By ML
msnsc21@aol.com
 

Feedback:  yes, please
Distribution: Kimpa and Enigmatic Dr., always; Ephemeral,
Gossamer, or if you've archived me before, yes; if you haven't,
please just let me know and leave headers, email addy, etc.
attached. Thanks!
Spoilers: This is post The Truth, so I guess...everything!  <g>
Rating: PG
Classification: Vignette
Keywords: MSR, Mulder POV
Summary:  somewhere, on the way to somewhere else.

Disclaimer:  These characters aren't mine.  They mostly belong to
the actors who portrayed them, but Chris Carter created them, and
Ten Thirteen and FOX own the rights.  I mean no infringement, and
I'm not making any profit from them.  But I am forever grateful
for their existence!

This story is particularly for The Enigmatic Dr.  Gratitude to
carol for poking and the once-over, twice!  More notes at the
end of the story.

=====

Department of the Interior
by ML

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
- R. L. Stevenson

The observation car was nearly deserted this time of night, though
it was hardly silent.  The noise of the train, rattling wheels and
creaking joints as it climbed through the mountain passes, seemed
louder in the dead of night with no chatter of human voices to
mask it.  The moon outside the curved windows was half full, and
afforded occasional glimpses of landscape:  the silhouettes of
tall trees, a sparkle of water from a creek running alongside the
train for a space, meandering away and coming back like a dog on
a walk.

Only one person was there to see the midnight vistas, and he
wasn't paying particular attention.  His inner landscape was
getting most of his focus.

Fox Mulder sat slumped in one of the club chairs, his long legs
stretched out before him.  He remembered his last train trip all
too clearly.

He'd known his destination then.  He'd even had some idea of what
to expect upon his arrival.  It had been vastly different from
what he'd hoped would happen, but that was nothing new.

As to the trip he was on now, his ultimate destination was
uncertain, and as for what would happen when he got there, who
knew?  He'd been on journeys all his life, always believing that
the important thing was to arrive.  To get to the place he sought,
whether concrete or ephemeral.

He liked the feeling of constant motion on the train.  If Scully
were there, she'd cite that as an example of his need to keep
moving at all costs.  It was a discussion they'd had many times
over the years.

Things were different now.  In his previous life, he'd never have
considered train travel as a regular mode of transportation.
Trains had been used by his enemies as portable laboratories,
as repositories of secrets and danger.  He was taking a page out
of their book, he supposed.  Trains might not be as anonymous as
bus travel or private car, but more so than air travel.  Since
he'd been returned, flying had lost its appeal somehow, and the
need to rush from one location to another had diminished.  Yes,
trains were slow, and the timetables didn't seem to be based in
reality, but he wasn't in any hurry.  Now he preferred to take
his time.

He got up and paced from one end of the car to the other,
stretching his arms and legs.  He listened to the assorted
squeaks, creaks, and groans the car made over the rhythmic
clack clack clack of the wheels as the train labored through
the mountain passes and the incline of the tracks increased.
It was like the cacophony of voices he'd heard when first
affected by the artifact.  He no longer had that ability,
though he'd gained another unasked for gift in its place.

He remembered something he'd said to Scully once, half in jest.
"The dead are everywhere,"  he'd told her.  Now he knew it to be
true.

"The dead are not lost to us," he'd said more recently, but the
jury was still out on whether that was good or bad.  There were
some dead he'd like never to see.  He wondered if he had any
choice in the matter.  He hadn't been visited for a while, but
he had the feeling they'd be back.

Mulder stood leaning against the window, hands braced against
the cold glass as he stared out into the midnight landscape.
He was tired but he couldn't sleep.  Too many memories, too many
thoughts clamoring for attention.

