Changing Constellations
Author: Rihannsu
E-mail: maximana@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.oocities.org/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.

 maximana@yahoo.com