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"She met me out there in the starlight, Scully. Samantha. I saw her. I held her." He leaned toward her in the cool night air. His voice was eager and soft, with just the slightest edge of hesitancy underlying it. An edge that cut her to the core. Knifing through all those places that never quite healed.

She knew he didn't hear the hesitancy. Wasn't even aware of it. It had nothing, she knew, to do with any concern he had about sharing this private moment. Intimacy had long ago become a habit for them. It was only that, as so often, he couldn't fully put his weight down with her. Could never truly trust that she would simply believe him. It hurt in ways she had stopped trying to name.

She didn't want to be earthbound. It was simply who she was. He had never understood that about her. Had never really appreciated that she didn't always want to be the voice of science and rationality. It was just how she saw the world.

As Mulder continued to tell her what he had seen, she found herself losing awareness of his words-- hearing only his voice. Its tones and colors. Hearing beneath this story the myriad other stories of longing and need and incompleteness. And underneath it all, at the floor of the ocean, she could hear his need for faith and belief. Her faith and belief in him.

A strange ache rose through her, settling dull and bone deep. This was an old tension; a subtle ongoing struggle to maintain their balance. A delicate trust had been established almost immediately and then had been tested and refined, nearly lost and then found and strengthened as they worked together over the years. They had gradually defined their faith in each other, even as they both continued to adhere to and dwell in their separate beliefs of how the world was structured.

There was a part of her that wished it could be otherwise. Wished that she could translate her absolute faith in Mulder into the unquestioning belief she knew he craved. And in small ways, hard won compromises, she had learned over the years to bend and twist with his curving lines of reasoning; to accept without immediate scoffing his latest bizarre theory. To think carefully before offering him the compliment of rational opposition.

She wished, on so many occasions, that she could follow him out into the outer reaches of his intuitive jumps and fantastic explanations. It would be so much easier if she could just leap off the cliffs after him. Fall into the air currents that seemed to carry him so effortlessly as he leapt from fact to guess to barely seen theory. There were days when she felt herself running after him, trying to follow his unmarked footsteps into a foggy nothingness that she could never learn to navigate.

There were also days when she knew he was lost in that fog and only her clarity, her dogged insistence on the mundane but vital precision of her methods would see them safely home. They were balanced. But so often it was she who had to be the weight that set the scales in alignment.

It all left her so tired.

Looking up at him tonight, his face oddly luminous in the moonlight, she could feel the heaviness of that weariness pressing down on her shoulders, anchoring her to the all too cold and sharp reality of the night that surrounded them. She shifted a little under the iron weight, her movements small and constrained.

She could hear the early spring sounds of crickets' harsh creaking, wind through newly leaved trees. Almost she thought she could hear laughter in some distant clearing, but that was certainly only mirage.

He was still speaking, telling her of what he had seen--the other children, the boy who might have been Harold's son, the games and laughter of the dead. She was beyond words and could only nod, encouraging him to tell her this miraculous thing. Trying to tell him with only her silence and her eyes that she was listening and that she believed in him. Always in him.

She envied Mulder the seeming ease of his beliefs. It seemed to her that he dwelt there so readily and comfortably. He moved through and in his beliefs so effortlessly while she continually had to fight her way through thickets of facts. They were different, but ultimately complementary, journeys. And more often than not anymore, they arrived at the same destination.

In the past years, she knew she had changed. Impossible not to be a different person in the face of what they had seen. As the world and familiar frames of reference shifted around her, it had been difficult for her to maintain her balance between science and her faith in Mulder. But she had. She still trusted herself to tell the truth to both herself and Mulder. And she wanted so much, needed so much to trust him absolutely to tell her the truth as he saw it, to present her with his views. Sometimes it felt like he held back because he automatically assumed that she would disbelieve him.

It had been better lately, but it was still so easy to shock him, and it shouldn't have been. He covered it with humor--quips about telling his diary about her suggestion of spontaneous combustion, but the real shock was so easy to read for her, who knew him better than she should.

In her darkest moments--the nights when sleep would no longer come, when the shadows of her room held too many ghosts and bitter memories--she found there was only one small flicker of hope to cling to. The one thought that allowed her to reach morning was the knowledge of the faith that bound her to Mulder. And it hurt so much that he didn't seem to hold the same faith in her that she held in him.

She knew that wasn't entirely fair. Recognized that in her tiredness she was simplifying a relationship that couldn't be reduced to easy theorems and proofs. But right now, hearing the hesitancy in his voice, the slight doubt in his eyes, she wasn't in any mood to be fair. And this was a long-standing pattern.

