Title: Changing Constellations Author: Rihannsu E-mail: maximana@yahoo.com Website: http://www.geocities.com/maximana/ Classification: Vignette, Scully Angst, DS(R, sorta) Rating: R for adult language and situations Spoilers: general season 8 Archive: SHODDS, XFMU. Otherwise, ask and ye shall receive. Feedback: Please. Disclaimer: The characters of Doggett and Scully are property of 1013 productions. This particular arrangement of words is mine. Summary: When did falling in love become the worst you could do to another person? Author's Note: A sequel to my story "Untouchable Face," but you don't need to have read it. The title comes from a line in the song 'Untouchable Face' by Ani DiFranco as does a line near the end of the story. ****** They have silent conversations over Mulder's shoulder. Behind Skinner's back. Across the ten feet of empty air he has begun putting between them. Soon, she thinks, they won't even need to make eye contact. She will be able to aim a thought at his back and know by the way he cocks his head what his answer is. Everything has changed, but they have the same conversations. Just without words now. 'I'm fine.' 'No, you're not.' 'Neither are you.' 'Are you eating?' 'Have you been sleeping?' 'I don't sleep.' Of course he doesn't. She of all people should know that. Sleep is the first thing the X-files steals from you. Before you lose your health and your family and your dreams, you lose your ability to sleep. She knows all too well. It starts with the phone calls. Late in the evening after you have already settled into bed. In the middle of the night dragging you painfully out of sleep. And then there are the nightmares that make you dread the act itself. She hasn't slept well in years, and her pregnancy has made it worse. She hates her bed. When she tries to rest, the soft mattress sends white hot pain through her overstressed lower back. Since his return, Mulder has taken to sleeping on her couch and interrupting her rare stretches of sleep with his nightmares. She misses her partner's bed with its firm mattress, warm flannel sheets, and the gentle metronome of his heartbeat under her ear. Before him, she was never one to stay the whole night. She was always the first one to roll out of bed, to get dressed, to slip quietly out the front door and back to her own life. All those years of keeping at arm's length friends and lovers and family alike, and now all she wants is no space between her and one particular human being. There is nothing she can do about it. She is not supposed to drive. And she won't call him and ask him to come to her. For a woman who has always prided herself on her strength, she is in the weakest of all possible positions. And even if she could do either, what would she say to the man sleeping on her couch? The two of them have reached an uneasy truce. Left alone, they'll bicker like brothers, but they'll get the job done. Her mother had called them both to help move the Scully family crib from her basement. It was old and solid oak, a monstrously heavy relic from before furniture was designed to come apart. They had nearly hurt themselves getting it out of the truck and up the stairs to her apartment. Mulder had paused in her doorway to ask her where to put the crib leaving most of the weight going downstairs for Doggett to bear. 'Hey, jackass, less talking, more working,' he had said. Mulder had actually laughed. It was the kind of thing men said to each other and didn't take offense at. They had overruled her dithering and shoved it into the first open space. But when she enters the equation, it turns ugly. Mulder gets territorial. Doggett gets silent. 'Why do you let him push you around?' 'Why do you?' Another silent conversation. Do they ever really speak anymore? They are alike in that way. He understands the value of silence. Conventional wisdom holds that a photograph is worth a thousand words, and she thinks his glances are probably worth ten times that. It's unnerving to her. She had grown use to Mulder's wandering babble in the last seven years. Her partner was rarely ever quiet, talking about cases, cracking jokes, telling her whatever thoughts crossed his perpetually working mind. Drawing her into the case, into his obsession, into his life with the power of his words. She has miscalculated badly with these two men. It used to be enough to get up and go home. Physical space was enough to keep her free. But Mulder caught her with his words, and Doggett caught her with his eyes. Captivity is not something she grasps easily. She has been a rogue planet her entire adult life, spinning alone through the empty darkness, only occasionally allowing herself to wander into another's gravity. Older men, usually. Red giants and supernovas, men with power and authority. She's not attracted to either. Not really. Her interest was in the exhilaration of breaking free. Of pitting her own strength against seemingly impossible