Title: "Trees", #3 in the "Gone" series
Author: JiM
Date: 3/00
Pairing: XF, M/Sk
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: It is possible to talk less and still be heard
Thanks: MJ, Leila, Merri-Todd, Karen. Apologies to Mallory/Ethan for taking
names in vain. :-)
Webpage: www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/4859/JiM.html
Feedback: jimpage363@aol.com


* * *
"Trees"
by JiM

* * *

It is dawn when I open my eyes to the soft humming that has spidered into my
dreams. The road is a grayish mist beyond us, flashes of white and red
quickly swallowed up before I can identify them properly. I straighten up
and stretch the crick in my neck. Mulder stops humming and half-turns to me.
He smiles and hands me the half-full cup in his hand and I gulp down most of
his coffee before I realize it.

"Morning."

"How can you tell?" I mumble and finish his coffee, still staring blankly at
the gray fuzz beyond the windshield.

"The road's darker than the sky now," he says and I can hear the smile in his
voice. Why the hell is he so happy? "We're outside of New Haven," he adds.
"Breakfast? There's a Denny's at the next exit."

"Breakfast, yes; Denny's, no."

"You have something against Denny's?" he quirks his eyebrow at me. I notice
how dark the ring beneath his eye is, how pale the skin under the morning
stubble. I need to let him get some more sleep.

"If I never see another Denny's...some day, I'll tell you about it." My
stomach grumbles in uneasy memory. Mulder says nothing, merely nods and
keeps driving.

He is uncharacteristically patient with me and this odyssey. So far, he has
asked no questions. Perhaps he realizes that I have no answers to give. I
can give him nothing but silence and he returns the gift. We have never been
talkative men, not with one another. The years jangle with the silences we
have locked between us, all the angry, suspicious, hurt, careless, betrayed,
betraying times.

But we eat breakfast at a small diner with no words between us and it is as
peaceful and cool as the fog that licks at our freshly-shaven faces when we
return to the car. It has been years since I last washed up in some roadside
bathroom and now I remember one of the many reasons I no longer miss being on
the road. Mulder takes it in stride; it is his electric razor we use and I
realize he still does this every month or so when he's traveling on a case.
Somehow, that strikes me as terribly sad.

The fog, the empty road, the hum of the diner's neon sign, Mulder's smooth
jaw as he sits beside me -- they all swirl together and leave me feeling
loose and ragged, a frayed net from which unexpected things might slip in a
careless moment. The wheel beneath my hands gives me some stability, the
road before some spurious sense of direction, the man beside me some tenuous
link with a rapidly crumbling past.

After a while, the dawning sun begins to burn away the fog, the gray becoming
silver, then thinning to pure morning gold. Mulder still sits beside me, one
hand dangling loosely over the leg he has propped up on the dashboard. He is
humming again, a soft sound that carries over the engine and the endless
pavement noise.

"Mulder?"

He stops humming.

"I think I'm having a nervous breakdown."

The forefinger of the hand draped over his knee begins tapping softly against
the denim of his thigh. Finally, he nods and says, "I think you might be
right."

Somehow, that calm tone, that carefully considered response short-circuits
the crackling, stinging emotion that has begun to choke me. "So, what should
I do?" Cowardly of me, to throw it into his lap like that.

"Go with it," he says and I can hear him smile. "You're entitled."

My tongue feels cold and heavy in my mouth, the man I was is drowning in the
past, panic is a brassy taste that I cannot swallow away and he is telling
me...

"Just drive, Walter. It'll be OK."

I want to turn and stare at him. I want to glare at him until he stammers
out the secret that allows him to sound so calm, so sure of himself, of me.
Instead, I step on the gas, pushing the needle over eighty. The tires sing a
little higher now, soothing me almost as much as Mulder's words. What are we
doing here? Last night, it seemed to make more sense, but that careless
feeling was burned away with the morning fog.

Then Mulder says quietly, "Let's keep going until we find some mountains that
we feel like hiking. I think I'd like to sit somewhere and listen to some
trees. You sound like you could use that, too."

His words strike deep and I wonder if they have cut me or will ring and echo
inside me for years to come. "Mulder, do you read Frost?"

"'The Road Not Taken'?" He is smiling again, perfectly at ease discussing
poetry with a speeding madman. Only Mulder, I think, beginning to know why I
brought him with me. Now, if I only knew why he *came* with me, then I would
know something worthwhile.

"There's one called 'The Sound of Trees'." He grunts, nodding, waiting for me
to go on, so I do.

"Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door,
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice.
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone."

He laughs outright when I finish reciting the final lines of the poem that I
first stumbled over in some long-ago despised literature class, seizing on it
like silver gleaming from the murk. Then he says only, "So let's be gone."

It is my turn to grunt and nod. Somehow, I have less to say than ever, but
Mulder keeps hearing me.

* * *


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