TITLE:  Adisa
AUTHOR:  Bonetree
RATING:  PG-13
KEYWORDS:  Post-Ep (sort of), A, S, MSR (implied), Mulder/O (from
"3")
SPOILERS:  "One Breath," "Duane Barry," various bits of the later
seasons and earlier seasons...
SUMMARY:  August to November of 1994.
DISCLAIMER:  The following is a work of fiction.  Mulder, Scully,
Skinner, Penny Northern and anyone else who happens to pop up from
the show are the property of 1013 Productions and Fox.  No profit is
being made from the use of these characters and no infringement is
intended.  All other characters are my own creation.
ARCHIVE:  At my website and Gossamer only.  Thanks.  Requests for
links
to those sites are all right, of course, but please wait for
persimmons.
I mean, permission.

Thanks to Dani, Revely, Shari, QofMush, Lilydale, Mara, Robin, dtg,
Blueswirl, Beth and Diana Battis for help finding my way through the
timeline and for beta and cheerleading. Thanks to my dogs - Faulkner
and Eliza Jane -- for only bothering me every three or four hours
while I was writing this and only wetting on the kitchen floor once
the whole weekend.  Thanks to Apple Computers for my amazing new
machine.

For Jean Robinson and Mara.  Just because.


*****

They were looking at her through glass bubbles, and she could tell
some part of them was afraid.

For her own part, she stood in the center of a room the color of
light, an inch or two of a clear liquid that could be water gathering
around her feet, reflecting her in her dark robe like glass.  Her
white suit, almost pink, and its scarf were gone, and with it was her
own lightness she'd hope to drape around herself when she'd chosen it
that morning.

Now she looked like some sort of sacrifice, there in the center of
the cavernous room, so bright and white it hurt her eyes to look at
it, at the halo of faces staring down at her from the globes around
their heads.  She couldn't see their bodies.  Only a hive of faces,
eyes black as a doll's eyes, mouths tiny downturned Us.  If they were
speaking to each other, she couldn't hear it.

When she thought to speak, she thought better of it.

Toeing the floor, she watched liquid seem to move, still reflecting
her in the black robe.  It was light, a fabric not unlike the cheap
robe she'd rented for her high school graduation.  It was tight at
her throat but she couldn't tell how it was closed - no zipper, no
button, no catch.

She'd expected a humming, a sound of something.  Nothing.  Above
her, the faces didn't move.  They grew out of the walls and ceilings
like gray bulbous flowers.

"Who are you?" she said into the silence. She couldn't take the eyes
on her any longer, and the silence made her feel as if there was no
air in the room at all, like being underwater.

The sound of her voice was eaten by the air, as though it was lost
in a rag stuffed in her mouth.  The only change around her were that
the heads in their globes, catching light, moved uncertainly, like a
ripple going through the crowd of them.  Five hundred.  Maybe more.

There'd been a light she'd thought for an insane moment was a
spaceship.  The beat of the helicopter's blades told her otherwise,
the way they'd whipped the tall grass on the mountain around where
Duane Barry held her by the back of the neck, her hands bound.  He'd
been screaming something at the helicopter and in the thrum of its
sound his voice had sounded like singing.

The helicopter had been smaller than she expected from the sound,
and black.  The people who came out of it were in biohazard suits the
color of coal, their faces lost in the plastic window that guarded
them.  She'd felt the pinprick of a syringe as they'd tussled her
toward the chopper, its blades still whipping the air and Duane
Barry, who had his arms out in some bizarre imitation of the
crucifixion, the tendons in his neck like wires as he laughed.

Then she was here, standing in the center of this place that felt
like no place.

From in front of her, across the room to a wall as white as every
other surface, a hand emerged.  An arm, a shoulder.  She took a step
back and the fluid around her feet, amniotic on her bare feet, moved
with her, gathering in a ripple.  Then the man emerged from the wall
fully formed in a robe that matched her own except for its whiteness.
The color stood out stark against his skin, which was black as night.

He walked one foot in front of the other, as though he moved on a
tightrope wire.  His feet were bare, and when they touched the floor
they made a soft noise like a tap dripping in a house.  His eyes were
on her, his arms barely moving, as he crossed the space between them,
a small smile on his face.  His eyes were the color of water, and
large in his beautiful face.  He looked like he was walking on
water.

