There was always electricity there, humming between us. But I
didn't want to see it. I denied it. Then he came in here and flipped
the switch, and it was like floodlights turned on inside of me. Guess
you could say he made me see the light. And it almost fucking blinded
me.
Now, I'm sitting here like I do every night, staring at the note he
left—"Things are looking up"—and thinking about us. Us? Jeez... I've
finally gone off the deep end. Well, maybe just teetering on the edge.
One kiss on the cheek and I'm a basket case.
I try to be logical about this. When I met him, I was alone.
Scully was gone, at Quantico, and the X-files were closed. Wiretap was
my only friend. I needed something to fight for, to protect. And he
became that to me for some reason in the short time that I knew him. I
wanted to watch over him; he was so innocent, so trusting. He looked up
to me. He believed in me.
Ha. Well, I fell hook, line and sinker, didn't I? What a sucker.
But that's how it started between us. A tiny spark to my heart.
What's odd is that the microscopic place he occupied then has grown
through the years, getting stronger every time I see him. And I hit him
harder every time I see him, want to kiss him more and more every time I
see him. And now he is flooding through me, my senses overloading with
images and sounds I can't forget.
He's like a fever I can't shake. Sometimes I feel like I'm burning
up in a forest fire and drowning in an icy lake at the same time. I can
barely contain it. Memories press down on me, suffocating and
overpowering me. It feels as if the world is too small to contain what
I'm feeling. I can't grasp onto anything; it all eludes me. But it is
killing me. Out of all the things that haunt me, he's the only one I
need. I need him like an addict needs alcohol or cocaine; it's
desperate and uncontrollable.
I think of the man. Now so different from the man I knew then, so
much better. Danger radiates from him. It pulses around him. He
embodies it. And that danger pulls me in, making me dream of what he
could have done to me, but didn't. That's his spell. He's like a
secret that can never be spoken. When I sleep, I dream of him. Of that
kiss, the kiss of a lover. Of the sting of when he left me, leaving me
here alone again.
I swear it is a fever, a sickness. It is killing me. He could ask
me and I'd drop everything and come to him willingly, forgetting all
common sense, all my morals. Forgetting myself. Losing myself in him.
Christ, I think I'm losing my mind. But nobody knows that I am.
Scully. Skinner. They think I'm the same old me. Crazy, but not this
crazy.
He's a ghost to me. I can see him in my mind. The memory of him
touches me, but when I want to touch him, he slips through my fingers.
I try to grip onto something solid, but it only succeeds in making me
rant and rave, screaming and crying his name as I wake from a
sweat-drenched sleep. And I can't sleep again, fearing that I'll lose
him again. I'm starting to think I'll always be trapped by my memories
of him. By his ghost.
Just to breathe the air around him would strangle me. I see his
eyes when I close mine, and to see the real ones would blind me. I
think that if I could just save him from his life, bring him into mine,
things would be OK. But I feel the earth shifting under me as I think
that, the world wobbling precariously at the unbalance. It would never
happen. He won't change. And when I think about it, I realize that I
don't want him to, really.
But if I can't have him here, then why must his ghost stay with me,
weakening me, wearing at me? Why is it that what I need to survive
would instantly kill me if I accepted it? He is the air I gulp into my
lungs and the hands that wrap around my neck to choke it out.
I have to swallow my feelings. My silence is bitter, the tang stays
at the back of my throat, and it fills me to the brim. I have only to
hope and dread seeing him, wanting and despising him. And though I hate
him, I love him more than anyone.
Demon
by Susan
I can't sleep. I can still see him, walking away from me as I held
the gun half-heartedly, my finger caressing the trigger before slipping
away. I feel the vacuum of his absence sucking me in. Months. It's
been months now since he came and destroyed what bit of life I had
left. Yeah, he killed my dad, et cetera, et cetera. All those things
hurt, but in that single, stinging kiss he changed my life more than if
he had put a bullet in my brain.
