Till Human Voices Wake Us by rollsofrice Feedback: apocalypse.deathinabox@gmail.com Characters/Pairing: Mulder/Scully Rating: PG Spoilers: For IWTB, post series angst Summary: "These things mark the way, white pebbles of moonlight, columns of salt where they have looked back." post series. -- These things mark the way, white pebbles of moonlight, columns of salt where they have looked back. The crumbs, eaten by wolves on hunting night. -- The stranger is still in the Room when she returns. His back is to her, scissorhands transecting feeble paper and serif text, size eighteen and trailing gray smoke-shadow in the ridges of his fingertips. She opens the door and waits; the entrance to his catacomb. The stalactites are at stage two, the one that drips. Each time she comes to the door with a new request or just a gnawing, compulsive need to see him, the first fleeting second is spent in raw fear if the room, were empty, laughter echoing into every corner, if she finds blood on the carpet, if the knob turns and she should step into a field of dead grass. But he is there, lost a little each time, false cheer in his voice. It makes her wonder if it really takes alien colonization for the world to end, for everything to burn, ashes across the backyard. -- One winter, a derailed locomotive and twenty-six casualties keep her three shifts straight between the hand-holding and the surgeries he gets a message on the answering machine. They hardly get television signals out where they are, so he turns the beat-up metal cuboid of a TV to the channel with the least static and watches fireflies dance over the screen. The leftovers are cold in his spoon and oesophagus; he lies on the couch and jolts upright when the headlights of a car appear at the slit under the front door. "Abundant caution does no harm, Scully," he says indignantly when she laughs, finding him wide-eyed and panicked in the hall. "Though I wish I'd learnt that before these leftovers." "Or you could have read the label," she says, eyeing the container. "This spaghetti's a week old." "That would explain the rather organic flavor," he chokes, half-smiling. She laughs with him, their fingers intertwining in the warmth of his lap. It's only later that she tells him about the two children playing on the tracks in the snow she couldn't save. -- In the day, the white picket fence and the dishwasher all this domescity that isn't them allows their forgetting, a quiet suppression of someone, something in effervescence to the surface. By night and the shadows of duck, it is different: the intensity of terror and trepidation. Past lives, the kind that no one wants to keep, etched in the earth and dust (90% of dust is human skin, he'd told her once, tracing the curvature of her shoulder under silk). Occasionally one of them will slip a thing of inevitability and names, events come forth, the remnants of a well-guarded existence. When she does he holds firm and watches silently, giving as much as she needs (as if he's strong enough for both of them). It's only after she finds blood-crusted dents in the wall concealed by his hardwood deck that it occurs to her maybe he isn't, neither of them is ready for this, the flight of fugitives. -- On the Tribune building, Chicago, is an ongoing history of the world: fragments of architecture, cement and wind-battered rock; a bite-size piece of everything. A stray finger over this wall might find that these mounted trophies (a notch below museums, one above taxidermists) are real, if barely, stuck on vertical slabs of concrete, half a world away and grotesquely, exquisitely noticeable. The Room is just that way, a metaphor in the making. Instead of chipped limestone, quartz crystal, the interior walls are plastered with gray newsprint, some yellowing at the edges. The carpeting is organic, the layer of sunflower kernels a minefield of shrapnel at his feet. If this were the darkest, mustiest of museums tagged catalogues, named, drawing-pinned it would be too much of a masquerade, the deliberate unearthing of a mythical creature. These are the things that haunt empty hallways, beds, sleep: the remembered warmth of a smaller, fragile body, the anatomy of bridges, footprints in the snow; the things lost in the fire burning bright. These are the things that remain, dust in the desert wind. -- Sometimes they lapse they have their beliefs and he'll lean across to her and say: "California's Alien Law, 1913. Alien, Scully, that's what they called things they thought foreign, unknown. Frightening, almost. Suppose our worst fears manifested in the form of things we couldn't explain, begins in the far corner of our unexplored universe? Things that didn't exist, not for real," and he'd laugh bitterly. Between the tone and timbre of his words is only this: maybe the world isn't going to end. Maybe that isn't brimstone and fire coming down in a blinding deluge outside the window. She crosses the room and strikes December 31st off the wall calendar petrified squares of days, and they are almost done. It is 2011, he breathes uneasily, and 2012, all in this floundering split-second between the quivering minute hand of the clock and its destination. In quantum terms, this is another dimension materializing, another decision made, another entanglement of objects. This is what a decade feels like, he whispers, and she nods. Slowly, wearily. There is no countdown. -- fin. Author's Notes: The Tribune Tower features rocks and bricks from a variety of historically significant sites that have been incorporated into the lowest levels of the building and are labeled with their location of origin. In all, there are 136 fragments in the building. I saw it on CSI:NY recently and thought it was interesting, though I certainly didn't think it would work its way into my fic. The California Alien Law of 1913 prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (i.e. all Asian immigrants) from owning land or property, which has nothing to do with extraterrestrials, but I've heard about a law prohibiting "communication or contact" with extraterrestrial beings. I used it in this context as "alien" is normally used to refer to something strange and foreign, although little green/gray men are also classified as such. The term "sunflower seed" is actually a misnomer. (Does anyone still write their fics on paper before going digital? I noticed today that I can't read and type at the same time.)