===================== Title: Bedlam Sidebar III: Mourning my Death By: Jessica Harris Disclaimer: I'm playing with Chris Carter's toys. Notes: No, the title has nothing to do with any events on the show this season... This one has been on my hard-drive for ages, and doesn't seem to be getting any longer, so I guess that makes it done... this is another bit that would come after the "Waking the Neighbours" section. If anyone wants to find the rest of the bulletins, they're at: http: //internettrash.com/users/livia/jessica/jh-series.htm Feedback: Feed my disease... lumpj@hotmail.com ===================================== Bedlam Sidebar III: Mourning my Death Jessica Harris ======================= Scully came over for dinner last night. She brought red wine, which I can't drink anymore, and Alex cooked a meal that was... well, pretty awful, really. His cooking tends to be nothing less than a full frontal assault on the ingredients, and everything ends up salted without mercy and scorched into submission. But he was pleasant, or at least civil, all evening, so I guess the cooking had some therapeutic value. And Scully ate without complaint, and made gracious conversation, and only once or twice did I catch her looking at me like she was already mourning my death. All things considered, a fairly successful dinner party. More successful than most we've attempted. Scully can't help it, really. It makes Alex ballistic, but she's a doctor, after all, she wants to *fix* things, and when something can't be fixed, all she can see is where it's broken. So when she looks at me... well, you can guess what it is she sees. I don't... I don't track time very well anymore. Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that for most people, it just moves one way, one day following the other on and on until things are all in the past, safely behind them. But for me... I know they're gone. The aliens, that is. I know that. I remember what we did, and Alex's eyebrows never did grow back properly after that final blast. But I... somehow I carry them with me. Inside me. Like a weight in the base of my skull. All of it - them, and the ships and the fires and the tunnels and the blood and the rain, the rain, the rain, that rain the ships brought with them, so black and sooty and strange. It's all there just on the other side of that thin edge of 'now', and here, where I am, the edges of things don't hold so steady anymore. It falls inside me all the time, that chill black rain, and it blurs things... Sometimes I'll be talking to Scully or Skinner and only when I see the look in their eyes do I realise that I've slipped again, that I'm telling them about a case long past, warning them of disasters that have come and gone. I think that Alex minds it even more than I do, that look in people's eyes. He gets so *angry*. When I finally shut the door behind Scully and came back into the kitchen, he was washing the dishes so fiercely that I feared for their lives. "Don't blame the dinner-plates, Alex," I said to him. He looked down at the plate in his hand for a second, then hurled it against the fridge where it shattered with such force that we both ducked. Then he pushed me up against the counter, grabbed the back of my head and kissed me. "I hate her," he finally said against the side of my face. "No you don't," I said. He tensed for a moment, then said, 'I love you." And I just nodded, and led him carefully through the shards of the dishes and into the bedroom. He'd never say it, but some of it scares him too. He's afraid that one day I'll slip back into that time before the battle when I hated him, when we were enemies. And because he won't say it, I can't tell him, can't tell him that that will never happen. The only thing that holds steady for me anymore is what I feel, and what I feel for him is... well, I could say love, but that's inadequate. Love is just one small piece of it.