African, she guessed, from the depth of the pigment in his skin.
His teeth were perfect, a cemetery of white as he stopped a few feet
from her.  She'd stopped moving backward with that single step, her
eyes wide and taking him in, from the glimpse of white around the
bottoms of his feet, up the tall frame, at least a foot taller than
her, past the ocean eyes to the black pate.

"You are Dana," he said, and she couldn't tell for a moment if he
meant it in greeting or if he'd said it because she didn't know
herself.  After she heard the word, she realized that she didn't.
His voice had an accent that reminded her of music.

"Yes," she said, the word falling between them.

"Adisa," he said, and laid his hand on his chest, right over his
heart, his fingers spread wide.

"Ah-dee-sah," she repeated.  "And I'm...Dana."  She tried them both on
for size.  Both seemed to fit, though there something about her own
name that sounded a bit out of place, as though someone had been
calling her something else and the word "Dana" was too crisp, like a
new shirt.

She looked around at the rippling sea of faces above her encased in
their glass, like bubbles bobbling on the white surface of the room.
"Who are they?" she asked, nodding toward them, but Adisa only smiled
wider, a chuckle as warm as a coal coming up his throat.

"I am here to explain everything," he said, and he reached his hand
out, the palm friction-white.

She looked at it, into his eyes, and back again.

"Come with me," he said, and she reached out with her small hand,
and it was lost inside of his.


****

PLEASANT'S EXXON
EXIT 150
DAWSON, WEST VIRGINIA
10:58 p.m.
SEPTEMBER 4, 1994


The world was made up of a series of islands, he decided, and this
flood of light, garish against a night sky that went on, literally,
forever, was no exception.

He'd decided to drive back from Los Angeles, leaving his ticket on
United Flight 219 out of LAX to Dulles on the night table at the
hotel by the airport.  He'd spent two days there after the fires had
burned out, just sitting on the edge of the bed through the darkness,
planes taking off all night and the television bleeding naked bodies,
the sound of breath.  Two days with the cross around his neck on its
too-long chain.  Then he'd risen, left the ticket on the table like a
message in a bottle to the next person marooned in the room, a chance
to go Somewhere.

A stop at Hertz and his Bureau card down and he was on his way in a
Mitsubishi Mirage, heading away from the city and its smoke and its
light.

He hit the desert beyond Palm Springs as the sun was going down that
first night, some part of him sure he could still taste blood on his
lips.  The windows down in the tinny car, he let the dry air ruffle
his hair, the open collar of his dress shirt, his tongue tracing the
corners of his mouth.

Dangerous, she'd said.  Blood tasted dangerous.

She hadn't tasted that way, he thought, moving out toward Barstow
and Needles, past Desert Center with its post office and its gas
station and its ice cream stand and nothing else.

What he remembered from the time in the bathroom, the time with her
seated on the edge of the counter, his razor in her hand and close
enough to his ear to nick as she'd bitten his throat, was the taste
of something desperate and fading, his hips pushing into her in a
motion he could only think of now with regret.

It had been like fucking Grief, he decided, tossing a sunflower seed
out the window into the night air, the stars so bright and so
numerous he felt like a speck.  Even the car seemed to be breaking up
in the wind as he moved along the highway throwing two puny beams of
light.

Now he stood at pump #4, high in the West Virginia mountains, some
No Man's Land between Charleston and the Virginia line, the gas
station an oasis in the night. He decided that it was his
consummation with Grief inside Kristen's dry, waning body that had
brought it into him at last now, as though she had, in fact,
transmuted something immortally sad with the touch of her body and
her teeth.

The pump clicked to show the tank was full, a puff of gas fumes
rising.  The console beeped as he replaced the nozzle in its cradle,
offering a receipt.  He was the only car in the gassing area, but at
the station itself - designed to look like some variety of pre-fab
log cabin with a greasy-smelling diner offering biscuits - was dotted
with people, some in rockers on the porch seated firmly in their
stereotype.  A man in a baseball cap was watching him with interest.

"Car's dirty," the man said.

Mulder took the receipt offered by the slot.  "Yeah," he said.  He
realized it was the first time he'd spoken aloud all day, and the
sound of his own voice startled him.

"Come a long way?" the man asked.  His rocker creaked out a beat.

Mulder went around the car, pulled open the pale green door.

"You have no idea," he said, and, lowering himself into the chintzy
seat, he closed the door and drove away.


*****


On the table, she watched the lights above her, her body encased in
silence.  Something was swimming in her veins that felt like sand,
the sheet over her reminding her of an autopsy.   Though she didn't
know how she was certain, she knew that somewhere above her The
Machine waited, its eyes closed.

