TITLE: THE ETERNAL
AUTHOR: Red
EMAIL: ds4fm@orange.net
KEYWORDS: MSR, ANGST
RATING: R
SUMMARY: Scully looks back over her love for Mulder.
DISCLAIMER: I do own them.  They're on my bookshelf! Oh - hang
on.  Sorry, that's my action figures.  I do not own the *real*
Mulder and Scully. (yet) They are CC's, DD's, GA's, 1013's etc
etc.  I was drugged!
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I wrote this after a thread on the Haven about
when M and S first got it on.  This is my answer, and a whole
lot more.
Much love to everyone on the Haven (my new home).  Enjoy!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Eternal


We were happy and relaxed, that first time.  Going through a
good patch in our relationship.  Having got through that awful
stage of small-town madness and constant ditchings, we'd had a
few nasty cases but were also enjoying ourselves again.  Our
work was truly _our_ work, again, as opposed to _his_ work
that _I_ help with.
We'd had some hard times, that was true.  I was abducted by a
man who wanted to exorcise my demons... which bothered me.  I
never thought I had demons before.  Mulder and I sat down and
talked for hours when we got back home after that case.  He
helped me to see that I am not the haunted person Gerry Schnautz
thought I was.
Then that terrible cult suicide at the Temple of the Seven Stars.
Mulder thought he had past lives with that terrible woman. I did
not believe.  We fought after that case.  But not terrible fights.
Not even tired fights.  Just feuds between two people, lives ever
entwined, after a bad week in the field.
Mulder went off to Russia, and survived.
Mulder thought he found his dead sister, but didn't, and survived
that, too.
Even the bright lights and yellow rain couldn't kill us.
We were invincible.

And so, one lonely night, bottle of red wine in hand, I phoned
Mulder and asked him to come to my apartment.
He came.
He arrived in just under fifteen minutes, hair tousled, eyes
bright, in jeans and a New York Knicks shirt.  With two X-Files
tucked under his arm, I couldn't help but chuckle as I let him in.
He knew, that night, what was going to happen.  I knew, too.
We sat down without a word between us.  The cases were thrown to
the floor without a glance.  No excuses needed this time.  His
eyes travelled from my bare feet to Levi 505's to white jumper
and then to my eyes.
He smiled warmly.
The bottle of wine, too, was left unopen.
That night, we gave in to too many years of craving.  A beautiful
man, a beautiful woman, an indescribable attraction that could no
longer be ignored.  He kissed me without a word, hot and sweet and
rich, took me in that moment and made me his own.
We fell into my bed in a matter of minutes, consummated that
burning desire for hours, slept into the next day, a deep slumber
of those who have broken the rules and wish to never face the world
again.
When we did finally awaken, things shifted and changed.
He seemed so sure of himself, so ready to accept the next step.
I froze in fear.  My controlled world threatened to collapse inwards
on itself.  I would lose myself, forget my identity, become _his_
property.
I was so wrong.
But then it all fell apart.
I became scared.  I ran.  I played games.  I ran off with Ed Jerse.
I made Mulder believe I _slept_ with Ed Jerse.  Why?  For what?  To
make him jealous, to show him he couldn't have me, to gain control.
The tattoo, the symbol of eternity, to show what?  To make me believe
I had eternal control over who I was?  I was fooling myself.
I got ill.
In that instant, all remorse, all tension, everything related to that
one lonely night was obliterated by one, horrible, inescapable truth:
I was going to die.
I faced a lot of my real demons, then.  The demons of my family, my
religion, my own soul.  My feelings for Mulder were never one of those
demons.
He fought them, though.  I saw it in his eyes.  His refusal to burden
me with his troubles nearly broke his own back with their weight.  He
was coming to terms with his love for me and was scared by it.  Dying,
I had no choice other than to accept it.  That day in the hospital when
I told him what had happened, I reached incredible clarity.  I knew
that the lust and craving between us had been only the very tip of
something deep and indescribable.  Love was something I had always
held in check.  Now that I felt I was slipping away, I was too resigned
to fight it.  Every day my love for him grew, even as my body grew
frailer.  It was as if my love itself were the only thing about me
that could continue to live, as I slowly died.
My remission was a moment of both immense relief and engulfing terror.
Even as I saw Mulder accept his love for me, I had to come to terms with
my feelings, knowing that they would no longer die before I had to deal
with them.