On his last trip, he'd been jumpy with anticipation.  He couldn't
arrive soon enough.  The combination of the hope of seeing Scully
and the certainty of danger had given him an adrenaline rush.  He
hadn't been able to keep still, prowling restlessly from car to
car, envious of the people stretched out and sleeping, oblivious
to the doom that awaited them all.  He'd desperately wanted someone
to talk to, to confide in.  But he was traveling toward the only
one who'd listen, or that he'd trust to tell.  Afraid of disturbing
other passengers and thereby drawing attention to himself, he'd
found himself in the observation car that night, too.

He'd known the whole thing was a set-up.  As soon as he'd gotten
the email from Scully telling him to put the plan for his return
in motion, he'd known.  He'd not been in touch with her, only the
Gunmen through a series of backdoors and re-routes that Langly had
tried to explain to him, though it was way more technical than he
needed to know.  In any event, they'd found the email purported to
be from him, among other things.  He'd anticipated that she'd be
monitored from day one.  When hadn't they been?

He'd gone to meet her anyway.  Regardless of the origin of the
email, he had missed Scully, and he'd wanted to come home.  He
could understand Scully wanting to believe that it was from him.
The mere fact that she'd asked him to come back was enough for
him.

He'd missed William, too, but more in the abstract.  He'd barely
had time to know his son before he'd had to go away.  And now,
William was lost to them.  Not forever:  Mulder couldn't say how
he knew this but he just knew.

He hadn't talked to Scully about it.  Except for that one tearful
conversation in his jail cell, neither of them had found the
courage to broach the subject.

Would it have made a difference if he'd stayed, or would he have
put them all in more danger?  It was no use wondering now.  He'd
covered that ground countless times already.  Even as he'd traveled
back to Scully he'd wondered how things might have been had he
stayed.

He'd spent much of that journey thinking of his first train trip,
the one that had taken him away from Scully and William.

When he and Scully had agreed that he'd better leave Washington,
he'd deployed an elaborate subterfuge.  With the help of the
Gunmen, he'd booked several destinations under both his own name
and various of his favorite aliases to throw anyone off the scent.
His luggage went one place, and he checked in to at least two of
the flights leaving at the same time, thanks to Byers and Jimmy
Bond.

Then he'd quietly boarded a train at Washington's Union Station,
one of the busiest railway hubs in the nation.  He'd checked
into his roomette, and hadn't come out for three days.

It wasn't a trip he much liked remembering.  He'd spent most of
his time curled up on his narrow bed, hugging a pillow that
smelled faintly of some chemical -- formaldehyde, maybe.  It
had inexplicably reminded him of Scully.  He'd buried his nose
in it and thought of her in scrubs and protective goggles,
standing next to an autopsy table.  She had her hands on her
hips and a stubborn look on her face.  It was a stance he'd seen
her in many times, and it always made him want to grab her and
kiss her until neither of them could recall what they'd been
arguing about.

A lot had happened in between those two trips, not much of it
good.  But despite it all, he still had hope for the future.

It was funny, this feeling that he had all the time in the world,
when now he knew for sure that the clock was ticking.  Time was
rushing forward, yet he stood still.

<'The world-without-end hour,'> he mused.  Here in the darkness
with the world rushing by, he stood still.  He let the world go
on without him for a space.

Scully had described a similar feeling to him, the weekend she'd
found Daniel Waterston.  "Everyone was rushing around me," she
told him later.  "I was like a stone in a stream, letting
everything flow over and around me.  I think I'd been like that
for a while."

"That's very Zen of you," Mulder teased her.  "What then?"
he'd prompted softly.  He made her retell it sometimes, especially
his favorite part.

"I saw you," she said, playing along though she rolled her eyes
at him.

"And?"  he grinned at her, brushing hair out of her eyes.

"It was like coming unstuck -- like I could move forward again."

"As long as you didn't come unglued," he'd teased gently.

"If you're going to make fun of me..."  she'd threatened, shaking
a fist at him.  He'd grabbed her hand and uncurled it, kissing
each finger and then her palm.  She'd succumbed to his attentions
and they'd gotten lost in each other again.

