Title: between these oceans Author: darkstar Email: clone347@aol.com Archive: Please forward to XFF, Gossamer, and ATXC. Anywhere else, I would be honored but please let me know :) Category: MSR dreams Rating: G Disclaimer: Not mine. Chris Carter's. Enough said. Notes: So I'll be honest. It has been too long since I have written, I am no longer a native of this world I seek to explore. But I am here because I am drawn back by love, particularly the love I used to see so clearly between Mulder and Scully. A love I remember for a show that started me writing in the first place. This isn't much, and it probably won't be very good, but at least it's a return. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Between These Oceans (1/1) by darkstar - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (scully) She dreams casually, now; it is often as simple and understated as a glaze over the left eye as she walks down the street, through a hallway. The right eye-- the dominant one-- scans the street to ensure that she avoids lightposts and bicycle messengers and old women with poodles, but the left eye sees none of this. This lesser, forgotten eye wanders freely through time and space at whim. An example: She took the baby for a walk, and on her way back from the park, she blinked (no more than twice, at the most,) and she'd reached another part of town entirely. The front of an imported French grocery store. Homemade soups. She must have looked lost; one of the old poodle women offered her directions. She knew the way home, but in one sense the woman was right. She is lost. She lives under the spell of the left eye, that rebel visionary, existing within the infinite universe contained in the sphere of her dilated pupil. And this is what she sees: *** The baby is a cluster of stars above her right shoulder, low on a horizon the color of raw indigo silk. A constellation, or perhaps a galaxy. From this distance, she cannot tell which. Only that it is there. Underneath her feet, a black ocean as broad and flat as an inversion of the desert. She walks on the water, and every time her foot hits the waves, there is a flash underneath, like sparks. This illuminates the vast, underwater world which she has not noticed before: an understandable ignorance, after all, she's as surface dweller. There is a city beneath, silver and austere as if hand-carved from individual driftwood pieces of moonlight, and there are people in the streets with hair the color of seaweed. They stand outside their houses and watch her with Caribbean blue eyes; the children point and ask many questions which she cannot hear. The water muffles the sound. She can only see them, in between footsteps, waver and indistinct. Every time she walks this way, she finds herself searching the crowd for his face. Angry if she does not find him. (What have you done with him?) She wants to ask the question, but they can't hear her either. The surface of the water reflects the sound, spinning it into useless air. In this respect, it is as effective as bulletproof glass. (Why won't you let him surface?) Or sometimes she sees him with the crowd, pale as foam, watching her from the bottom of the world. Irony: she has to step away from him just to create another glimpse of his face. Bare feet on the water, a residual glow. But no matter how far she runs, he is always there, underneath her. Keeping pace. Somehow it charges her with the energy required to move just above the speed of darkness, just fast enough to maintain light. She aches (that dry, dusty, land ache) to split the surface of the ocean and wash the earth from her bdoy. Then draw him back up with her, cupped in her hands very carefully so as not to spill him on the way. (What happens to foam in the wind?) Vanishing. (What happens to surface dwellers in the sea?) Drowning. Once, at night, she dreamed he broke surface and then dried up in her arms, a starfish on sand. A boy fathered by mermaids, cast upon rocks. They (speaking of those who create the darkness always one step behind her) pinned him onto a board; they cut open the body to discern ocean secrets. He bled salt water. In the morning she woke with tiny salt crystals on her lips. *** (Only days longer. Moments now...) She makes this promise ass she sits on the metro and watches the scenery melt around her. Ebbing and flowing, as a tide. (Moments he will return, or if all else fails us, as it often does, I will have to be the one to go to him.) Over a bridge now, water the color of sea weed children stretching underneath her, for the glittering of a second. (And if in the end that's how I must find you, by sinking, then bring it on. I'll drown.) She presses her hand against the glass and closes her eyes. Whispers the afterthought: I will not be afraid if I break the surface of this water because I know you are already waiting for me underneath. Left-eye dreams. --------------------------------------------- (mulder) He dreams furtively, now, for fear they will find where