for tracy

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the groaning rush of the universe as it is sucked into the vacuum behind the boy who from one second to the next is turning in his sleep, then rolling out of bed, then pitching forward into the bottomless beyond. It snaps shut instantly, cutting off in mid gasp the lungsful of air he would have needed to scream. And that is all there ever was, or ever will be.

********

"A dream is the place where words dissolve into symbols," Mulder begins, "Where everything has its true meaning, spoken in some forgotten language in a way we can't easily translate back later when we're awake."

Prologue over, Scully thinks. Get on with why you woke me up in the middle of the night, guaranteeing that tomorrow while your face will look romantic and haunted from lack of sleep, mine will only show the haggard lines of wear.

It's a small mean thought, and of course she is instantly ashamed. She concentrates harder on following his words despite her sleepiness, which makes her even more irritable. A good punishment; she is satisfied that she deserves it. Her resolve strengthens. This cycle of shame and self castigation is well established; she's aware of this but never thinks to question it. Scully is so tight you cannot slip a finger in her from any direction.

And he is so damned handsome, one leg bent with the knee up, the blanket lying across his thighs, his half erection a suggestive bulge in his boxer shorts. A lock of brown hair falls across his pale forehead. There is forever the impulse in her to smooth back that spikey hair; she has done it under a hundred guises, and sometimes he leans into her cool fingers, but more often he pulls away like a sullen five year old.

"But this isn't really like that," he says, to some audience beyond the fourth wall, his words not so much communication as a kind of sleeptalking, as if he is forgetting Scully as he speaks, outdistancing her somehow. "This is like...I can't say exactly what it's like because it isn't like a dream at all. I mean, it is, because it's all in some kind of symbolic language, but it isn't, because some of the symbols are so strange they can't be...can't be symbols at all..."

Resolve be damned, Scully is dozing. His soft voice is doing it, the rumble of words deep in his chest like the purr of a lion.

Mulder's head lolls drunkenly to look at her as he struggles to stay awake, to keep talking. She has her elbow on the nightstand, her cheek in her palm, the whole weight of her upper body leaning on that elbow. Her lashes flutter a little and Mulder imagines he can feel the tickle...

He goes on talking...she hears him...flickering in and out a bit, but still, each of them is still there for the other...always. Always.

Mulder wants to tell her but he's not sure of the language he needs for this. The words are falling away, somehow, becoming smaller and smaller. He has seen the architecture of insects in his dreams, giant red mounds like termites might build, but the termites themselves are like something he has never seen before, and has no word for, and he knows that nothing like these things have ever been seen by anyone and may have no names at all.

A quart mason jar, with a screw-on lid, and inside, something buzzing furiously with a tiny glowing rage so intense that the outer glass of the jar is hot to the touch.

He kneels to look at the jar, which is set on the hard polished ground of some alien landscape, the way he imagines the Salt Flats would look close up. Somehow, he understands...the intensity of the rage is like a collapsed star, weight beyond measure fallen in upon itself...and so powerful that if somehow the rage could be translated into physical mass, a grain of it would fall right through the earth and out the other side.

The man in the black hat rises in a dark shimmer of heat on the horizon, in waves that blur the highway, taking shape and form. He holds out that long arm, those long fingers. Mulder shrinks back. The thing in the jar buzzes and burns.

And then...Mulder is looking at Scully in her chair, and it's like looking at something not Scully, but at the same time, quintessentially Scully. As if Scully could be reduced to a single sentence, something short and poignant about a woman in blue pajamas with the top button half undone, her skin pale as milkglass, stained faintly pink just at the cheekbones, her lips pursed a little as they must purse naturally when she sleeps, pulled together that way by a drawstring he has created; he can SEE the imprint of himself in her face, every line he has etched there, indelibly written with his name...

And for one explosive second Mulder understands something, and is filled with the greatest wave of remorse and loss he has ever known.

Then the dark man touches him and all the world of Scully flips and flutters away like a balloon suddenly released, and the only thing Mulder knows after that is the sound of the centuries swarming over him and the groaning rush of time falling apart.

oyster 7