EARTH.

There it was. Right in the phone book: "Scully, D.K., MD., Quantico." He lifted the receiver and almost dropped it. Wiped his hand on the side of his coat. Sweaty palms.

He was scared shitless for some reason.

*Jesus, it's *her*, not a stranger. She'll be happy.*

She wouldn't hang up, would she, thinking it was some sick joke? Fuck.

Hand shaking, he pressed the little numbered, square buttons that would connect him.

Anyone passing by the phone booth would have seen a tall, brunette, good looking man in faded jeans and blue T-shirt, a worse for wear trench coat hung loosely about slumping shoulders. Anyone caring to look closer might see exaustion etched into the flesh around the dialated eyes. Eyes that looked scared and tired and relieved all at once.

Anyone stopping to look would notice him occassionally covering those eyes with his free hand. They would see that he was having difficulties. That he was trembling and crying a little and failing to keep it completely hidden.

No one stopped.

He heard it ring once on the other end.

Twice.

Would she even be there at this hour?

Eight years, he thought.

Eight....

...*Years!*.

I'm thirty-seven years old.

It's Two-thousand, Six.

Thirty-seven plus eight...

...forty-five. A forty-five year old man.

It was gone,...fucking gone,..

Once they'd lost nine minutes with no memories.

She hadn't believed him.

Now what he remembered bunched together behind his minds eye, orbiting a black hole. A legion of demons called. The event horizon of his soul.

Eight. Forty-five.

The values really had no meaning. He forced himself to listen to the tiny chirp of a ringing phone.

*Treeeep, treeeep...*

He didn't want to go insane quite yet.

Five rings.

Had Scully moved on? Other job? Better life? He didn't know. But he knew the year so she must have.

He'd seen himself once in a bathroom mirror, after breaking into that familiar house and taking some clothes. Brown hair now not all brown. Face not all smooth anymore, and his eyes!

His eyes had scared him. Sunken, except he was not that much underweight, and smudged underneath with grey bags. And wrinkles where there'd been none. They'd looked like someone else's eyes.

Left as himself and came home a stranger. A haunted creature that was no longer familiar with its own shell. Like a trapped animal which had chewed off its own limb to escape, he'd come home missing something. Half a soul. Some of his mind.

Now that he was among remembered things,...

...he didn't have to run here. No-one took from him, but left him alone, undisturbed, in his phone booth...

...he was truly afraid.

As for how he had arrived there...

His mind was still pretty fuzzy on that point. He did remember crawling over rocks, he did recall stepping through a...doorway,......a passage?, something like that.

Then, dressed in only dusty white shirt and trousers, the next thing he recalled was walking along a dirt road somewhere on a planet called Earth and he couldn't remember where he'd left his car.

After finding out he had no weapon, keys, phone or money, he'd sat down on the scrubby rise at the side of the gravel road and puzzled on it for a while. Puzzled for ten, fifteen minutes. Couldn't make sense of it.

The sky was charcoal against which hung a white, fingernail moon. The air smelled good and the dirt felt right. The trees were normal. Coniferous, pine odor. Deciduous, their brown leaves teased from their hold in a feeble night breeze and dropping.

When he'd reached a two-lane highway, he began to see discarded fast-food cartons and empty cigarette packages and knew for sure he was where he should be, as far as he could remember. Sort of.

But he was - oh - so tired. That really deep, bone-aching weariness that just made you want to curl up where you were and fuck it all.

But instead he walked along the highway's ditch, more-or-less in the right direction he thought.

Found an old Times magazine, thrilled at seeing something so ordinary. Read the caption: The Breaking of the Tech' Barrier; Fifty Years of Scientific Revolution.

Then he saw the date:

2005.

December, 2005.

His hands shook so badly that the letters blurred.

It was fall, it was still warm out at night. Eyes burning, he looked at grass and trees. Dead leaves. They were falling.

Autumn. Not winter. So it must be 2006. September maybe.

And then his legs turned to water when terror struck. Guts quivering, he fell to his knees and then to his elbows in order to contain it.

Toppling to all fours, crushing the heart-bursting, dirtied glossy cover to his face to absorb the tears or the blood or whatever it was that was spurting out of his eyes and pouring down his cheeks, he was broken.

Sobbed. Little whines escaped his lips, words formed within his throat and on his mouth that never made it to his intellect. Noises that made sense only in the context of the greatest grief imaginable. The power of them had no place in everyday language.

Crashed and burned, metaphorically speaking.

Hours later, he'd turned away from that mirror, the mirror in his mothers house, afraid for himself and, for some reason, ashamed.

