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English
Series:
Part 3 of Gone
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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
Words:
958
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1/1
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12
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803

Trees

Summary:

Summary: It is possible to talk less and still be heard

Work Text:

Trees
by JiM

 

It is dawn when I open my eyes to the soft humming that has spidered into my dreams. The road is a grayish mist beyond us, flashes of white and red quickly swallowed up before I can identify them properly. I straighten up and stretch the crick in my neck. Mulder stops humming and half-turns to me. He smiles and hands me the half-full cup in his hand and I gulp down most of his coffee before I realize it.

"Morning."

"How can you tell?" I mumble and finish his coffee, still staring blankly at the gray fuzz beyond the windshield.

"The road's darker than the sky now," he says and I can hear the smile in his voice. Why the hell is he so happy? "We're outside of New Haven," he adds. "Breakfast? There's a Denny's at the next exit."

"Breakfast, yes; Denny's, no."

"You have something against Denny's?" He quirks his eyebrow at me. I notice how dark the ring beneath his eye is, how pale the skin under the morning stubble. I need to let him get some more sleep.

"If I never see another Denny's... some day, I'll tell you about it." My stomach grumbles in uneasy memory. Mulder says nothing, merely nods and keeps driving.

He is uncharacteristically patient with me and this odyssey. So far, he has asked no questions. Perhaps he realizes that I have no answers to give. I can give him nothing but silence and he returns the gift. We have never been talkative men, not with one another. The years jangle with the silences we have locked between us, all the angry, suspicious, hurt, careless, betrayed, betraying times.

But we eat breakfast at a small diner with no words between us and it is as peaceful and cool as the fog that licks at our freshly-shaven faces when we return to the car. It has been years since I last washed up in some roadside bathroom and now I remember one of the many reasons I no longer miss being on the road. Mulder takes it in stride; it is his electric razor we use and I realize he still does this every month or so when he's traveling on a case. Somehow, that strikes me as terribly sad.

The fog, the empty road, the hum of the diner's neon sign, Mulder's smooth jaw as he sits beside me -- they all swirl together and leave me feeling loose and ragged, a frayed net from which unexpected things might slip in a careless moment. The wheel beneath my hands gives me some stability, the road before some spurious sense of direction, the man beside me some tenuous link with a rapidly crumbling past. After a while, the dawning sun begins to burn away the fog, the gray becoming silver, then thinning to pure morning gold. Mulder still sits beside me, one hand dangling loosely over the leg he has propped up on the dashboard. He is humming again, a soft sound that carries over the engine and the endless pavement noise.

"Mulder?"

He stops humming.

"I think I'm having a nervous breakdown."

The forefinger of the hand draped over his knee begins tapping softly against the denim of his thigh. Finally, he nods and says, "I think you might be right."

Somehow, that calm tone, that carefully considered response short-circuits the crackling, stinging emotion that has begun to choke me. "So, what should I do?" Cowardly of me, to throw it into his lap like that.

"Go with it," he says and I can hear him smile. "You're entitled."

My tongue feels cold and heavy in my mouth, the man I was is drowning in the past, panic is a brassy taste that I cannot swallow away and he is telling me....

"Just drive, Walter. It'll be OK."

I want to turn and stare at him. I want to glare at him until he stammers out the secret that allows him to sound so calm, so sure of himself, of me. Instead, I step on the gas, pushing the needle over eighty. The tires sing a little higher now, soothing me almost as much as Mulder's words. What are we doing here? Last night, it seemed to make more sense, but that careless feeling was burned away with the morning fog.

Then Mulder says quietly, "Let's keep going until we find some mountains that we feel like hiking. I think I'd like to sit somewhere and listen to some trees. You sound like you could use that, too."

His words strike deep and I wonder if they have cut me or will ring and echo inside me for years to come. "Mulder, do you read Frost?"

"'The Road Not Taken'?" He is smiling again, perfectly at ease discussing poetry with a speeding madman. Only Mulder, I think, beginning to know why I brought him with me. Now, if I only knew why he came with me, then I would know something worthwhile.

"There's one called 'The Sound of Trees'." He grunts, nodding, waiting for me to go on, so I do.

"Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door,
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice.
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone."

He laughs outright when I finish reciting the final lines of the poem that I first stumbled over in some long-ago despised literature class, seizing on it like silver gleaming from the murk. Then he says only, "So let's be gone."

It is my turn to grunt and nod. Somehow, I have less to say than ever, but Mulder keeps hearing me.

 

end

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