Maria Nicole Marianicole29@yahoo.com In the Clearing (1/1) Rating: PG Category: S Spoilers: Our Town. Smaller spoilers for Duane Barry, Irresistible, Colony/Endgame Keywords: Mulder/Scully friendship Summary: A conversation at the end of Our Town. Disclaimer: They're not mine. They belong to Fox and 1013. The good townsfolk had scattered, and the masked sheriff with his axe was dead, but they stood in the clearing back to back, and Mulder kept his gun out. "How long are they going to be?" he asked, when she had gotten off the phone with the local field office. "An hour." "Damn." "It's not that long." "You need to see a doctor." "I am a doctor. It's just a bump." "You could have a concussion." "I'm fine." "You should see a doctor," Mulder repeated stubbornly. "I wouldn't trust any doctor within 50 miles of here anyway. We don't know who was here tonight." "Yeah, but..." Scully rolled her eyes, and then sent a quick glance around the clearing. "What was that?" "What was what?" "You didn't hear anything?" "No. What'd you hear?" "Nothing." "What'd it sound like?" "I don't know. Not people coming back, just noise." "Just the once?" "I wouldn't hear it over us talking." "Oh." They both listened for a moment. "You don't think that they're going to come back, do you?" asked Scully, and winced inwardly at her own breathlessness. "Hope not." "Me too." "We can jump in the car if we have to." The sky was so very dark, and the clearing almost silent. "Why's it taking them that long?" he asked after awhile, and she heard the high edge of fear in his voice. "They're coming as fast as they can, Mulder. The field office isn't that close to here, and I'm not going to trust any of the local town's law enforcement." The still burning fire was casting huge shadows, and except for its crackling the clearing was unnervingly quiet. "On the phone, earlier...you said something about Chaco..." "He...uh, he's got the heads." "What?" "He keeps the heads in a bureau thing." "Mulder, that's sick. That's...just sick." "No, it makes sense," he said, in his lecturing professor voice. Mulder, she knew, found the display of knowledge to be a soothing thing; it was fortunate that Scully did as well, or they would probably have had a much rockier time in stressful situations. "A trophy. A visible sign of the power they've inherited. Most religions have objects that contain symbolic power, and who better to be the keeper of the symbols than the high priest of the religion?" "First of all, most priests don't keep heads in their house. Second, this isn't a religion, it's...it's a mass psychosis." "A lot of belief systems look psychotic to the people outside them." "Most belief systems don't involve *cannibalism.*" "As I said before, it's not an uncommon idea that eating flesh will lead to..." "Symbolically. I'm talking about literal cannibalism. Most religions practiced today do not involve cutting someone's head off and then eating that person's body." "Well, yeah, there's that," Mulder admitted. There were stars somewhere way, way overhead, but she kept her attention focused on the ground. A branch crackled in the bonfire, making her jump at the sound. "I don't understand how Doris Kearns got involved," she said. "The others...I don't understand that either, but at least they grew up with it. But she..." "Baby steps." "What?" "It's like any cult. You start someone off slow, you isolate them from people who might refute your ideas, give them a sense of belonging. Gradually you reveal your beliefs." "It's a pretty big step between 'oh, these people are all so nice,' and 'let's *eat* somebody.'" Mulder didn't appear to have a response to that. She crossed her arms and kept her eyes skimming over the edges of the clearing. "You want to hold the gun for awhile?" he asked. "Okay." She hoped that that didn't sound too eager, but the weight of the gun felt good in her hands, reassuring her. She wanted her own back, though. "They say how many people they were sending?" he asked, and the edginess in his voice had grown more pronounced. She could tell that he didn't like not having a gun in hand any more than she had, and felt absurdly grateful, and a little chagrined. She hadn't known that it was so obvious that the best way to make her feel safe was to provide her the means to assure her own safety. "20, I think. The number of bones we pulled up from the river makes this a pretty big deal." "I don't believe they're making us stay here." "We