It wasn't just that he couldn't accept her beliefs, her reliance on scientific explanations. On some levels it was so clear that he had never really learned to understand her. Hadn't learned to understand and respect her belief system.

She knew that he absolutely respected her as an investigator and a partner, but sometimes she wasn't so sure about the respect for her as a person. Nothing overt and not absolute, but she sensed in him, at odd moments, a vague condescension--an implied "oh, Scully doesn't get it. Her mind can't absorb this."

What he had failed to understand was that she got it; it was simply that she found other explanations more convincing most of the time.

"Scully?" The soft brush of his hand against her arm alerted her to the fact that she had missed the last several minutes of what he'd been telling her. She pulled herself back to the strange ambivalent present.

"I'm sorry, Mulder. I...I don't know quite where I was."

"Hey--that's my life story. You ok?" He was still slightly intoxicated on discovery and mystery. His grin was infectious and she found herself unexpectedly mirroring it for a fleeting second. What was important that he was there in front of her. That he wanted and needed to share this with her.

"Yeah, I'm ok. Are you?" And it was all it took for him to launch into another description of what he had just seen.

Listening to his tale of the children playing and the music that had surrounded him out there in the clearing, she was surprised by a sudden wave of something that felt almost like resentment. She couldn't escape the sharp envy that his encounter with the other plane had been so soft and gentle. Sad, yes, but so sweet.

The handful of times that she had been pulled sideways into that other world had not been soft. She had been confronted with icy altered realities of dead fathers and dying women that left her cold and shaking. Why would she seek out or want to believe that reality?

And yet, for his sake, she stood there trying to believe and accept. In the end, though, she didn't know what to make of it. How to process these data in light of all that she knew or thought she knew.

So she simply stood and listened. Stood and waited for him to share his story with her. Waited in her weariness, waited for him, as she had waited for so long.

The brutality of this case still tore at her. It did not have the spectacularly gory ending that some of their other cases had had, but it had exacted a toll that she still had not fully calculated. For both of them.

She was so weary. So tired now that it was all over, this strange quest they had undertaken.

It had been her quest, too, although there had never been a requirement that she share the hazard. And in the dark nights, when she asked herself why she was sharing the pursuit, even in the face of Mulder's changing views of what was real and true and wasn't, she always had an answer. It was love, of course. A fact she had long ago come to terms with. They belonged together in this strange and irreplaceable partnership that had had become a central truth of her life. And yet, it didn't mean there weren't days when she was so tired that she could hardly stand. Days when she was sick to death of him, of them, and the half-lives they led.

She had come to realize, with some irony, that Mulder, who wanted so much to believe, could not bring himself to take the final intuitive jump with her. Only with her could she see him holding back, over-analyzing. It never ceased to amaze her that he hadn't simply walked through her walls years ago to spark to life the final intimacy between them. But he hadn't. For her part, the temptation to just cross the ground was nearly irresistible, but a lifetime habit of reticence and the habits of distance always held her back.

So, they had become masters of the half-completed gesture. Reliant on nuance and a handful of words to convey complex paragraphs of longing and gratitude and appreciation. It was frustrating, but comfortingly familiar seven years later.

As Mulder continued to tell her about his discoveries, she found herself wondering if it was an inevitable part of the human condition to measure the things that happened to others by the reaction and emotions that they sparked in you. Could she only understand Mulder's state of mind and what happened to him out there in the starlight by holding it up to the light of her own experience?

She wanted to simply be glad for him. For the peace, however temporary, that he found out there. But she couldn't help thinking about what this meant for her....for them.

They were, she realized with a small start, so inextricably bound that she had to assess this change for him in terms of herself as well. A change of this magnitude would have to reverberate between them. The tiny tremors and quakes shaking loose old patterns and habits. Dust falling away from the assumptions and customs that had guided their interactions for so long.

In the morning, he would wake to find himself different. He would have to, she thought, redefine himself, and she couldn't stop herself from closing her eyes against the unexpected pain that gripped her heart. When he redefined himself, this quest completed, where would she fit into his new life?

At this late hour, standing by their car, on a road that was miles from anything she knew, she was left only with unanswerable questions. Who were they now? What did this change for them? Who was she to him now? Partner? Friend? Something for which they as yet had no name? Would their faith be enough?

But she said none of that to him. And knew that her face had betrayed none of her thoughts.

All he really needed from her right now was her assurance that she believed in him. Which she did. Which she did without resentment. Because, at the end of this very long road, she knew exactly why it was she stood in the moonlight with him.

What she said was, "I'm glad you found her, Mulder."

And she allowed herself to touch his face briefly, knowing that he would draw all the wrong conclusions from that gesture, and then she drove them home through the night which gradually became dawn.

END

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