he's been. Where his mind has gone, who it's gone with. They would know if he lied. He has become adept in various methods of erasing himself: everything can be faked. The color of his hair, of his eyes, the age and address on his four different driver's licenses. The names he writes on the registers of the endless one-night cheap hotels. Endless variations on the same theme. But he has one weakness: he sifts through crowds for fragments of her face. An eye, a cheekbone, a corner of the jaw. From this he pastes together a collage in his mind, images of her that only he can decipher. Sometimes he finds himself in thrall. An example: he read her last email and on his way back to the motel, he fell madly in love with three different women passing him on the street. This was because for ten seconds, he believed they were her. On the eleventh second, he hated them because they were not. Unfair, of course, but inevitable. He opens the file on his desk and begins to read the latest shred of the truth, or perhaps the latest lie, but he is distracted. He sees only his collages, the reflections of her that leave every piece of his surroundings (pen, paper, sunflower seeds, styrofoam coffee cup) forever altered. A sort of flash, but distant, as if seen moving over the surface of water. When he looks up at it, startled, this is what he sees: *** His quest is a wrecked galleon half-buried next to a black coral reef; inside the captains quarters is still the journal of the men who went down with the ship. But it's too late; the ink has returned to the sea, and he cannot read their messages. He lives in this galleon, quite comfortably, as he has by now acquired water lungs. He can see them glowing through his chest: thin golden sponges streaked with red filaments that ebb/flow ebb/flow with the currents. The ceiling of the cabin is painted indigo, tiny fragments of mirror embedded in the wood to reproduce stars, though he does not often look at them. He keeps to his normal, undersea business and does not dwell on worlds above the waterline. One exception: when the others (those who live in the city of moon and bear children of kelp) come to tell him of the walker on waves, he forgets everything. He follows them as a man in trance. He stares through the looking-glass belly of the ocean, but it is too dark. He can only see her by the light cast by her footsteps as she strikes the water. Silver flint. (Be careful, you'll slip.) He wants to warn her but his voice bounces off the surface and richochets back to the bottom, scaring the fish. (How do you keep your balance on nothing but foam?) And because her eyes-- in phosphorus millisecond glimpses-- search him out, or because she is preoccupied with his face and cannot see what is ahead, he runs with her. Out from the city, over drowned continents and submerged deserts. At times only her exploding footsteps provide light for him to see, but he is prepared for this. There have been times he's run stone blind. He longs (a waterlogged, swollen desire) to breach the waves and take her by the hand, drawing her back to the galleon. He will show her the glass stars by the light of electric eels; this will prove he's not afraid to hold raw energy between his hands. After all, he holds her. (What happens to sand in the water?) It dissolves. (What happens to water lungs in the air?) Asphyxiation. Once he dreamed she plunged to him and dissipated in his arms, golden dust spread thin on waves. A girl, fathered by deserts, drowning under three tons of liquid. They (speaking of those who demand he stay submerged) tied her body to the mast of the galleon, as a warning. They dissected her heart to find why land defied water; it burst into flowers. It was not yet morning when he woke with pollen covering his fingers. *** (Only days longer. Moments now.) He makes this promise as he exits the latest motel, out the back door, dodging streetlights. Rumor has it he's being trailed; there are sharks about. (Moments now and I will return to her. But what if they catch us anyway? What if it's never over...) Down the alley now, toward the dirty orange lights of a downtown espresso bar. Prufrock's. He'll blend in, watch the windows, hitch a ride in someone's car, probably a woman. She'll ask him home but he won't stay. You don't want me, he'll say, there's someone else. I'm soaked to the bone. (Then we will run together, next time. And if it goes down that it's the only way to protect you, by surfacing, let it come. I'll choke.) A saltwater dream. ------------------------------------- This is how they live, now. Within and without of the water, swimming and drowning and walking on foam. Right in the middle of other, more important things, they stop. Close their eyes. Both caught between their oceans, dreaming of water that will not part, not for them. Not yet. Then they walk away. ----------------------------------- Thanks for reading :) Any comments, questions, or suggestions for improvement are welcome at clone347@aol.com