forces. Of picking her own guiding stars and controlling her own forward momentum. For a time, she would be content orbiting these stars, stocking up on warmth and affection and human comfort before breaking away and continuing along the intentionally lonely path of her life. And she always moved on. Except from Mulder. She is still in his orbit. Still desperately attracted to the light and heat of his personality. His gravity is impossibly strong, and she wonders how she will ever escape it. If she wanted to, and she still doesn't know if she wants to. Even those months without him, she was following the lingering trace of that gravity. Once it would have been so easy to spin into another's orbit. It has been her habit, her style, and it has served her well. It should have been easy. But the moment is years past. Time and again, she has been presented with perfect opportunities to move on, to pick a new star, to seek her own path. Years worth of reasons, years worth of excuses in the form of words and deeds she would never have accepted from another person. Had anyone asked her advice on a similar situation she would have laughed at their idiocy, at their weakness. But this time, she has lingered too long, and all the old rules no longer apply. She is still strong; she could wrench herself free from this. But she knows what it will cost her. And she has not yet resigned herself to that loss. She has had years of practice at losing Mulder, but she still can't accept it. She can't accept losing him, but she knows she will. Eight years of reprieves haven't deluded her that it will happen. And what of the other man who shares this awful path? Without her ever knowing, probably from the moment they met, she and Doggett began orbiting each other. A distant elliptical movement drawing close for a short time then drifting apart and back again. He is no white hot star capturing her, stopping her forward momentum, warming her and threatening to burn her alive in the same instant. He is another lonely planet wandering his way through space. He has been pulled into her orbit, and she into is. They have been a mismatched pair of perfectly complimentary twins as they've followed the lingering heat of their lost star. But now she has pulled him into Mulder's orbit, into his obsession with this alliance. And of all the unforgivable sins she has committed in her life, it is surely this one that will damn her. She wonders how long this strange gravity will hold them together. She can not imagine another person following her. And no matter how desperately she fights his loss, she can not even imagine following Mulder for seven more years. Not for any more years. But this gravity is not a quest. It is a true orbit, a path without end or beginning, a perpetual circle as they move in unarticulated accord. Looking for hope and truth, and following the star whose gravity now tugs at them both. She wants to know who used to be the bright and shining light that lit his world. His wife. Monica Reyes. Someone else entirely. A part of her hates that she'll never be that for him. She wants to be the sun in someone's sky. Wishes briefly that he could be hers. "'Lo," she's not aware she's picked up the phone until his rusty voices answers on the first ring. "Were you sleeping?" "No." "It's late." "I don't sleep much." He used to sleep. He would sleep when she slept, secure in the knowledge that she was safe, that he was within easy reach should she need him. She's taken that security from him. "You should see a doctor. There are prescriptions . . ." "I don't need them." He doesn't. He needs her. At least she wants to think that. There is something uncomplicated about what he needs. He wants truth and justice and all the fine ideals that Mulder has always sought, but all he really needs is to know that the people he cares about are safe. In any other time and place, it would be the easiest of things. But in the strange corner of the universe that the X-files inhabits, it is as elusive as starlight. "John . . ." She's taken to calling him that. It's what his friends call him. Monica and Danny. Skinner, even. He's stopped using her name all together. He gave up calling her Agent Scully when she crawled into his bed. He stopped calling her Dana when she crawled out of it. Now, he simply looks at her and speaks without identifying his words. She doesn't know if that implies greater intimacy or less. "They don't make a difference, do they?" "No," she says softly. "They don't." They are silent for a long moment. "I hate my bed." "So do I. Want to trade?" "Yes, no, . . . I want . . ." "What do you want?" "What I can't have." His silence is almost a tangible bond stretching across the Potomac and through the suburban hills connecting them through miles of dark skies. "Do you ever think about stars?" She asks. "Stars?" "Stars, suns. Do you ever wonder what it must be like to be the center of something? What it would be like