If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things by rollsofrice Feedback: apocalypse.deathinabox@gmail.com Characters/Pairing: Mulder/Scully Rating: PG Spoilers: For IWTB Summary: "They speak of butterflies and Atlantic tornadoes; a flutter of powdered wings translating on the whispering of latitude winds to the funnel-likeness of phantoms." Author’s Notes: I initially wanted to title the fic ad noctum-- "into darkness", after watching "Detour" and to make an oblique reference to IWTB. I guess I just have a thing for long titles. -- They speak of butterflies and Atlantic tornadoes; a flutter of powdered wings translating on the whispering of latitude winds to the funnel-likeness of phantoms. On this night, bitterly cold, she exhales in tandem with his breath on the back of her neck; insects in free fall. -- He wants a house with a basement, one with a washed out ceiling and a bulb with a flickering filament, tells her it's "sentimentality, Scully, for old times' sake." Laughs, a palm against the room’s whitewashed wall; a master inspecting a new canvas, turning to her and gesturing: here—I could get another poster from that place on M Street, and this ceiling looks like it could use a little something; she laughs with him. The real estate agent looks at them strangely, at the single cardboard box he lugs up the porch stairs—their past and the things they salvaged from the flotsam that washed up on shore. (two years after, they stop running.) -- In the back room, his room, sunflower seeds cover the floor rug and the desk. She squints at the density of newsprint on the walls and the scattered seeds; it makes her feel like the woman in Florida who saw the Virgin Mary on her burnt toast, somehow, that if she looks long enough she’ll find something there. He lifts his gaze to hers, glancing briefly at the floor of his home office. "Maybe they'll grow, Scully," he murmurs distractedly. "Maybe they'll grow." "Don't get your hopes up on that one, Mulder," she says, a smile playing on her lips. -- He subscribes to twelve different periodicals and five newspapers, hiring a P.O. box an hour's drive away. She raises a single eyebrow when he hauls his daily catch in, the "highest low-level information they have around here." (you don't have to know everything, she says.) -- It takes her a year before the sound of someone approaching from behind doesn't warrant the reflex of a hand to a (now absent) holster; two before he stops turning to face anyone who opens the door with the most lethal object he can find (usually one of his pencils). Finding her, he laughs: I knew it was you, Scully. She watches him finger the chrome yellow dowel; threading carbon with his palm. Later, she finds a remnant of painted wood in the trash, splintering at each broken edge. The surface of the pencil yields dried blood. (when this paranoia fades—they are now experienced fugitives—what stings the most is the thought that this is what it's like to give up, and how they have won.) -- (Once upon a time— --nothing would end this way; there would only be sunsets and whirligigs and candlelit evenings. There would be fields with no weeds, a green-glass bottle of sun. He would be here whole, not broken. The darkness would not follow the trail she has laid so carefully for him: sticks and stones and broken bones.) -- fin. feedback is appreciated.