Hole in the Black by PD ARCHIVAL: Gossamer, no thanks. Stories will be housed at my site only. If you'd like to link, I'd love it, but please drop me note with a heads up. DISCLAIMER: Can I borrow the keys to the franchise, Chris? I won't go to any FBI balls, I promise to make a full stop at most clichés, and I will try not to dangle my participles at the nice couple in the unremarkable house. CLASSIFICATION: SRA, MSR, IWTB, TMI, ASAP RATING: R SPOILERS: Through The X Files: I Want To Believe SUMMARY: "I wasn't in the group, Mr. Mulder. I was a tangential part of the project - in league with those few who were adamant on the subject of developing an antidote and a vaccine. He was our man on the inside, but we were not on the side of complicity with the colonists and that meant we were on the outside. Fringe element. We were not highly regarded. We weren't even invited to the group barbecues." He caught himself and smiled. "Ah. No pun intended." All stories can be found at http://www.syzygial.com SPECIAL THANKS: To AnnaX whose tireless, relentless poking is why this story is here. Truly, thank you. FEEDBACK: If you enjoy that sort of thing. I know I do. syzygial@comcast.net CELL PHONE SERVICE: A CAVEAT IN TWO PARTS I take a page from the book belonging to the creative team(s) at Ten Thirteen. To wit: 1. Cell phones work when it serves the story. 2. Cell phones don't work when it serves the story. AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'd been itching (in the way that poison oak tortures you until you reluctantly have to tear your skin to shreds to do something about it) to... (Continued at the end to avoid spoilerage) ~ Chapter 1 ~ In the end, she had to give him up. Three months later, when word got out that a lone doctor at a small Catholic hospital was working with experimental treatments for a boy with Juvenile Sandhoff Disease, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the NTSAD (National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association) got involved. It happened quickly. With the consent of the parents, the hospital administrators at Our Lady of Sorrows and, reluctantly, the primary physician, the boy was transferred to the University of Minnesota Medical Center where clinical trials were already being performed in earnest. She had to give him up - for his own sake. ~:~:~ Friday, April 11, 2008 5:45 am House in Rural Virginia He knew it before she realized it herself. "What are you doing awake?" he whispered from behind her. "Just thinking," she said after a moment. "You're always thinking," he said and she sighed in acknowledgement. "Occasionally," he said, snaking an arm under the covers and around her waist, "we must give way to the body's biological imperative to sleep - much like the familiar log and rock." Glancing at the clock, she smiled and pulled his hand between her breasts, snuggled into it. He wiggled his fingers and snuffled into her shoulder blade. "It's almost six. I haven't been up all night. Just seems like it." "Then you should join me in my world of," he yawned and pulled her closer, "quasi hooky. Stay home and we'll watch TV in our jammies and make cookies." She smiled, turned in his arms and stared at his sleepy, grinning face. "Maybe brownies," he said, and she burrowed into him and rested her head on his shoulder. "As nice as that sounds, Mulder..." "I know. No time. Workworkwork." "Look who's talking," she whispered. "What I'm doing is not working, Scully. Not in any traditional sense. I talked to Agent Eccher yesterday while I was peeing. I focused their profile while farting and eating a Ho-Ho." "My refined hero." "Multitasking comes in a multitude of forms. Miss Manners can kiss my ass." The overcast morning light began peeking through the curtains. "Besides," he continued, "I'm trying to start a career again here, Scully. By necessity, I have to overextend and - eat, drink and sleep it for a while to understand my own thought process again. Full tilt boogie - but, you know - with farting and Ho-Hos. And before you say anything," he placed his palm on her hair and pressed her head gently to his chest, "don't worry about me or my mental health. Doing it this way is not quite the same as it was back in the day." "Okay." "It's almost completely removed from the - it's detached. I mean I'm detached. Sort of." "All right." "You should feel free to keep an eye on me just the same, though." She smiled and trailed her fingers back and forth across his breastbone. "Always." She lifted her head and rested her arm on his chest. Raising a finger, she toyed with his bottom lip. "If you make brownies, I'll eat them with you when I get home." "You're on." He grinned and kissed her wandering fingers. They shared a look that sealed the deal. "Tell me," he said after a moment. "Hm?" "What were you thinking about?" Persistent as ever. She was quiet for a while, gathering her thoughts, then, "it started - I was trying to remember what it felt like to go on vacation. I mean a real vacation. And it made me think about the trips we took when I was a kid - sitting in the backseat, wedged in between Melissa and Charlie. Bill always got the back-back seat to himself in the station wagon. I thought about the trip we took through Monument Valley." She smiled. "Every time I see Thelma & Louise, I think of that trip. So beautiful." She paused and the room was still and silent except for the soft sounds of their mingled breaths. "I thought, how wonderful it is to be a little kid, going on vacation with your family, your parents in the front seat, safe and happy and just looking forward to the experience... Sometimes, I think I'll never get back there, back to that place that's filled with so many good memories..." He tightened his hold around her, rubbed his chin back and forth, back and forth against her hair. He closed his eyes and prepared to hear it. He knew what it was. He knew it before she realized it herself. "I was thinking of William," she said. He didn't have to nod for her to understand that he was with her. "I keep thinking -" she started, and sighed in frustration. "I just keep thinking." They lay in silence, not really noticing the blush of morning as it slowly illuminated everything around them, pushed the dark out of the corners. "If you need to let it out -" she started, then let her thought finish itself in his head. "I don't," he said. It had happened on one of those dismal nights early in that first year. Constantly looking over their shoulders, afraid, angry, it seemed the only thing that held them together was their newfound, mutual hatred for the world in general. The beginning of that first year was not about love against all odds. It was about survival and the inescapable, bitter realization that the only thing they had was each other. That they had somehow, quite deftly, thrown their lives away. Oh, not without help, but there they were. That terrible night, he hated her, and he couldn't have hurt her more if he had knifed her repeatedly and laughed at her oozing blood. And she let the words wash over her, let the knife prick her flesh over and over; she deserved it. William, William, William. They didn't talk for days afterward. On the third day, when he left her in the motel and didn't come back, she was certain he was gone forever. Her new low, one she never thought possible, was to sink to the bottom of a bottle of vodka and contemplate the end of the world. When he came back late in the evening of the next day, he found her in a heap, asleep on top of the covers in the dark, shabby room. Nothing he could say would change the past, so he crawled onto the bed and wrapped his body around her. Hours later, she woke to find him beside her, staring at her. She wanted to cry, but she didn't. He wanted to apologize, but he didn't. Instead, they closed their eyes, got under the covers and slept, intertwined, as ever. She used to dream about that horrible time and especially that night. She would wake in the night, tears soaked into the pillow, unable to catch her breath. She would pull him close and whisper into his skin over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Sometimes, he would wake and hear her. Sometimes he comforted her. Over the years, the sharp edges of those feelings smoothed into manageable, fleeting sensations. Occasional pebbles in their dispositions. He grazed his knuckles across her cheek. "I don't," he said. "I don't need to let anything out, Scully." He dropped a kiss on her forehead. "I promise." She nodded her understanding. The ache of their son's absence was strong, but learning to focus their anger and blame elsewhere gave them a hope of sorts. Mostly the hope was that they would finally be content with the fact that he was not a part of their lives. But sometimes it was dream-like - a needling, painful hope that one day, regardless of the circumstances, they would find each other again.