He floats within it. Weightless. Horrified.

In his arrogance, he expected to be treated better. He expected, with his knowledge of the abduction process and his years of dedication to the work of the x-files, to be put on some equal and level plane with the aliens. Not treated as one of the nameless, faceless masses that have gone before him, no more than another anonymous body to experiment upon.

This is only a flash of insight. His mind can't hold a thought long. They pass through and are gone. Disconnected, non-sequential moments. This one goes the way of the rest.

He needs to tell Scully.

What he needs to tell her, he does not know.

Congealed and concentrated, his heartbeat has slowed to a sluggish but tenacious turnover. The lub and dub of its valves snapping closed is a leaden, dragging accompaniment to his dull-witted stupor.

His brain misfires in real time, or possibly it is flashing forward at the speed of light and he just can't tell. Memories fire off and fade away as he grasps at them. A lucid, dreamlike state that he can't awaken from or hold onto.

Breathing is the worst. Coagulated, viscid, liquid moving in and out instead of air, filling his mouth with a metallic tang. The unpleasant taste is accompanied by a helpless sensation as his lungs collect the heavy fluid. He has never gotten used to this. If he thinks about it, he panics. Flailing in bovine, graceless impotence within his suspended state.

He stares ahead at the blank, black wall of nothingness. Struggling to stay calm.

Flashes of brainwaves. Synapses firing. Firing. Firing. Always firing.

Useless mental agony.

Suspended nightmare.

Scully...

He pictures her vividly. Standing at the edge of an ocean somewhere. He doesn't know why he pictures this, for he's never watched her standing at the edge of an ocean at night. She looks different.

She looks misshapen. Altered.

Pregnant.

No. No. No.

Oh god, no. He doesn't understand this vision. All too often, he is treated to the darker musings of some unintelligible nightmare. The misfiring of dismal and somber brainwaves. The horrors that have been visited upon him or the horrors he feels he's visited on others, magnified tenfold by an imagination gone haywire.

Don't think about this.

He can't decide if this vision of Scully is a dream or a nightmare. But he can't stop the visions. They come and go. Come and go. Out of his control. Elusive. Terrifying.

Comforting.

He watches her, mesmerized.

Scully moves into the ocean, and the moon is painting her a ghostly white. She seems ethereal. Transparent. Barely there, despite her more substantial state. He watches her disappear step by step under the metallic, moving surface with a foreboding he can't shake. The ocean is a dark, absorbing mass underneath its serenly silver moonlight surface. Cold and menacing.

The liquid coagulates in his lungs as he envisages her, moving on its slow passage in and out. In and out. His breathing is no longer under his control, but seemingly someone else's assignment. If he could, he would stop it. Drown in this gelatinous pool of confusion and pain.

He wants very badly for this to end, even should it mean his death.

Scully is moving through the water. Her strokes are strong. Assured. Cutting a wake behind her. The nameless dread does not leave him. It clings to this altered consciousness with sinewy tentacles. He feels a sharp, piercing ache start behind the sightless orbs of his eyeballs. Moving through his head as if his brain is no more than a network of fibrous connections, just there to pass the pain along.

The agony intensifies.

Scully swims away from him in the gaping sea. Growing obscure and indistinct from the background of his discomfort. He doesn't want to lose her.

He only wishes to lose himself.

He is weightless in his disorientation.

Floating.

Scully parts the water with her body. Moving forward. He follows her in his mind. Trying to keep up. She seems to be going too fast for his dulled mental capacity. Slow motion agony. And then, lightning quick, he's ahead of her, missing a flash of time, trying to slow her down with his thought processes alone.

Her movement is agonizing.

He knows his hand is still connected to his brain. He attempts to manipulate it. He wants to use it stop her almost frenetic forward motion. He wants to touch her. He feels each nerve synapse as he forces the impulse to travel downward. It seems impossible but, at times, he's aware of his body at an infinitesimally molecular level, enlightened to the billions of cells coming together to define what he is, and where he begins and ends in this universe. There is a surreal beauty to this knowledge, and a searing anguish he is paralyzed by.

At other times, he's completely numb to his own substance or existence.

This time, he wills his hand to reach out as her image is escaping him. The ebb and flow of the waves against the shoreline distract him, tugging at visceral membranes, and obscuring her in the wash of water. But he doesn't want to let her go. He forces himself to concentrate.

His fingers stretch forward.

He suffers the distress immediately brought forth by this attempt to touch the indistinct fog of his hallucination. Despite it, he fights and pushes through his reduced world, choking on the condensed medium that fills his mouth. A tingle travels down his arm and into his fingers, bringing both welcome and incapacitating sensations. He hears a sharp shrieking wail, tinny and paralyzing in his ears. A muffled, recognizable reminder that these sensory organs still exist as working appendages. A shrill alarm from somewhere outside his incomprehensible prison betrays him.

For a moment, in his bloated and violent agony, he thinks his captors might finally be killing him.