He'd found no money anywhere there, except for a bit of change in his mother's emergency jar tucked away behind the books on the living room shelves. It was only enough for public transportation and a couple of phone calls, so he'd grabbed the only source of food in the pantry, dried macaroni, and shoved a handful into his coat pocket. Mom wasn't home.

Somehow he knew she was dead.

But he stopped thinking about her. And the calendar date. On purpose.

He tightly clutched the phone until his fingers ached. A good, honest, self inflicted hurt.

Every so often, he popped a few macaronies into his mouth and munched loudly. At least it was filling the hollow in his stomach.

He wished he could have dressed better, taken the time to shower, maybe brushed his teeth, but the house'd been wired with a silent alarm and he hadn't wanted to take any chances by staying too long. Showing up after...a long time and breaking in would be an easier matter to present to Scully than to the Chilmark police department.

At least he hoped so. Her face caught in his memory, making him smile - inside, not outside - still, it didn't come easy.

That pretty face.

Suddenly his eyes filled and tears leaked out beneath fingers desperately trying to keep them in. Crying made him tired.

Drew in a long, shuddering breath for control.

On the sixth ring, a woman answered.

"Thank-you for waiting, Doctor Scully's office."

Not her.

Must be a secretary. *Good for you, Scully.*

He managed to get out a stammered question, one hand squeezing his eyes shut, the other hand holding the phone to his ear, knuckles white.

He was crying freely now but somehow keeping the sobs out of the mouthpiece.

In between questions, lots of little gasps though.

The woman was speaking, giving him answers.

Yes, Doctor Scully was in. No, she was in the middle of her evening class. Do you want to leave a message? Yes, the Doctor is Chief pathologist. What do you mean, is she married??

*Fucking hell! Did I ask that?! FUCK!*

The womans voice turned from polite irritation to annoyed suspicion. "Who is this? I am not authorized to give out personal information!" The last words he heard before she hung up.

He remembered another number, shocking himself. Pretty good after...after no telephones.

Pushed the right buttons.

He guessed she wasn't married because she was still using her last name. But then, she might anyway.

One ring.

"Scully." The disembodied voice announced neutrally.

He stopped breathing. Felt like sinking to his knees and passing out. But that would have to wait for a better time and place. Still, he couldn't make his tongue work. Say something!, he begged the person at the other end.

"Hello?" Now she sounded annoyed. He must have interrupted a speech to her students or something.

Lungs starved for air, he gasped, and the tears would not stop.

Goddamn it, it should be easier than this. Every word he'd practiced scattered in the wind like dust.

"Pervert!" The line went dead.

She must have heard his heavy breathing and thought he was some kind of bored deviant getting his rocks off.

Almost the good old days.

It should be funny and if he could stop crying like a baby, he would laugh.

He redialed, hand trembling so bad he might have missed a couple numbers.

"Hello?!" this time she was angry and her tone had said: "If you don't say something intelligent immediately I'm hanging up and I won't be answering a third time, asshole!"

The power in her voice, the beautiful fire that came through with that one word warmed his soul like no fifty year old bottle of scotch ever could. It helped him find his voice.

And it almost stopped the tears. Not quite.

"Sc-scully." It had come out all wrong, a sob wrapped in a whisper but it would have to do.

"Hu..hello? Who IS this?"

At least she'd heard it this time.

His muscles turned to liquid and the phone dropped away momentarily. He forced it back. After two droughts of air:

"Scully."

Clearer this time, but he couldn't get out anything else. Nothing came to mind. Everything he'd rehearsed seemed ridiculous now. For the first time in,...in...so long, he really wanted to speak and couldn't make it work.

The seconds of dead silence that followed terrified him.

"WHO is this?" she asked again. Now she was whispering, fearful, puzzled. Afraid to believe.

"It's me." *Brilliant!* But it was a beginning and his heart was pleading. Don't hang up! He wanted to say it but didn't. He wanted to say other things, right then, while he had the chance, before fate decided to remove the opportunity. But then fate had brought him here.

"Meet me?" It was a question and it was all he could think of. His soul and life and everything begged for her to believe.

Her answer was a sharp intake of breath that caused a sob to escape him, so terrified that she would hang up, that she wouldn't believe her own ears. Or that she might believe and it would be too much for her.

A dial tone would kill him.

It was agonizing, that long minute or more of silence but for her quick breaths through the line into his ear. His heart pumped painfully with her uncertainty and his own fright. He felt like a six year old lost at the World's Fair. Long, sickening waves of fright.

He was not a child.

He was a grown man.

And what happened in the next few seconds or so would either save or destroy him. Everything depended on it.

"Where?" so far away, she had sounded. Light years distant. So faint. A whispered scream trying to reach him across years of separation.

