oyster 9

one leg in one leg out

Scully wakes from a strange dream where she is trying to put on a pair of slacks, but she can't remember exactly how they go. She is hopping around on one foot while she tries to fit the other leg into some kind of odd shaped opening.

She raises her head, blinking. She's left the bedside lamp on and the room seems full of looming shadows. The pillow is damp. Maybe she was crying a little before she fell asleep. She wants to cry. It is a sick heavy misery in her all the time. She wants to vomit the feeling out but the stronger urge is to do something, take some action that will make the situation better.

She will not let Mulder go. She will not face the feeling in her, sharp and jagged as a hangnail that catches each time she thinks of him.

No, they'll find him. They just haven't looked in the right place yet.

But the truer part of her knows, and feels his absence in her bones, knows that Mulder has gone out of the world, has been subtracted from the air she breathes and the spaces she moves in.

Last night she came here to his room, ostensibly to inventory his belongings to make absolutely sure that wherever he was (though she knew even then he was not wherever, that wherever would have been a relief) he had not taken any personal belongings. The more she went through his things, his wallet, his toiletries, the more the heaviness inside her had grown, until she sat on the bed with his balled up socks and extra pair of jeans and two Oxford shirts and her stomach convulsed, her ribs seemed squeezed together, in the awful need to cry. But she wouldn't do it. Not enough tears in this dehydrated land to spare, and besides, she wouldn't give Fate that satisfaction. She fell asleep on his bed, exhausted with the effort of trying not to think.

Now she feels so dry; her tongue is cotton, her eyes burn. She goes into Mulder's bathroom and takes off her clothes and gets into the shower. For a long time she stands under the pouring water, knowing scientifically that the heat and external moisture will only dehydrate her worse, but it seems like the only place she has been since this disastrous journey where she has been able to breathe without taking some kind of powdered glass into her lungs.

No tears come. The shower is a safe enough place to cry, the running water, the mask of steam, the noise to drown out any girlish wails of woe. But it doesn't happen. Each time she swallows she feels the giant ball of pain inside her and tells it, "We'll find him. It'll be all right."

She gets out of the shower only when she notices the skin on her fingertips is shriveling. Naked, she realizes she'll have to get back into the same stale clothes she wore when she came to the room, and she hates that, hates especially putting on the same pair of underwear twice without washing them. She steps onto the rug and pulls the inadequate towel from the rack and rubs lifelessly at her wet flesh, and then she sees one of Mulder's shirts, a white one, hanging on the back of the door, not like the others, but still on the hanger. The shirt Mulder was going to wear the next time he put on a shirt. A thing that represents not Mulder's past, but his future. She takes it down and puts it on, surprised at how big it is, the tail coming almost to her knees. She comes out of the bathroom in a breath of steam and bright light, and goes back to the bed to sit on the edge and button the shirt. Almost done, she pauses, and considers the overlong sleeves, and then suddenly lifts her arms and wraps them around herself, hugging her body with the shirt like a straitjacket, and that's the click, the key, the nudge over the edge that breaks her down and enables her to cry.

Damn you, Mulder! Damn you!

Without taking her arms from around herself, she rolls back onto the bed and lets her head fall to the pillow, and curled in a ball Scully cries herself to sleep.

And she is sleeping like this on the blanket, nestled inside the feeble comfort of Mulder's big white shirt, and wearing nothing else at all, when the next morning Skinner uses his card to let himself into the room.

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oyster 10