By Jake
nejake@tds.net
 

Rating: PG-13 (Adult Situations)
Classification: Post Ep
Spoilers: "Fearful Symmetry"

Summary: "The motives of the silent visitors who set these
events in motion remain unclear. Could this be a judgment...?"
-- Mulder in "Fearful Symmetry"

Disclaimer: Do these characters really belong to Chris Carter,
FOX and 1013 Productions? If so, no copyright infringement
intended. Fun, yes. Profit, no.

Author's Notes (Author's Warning?): This is a bit of an
experiment, so to speak.
 

THE MOTIVES OF SILENT VISITORS
By Jake

~~~~~~~~

//Willa Ambrose and Ed Meecham have been charged with
manslaughter for the death of Kyle Lang. And though the courts
will rule on this matter, and justice will no doubt be served,
the pall of a greater tragedy remains. The motives of the
silent visitors who set these events in motion remain unclear.
Could this be a judgment on a global rate of extinction that
has risen to one thousand times its natural rate in this
century? An act of alien conservation of animals we are
driving hard toward oblivion? And if so, might it follow that
our own fate and existence could finally be dependent upon the
conservatorship of an extraterrestrial race?//

~~~~~~~~

FAIRFIELD, IDAHO
FEBRUARY 24, 1995
9:15 PM

"One more night in Idaho, Scully. Flight leaves at 8:00 in the
morning." Mulder reviews case notes; his paperwork spreads
from one side of Scully's bed to the other. He is part of the
clutter, stretched out in the bed's middle, four pillows
stacked behind his shoulders. The paisley comforter all but
disappears beneath his collage of crime scene photos.

Scully sits at a small, round table typing field notes into
her laptop.

//...evidence of hyperplasia and the corpus luteum...//

She pauses, fingers hanging above the keys. "Too bad about
Kyle Lang."

"Too bad about the animals."

"How's your eye?" She turns to study the bruise that shadows
his right temple behind the bow of his glasses.

He shakes his head, and continues to mark circles on a map,
pinpointing the location of each zoo animal's reappearance.

"Jesus, Mulder, my bed looks like a tornado hit it."

"I told you, it's not tornado season."

Stiff from sitting and feeling a little thirsty, Scully
abandons her laptop and rises from the table. "I'm going for
ice. You want a soda? Something from the snack machine?"

Mulder ignores her, focused on his calculations.

Invisible elephants? Their job -- her life -- is rife with
irreconcilable events.

She shrugs into her trenchcoat and grabs the ice bucket. "I'll
be right back." She opens the door and steps out into the
rain.