without their light and warmth?" "We're not talking about astronomy." He sounds suddenly tired in that moment. Tired and impossibly old. How many lifetimes worth of pain has he endured in just a few years? More than anyone should have to bear, she thinks, but he does it without complaint. How many more has she added, and how can he possibly forgive her for that? "No." "I'm no one's star," he says quietly. "Neither am I." "You can't have a solar system without a star." "Somewhere there must be one," she says. He doesn't reply. What would he say? He is not a scientist. The cold logic of chemical reactions and the movements of atoms hold no interest for him, and the black vastness of space is not his home. He is as earthbound as any ancient oak. "Promise me you'll sleep," she says. "No." He doesn't deny her things. She doesn't understand why he's started. "Why?" "I won't make a promise I can't keep." "John . . ." "Don't ask me to lie to you. I won't do that. Don't ask me to pretend this is all right. I won't do that either. Whatever else you want, you can have but don't ask me for either of those things." For him it's practically a soliloquy, and she wants to draw this conversation out until he asks her for something else. She wants him to ask her to be with him. Wants him to ask her to stay with him. Please, she thinks, ask me to love you. But he says nothing, and she is not surprised. It's what she would have done. She listens to the whisper of his breath in the silence. With every exhale she feels him slipping farther from her, a tide washing out to sea, the lonely planet spinning its way to the apogee of this strange orbit. She feels the tug of gravity in the pit of her stomach as he tries to break away from this merciless movement. She closes her eyes and refuses to answer that pull. Following is not an option, but neither is letting go. Break me, she thinks. Shatter me. He's strong enough to do it. Of all the men she has known, he is the only one who could evade her gravity. Break me, she commands. He sighs a silent resignation, and his path arcs toward her again. Is this love, she wonders, refusing to let go and refusing to hurt? Can you call it love if you won't talk about it? "I'd fix this if I could," she says. "I knew what I was getting into," he says after a pause. "You deserve better," she says without thinking. "Yeah, yeah, I do." She wants to laugh at his frankness or maybe to cry. They're starting to feel the same. She reaches out for comfort, but all she finds is the harsh edge of his breath. "Did you want something?" He asks anger coloring his tone. The second time she's ever heard it in his voice. His anger is fiercer than any supernova, and it ignites her own. No longer lonely plants, they have become a binary star. "You," she says harshly. "I want you." She is letting years worth of anger flow. Years of resentment, of loneliness, of pride. She is forcing them all out in three little words. Not the right words. "You have me," he says with bitter resignation. It's the same tone you use when you say 'I have cancer' to someone you love. "I'm sorry . . ." "Don't apologize to me," he snaps. "I didn't ask you for anything, and I don't want anything." And this is the tone for saying: 'Fuck you for existing in the first place. I love you, but fuck you.' Yes, fuck you, Dana, she tells herself. Fuck you for all the things you've done. What happened to 'first, do no harm,' Dana? When did falling in love become the worst you could do to another person? She feels her own anger peak and dissipate in the space between heartbeats and hears his wash away on a guilty breath. They were right before; they are not meant to be stars. They are the quiet practicality of facts and numbers and due process. They are planets meant to quietly nourish, fallow fields waiting for the warmth and brilliance of sunlight. They are destined to remain constant and unyielding, fixed in orbit about a star hurtling its way through space. And this foolish attachment is their penance for daring to think they could be stars. "I won't leave you," he says suddenly, the words coming to her almost unwillingly. "I won't leave you alone." "I know." It's his turn to promise to fix this broken orbit, but he doesn't. He doesn't make promises he can't keep. "It's the best I can offer," he says, and his tone is full of self- loathing at finding a flaw in his ability to care for her. "It's the best offer I've ever had," she says honestly. She ends the call as thoughtlessly as she placed it. When she becomes aware of the absence of his voice in her ear, the loss is like a physical pain. But across the dark and empty city, she feels his presence, the steady pull of his gravity, and the tight bonds that will never break apart. Strange how his gravity feels not like captivity but freedom. ****** Note: The line "Fuck you for existing in the first place," is the one from the song. All hail Ani's greatness and brilliance.