We sat and talked for a long time.  All I wanted to do was get back to
normal, and that was what I told Mulder.  He understood.  I'd been
through enough - we both had - that a little touch of normality was
what we needed.
We didn't talk much about us.  We never really had the need.  'Communication-unspoken-you-know-what-I'm-thinking' became our motto.
We had some good times that year.  A few hugs, numerous late night
telephone conversations and countless all-nighters at one apartment or
other, once again with a pile of X-Files, a large pizza and a bad monster
movie.  Normality.  I allowed myself to enjoy it, but I also had a
feeling that things were going to change soon.
I was right.
Diana Fowley happened, and my _normality_ went out of the window.  I
was forced, after a blisfully ignorant year of friendship with Fox
Mulder, to accept once again my love for him, and in the worst way
possible: via jealousy.
After they burned down our beautiful office, Mulder and I were lost
at sea.  We retreated to his apartment and camped out on the couch,
going through the one cardboard box holding everything we had managed
to salvage from our safe haven.  His poster was gone.  His hundreds
of clippings, photos and articles were gone.  Slides gone.  Even _my_
work, my neatly-stacked collection of strange autopsies and scientific
anomolies went up in flames on that fateful night.  All we had rescued
were a few simple things: his name plate, my microscope, a few
scribbled case notes and two complete files.  At the bottom of the
box was a photo of the two of us, taken during our good patch, when
it first happened.  Perhaps some sort of sign, that such an
important photograph should survive.  We didn't sleep that night,
but we were barely conscious, either.  We didn't speak.  We just
sat together in the darkness, all night.
Re-assignment was hard.  Not much of a surprise, then, that so
quickly after being re-assigned we should stumble across the
biggest case of our lives.
I didn't want to quit, but I didn't want to work away from Mulder,
so I ultimately thought I'd chosen the lesser of two evils.  I
didn't figure how much my decision would affect him.
Enough for him to say those fateful words and force me to climb a
level with him.  What could I do?  Even as his mouth met mine I
was both reminded of that first time of careless pleasure, and
thinking ahead to a new kind of love.
Damned bee.
What happened?
Another year of Diana is what happened.  Mulder seemed unable
to accept my jealousy.  He came to me one night and made love
to me in my bed, but I just cried and cried.  He didn't understand
my insecurities, and, I thought, chose me over her.
But then she died, and things changed again.  We grew closer.  I
felt, for the first time in my life, free.
If only I could pinpoint the day that Mulder gave this wondrous
gift to me.  It could be any time out of dozens.  There was no
way we could have known what we were creating, whenever it happened.
Our times together were sweet, warm, incredible and unforgettable.
If we had known, I wonder how different things would have been.
But we didn't know.  Instead, they took him from me and my world
crumbled.  People came and went through my life with me barely
noticing them.  I was on autopilot.  People spoke and I responded:
acted and I reacted.  John Doggett became a name I heard but yet
barely understood.  I was drowning in blackness, life growing
within me, reminding me of what I had lost.  They told me my
baby was not normal, was not possible, I ignored them all.  I
could not say when my child was conceived, but I knew by whom
and would accept no other answer from anybody.
They brought him back and he was dead.
The blackness, on that day, was blacker than ever before.  I
was blind, as I wept on the ground, to anything and everything
around me.  I held his body and shielded him from the world
even as I felt it slip away.  Autopilot disintegrated.  I was
nothing.  Three months of Mulder's life gone - three months of
mine.  I don't have a single memory from that period at all.
He came back, and he was not the same.
Death had changed him into a cold and heartless creature without
a care in the world.  My heart bled night upon night with the
rollercoaster I was riding, until that day that I faced him at
his door and _forced_ him to acknowledge what had happened to
him.  He smiled at me bleakly.
"I accept what happened to me, Scully.  It's what you've been
through that I can't bear."
We talked about the baby, we talked about Doggett, we talked
about our X-Files and how my life had changed.  I told him
that my life died on the day that he disappeared.  He cried.
We silently repaired our relationship for good on that night.
William was born.
And then my life was reborn, too.
Mulder and I, standing by the window, enemies slaughtered for
now, were together, safe, warm and happy.  Two people, lives
entwined, opposites ever attracting one another.  The snake
on my back reminds me of the first time, but it also
symbolises our eternity as one.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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The Love Shack:
www.mulderandscullyshouse.freeserve.co.uk
"Hey Scully, does this demonstration of boyish agility
turn you on at all?" - Schizogeny