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Accountability

Chapter 2
The grey Taurus flew down suburban streets, past a thousand identical
houses, each flanked by a standard issue green minivan. Scully thought
they must be traveling in circles, except that the cutesy street names
kept changing, and she could actually feel them getting farther away
from that house.

After about five miles, she pulled over into a quiet church parking
lot, abandoned on a late Friday afternoon. People needed time to
commit the transgressions they would ask forgiveness for once the
weekend was over.

She really just wanted to get him home, but first she had to know how
he was dealing with all of this.

His gaze was focused somewhere outside the window, or maybe on his
reflection within it. Her own eyes fell closed as she pictured the
woman she'd spoken with. She still couldn't force her mind around the
concept of that woman being Samantha. The Holy Grail. The truth of all
truths. Drinking coffee in her kitchen. Crying over her daughter.

Mulder's neice, she realized. Mulder had a family, one he didn't even
know. A family that had been simultaneously given and taken away. Her
heart ached for him, knowing how long he'd lived with that very
possibility. 

Her sympathy for Amanda--Samantha--abated somewhat in the face of her
resentment, on Mulder's behalf, of being shut out of her life.

Slowly, carefully, Scully touched his hand, ice cold fingers
instinctively clenching her own.

"Mulder, you're in shock. It's an understandable.." Bright, unfocused
eyes turned to meet hers. He shook his head, mimicking his own
movements outside the house. "I didn't know," he insisted.

She nodded, raising her voice to be heard over the thousand voice
Vienna Boys' Choir of Guilt that resounded in his head. Everything is
Mulder's fault, alleluia.

"I know you didn't,Mulder."  She reached to feel his forehead,
brushing the hair away. "I need to get you home. Just hang on for me,
okay?"

Scully made record time flying through the nauseatingly pleasant
housing developments, circled the Beltway and joined the stream of
cars crossing the Key Bridge. The sedan climbed the hills behind M
Street, shuddering to a relieved halt in front of her building.

A frigid wind whipped her hair as she stood on the sidewalk, waiting
for her partner to get out of the car. He stumbled past her through
the front door and into her apartment, disappearing wordlessly into
the bedroom.

When you first fall in love with someone, the hardest thing you must
come to realize is that you can never be everything, fill every need,
for another human being. That no matter how much of a soul you share,
there are some corners in which there is only room for one. As much as
it hurt her to watch him retreating, she knew he was at the very
threshhold of his pain right now.

She had once accidentally put her hand on dry ice. It seemed to burn
her at the slightest touch, until her brain had time to register it as
cold.

Her first instinct was to go to him, but she was wiser now than she
had been in the past. He needed her so badly, and her first attempt at
comfort would warm him momentarily, but then it would damage his raw,
exposed emotions. Then he would push her away, unwilling to expose her
to the full array of his sorrow.

Wiser now, she would wait.

After almost an hour, she heard a tiny noise from the bedroom. She
moved to stand in the doorway, shrugging off the coat she had never
thought to remove.

He lay across the bed, his back to her. A low moan reached her ears,
drawing her to him as surely as if he'd called her name.

Pulling the comforter over him, she folded her legs and settled
herself on the bed behind him. Without looking up at her, he shifted
his body so that his head was in her lap, and she felt the tears
riding waves of shivers as they left his body.

Her fingers buried themselves in his hair, drawing the thick strands
away from his face. She leaned down to kiss the paths her fingers had
traced.

His hand came up to rest on her knee, gently circling her kneecap.

She looked down at him, at Mulder: Version 2.0, to which she owned the
exclusive rights. No one else would ever be allowed to see him like
this. She felt alternately blessed and cursed by that distinction.

As his soundless tears were seeping through her pantyhose, she made a
mental note to find out first thing in the morning who was responsible
for assigning them to this case.

It was obviously someone who'd wanted to hurt him, make him bleed to
death and kick the body. Looking down at his beautiful crumpled form
in her lap, she vowed that, before this was over, whoever they were,
they would pay. 

Accountability 
Chapter 3

3:37 am

Scully knew her Mulder-gauge was reading empty the second before she
woke up. Startled, she rose and pushed the comforter off her
still-dressed body.

No particular sound was coming from the living room,or maybe she could
hear his breathing. Maybe it was just a sense of his presence. But he
was there.

Silhouetted in the moonlight, he stood, clad only in striped boxers,
staring into the night.

She crossed the room to stand behind him, noticing the tension in his
shoulders and feeling it in the air around him. She reached her hands
up and over, and down his folded arms, as though she could purify his
skin with her touch, drawing away the sadness like moisture. Watch it
evaporate into thin air.

If only it were that easy.

Her hands found each other and connected, linking around his waist.
Her lips placed gentle kisses on his back. She felt his large hands
come to cover hers.

Leaning her face against him, she could track the shiver that traveled
along his spine.

"You're cold. Come to bed."

The muscles beneath her cheek quaked slightly as he shook his head.
"I'm not cold." He ran his fingers over hers as if each one were a
note, and he was playing a song he knew by heart.  

"I just love you so much, sometimes it surprises me," he whispered.

She smiled, squeezing more tightly around his bare waist. Their
feelings for each other were rarely a topic for discussion. Much like
everything else they'd done together, words seemed painfully
inadequate. Even his moving in was a simple matter of her making extra
room in the closet and bureau. Watching her that morning, he'd left,
returning with his clothes and fishtank, and it was done. Looks and
gestures had served as their romantic currency, and they were both the
richer for it.

Still, it was nice to hear.

He turned in her arms, scooping her into him, surrounding her with the
only security she knew.

One deep breath, then she pulled away, pulling his hands with hers
towards the bedroom. "Come back to bed."  He nodded, and lay down,
watching her undress and pull on a baby-blue t-shirt. She joined him,
turning on her side as he pulled her back against his hard stomach.
She felt his grip tighten around her, and she placed her smaller hands
atop his, drifting to sleep with the staccato sounds of his heartbeat
dictating her own.