oyster 7

As she comes awake, Scully has a series of loosely connected thoughts, linear, but too far apart to join into a single concept, shadows of ideas, like light filtering through frosted glass. The thought comes as if asked of her in a classroom: what if time had weight? That would mean it could be stretched and pulled out of shape, which would offer scary potential for distortions, but it would also mean that it could be proven to exist, that it isn't a human construct. Not like consciousness. How can consciousness ever be proven to exist, she wonders drowsily, if it has no weight?

Numbers flash and jitter in space as if on an old movie reel, formulae she can't translate, physics that make perfect dream sense but display increasingly elusive meanings as she nears the surface of what she knows as reality. Then she's almost awake, and her scientist's mind rebounds: well, time has no weight so the rest of the argument is invalid. If it had weight...then it wouldn't always be now. Or is "now" the human construct?

And now she is awake, and blinking, sitting erect in her chair, heart pounding, as she sees the sheets, the blanket, floating down onto the bed. Or thinks she sees them move, but maybe not, maybe they were moving but are not moving now...

"Mulder?" Her voice is husky; her mouth aches with dryness. She swallows, licks her lips, swallows again; her throat is a hot tunnel of sand. She sees the glass of water on the nightstand, picks it up and drinks, first a swallow, a pause, and then she drains it, gulping greedily. There is something disturbing about the cool cylinder of glass in her fingers. Didn't Mulder drink from this glass last night? Didn't he drink it all? Maybe he refilled it. But it tastes dusty, warmish. Something about this water tells her something bad. It's visceral, no logic to it. She has to steel herself against it, then, but her heartbeat, still pounding from whatever disturbed her in the dream, doesn't seem to be slowing down. She should understand, but something in her rebels against understanding.

A little louder: "Mulder?"

*******

Skinner is dreaming. He rolls over on his back and mumbles. Base camp, everyone sleeping on the scratchy blankets. A sound wakes them and they spring alive, every dead man on his feet. There is gunfire. No, just a milk truck rattling over a railroad track. No, just someone putting a glass full of water down on a table.

The sound comes again, tap tap tap tap, and this time it resolves itself into a knock at the door.

Skinner opens his eyes. Hotel room. Las Vegas. Smell of fresh laundry and sense of being surrounded by great empty spaces.

He throws the bedclothes back and swings his long legs over the side of mattress, his feet meeting an unfamiliar carpet instead of the bare floor of his own bedroom. He recognizes the urgency in the quickness of the knocking, tap tap tap tap: that's Scully's anxious little fist.

He takes his underwear from the chair by the bed and pulls it on hurriedly; he has a massive morning erection and his head is still full of cobwebs. There's an ache in his bad knee that wasn't there yesterday. Stepping into his pants, he calls, "Just a minute."

"Sir, it's me, Scully."

The tension in her voice is all the more reason to assemble the mantle of authority, to get his socks and shoes on, drag his tee shirt over his head, find his glasses. A moment later he opens the door and she strides into the room without being asked, an unScullylike act that bodes no good news to come.

"Sir," she turns and looks up into his face, making his heartbeat pause in an interesting way, her eyes dark with anxiety, faint blue half moons under them as if she hasn't slept. "It's Mulder. He's gone."

"Gone where?"

"Gone missing, as far as I can tell." Her voice is impatient, but not with him; she's frightened because of the danger to her self control, and he looks for a way to calm her down without patronizing her. Her lips are parted; she's breathing through her mouth. Her hair is falling forward, half across her eyes. She's wearing a white shirt with small pearl buttons and black trousers, and the bottom button of the shirt is undone.

Skinner starts to ask her to sit down, then suddenly what she is telling him sinks in, and he snaps back into full administrative mode. "Mulder is gone?" he asks. "You mean, gone, like the others?"

"I don't know," she says, but the way she says it means yes, just like the others. "He was in his room last night and when I woke up he was just not there. I've checked everywhere I could think of, but he wouldn't have just disappeared without saying anything. Without taking his clothes."

Skinner builds images based on her words, then the images collapse, and he tries to rebuild them again, but he can't get past the fact that she and Mulder were sleeping in the same room. Maybe he misunderstood her. No, she knew he didn't take his clothes. He pictures a naked Mulder, a vaguely flesh colored image, in bed beside a far more detailed naked Scully.

He clears his throat, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips under his glasses, and says, "Sit down, Agent Scully."

She ignores the order, and gazes up at him with an expression of mute desperation. He's seen that look before a time or two. It's the same look that has led him down dark alleys and into fist fights and beyond boundaries he never dreamed he'd cross in this lifetime.

When she was sick, when she lay so tiny, so diminished, so close to death in that big cold hospital bed, she never once looked at him that way. Nor at anyone else, he suspects. This soul-rending, beseeching look has always been on behalf of her partner. *Please help me by helping Mulder.* She could have an arrow through her own heart and those lips would clamp together against the pain, and her eyes would go stubborn and brave, and she would never in a million years ask him to pull it out of her. But for Mulder she would go down on her knees and beg him to remove a splinter.

Skinner allows himself the brief intensity of pleasure and pain of looking down at her. The truths he believes in, country, justice, order, authority and obedience, melt away in the fire of the greater truth that he sees in that look in Scully's eyes.

"All right," he says in a calming voice, "It's all right, Scully. We'll find him."

And it doesn't matter if the promise he makes can be kept or not; just the fact that he gives it now it is all either of them need.

**********
oyster 8