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English
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Part 5 of Gone
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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
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1,715
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1/1
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18
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Mountain

Summary:

Summary: Mulder and Skinner take it slow.

Work Text:

Mountain
by JiM

Something happened to Mulder today, out under those bare spring-gnawed trees. He sits across from me, drinking his coffee in slow measured sips and I can almost see him, feel him ringing like a crystal bowl. One dead man's words, nailed to a tree, have left him silent, pale and gasping, a bruised look to his eyes. The only question is: will the blow, whatever it was, shatter him?

I shake my head. How can I worry about him when I can't even answer the question for myself? I may yet shatter; I can feel the cracks spidering outward, cutting deeply through everything I ever thought I knew. Mulder believes there is something new on the other side but I am not so sure. I have seen men come back from their breakdowns and seen only fractured ruins in their eyes, watched their days carved into portions carefully allotted to pills and therapists. If that's what waits for me, I won't come back from this trip. I'll just keep driving.

But what about Mulder? He wasn't ready for this. I have known, in some way, that this was coming for a long time. I could feel the levees and dams washing away within, could tell my control was flaking away like rust. But I don't think Mulder did. After all, it's such an ordinary kind of terror, this awakening to find oneself rimed with middle age.

It's lonely as hell to discover that you have neither children nor wife nor good friends nor a spectacular career to show for the efforts of an entire adult life. I was full of such promise when I left college.... At least Mulder can point to the concerted efforts of an entire shadow conspiracy that he opposed with every breath in his body, several times to the point of death. They were more than reason enough for a man to fail. And he did not, not entirely. But me? No answer. Yes, I opposed them, but not whole-heartedly. I tried to balance between expediencies and I was chewed up and spit out. Now there is nothing left of who I wanted to be. All those nights I sat in the desert and wanted, I think I was wanting to become myself. And now, I don't think it's possible.

We drink our coffee before the round stone fireplace, raised up like an altar to a benign household god. Our hostess comes and goes as silently and kindly as breath. Coffee and brandy and something baroquely soothing plays on hidden speakers while Mulder continues his inner inventory and I watch the flames. The innkeeper's dog leans against my knee and sighs in contentment as I stroke his silky head. Perhaps it is progress; I have made one living being content for one entire minute. It is more than I ever thought of before.

Tomorrow, I think that we will climb the path and go look at the Old Man of the Mountain. The stone profile has been crumbling away for decades and they have spent outrageous amounts of time and money demanding that it remain exactly as it was with wire and spackle and bolts. But they are fools. All things change, even mountains. I need to see that mountain, to watch the facade crumble into gravel and scree and to lay my hand against the rock and know that I will still be myself when everything loose within me has fallen away. I think Mulder does, too.

He hasn't said a word by the time we both head up to bed. We slip around one another quietly as we undress and use the tiny bathroom off our room. Mulder is sitting on the end of his bed when I come out of the bathroom in boxers and a tee shirt. He is staring blindly at the work boot in his hand; the other remains on his foot. When I lay my hand on his shoulder, he starts, then looks up at me. I can do nothing but nod, I am as lost as he. But somehow, that's enough. He nods back, a small smile forming on his lips. Sometimes, it is enough to know that one isn't lost all alone. I fall asleep to the sound of his breathing in the moonlit darkness.

When I open my eyes, it is deep in the night. The moon no longer shines directly in the window, but it throws long silver rhombuses on the rug. Mulder stands in only his shorts, looking out the window. His back is against the window frame so that I see exactly one half of him silvered in the moonlight, the other half too deeply shadowed for me to pick out even his most familiar features without my glasses. He has the window open and icy air pours past him, carrying the scents of granite and trees and time. I can no longer hear him breathing and it is this that finally makes me whisper, "Mulder?"

There is no answer for a long time, then he replies to a conversation that I hadn't realized we were having until this moment. "I just want something... someone to hold on to," Mulder says softly, mostly to himself. The words hang in the cold night air and shimmer like quicksilver. He is looking at me now, frosted by the moon and shivering in the cold, standing alone and proud, more than half of him made indistinct by the darkness.

After a long moment, maybe the last moment in a long lifetime of numbing disappointments, I hold up one corner of the quilt. If it isn't quite an invitation, it is an acceptance of something I never before acknowledged, something that is now almost comfortingly inevitable. I move back to give it some room.

Mulder stares blindly toward me, then makes his way over and slides between the warm sheets, settling with a shiver into the space that I have left for him. There is a long silence and we lay without touching, without talking. I can hear him breathing in the silvery darkness again.

"Mulder, is this why I invited you along?" I am staring at the ceiling as if not making eye contact will rob this moment of all its dangerous rhythms.

"I think so... part of it, anyway," Mulder says gently.

"I didn't know." I sound a little desperate, like a man who doesn't know why he just invited someone into his bed.

"I know," Mulder says in that same gentle tone. My right arm is up above my head, my fist clenching, flexing and opening like some kind of destructive night-blooming thing.

Mulder's voice sounds again in the darkness, as comfortingly familiar as a stuffed animal. "It's all right. It's just something new."

It makes me laugh, small choked noises and my lungs are clenching in time with my fist. "Damn straight, it's new."

"You really never knew?"

"I... don't think so... no."

"It'll be all right," Mulder says again.

The sheets whisper beneath me as I turn to face him in the dark. "I'm too old for 'new'," I say, clutching desperately at who I used to be as the rocks begin to slide in earnest.

"What else is there?" Mulder shoots back.

Pills, I think. Therapists and that carved-up look in my own eyes. Pills, or Mulder. As if I've made any other choice in the past ten years. I reach out my hand, fumble it towards him. He catches it securely in his own hand and holds on tightly, as if I would fall away, slip beneath the waves, be dragged off if he did not grip me with all his strength.

"So, what happens now?"

"How the hell do I know?" Mulder says with a touch of irritation.

"Hey! I'm the trembling virgin here, dammit. It's not like I have a clue."

Mulder's laughter pisses me off for one white-hot moment, then I see that it really is funny. I guess sex always is. We are both still chuckling when he realizes that my hand is shaking again, fingers clutching his a little too tightly. Then Mulder is pulling my hand up to rest on his chest and saying quietly in the dark, "It'll be OK, Walter. Just let it go for tonight."

"But...." I have no idea what I meant to say; I have only the dimmest sense of outrage that I can't just leap off the cliff now and be done with it. I am terrified and must turn and fight my fear and he is telling me to lay beside it and....

"Sleep would be good," Mulder says, then yawns. Immediately, I remember that I have hauled this man six hundred miles from his home and he hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours. "It's not that I don't want you, because, trust me, I do. For years now," he mumbles. "But I think slow would be good here. At least, I'd kinda like to make love to you when I'm not strung out on caffeine and existential crisis," he says softly, eyes gleaming in the uncertain light.

I can feel myself blinking; he is braver than I am. He has said the words that I can barely think. But I am a fighter and my hand is still in the grip of a comrade. Tonight, I think, we will sleep beside one another. Then tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime very soon, we will make love and he will be my lover. And I will be his.

We are both insane.

But all I do is nod. Mulder smiles again, that very gentle smile that goes with the voice and I think of how cowardly I am, making him carry me through this. Without thought, I am leaning toward him and my dry lips brush his cheek. When I settle back, he blinks slowly at me and his smile is so happy; once again, I have made another living being happy for one instant in time. It is a good feeling to take down into sleep with me, my fingers still tangled up with his, rising and falling on his sleeping chest.

If a mountain can reshape itself, so can I.

 

end

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