But then, a slow, lethargic peace begins to crawl through his limbs and sedate his pain and his panic with a familiarity he's coming to recognize and hate. A cloudy haze floats in to deliver him into an insensate apathy. Something has identified his awareness and is deadening it. The slicing glimpse of comprehension is now fading to a blunted, all-encompassing, dull ache in his head.

But in the glutinous gel of this numbed terror, he can still see his hand.

Somehow, he's moved it. It floats there in his indistinct view like an accomplishment. The ropy tendons and bones are visible even with his unclear vision. The fingers extend forward in supplication. Searching uneasily for contact.

Restless in their benumbed splendor.

He can feel it. Each delicate bone structure. Every nerve firing and blood vessel pumping, covered with a thin blanket of muscle and skin. A ruthless, throbbing ache of awareness. An accomplishment, approaching nothing.

But it is, nonetheless, his hand, shouting of life.

He wants to cry out with horror or relief but he's lost this capacity.

He needs to tell Scully.

What he needs to tell her, he can no longer grasp.

His hand begins to frighten him with its inert suspension and lack of any further sign of life, fragile and still before his paralytic vision. He closes his eyes through a more massive effort than running a marathon. The lids slide through syrupy adhesive, over unfocused lens and aqueous humor. The lashes crash against each other with a tremendous impact and lock together in the gloom.

He stares at nothing. A wall. A blank wall. A blank, black wall looming in front of him. It would remind him of the night sky but for the creeping lines of red blood vessels tracing across it.

He ignores the red and imagines a blanket of midnight blue. He pictures stars. A sky full of stars. Pinpricks of white light. A universe full of possibilities, not prisoner to the frailty of this human condition. Unmoved by the small and terrifying world he exists within, overseen by undefined alien forms and the unknown, incomprehensible set of rules he is subjected to -- blinded by helpless fear and rage at the unfair subjugation, but trapped within the limits of human perception and unreal physical pain.

Stop. Don't think of the body. Don't think of the pain. Think of stars. A brilliant firing against the blue velvet sky of his mind.

He senses her -- one delicate connection. Human to human. One mind reaching out to one other mind. He feels the joining as if she were an extension of the nerves that travel through his body. But these fibers are traveling through space and time to link to another body entirely. A gossamer web of life connecting to life.

Scully is lying on a blanket, staring at the stars. He feels her emotions wash over him. Hopelessness, for a moment so complete and utter it makes him wish for the capacity to weep through his dammed up eyes. He feels fear. And despair. But there are other emotions welling up within her -- an impossible, clinging confidence. A confused trust in good. A belief that he is out there.

It's comforting.

Scully, for a few moments, is at peace, an island floating in her own sea of restlessness.

He wishes he could reach her. He wants to touch her with the hand he knows is suspended out there in this space. He wants to protect her.

From what, he doesn't know.

He feels the movement of his fingers, reaching toward her. This is only a flash of insight. It passes and is gone. He is once again losing control over his body and his mind. Disconnected, non-sequential moments come and go in the confusion of his fast-fading consciousness until this one, too, has gone the way of the rest. The tendrils are unfurling. Snapping back into his head.

He needs to tell Scully.

What he needs to tell her, he no longer knows.

He sees her walking away, trailing a towel, leaving despite his efforts to hold on to her. The smell of spruce suddenly assails his nostrils. He remembers trees as she looks up at a sky full of stars. Impossible comprehension blooms and withers. The connection fades off even as he attempts to concentrate on it.

Until he can no longer grasp it, ensconced in an ambiguous, dreamlike state he can't awaken from or hold onto.

He does not know what is real anymore. This is not air, but some congealed substance. A torpid suspension of his body.

He floats within it. Horrified.

Weightless...

His hand curls back in against his body, fetal and lost.

In one last bright flash of lucidity, he hopes to dream of Scully.

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Above
Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, He sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.

I do not know what promise it makes to him.

~Robert Penn Warren~
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THE END

AUTHOR'S NOTES: A mighty thanks as always to my good friend and tireless beta, Meredith, and to another most wonderful editor and friend, Toniann -- forgive me for being so quiet for so long!!! And a big thanks to FabMon, Laine, Kestabrook, Clarissa, Laura and all my crystal-shipmates who let me think I have something to say. Lately, it's been mostly just 'I miss Mulder!' Hearty hellos to Lenore, JLB, Erly, and Lena -- I'm dedicating this to all of you until I can get my butt in gear and e-mail you. And to anyone else who's so kindly written and not heard from me yet -- I promise your thank you is coming! Real life is a nasty and unforgiving time-suck! But I write these stories for those who read them, and I thank you for making it this far on the journey with me...

"Whatever occurs can be regarded as the path and all things, not just some things, are workable." ~Pema Chodron~

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I HAVE A NEW ADDY !!!!!!!!
VISIT MY FANFIC: Please bookmark my new home !!!!!!!!!!
It's very lonely out there in my NEW little corner of cyberspace!
http://members.nbci.com/katybluemoon
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