His times with Scully were world-without-end hours, rare and
precious and hoarded against his lonely times.

At the sound of the door sliding open, Mulder was instantly alert.
His hand automatically went to his hip, though no gun was there.

It was only Scully, however, come to find him.

He grinned to himself at the word "only."  He used it for Scully
in an entirely different context.  She was "only" his one in five
billion, the only one who really knew him or cared about him on
the whole damn planet.

He'd left her in their roomette, finally asleep after a day of
poring over the data they'd been able to gather as they
crisscrossed the country.  Scully's science background was
once again proving its worth.

Having Scully with him again added an unexpected dimension to
the journey.  He'd missed arguing with her.  He'd missed the
give-and-take that kept him on the top of his game.  She did
more than keep him honest, she kept him sane.  She had his back,
and he'd had no idea just how much he'd needed that until he
didn't have it any more.

It was no hardship to be shut up in a room with Scully for days
on end.  In fact, it had been the subject of many Mulder fantasies
in the past.  The reality was that they spent more time discussing,
planning, and researching than anything else.  Consciously or not,
they'd adopted their lifelong work habits, and having a private
room made this easier.  They had little fear of being overheard,
or of disturbing other passengers when their discussions got heated,
as they so often did.

Their most recent foray had been to Yucca Mountain, Nevada.  Though
the site itself yielded nothing, Mulder had developed some theories
about radiation and its possible uses against the super soldiers.
He'd presented Scully with some information he'd gathered with a
little help from some outside sources.  She was analyzing what
she could, comparing it with what they already knew about their
enemies.

Mulder hadn't told her that Langly pointed him in the right
direction, peering over Mulder's shoulder as he sat at his
laptop.  Langly had muttered something about amateur hackers
but Mulder had learned a thing or two.

He missed being able to call the Gunmen and put them on task
when he needed them, and they evidently didn't appear on command.
Langly had just showed up and started telling him what to do in
his usual sarcastic way.  He wasn't sure if it was luck that he'd
found what he found, or if Langly really had helped him.

He hoped with all his being that Frohike wasn't lurking in the
shadows of their room, and then was sorry he'd even thought of
it.  Nothing like thinking of a ghost voyeur to dampen the
libido.

Scully was wearing the sweats she'd fallen asleep in, and a pair
of Mulder's socks engulfed her feet.  She had a blanket wrapped
around her shoulders.  She shuffled over and stood next to him.
"You okay, Mulder?"  she asked in a sleep-softened voice.

He nodded, peering up at her.  She wore no makeup and she had a
rumpled air.  Her eyes were half-closed like a sleep walker and
he had an urge to grab her and kiss her.

Instead, he pulled her into his lap.  "What's the matter?"  he
asked.  "Couldn't sleep?"  He rubbed his cheek against her hair
as she rested against his chest.

"I got cold," she said.  "I missed my blanket."

Mulder plucked at the one around her shoulders.  "What's this
then?"

"It's not as warm as you," she said, snuggling closer.

He smiled into her hair and held her closer.  "Happy to be of
service.  Did you get a little sleep?"

She yawned.  "As fascinating as gamma radiation particles are,
I did.  You should try reading about them sometime.  It might
help."

"Thanks anyway," he said.  "That's your department."

"Then what's your department?"  she asked.

"Let's see ... finding conspiracies, breaking and entering,
keeping you happy ... how'm I doing on that last one?"

Scully thought about it for a long moment, then said, "About a
nine and a half out of ten."

"Only nine and a half?"  he pouted.

She smiled.  "I have to give you something to work toward."

"Okay then," he said with a wicked grin, and bent his head to
touch her mouth with his, just offering gentle, tender tracings
of her lips at first.  She responded with soft caresses of her
own.  Each touch engendered another, more insistent, less
delicate.