He couldn't stop crying but it felt good now because it wasn't from fear of darkness or hopelessness, but from possibility. From the faint light up ahead of this black tunnel he'd been stumbling through. He wanted to see her see him as she always had. If she saw him and believed, he would be real again.

It was all he wanted, to be in her sight and feel alive.

Salvation.

Scully.

He forced syllables out through his mouth. "Bus station. Downtown. Gate 23." Telegraphically said. Complete sentences still impossible.

Somehow, she'd located her own voice box. "Stay there. Don't leave. Just stay where you are. I'm coming right now, okay? Don't go ANYwhere."

As if he was planning on going anywhere ever again as long as he lived.

Whispered "Okay." Unable to manage anything else and didn't want to hang up, either, the voice on the other end his only hold on gravity and substantial things. He couldn't bear to sever that tenuous connection through fiber optics to them or her, not until she hung up and did it for him.

He replaced the phone before the dial tone came through, wiped his eyes, and made his way back through the doors into the building. Off the busy street and into the hustle and bustle of the crowded Greyhound station.

Gate 23 was about in the middle. He choose it because it was central, no other reason really. It didn't stand out any more than any other gate but it was the easiest decision.

He didn't sit down in the hard, plastic uniform chairs or lean against the wall, he just turned in little circles, feet shuffling, covering about six square feet every minute or so.

Circled where people milled around and moved passed him, some sitting with their suitcases and griping about the lateness of their connections. Some drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

The aroma of coffee, his first since..., it came to him, eight years, made his mouth water. It was physical torture. He had forgotten how good it smelled. Couldn't remember how it tasted. His stomach churned acid and uncooked macaroni.

Small circles. Eight year old habit.

He looked for her, afraid of the what if's. What if he didn't recognize her, or if she didn't know him?

If she couldn't find him.

If she changed her mind.

If she was furious at him and hated him for leaving without warning and returning the same way.

But to see recognition in her eyes when she looked at him would make it all better. To know he was not a stranger to *her*.

Because he was so to himself.

It wasn't much to ask but still hard to hold on to; to hope for; to believe in that little, teetering maybe.

*****

---------------------------------------------------------------------

*****

Doctor Scully shut off her cellular, excused her class, removed her goggles and hair-cap, grabbed her white lab-coat and made a fast dash for the door, mumbling "family emergency" to her wide-eyed pupils.

Out of the room and the building, into her car and out of the basement parking garage, driving as fast as she dared. As she handled the wheel and the quick turns she prayed, her first prayer in a long while to her God who had been too silent these last years: *Let this happen. I need this. As much as I think I still need you, I need this more. I need him.*

Keeping emotions strictly in check, she swallowed apprehension and doubt. There would be no hesitation in her if - when - she found him, she allowed no room for it anymore. But, for right now, because she was still a scientist and functioned and thought as one, she would await the evidence before committing herself to the truth of him. Allow no opportunities for hope unless this time she saw with her own eyes the very living reason for that hope.

Maybe she'd be able to rebuild her faith if this wasn't just all a terrible mistake. Someone's cruel joke.

She thought about phoning her old boss, Walter Skinner, now Director of the F.B.I. but no, she would wait until she knew first. Until she found out what the voice on the phone wanted and there was some sort of order to it all.

Couldn't even let herself *think* his name yet. It wouldn't do to allow too much in there, in that spot in the center of her chest which was already swelling.

What to say if he were real? The hundred questions she'd for years stored away under mental lock and key meant nothing now. Just words and what were they? Noise.

Stupid to have thought that answers were always the crucial goal.

To hell with answers. What was really important had nothing to do with pat knowledge. Things like friend- ship and warmth, happiness and hope, forgiveness and love. Those were worth seeking and fighting for.

Few words had been spoken during that phone call.

But enough.

Her eyes misted. It had sounded like him.

*God, if you're listening today, listen to me. If you want me to believe in miracles, then give me one. Let it BE him.*

She parked her Explorer right outside, illegally, not giving a shit. Let them ticket and tow it!

Taking only her keys and dressed still in her working greens, she tried not to run into the bus terminal, forcing her limbs to behave as normally as possible under the rush of adrenaline. Ignored the looks people gave her stained medical garb.

So many people. Everywhere, blocking her view. Where the hell did they all come from? Why don't they go home?

She couldn't see squat.

The doctor would have given anything if she'd only worn her three inch heels that morning. But standing lectures and hours of being on ones feet meant low heels or better yet, sneakers.

She strained to raise herself up above the sea of human heads.