need to preserve the integrity of the scene. And besides, it's not like anywhere we could go in this town would be safe." "I was more thinking along the lines of getting the hell out of here." "Mulder." "Yeah, I know, we have to stay. Doesn't make this any more fun." The fire was finally starting to die down a little, she thought. She could see the shadows she and Mulder cast, large and flickering, and feel him close to her. Her hands holding the gun were steady, but her heart was still beating too fast with a mixture of relief and terror. "I wonder how many people were involved," said Mulder after an interminable time of silence. "I wonder how many will get Creutzfeld-Jacob," said Scully. "More effective punishment than we could come up with." "It's not a punishment; it's science." "You never know, Scully, maybe this was nature's way of reacting to a crime against her." "Nature doesn't work that way, Mulder. Diseases are indiscriminate. They don't choose the people that 'nature' doesn't like." "You think they would have kept doing this without any physical effect if it hadn't been that one of their victims had Creutzfeld- Jacob?" "Until someone noticed that there were too many disappearances." "I wonder how often they did their ritual." "Do you think they did it when the opportunity presented itself or that they chose someone when they needed to?" "They probably had a lot of symbolic timing worked out. I doubt that they were purely opportunistic. Or they did it when they felt that something was going wrong and that some sort of balance had to be restored." "Which would explain why their behavior was escalating. George Kearns, and Chaco himself, and..." They both frowned. Mulder cleared his throat and went over to examine the mask that the sheriff had been wearing. Another interminable time of silence. "Hey, Scully?" he said, still bent over the mask. "Yes?" "You doing okay?" She wished he hadn't asked that question then, when the adrenaline was starting to wear off, and the realities of that night beginning to hit her. "I'm fine." "You sure?" He stood and looked towards her, and the concern in his eyes was suddenly smothering. "I can't say it's how I wanted to spend the evening," she snapped at him. "No, these weren't my plans either," he said just as testily, and somehow his irritation soothed her. At least he wasn't treating her like she would break. "I'm fine. I want to get out of this town and take a real long shower, and get back to DC and my own apartment--and throw out any chicken I had in the freezer--but I'm fine. No permanent harm done." "Okay." Fire. Sky. Dead men on the ground. If she weren't still on the end part of an adrenaline rush, she'd be bored. "Do you want your gun back?" she offered grudgingly, in apology for being snippy. "S'okay. You're a better shot, anyway." She was, in fact. Not by much, but her scores were almost always a trifle higher than his. She had wondered if this bothered him, but it never seemed to. There was a small sound, and she whipped towards it, but it was nothing, and she shifted impatiently from foot to foot. It was official: you could be jumpy and bored at the same time. "You ever eat Chaco chicken, Mulder?" "Yep." "Me too." "I don't think I'm going to anymore." "No. At least we're fairly sure that the chicken feed didn't... well, that Chaco chicken didn't have any human remains in it." "Yeah. I still don't think that I'm going to eat it." "They'll probably have to be shut down for inspections, and I bet the public response will finish the company off." "You know what does sound good, though? Pizza. Pepperoni. And maybe mushrooms, and..." "Mulder!" "So, I'm hungry. There's nothing wrong with that." "We're discussing cannibalism one moment and the next minute you're thinking about dinner? That's disgusting." "Scully?" "What?" "Bite me." Oh, please. She rolled her eyes. "Oh, c'mon, you would've been disappointed if I hadn't said that." Sadly, that was quite possibly true. "Scu...leeee..." he whined, when she still said nothing, and she relented. "You shouldn't put ideas in my head, Mulder." Fire. Shadows. The warmth of Mulder's body nearly touching hers. "Pizza's okay," she allowed after a few more minutes. "So you want to get one, after we get through here?" "I'm not staying near this town tonight. We're going to have to find a new hotel." "So find a hotel, change clothes, order a pizza?" "Sounds fine." "How much longer do we have?" "Fifteen minutes." He sighed loudly. "It's not that long." "I don't want to be here." "I know." His voice shifted from petulant and bored to soft and intense. "No, really. This place...tonight scared me." The words "me, too" stuck in her throat. "I know," she said instead. "I was afraid it would be like...that I wouldn't get here in time." Like Duane Barry, the name they hardly ever spoke, and then only in the context of a case file. "You did, though." "You're really okay, huh?" "My head hurts a little. Other than that, I'm fine. As I said, no permanent harm done." "Physically." "I'm *fine.