Scully and Mulder in a hallway, with his hands on her waist.

Mulder says, "Like hell we can be friends."

Scully feels a rushing sensation, as if she is falling off a cliff. As a matter of fact, she can no longer feel the carpet under her feet.

"You came here because you wanted something," he says. There is more than tension in his voice; he is angry, he is bitter. He can barely speak.

She looks up at him, thinking, Who are you and what have you done with Mulder? "I wanted you to come back to the X-Files," she says. "I wanted--"

"What?"

"I wanted to see you again," she says, and wonders why it comes out as a whisper. "I didn't want us to never see each other again."

"Scully, it can't be like it was. We can never go back to that place, to the people we were."

She barely understands what he is saying; his voice is all over her skin, and she can feel the words but not quite grasp their meaning. Except she knows he is going to say goodbye. The next thing out of his mouth is going to be the last thing he ever says to her. The last real thing, anyway. Goodbye Scully; we'll see each other now and again, but you can't carry me around in your head anymore in a vision of how things might someday be, because it's never going to happen.

She leans forward, falling, falling. Let it happen. Don't jerk back from the edge this time. Just...fall.

Mulder's chin grazes the top of her head. His arms are sliding around her, an affectionate hug goodbye. Goodbye. Her heart aches like a raw wound, and she clings to him in sorrow and despair. This can't be all. This can't be goodbye. She wants to stop him but not like this, not with her body. She would do anything to change things, anything, well, almost anything, but not this. Not hold onto him when he doesn't want to be held.

He brushes his mouth against her forehead, his nose nuzzles through her hair, inhaling. She smells the warm fragrance of the skin on his neck and puts her lips on that spot near his throat, that sweet special spot where he seems so vulnerable. She feels his lips, the tiny suction of a kiss on her cheek, another near the corner of her mouth. His breath is coming too quickly. No, wait, that's her breath, hyperventilating. That's why she feels so dizzy, so out of control. That explains the falling sensation, and why she can't think clearly. If only she turns her head a fraction of an inch, if only he turns his, their lips will slide across each other sometime between this heartbeat and the next...

In the dark hallway, cold through her thin blouse, the sparkle of fire suddenly makes her flush all over, and she says a single agonized word: "Mulder."

His name forces her mouth into the shape of a kiss.

His mouth is on hers. The room is moving, no, they're moving, no, nothing is moving; they've become unstuck in time. Mulder's mouth is on hers and she is kissing him with a hunger she never imagined in herself, never let herself dream about, her mouth is open to welcome his tongue, she is licking, sucking, biting gently; she tugs at his lips with her teeth. One minute this kiss is the focal point of all existence and then his hand closes over her breast and no, this is all she wanted, just this, and then his mouth moves and the focus shifts back as she surrenders to the demand of his kiss and then makes him surrender to the demand of hers and she hears him moaning Scully Scully...

He is holding her against the wall, his hands hurting her arms, her curved back not meant to fit against the flat drywall plane but he is holding her there and smoothing her out with his hands, molding her so that everything becomes pliant and liquid and amenable to suggestions of any shape his desire might sculpt out of her passion. His erection is an upward thrust that she would come down on if she could, but suddenly there are layers and layers of clothes in their way.

In real time maybe five minutes pass.

He bends his knees so that his fly is even with the juncture of her thighs and lifts her against the wall, his hands under her buttocks, gripping, but it isn't making love, it isn't even fucking, it's just rubbing, frantic, there isn't time for anything else because any second now one or the other of them is going to wake up and say no, no, this can't be happening...

The door in the other room, the kitchen, probably, comes down with a crash of glass and a splintering of wood and a shrieking of hinges. The noise when it reaches them shakes the hallway, sends a shock of sound like a wave of sensation through their very bones.

Mulder lets her go but doesn't move back so when she slides down him it's like striking a match, and they both clench their teeth and close their eyes for a moment. Only a moment. Scully clings to the cloth of his shirt to keep from toppling over; her legs won't work right yet.

Mulder is looking down at her but in the shadowy hallway she still can't see his eyes and time is going to start again at any heartbeat, and here they are, on the verge of something, something powerful, something momentous, an epiphany, the voice of God suddenly distinguished from all the white noise of the universe, speaking of the one good thing, the one true thing, that every heart is listening for...

A high, thin wail breaks the spell, "Daaaay...nuh," and they leap apart, prepared for battle, as if nothing had happened in the interval, and Scully's gun is in her hand, and Mulder is moving cautiously towards the doorway that leads back to the living room, and she is right behind him, back in reality, or so they imagine, as if nothing had ever happened, as if they had never left.

********

In the kitchen there was a gaping hole where the door had been. Mulder held his arm out, blocking Scully, even though she was the one with the gun. They edged forward, and Mulder reached for the light switch, but when he flipped it on, nothing happened.

It didn't really matter. There was light coming from the entrance, a kind of shimmering, underwater light that made a long rectangle across the terra cotta tiles of the kitchen floor.

Framed by the doorway, a few feet outside of the threshold, a man stood with his legs spread, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

Scully and Mulder gripped each others' hands like children, because the man was there and he wasn't there. It was obvious he was only a reflection made up from the moonlight shining on the leaves of the trees, the curve of the window from the corner of the house, the back porch light of the neighbor's that was shining through the cracks between the boards of the fence. The kind of apparition that would vanish if only the viewer moved an inch or so in either direction.

But they moved, and he didn't. He stood there, looking at them mournfully. Scully gave a little cry, hardly audible, and Mulder squeezed her hand reassuringly, but it wasn't a cry of fear. She recognized this man. He was the man from her dream, the one with the hanging child.

Mulder said, "Who are you? What do you want?"

Scully felt a surge of love for him, because his voice wasn't surly or suspicious, but awestruck, full of wonder, the voice of a child before it learns how to lie. The Mulder she had known so long ago, startled out of hiding by the sight of a ghost. She almost smiled.

The ghost was staring at Scully. "You were there," it said. "You saw."

She shook her head. "Saw what?"

"Alyce." The word ended with a long hissing sound, and it might have only been the wind; they might have just been imagining the whole thing. After the moments in the hallway, anything seemed possible, and nothing seemed capable of regaining the sharp edges of real worldliness.

The ghost raised its hand, pointing at Scully. For a few seconds it was more than just reflected light with the wind as its voice. It was a man with brown shoulder length hair, wearing a coarse shirt, leather trousers, boots that laced halfway up his calves. A medieval peasant, centuries dead, who'd come to deliver some message.

The words were faint, but clear, each one enunciated with great care. "Not everything dies," it said.

And then they were standing in the kitchen with the light glaring overhead, and the door on its hinges exactly as it had been all along, an ornate clock over the refrigerator ticking ten past nine, and except for the strangeness of their positions in the doorway leading from the living room to the kitchen, nothing out of the ordinary was to be seen.

They blinked at each other uncertainly, each afraid to be the first to speak.

Finally Scully said, "This has got to be the strangest night of my entire life."

Mulder rubbed his eyes, "You saw it, Scully. Tell me you saw it."

She nodded. "I saw it."

He leaned weakly against the kitchen counter, shaking his head. "I'm almost afraid to wonder what's going to happen next," he said.

Right on cue, the answer to his question: the telephone, which he had slipped into his pants pocket earlier, began to ring.

*********

Tomorrow: The Call