Three doors down, she turns her collar to the wind and feeds
coins into the machine. She buys Mulder an apple juice and a
Payday and then selects a diet root beer for herself. Filling
the ice bucket, she tilts her head from side to side and tries
to work the kinks from her neck. When a car pulls into the
parking lot behind her, she peers over her shoulder and gazes
directly into the twin beams of its headlights.

~~~~~~~~

You stretch, unknotting your spine with a pleasant pop-pop,
and squint against the brightness. This room teems with
sunlight despite the overhanging roof and the mini-blinds. An
expansive one-story affair with plenty of elbowroom, this
house is grander than you ever expected to share with
Mulder...or with any man, for that matter. Living room,
kitchen, bedroom, all over-sized to the point of extravagance.
Such profligacy comes with a hefty price tag, however. Can you
afford this rambling, golden-aired dwelling?

You might believe this all a dream if you hadn't woken only a
few hours ago from a nightmare about invisible elephants and
disappearing tigers.

Mulder still sports a black eye, fading memento courtesy of
Sophie the talking gorilla. The injury does little to diminish
his good-humored good looks. He parades barefoot and bare-
chested around the house, his skin as golden as the Midas-
kissed air. He is at ease in a way you have never seen him.
Did you realize his laugh could buckle your knees?

Do you know why you are here?

"It ain't no pickle barrel," Mulder teases, referring to the
size of the house, reminding you of Kyle Lang's comment about
Ganesha's 50- by 50-foot cage. "You like it, Scully?" he asks,
and swoops in to kiss the back of your neck.

"It's beautiful, Mulder."

You stand together at the kitchen counter where you pour twin
cups of fresh coffee. The mugs are white. The cupboards are
white. The countertops, the coffeemaker, the floors are white,
white, white, like the gauzy pajama bottoms Mulder wears and
the flowing nightgown that swirls softly around your own bare
legs. It is all make-you-go-blind-white, like the acres of
sheets on your unmade bed.

Mulder's fingers trail up your bare arm. He smells of honey
and muskmelon and slightly burnt toast. A few toast crumbs
ride the bristle of his unshaved cheek. You wipe them away
with your thumb just before his mouth slides onto yours. His
pumicey jaw scours your cheek and his kiss...his kiss makes the
mantle of your womb flow molten. You watch him through your
rust-colored lashes -- a veil of Pele's tears. When did the two
of you become so pyroclastic?

When did you become anything but Platonic?

Later, you sit on the edge of the bed waiting for him to
return from the bathroom. When he does, he pauses at the
threshold and eyeballs the wrecked linins.

"Let me ask you something, Scully. In your opinion, the damage
here -- could this have been caused by an escaped elephant?"
he asks, before thundering toward you and diving headlong onto
the mattress.

His question sounds vaguely familiar, but his earthquake
landing produces an aftershock that unbalances you and you
forget your sense of deja vu. You tumble backward onto the
bed, rolling into the well created by his body, giggling in a
most uncharacteristic way. He makes you feel girlish. For the
time being, you like it.

Inch by inch, he tugs your nightgown upward, baring your
knees, your thighs. His hand sweeps beneath the gown's lacy
hem to paint your hip with his heat. Your hips still ache from
overextension when, earlier, you spread your legs wide to
accommodate him. You ignore your discomfort and part your
knees now, allowing him to investigate your body. He pets you
and you are reminded of Willa Ambrose and Sophie.

"Mulder?"

His exploration stops.

"Mulder, how did we get here...exactly?"

He shakes his head. "Dunno," he says, and nudges your ear with
his nose. "Who cares?" His fingers resume their journey
through your curls.

You draw your knees together and sit up. "Do you remember
driving here? Because I don't. For that matter, where is
'here'?"

"'Here' is Fairfield, Idaho."

"This doesn't look like the motel we checked into on Highway
24. I'm pretty sure my room had paisley drapes and velvet
paintings."

"Must be magic. I saw David Copperfield make the Statue of
Liberty disappear once."

"You made that joke yesterday."

"Did I?" He frowns in mock concern.

"Mulder, what's going on?" You scramble from the bed and pace
the room, gauging its limits.

"You okay, Scully?"

His long-limbed contentment annoys you. "*I* am fine."
Crossing your arms, you reign in your temper. "We never came
here...did we?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Mulder, what if...what if we were brought here, the same way
Ganesha and Sophie..."

"Ganesha and Sophie...what?"

"Were taken, abducted, whatever."

"Who would take us? And why?"

"I don't know." Visions of spinning drills and Duane Barry and
a white, white, white light suddenly threaten to crack your
teeth. "To get me pregnant, steal my baby? Mulder, why doesn't
any of this bother you?"

He smiles and climbs from the bed. "Okay, Scully, let's find
out where we are." He looms over you and messages a hypnotic
circle onto the nape of your neck with his middle finger. His
breath sifts across your shoulders, tempering your not-so-
steely resolve beneath the bloomery of his lungs -- some kind
of enchanted half-carburization process that makes you too
pliable and too tenuous. "You calmed down?" His voice is seed
on the wind.

"Mulder, you said *that* to me yesterday, too."

"I guess I'm repeating myself. I apologize. Come back to bed
-- we can repeat something else." He tugs at your wrist and
waggles his brows.

"No. I want to look around -- outside."

He shrugs and dovetails his fingers with yours. "Sure. Lead
the way."

You tow him through the house, through rooms so vast they seem
to take forever to negotiate. Over carpeted living space,
tiled kitchen, past sheer white drapes that veil every over-
bright window. Finally at the front door, you hear the clatter