*Tall. He's tall. Look for tall and dark.*

Minutes went by and her mind left the pseudo calmness of reason, entering the blunt rush of panic. Goddamn it, she couldn't see!

Then she did. The back of a dark head that reached an inch, two, above most others. It was the right shape, the right shade.

She opened her valve of possibilities and let a little of it flow freely. Bit her lip from the painful flutter inside her.

Hope was beating its wings.

She moved closer, picking up her pace, finding her way passed bodies.

The hair color looked the same. Stance, the same. Movement appeared the same.

Hurry.

Then the one that seemed to fit turned her way but missed her, looked passed her, not seeing.

She stopped, clamped a hand over her mouth when the rest of him fell into place within the mental template of her mind, stifling a sob.

My God.

It was.

Yes.

*MyGodMyGod*.

No. Have to touch first.

Make sure.

She walked more quickly, pushing passed strangers, getting them out of the way, all meaningless obstacles.

Kept her eyes forward, not letting them drop for an instant, not blinking lest she lose sight of what might have been an apparition but, by all that was holy, surely was not.

Quickly.

Then she saw his eyes on her. And they fit too.

God, they were the same eyes! They had the same dark depth and the same sorrow.

Maybe more.

A laugh escaped her, boiling up out of an unbelievable joy. It mixed with her quiet choked-back sobs. Her lips trembled.

"Ohmygod, ohmygod-ohmygod-ohmygod..." Rushing through the crowd who no longer existed or mattered.

Nothing else did now. Or ever would.

Not like this.

When he saw her, terrible years and incomprehensible distance shriveled to twenty normal steps.

Tears he'd conquered threatened to resurface at that first sight but he beat them down.

She was closing the last thirty feet, finding a quicker path between dozens of bodies while her eyes never left him at all. Her hair was shorter, wavier, lighter and softly framed those beautiful features that had almost faded away in his mind forever. She was older, must be, yes, but nothing had touched her beauty.

Perfection and paradise walked toward him.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

He'd prepared himself to embrace her tightly, apologize, hold her hand, beg forgiveness, defend himself against the anger he knew was coming - anything to keep her there. Anything in the world.

Was not prepared when she, (finally reaching him), gathered his shoulders in her arms and then his head between her palms, pulled him down and kissed his lips.

Then kissed him again. And again, trembling and clutching at him, not letting go of any part of him.

She kissed him, little kisses and then longer ones and back to little ones.

Heat rushed up his torso to his head when her meaning became obvious to his dulled senses. It was no accident, this. She knew who he was and she wanted to do this; had wanted it and been denied for years. She meant to tell him her meaning silently with her mouth and that it should have been said long ago, before the hard lesson had to be learned. She was apologizing herself in a way.

He responded now, kissing back, then buried his face in her soft neck, smelling her perfume and couldn't stop the shaking in his shoulders or the old, decomposed, grief anymore.

"I'm sorry-I'm-sorry-I'm so sorry-I'm sorry..."

She clung to him, still as an anchor in a shallow lake.

"It's okay. It doesn't matter. It's okay. You're here. You're here with me. It's okay now..." Lifted his face to kiss him again.

For minutes upon minutes they stayed that way, on their tiny island, while the world lapped at their edges.

Then, strangely, Mulder pulled back, "Scully?"

She bit her lip then. His face. She'd seen the expression before during her medical internship. The time when she'd spent a few weeks in an ER before switching to pathology when she found she couldn't take seeing that face anymore.

The face of shock and tragedy. The faces people wore when they were told that their son or their daughter, their husband or wife or whole family was dead. That their broken and bleeding bodies couldn't be saved.

Or the face of the victim on the emergency room table, surrounded by machines and strangers, when they knew they were in big trouble. When they could see by the look in the nurses eyes that they were dying.

Just like the face Mulder wore now.

"Scully. Where've you been?"

"Well, you know, Mulder,...r-right here." He had sounded as if they'd missed each other at coffee break. "Just waiting for you,...like always." She forced an apologetic smile. Let him think it.

She drank in the remembered face, seeing unfamiliar faded scars on cheek and forehead. And, through his torn T-shirt, a painful looking one in the hollow of his shoulder. It was an unusual shape. It was pale, a deeper scar than the others, the flesh surrounding it puckered. She noted every new tiny fact but asked nothing. That he was warm under her hands was more than enough. Plenty.

To hell with questions.

Fuck the truth.

"I need to ask you something." He said, his face buried in her collar, his voice hoarse.

She kept her cheek against his, if for her comfort alone, so she could keep him from vanishing into nothing. She hadn't the courage to let go just yet. "Anything."

His breath was tiny wisps of warmth on her neck, he was buried in her hair and skin. Just where she wanted him.