"Adisa?" she whispered, and from nowhere, he was there.

"What is it, Dana?" His voice had that same lovely cadence, the
elegance she'd always found when English was mastered but did not
come first.

"You said you'd tell me why this is happening to me," she said as
his hand touched her forehead as if to heal.  "You said you'd tell me
everything."

He smiled the same gentle smile.  "What do you know of the ocean?"
he asked.  His eyebrows moved down, shores above his eyes.

"The ocean?" she said, confused.  Her voice was hoarse.  "It's made
of water and salt...it's where we came from."

Adisa nodded, his hand stroking back her hair.  "Where everything
comes from," he said.  "And very much like your mind.  Your dreams."

She shook her head, though she found that something kept her from
moving much, something that seemed to be growing stronger around her,
like being caught in a fist.  Above her something whirred like a
syllable deep in a throat.

"I don't understand."  It came out filled with sand.

"Feel yourself on the table," he said, leaning close, whispering in
her ear now as though what he said was a child's secret.  "Imagine
yourself a boat."

She blinked her assent.  "Yes," she murmured.

"Below you is the ocean.  You ride atop the ocean and you never sink."

"But--"

"No, YOU, Dana, you never sink."  His whisper grew more urgent, his
hand moving off her forehead, his body moving a step, then two,
away.

Above her the ceiling seemed to open, The Machine lowering, the
drape over her belly sliding away.  A pipe made of the brightest
metal she'd ever seen, a flat circle on its base, a hole at its base
like an eye.  When it touched her abdomen, just at her navel, she
felt something sharp slide through her skin.

"I never sink," she said, her blood growing thick inside her, her
body growing still.

"The ocean is the sum of everything your race has ever experienced,
Dana," Adisa said from behind her, unseen.   "It's the sum of
everything you yourself can know.  It is your past and your future.
Your beginning and your end."

She blinked again.  The metal went further.  She felt something
inside her suddenly, something round as an egg.  In her mind, it was
blue.  A blue egg made of water.

Her belly rose like dough.

"You sit on top of all of this," Adisa continued, his voice seeming
far away.  "You are on top of it but cannot see it or know what lies
beneath.  I am part of what's beneath, Dana.  So you must think of me
as a silver fish that comes to you from some place very deep, like a
dream visits your sleep, a fish that comes close and whispers to the
boat."

The stretching grew to a burning, her belly round, something moving
within it, something going out and something coming in.

"How..." she managed.  "How do you know all this?"

She could hear his smile in his voice just before she lost the fight
to the darkness.

"I don't remember," he said, and she knew he didn't say it as an
answer.  "I don't remember anything."


****

WHITE BEAR LAKE
OUTSIDE BIRCHWOOD, MINNESOTA
6:14 a.m.
OCTOBER 30, 1994

Across the surface of the lake, fog rising off of it in white wisps
like an old woman's soft hair, Mulder knew Canada waited.  The St.
Croix River, some life beyond it where he could be someone else.
Someone who didn't know the things he knew or had seen the things
he'd seen, Duane Barry dead on Skyland Mountain.  Some man who would
not remember her blue eyes, or a smile over a paper bag and root
beer.

Some stranger who would not admit, as he was doing at that moment,
that he was in love with her.

He toyed with the cross between his fingers, looked into the sky as
light painted it with a hundred shades of light.  He'd slept in the
rental car, the Mirage looking old and utterly disposable.  Yesterday
in St. Paul he'd used the Gunmen to make all that he'd need to turn
into someone else.  Daniel Minson.  Prince Edward's Island.
Fisherman.  He'd hoped it would give him some peace.

Instead he sat on the edge of the lake, his feet right near the
water, the cross between his fingers, the rough tips worrying the
gold like a charm.  He did feel free in way, he supposed, but not the
way he'd hoped.  He felt free in the way he'd seen a kite go free
once when he was a boy, its string tangled in a gnarl of autumn
branches, its owner giving a hard yank and the string breaking, the
kite catching the wind and twirling itself away.

He could not believe she was dead.  He'd decided not to believe that
from the moment he'd left the Exxon station in Dawson, turning not
East toward home but West, going back the way he'd come and becoming
lost in the miles.  America was good for that.  It was an easy land
to go missing within.  Skinner had not called to find where he was.
The man was too smart for that.