of wind chimes outside. You know without looking the noise
comes from a string of seashells.

**"The construction worker who was killed had his spine
crushed like a string of seashells, and a circular abrasion on
his torso in roughly the shape of an elephant's foot."**

Mulder's words...also from yesterday. Is this really as simple
as deja vu?

"Allow me." Mulder opens the front door and you are momentarily
blinded by the radiance that pours across the threshold. Mulder
surprises you by scooping you off your feet and striding out
into the midday heat.

"Mulder, what are you doing?"

"I didn't carry you in, so--" He accidentally bumps the wind
chimes with one shoulder and starts them rattling. A string of
seashells hangs like an infant's spinal column from the
overhanging roof.

Cradled in Mulder's arms, you feels weightless and dizzy,
ungrounded, un-you. "Put me down."

He sets your bare feet onto a plain of warm sand that extends
beyond the reach of your vision. The terrain is flat and
barren. A ground-fog of cascaho billows around your ankles in
a whirling dervish that stings your skin. You are on pins and
needles.

"Mulder, what is this place?"

"Looks like the desert to me."

"It doesn't look a thing like Fairfield, Idaho." You scan the
sky, squinting against the brilliance only to somehow lose the
sun in the clear, forget-me-not sky. "Mulder, what time is
it?"

"Not wearing my watch. Why?"

"Have you noticed we don't have any shadows?"

"Then it must be noon."

"So where is the sun?"

He scratches his tousled hair, takes a few tentative steps
away from the house and stares straight upward. Dissatisfied
with his inaction, you begin to explore the dwelling's
perimeter. Your footsteps kick up ghostly mini-tornados. He
jogs to catch up with you. Halfway around the house, the
landscape remains featureless.

"Got any theories?" You're hopeful. He shakes his head and you
continue to circle the house. "What is this place, Mulder?"
you ask again when you stand once more at the front door.

"I'm...not sure."

You turn your back on the house and face the empty horizon.
"Come on."

"You want to just start walking? Across a desert?" He stands
firm.

"What choice do we have? Did you see a phone in the house? Fax
machine? Computer?"

"Scully, we're not prepared. We have no water, no compass, no
sunscreen..."

These should be your words, not his. "We have no sun, either,
so I don't think melanoma is a serious threat here. And since
when did you become so cautious?"

A question mark appears in the folds above his brows. "The
wind will cover our tracks. We won't be able to find our way
back."

"Why would we want to come back?" You picture your vanishing
footprints and begin to walk a straight line toward nothing.

He trails after you. "This is crazy, Scully."

"At least we agree on that."

You keep walking. The further you travel, the harsher the wind
blows, sandblasting your skin. You protect your eyes with one
upraised arm and dig your toes into the desert with each step.
Your calves burn and your throat is raw from sucking grit into
your gullet. Sweat slicks your back, pasting your nightgown to
your shoulder blades.

"Scully, stop. Please." Mulder is right behind you and tags
your arm.

You slow, turn, take two steps backward before stopping.

"The house..." He points. The house has diminished to a mere
dot on the horizon. "If we go any further, it'll be out of
view."

"I don't care."

He traps his lower lip between his teeth and surveys the blank
horizon ahead. "I have an idea. You stay here. I'll keep going
until I can barely see you. That'll almost double our range.
If there's nothing beyond that, we can still go back."

"I don't want to go back, Mulder. We don't belong there."

"Why not? Was it really that bad?" He strokes your arm and you
want to give in, you really do.

"This is a jail cell," you say.

"This?" He pivots and an unconvinced laugh chuffs from his
lungs. "But it's huge."

"Then it's like a habitat at the zoo. Same thing." You drag
yourself from him and start walking once more.

The space between you grows. You know without looking he
watches your back -- he has watched your back for almost two
years, why would he stop now? You try to ignore the ungodly
loneliness that grates your breastbone by concentrating on one
foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of
the other. Doubt hammers at you until you decide to beat it
back by chanting, "This can't be real, this can't be real,
this can't be real."

"Scullee!" Mulder's voice is almost lost in the hiss of sand.
You spin and he stares at you from the end of the earth, the
house invisible somewhere behind him. You can see him sway,
battered by a whirlwind. He waves you back and his
unrecognizable attitude wreaks havoc with what see with your
own eyes.

You have studied this man for months -- his riffled hair and
his quirky half-smile, the mole on his cheek and the way he
keeps his nails trimmed even though he admires the natural
beauty of a devil woman in New Jersey. You have noticed his
Adam's apple rise high in his throat at the smell of a cadaver
or at the sight of you handcuffed to an iron radiator. You
have watched him chase mutants, idolize astronauts, fear
nothing but fire and romantic commitment. You know he believes
the stories of alien abductees, champions deadly
extraterrestrial life forms, and has saved your life in
Steveston, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and as close
to home as Baltimore...twice. But it is his relentless search
for his long lost sister that has shown you he never, ever
stops asking questions. His unwillingness to give up is perhaps
the thing you admire most about him.

This man isn't Mulder. He is a stranger. Or a figment of your
imagination.

What is this place?

Ahead of you is more white desert and forget-me-not sky.
Behind you is a mere illusion, a magic trick. Maybe David
Copperfield is in town.

Feeling lost, you bend to scoop up a handful of sand.
Miniscule grains stick to your humid fingers. Crushed
seashells? Or the wind-scoured bones of a trillion fetal
skeletons?

