. The chemo is a distant
dream now she's much better. She's in remission and the prognosis is
good. He didn't pick out a headstone and give a eulogy and watch her
body being returned to the earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just
like the priest said. Nobody cried because there wasn't a funeral and
he doesn't spend his days trying to forget because there's nothing to
remember.

He doesn't fight back tears when anybody mentions her name in
conversations he isn't supposed to hear. Nobody looks at him with
pity in their gaze when he drags himself to work for yet another day,
clothes rumpled and face unshaven and eyes red. He doesn't find one
of her sweaters in the laundry basket and he doesn't pull it out and
place it carefully in her drawer - her drawer - because she'll be
coming over again and she might want to wear it.

She's lost her cell phone. That's all it is, and her internet
connection has been bust for months. She's on medical leave from the
Bureau and she's using the time to go travelling, and that's why
nobody's been able to get in touch with her. That's all it is. When
she comes back they'll laugh and talk and swap stories, and he'll go
back to life and get some work done instead of floundering in a limbo
where he can't stand the sight of himself.

Her mother doesn't call to talk about her and her voice doesn't
break when she says her daughter's name. Her older brother still
hates him. He doesn't meet the younger one and he doesn't solemnly
shake his hand and he doesn't use his shoulder to cry on.

He doesn't get drunk that night and wake up completely lost the
following morning. He doesn't repeat this process for a week until
his supervisor tells him to get over it, she's gone and he's still
here and life sucks, everybody knows it but some are better at hiding
it than others.

There's no need for him to be swallowed by the blackness, to think
of ways he could destroy himself. He hasn't put his gun to his mouth
every night for two weeks, and he hasn't pulled the trigger because
she's still here. 

When he calls her number he hears her voice but she doesn't return
his calls.

* * * * *

12. i'm gonna find another you

So go on, baby
Make your little get away
My pride will keep me company
And you just gave yours all away

Europe.

That's where she's going. Where she's running to. And he's powerless
to stop her. Isn't sure he wants to.

He watches her take her sweaters, her time, and with every balled-up
pair of socks and folded t-shirt she tosses into the suitcase he
finds his rhyme and reason curling up alongside them. 

He doesn't tell her that. Doesn't tell her not to go. Certainly
doesn't beg and plead, even though his heart wants him to and that's
usually what fuels him, but he could have sworn it was broken because
it hurts in his chest and he doesn't trust it and he can't seem to do
anything, say anything, to prevent her from leaving.

He can't move from the doorway, even as she passes, case in one
hand, his rejected love, their discarded life, in the other. She
can't look him in the eye and he thinks that alone speaks volumes.

"I'll call," she says.

"No, you won't," he replies, and hears her leave.