Her proximity always made him want her, but they were trying to
be low-profile.  Being caught in flagrante delicto in a public
train car, while exciting, would draw a little too much attention.
He contented himself with holding her close, and exchanging long
slow kisses.

He made himself stop before things got entirely out of hand, and
was gratified to see Scully's disappointed expression as he
reluctantly pulled his lips away from her.

They sat cuddled together and watched the first faint curlings
of dawn edging the canyon walls outside the window.

After some moments of silence, Mulder asked, "Seriously, do you
think there's anything to that gamma ray stuff?"

Scully made a face.  "You make it sound like some science fiction
story."

"That's what it is, isn't it?  I mean, who'd have ever though we'd
be pursued by humanoids with stainless-steel spines?  Or that we'd
see them explode because they got too close to a bunch of rocks?
This is our reality now."  He hugged her close.  "Kinda makes you
miss ol' Flukeman, doesn't it?"

"I wouldn't go that far," Scully said.  "Okay, seriously, I think
I need more information.  If I could get my hands on a program or
two, it would help.  But I'd need a pretty powerful computer to
do the testing and modeling I need to do."

"Well, maybe we could break into Lawrence Livermore or Los
Alamos," Mulder suggested.  "B and E is my department,
remember?"

"Don't you dare..."  Scully looked up at him, her mouth open to
protest further when she saw the grin on his face.  "Not funny,
Mulder.  I don't want to visit you in another jail cell, ever
again."

"Never happen.  I'm sure next time they'll shoot to kill."

He was immediately sorry when he saw the stricken look on Scully's
face.  "Hey, I'm sorry, Scully.  Just a little gallows humor.
You'll kick my ass if I get anywhere near these places, right?
I'm counting on it."

"You know I will," she said, but her eyes were still shiny with
tears.

He cradled her head against his shoulder, stroking her hair with
gentle fingers, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head.  He
tended to forget how close to the bone life had been for Scully
these last several months, and she wasn't quite ready to joke
about all of it.

"We'll find a way," he said to her softly.  "We will."  He wiped
the tears off her cheeks.

"I'm counting on it," she said.

She settled quietly in his arms, and before long fell into a
doze.  Mulder watched her for a time, the pale light from outside
starting to flicker over them both.  He let his head fall back
against the seat cushion and dozed as well, the rocking of the
train lulling them both.

The train rounded a curve and the sun began to stream along the
canyon walls, igniting the tips of the conifers with golden light.
Another long, slow incline and turn, and the sun touched them both
with its warm fingers.

Mulder was the first to open his eyes.  He touched Scully's face
as gently as the sun did.  "Scully, you gotta see this."

She opened her eyes to the vista between the canyon walls:  framed
by pine trees and bushes dusky with purple and pink flowers, the
mountain towered -- stark, white, lording it over the countryside.
As the train continued on its journey, the mountain seemed
stationery, a sentinel, dominating the view as the rest of the
landscape rushed and rushed along.

With the dawn, others entered the observation car, and the sounds
of life surrounded them as people came and went, looking out the
windows for a few moments and then moving on.  But the two partners
stayed where they were for as long as the mountain was in sight.

end.

=====

Notes:  This story owes its existence to Tamra the Enigmatic Dr.
I had a lovely visit with her and her family in a train station
one late night while they were on vacation.  The next day she
emailed me a list of elements to use in my next story:

-gamma radiation particles (used to detect radiation)
-a loud creaky train car
-missing email, missing contact with people you care about
-a pillow that smells like formaldehyde
-trying to talk softly so as not to wake up other people when you
are on an adrenaline high
-laying down and snuggling up to your partner to stay warm with a
way too thin blanket
-Then waking to a beautiful canyon...opening up to a view of a
mountain lording over the countryside

I hope you enjoyed it.  I'd love to hear from you:
msnsc21@aol.com

And if you're looking for story recs, both old and new, check
out the Enigmatic Dr.'s site:

http://X-Files.bytewright.com/

Thanks for reading!