*" "Right." "If you're doubting that I'm going to be able to do the job because you think I've been...emotionally traumatized or something..." "The job has nothing to do with it." She raised an eyebrow at him. "What, I'm not allowed to worry?" "You're allowed to worry. Not to hover." "I never hover." The astonishing thing was, it looked like he actually believed that. "For a month after...after I came back...you'd look at me twice anytime you did anything, as if you were making sure I wasn't going to fall apart on you. After Donnie Pfaster, you did the same thing. I can't do my job if you don't let me do it..." "You were hit on the head and almost...that's supposed to be a problem! You're not supposed to get over that right away! And you know damn well that if situations were reversed, you would have been shining a flashlight in my eyes and talking about concussions and all that. And you say I hover. After Alaska..." "I was concerned. I didn't hover." He snorted. "I didn't." "Neither did I." She turned and took a step away. "Okay, maybe a little. But, Jesus, it wasn't because I thought you couldn't do your job. It was because...I was just making sure you were still there." "Well, I was. I am." "All right, then." "All *right.*" Mulder crouched down again by the mask the sheriff had been wearing. "You got a glove?" She dug into a pocket and dragged one out. "Here." "Thanks." He pulled on the glove, movement almost violent, and shifted the mask to see it better. After a moment, he spoke again, still crouched by the mask and facing away from her. "When Samantha was taken...for a year or two afterward, I would see a girl on the street who looked like her, and I'd think it was Sam. I'd start walking towards her and then I'd see it wasn't." "Oh, Mulder. But that's understandable." "Yeah, I know. So when you were taken...I was expecting it. Every time I saw a redheaded woman, or someone about your height, or build, I'd start walking towards her." "Mulder..." "But I was expecting that, so it was okay. Well, not okay, but it made sense. What I didn't expect was that I wouldn't stop looking when you came back." "What?" "I looked for three months, Scully. It got to be a habit. And I still...I'll see women who look like you, and I think, 'Scully,' and then I remember that I don't have to look anymore. It still...it surprises me sometimes when I look by my side, and you're there." She crouched down by him. "I appreciate your concern. You don't know how much. But I'm not helpless. And I can't...I don't like being treated that way, whatever the motivation." She was surprised by the gleam of amusement in his eyes. "I never would have guessed." She started to stand back up. "Scully, I promise, I don't see you as helpless. Ever. But you just came close to dying tonight. I can't ignore that." "Moving past it isn't the same as ignoring it." There was the sound of sirens coming closer, and they both tensed and stood up quickly. She heard Mulder mutter something behind her, but focused on the sirens and then the flashing lights. She started to walk towards them. "Scully?" He caught her arm. "What? Oh, here." She handed him back his gun, and he took it automatically. "Yeah, um..." "What?" "Humor me on something?" "Probably." "I know it's not necessary, but if we get connecting rooms, leave the door unlocked?" "Nothing's going to happen," she told him. "I know." "So..." she raised an eyebrow at him. "So?" He shrugged. "Okay." "Okay?" "Okay, I'll leave the door unlocked." "Thanks." "Although I'm not going to need rescuing." "I realize that. Permit me a moment of irrationality." She restrained herself from commenting on that, heroically. "Besides, you never know when *I* might need rescuing. A slip on the bath mat, an exploding TV...the possibilities are virtually endless. I could burn myself on a hot plate. I could..." "Mulder?" "Hmmm?" "Bite me." End