"Are you married?"

She smiled a little. Rueful. Interesting first question. She'd just kissed him harder than she'd kissed anyone. It had been spontaneous and, she felt, absolutely necessary, but completely unexpected for both of them she thought. Now he needed to know if it was the only time.

He seemed to be existing in two mental places at once. Switching back and forth from today to years ago and what horrors they had held for him, and back to today.

He was so vulnerable. On the proverbial knife's edge. One misstep on her part...

But he wanted to know.

HAD to know if what he was holding was her and was something he could keep - hold onto like a life jacket - or did she belong elsewhere? Were things going to be the same or was she just some kind of cruel joke god was playing on him.

And of all the things for him to have said or asked after eight agonizing years, it was completely Mulder that it was not only one she couldn't possibly have guessed, but one that, in a way, involved sex. She had to chuckle.

"Divorced." She felt his arms tighten.

He was glad. "Good. Then I want...I-I want you to...m-marry me, Scully,...please."

She hadn't expected that. "Um, marry you?" Not trepidation, strangely enough, or doubt, just surprise.

He straightened and looked down at her sweetly shocked expression. "I d-don't ever want to...lose y-you. I couldn't survive it. Never. Please."

Scully stared. Really stared. He looked physically exhausted. He looked sick and frightened and he was stuttering. Mental exhaustion too.

Something had reached inside him in those missing years and pulled him inside-out. Taken him apart.

Crushed him.

She didn't know what or who or just how bad or if he was beyond repair. Mere damage control would this time be out of the question.

"I've missed you." she said to him. "But I think we should take this one step at a time."

"Scully - "

"-Mulder....I just left a classroom full of med-students standing over a partially dissected corpse..."

...Terrible images against his will. Body parts swam through murky memories. People. Dead and dismembered and displayed on shiny metal slabs. On display screens with incomprehensible symbols...

His head hurt.

..."I don't even remember what I said to them before I ran out of there"... She touched his hollow cheek. "And you're not well."

"Scully, I need to know...I need an answer...something. I don't,...don't knuh-know what's going on..." He began to shake. Really shake. A high fever trembling that started somewhere and ended everywhere.

A panic attack? she wondered. Scully felt sure he was near to collapsing from fatigue. His eye bags were so deep and dark, they looked as if they'd been carved into the flesh with a spoon. Something had made a long meal of him, and the simple task of speaking was sucking up the leftovers.

Whatever he had been through, even in just the last few hours, all the emotions, all the tears and possibly the shock of seeing her again, was costing him even more. She had to get him out of there and to a hospital, or at least home.

Her place.

"Please, Scully."

This is insane, she thought. Only Mulder could show up out of thin air looking like an eight year binge hang-over, ask something like that and pull it off.

He was ill. He needed rest, food and drugs. Not a honeymoon.

At his eyes brimming with a bit of hope and a lot of fear, she bit off anymore excuses, either for him or herself.

He needs something to trust.

I need him.

Admit it.

Then she spoke furiously, not leaving either of them wondering a minute longer. "Yes, okay. Yes." Nodded. *Fuck. Of course!* She'd been waiting to say it for - what? - ten, twelve years? No beating around the bush anymore. "Yes."

"There's a...a condition."

She looked up at him incredulously. "What? What kind of condition?"

He poured the words out, like he wanted to get them over with. "I don't..ruh-really k-know what's happened to me..."

His voice broke. The anguish in it was painful to her ears and what his face showed nearly made her heart stop. But she made efforts to follow his jumbling sentences.

"...Don't ask me what..where I've be...what's happened. I c-c-can't talk about it, I don't kn-know. A-and you'd th-think I was crazy, and,"

Then in a barely audible voice, terrified of something he could not look at.

"...I don't...I don't think I ever wi-will...be able to. M-maybe I...I could be...I just can't." Pressed the side of his face against her clean hair. "Suh-sorry."

She kissed that face. "I know it was something horrible but it's over now. I promise you, I won't ever ask." She held his head between her hands, "Not until you want me to." Stroked the faint scar above his right eyebrow. "Anything, Mulder. Anything to keep you here."

"I think it was something...r-really bad...." He wanted to tell her though, even though it made his guts twist and melt in fresh fear. Even though the swirling, nightmare images were as starkly ugly as she was softly beautiful.

- Even though he couldn't separate them from the terror in his mind or from the pain in his body.

- Even though they were intertwined within those elements like cancerous tendrils.

Even though all of that - her words of promise had reached one loving hand through the bars of his polluted, self-erected isolation, and warmed him.

So maybe someday he could open it wide and she would cross that dirty threshold.

"It doesn't matter, Mulder..."