~~~~~~~~

"Ms. Scully?"

Scully squints into the paramedic's penlight. Sitting above
the rear bumper of an ambulance, she waves away his fearsome
beam. It's nighttime and drizzling. Gyrating blue lights warn
oncoming traffic to steer clear of this side of the street.
The fault is hers. She's chilled to the bone and shivers
beneath the medic's blanket. For some reason, an ice bucket
from her hotel room rests in her lap.

"Where's Mulder?"

"We called your partner ten minutes ago. He's on his way."

On his way? From where? To where?

"Do you know where you are, Ms. Scully? Do you remember how
you got here?"

Her head wags and water rains from her saturated curls. Then
she spots Mulder's car and his slouching silhouette and her
teeth no longer chatter. He lopes toward her, concern etched
like a canyon between his brows.

"Scully," he exhales her name when he's close enough to palm
her shoulder. "What are you doing out here?"

"I'm not sure."

He uses the pad of his thumb to capture a drop of water as it
sluices down her cheek. She shivers and he shrugs out of his
trenchcoat, wraps it over her blanketed shoulders. He has body
heat to spare.

She leans close to his ear; she doesn't want the paramedics to
overhear. "I don't even know where I am."

"Do you remember how you got here?" he whispers back. "Did you
walk?"

It would be so easy to blame it on somnambulism, but she has
no history of sleepwalking. Still, the explanation is more
plausible than Mulder's black holes, cosmic anomalies or alien
abductions -- irreconcilable events, as impossible as an
invisible elephant.

"I don't know what happened to me."

"Scully, we can't ignore where we are--"

"And where is that...exactly?" she asks.

"Three miles from the Fairfield Zoo. Six from the motel."

"Mulder, I wasn't abducted."

"Then what's your explanation?"

A simple walk, lost in thought? Certainly not alien visitors.
"Maybe tornado season came early this year." She fails at
forcing a smile.

"A tornado lifted you out of your hotel room and dropped you
six miles away?"

"I wasn't in my room, remember? I was getting ice." She holds
up the plastic bucket.

He softly observes the bucket, working his cheek between his
teeth and nodding. His Adam's apple rides to the top of his
throat. "You weren't gone more than two minutes. There's not
a scratch or a bruise on you, Scully. How is that?"

Mulder pursues the impossible, refusing to drop his search.
Tucked beneath the drape of his arm, she knows she is where
she belongs.

"No more questions tonight, Mulder. Save the investigation for
morning."

"But by then any evidence--"

"Tomorrow." She puts two fingers to his lips. "Please."

He helps her from the ambulance and guides her toward the car
with one arm. "Scully, I have several files on people who
claim to have been picked up by tornados and put down miles
away. Frank Bigelow of Four Corners, Oklahoma, insists he was
carried across state lines into Sunnydale, Arkansas."

"Then why is it so hard to believe the same thing happened to
me?"

"Because when Mr. Bigelow took his unexpected trip, it was
tornado season. And everyone knows--"

"This is alien abduction season?"

"Something like that." Opening the car door, he helps her
inside. He ducks to peer at her. "You're okay, Scully, right?"

"I'm fine, Mulder. Take me home."

THE END

Author's notes: Yikes! What the huh? Dunno where all this
metaphorical stuff came from. Too many hours viewing the Top
10 Worst XF episodes? If I watch "Shapes" next, will it put me
over the edge permanently?

Feedback, good or bad, is welcome on this or any of my
stories. Send comments to nejake@tds.net