Now almost two months gone by.  Twenty-eight states.  He'd told
himself he was looking for her.

He couldn't believe she was dead, no.  But he could believe that HE
was no longer alive.

It was cold, a small breeze coming off the water.  The water blew
back in ripples, looking thick.  It made a soft noise against the
shore.  He pulled the army surplus parka he'd bought in the city
around him more tightly and blew into his hands for warmth.

From inside the coat, his cell phone beeped.  Once, then again.  It
moved to voice mail and he let it.  Then it beeped again.  Again.

He reached inside and noted the number - a Maryland area code.  He
tapped the button to talk.

"Fox?" Margaret Scully sounded too tired for good news.

"Mrs. Scully," he replied.  "How are you?"

"I'm..." Nothing.  A beat of silence.   "I don't have any news.
There's been no news."

"I know," he said gently.

"I don't know where you are, Fox," the voice continued, sounding
more tired.  "But I'd like you to come look at something with me."

He could already see it in his mind.  Her name cut into marble.
Empty earth.

"I'm not giving up," he said.  Until he said it, he didn't know he
believed.

"I am," came the reply, and the words tumbled their way out now that
those two had cleared the way.  "I need to feel like there's an end
to this.  If I can't find an end I'm going to damn well make one--"
Her voice hitched, tears catching her throat.

"Mrs. Scully," he rushed in.  He didn't remember even getting to his
feet but he was standing and had taken a couple of steps from the
water.  "Maggie...don't.  I'm...I'm on my way.  I'll come now.  I'll
be
there..." He trailed off, trying to calculate the geometry of time and
distance.

"I don't care when," the voice at the other end bit out.  "Just
please.  Get here when you can."

******

"Do you see them, Dana?" Adisa said from the darkness.

"Yes, I see them."  The pain was becoming tolerable, The Machine
gone, the test complete.

"What do you see?  Tell me."

She smiled, but it was a sad one.  Even in the darkness, she could
tell it would look wan.  "You already know, Adisa," she said softly.
"It's you that's showing me.  Isn't it."  It was not a question.

"Tell Penny then," he said gently.  A space like a door opened and
Penny Northern came in, trailing a sheet like a blanket.  Light
followed her in in a bar.  Penny was rubbing the edge of it with her
fingers, her hand on her belly as though she were protecting
something precious.  Herself, or something within her.  Scully had
learned to think of them as one and the same.

"Dana," Penny said, standing beside the platform Scully lay on.
Scully had grown to love the other woman's face, the well of her
eyes.

They did not ask if the other was all right.  They had stopped long
ago.

"I see my son," Scully said to her without prelude, their hands
interlacing, their fingers cold.  "And Mulder."

Penny smiled, a real smile.  "What are they doing, Dana?  Where are
they?"

Sometimes it was like this.  Time had no meaning where they were,
and parts of their lives would lap and overlap.  They came like
dreams but they were not dreams.  They whispered to Scully and to
Penny, just as Adisa said they would.

"Mulder's older," Scully began, gripping Penny's hand and gazing
into the pale face in the light thrown from the opening in the wall.
Adisa stood beside it, his hands folded in front of his chest.  "He
looks strong. He's on a beach and he's building something in the
sand.  The ocean's right there.  A cloudy day.  And they're
building...something..."

"Tell me about your son," Penny interrupted, leaning closer.  "Tell
me about him."

Scully smiled up at her. Her belly ached like memory.  "His name is
William.  He...looks like me...Mulder is laughing.  My son is
laughing..."

She couldn't say anymore.  Penny's face was against hers, the
woman's cold lips on her forehead.

"What do you see when you see these things?" Scully asked as Penny
pulled slightly away.  "What do you see?"

Something passed over Penny's face, her mouth turning down, though
she tried to push it away.  She smoothed at her own hair, smoothed at
Dana's.

"I don't remember," she said, and Scully swallowed at the tone of
finality to it.  "I don't remember anything."


*****

NORTHEAST GEORGETOWN MEDICAL CENTER
WASHINGTON, D.C.
10:01 a.m.
NOVEMBER 2, 1994

She could tell he'd been crying, that it had been weeks or months
since he'd dreamed untroubled sleep.

But she could remember his voice from the night before, the feel of
his hand touching hers.

"I'm here..."

She could hear a voice - changed - beside her, telling her her time
wasn't over...a familiar voice.

A man's voice?

No, that was someone else.  Someone else...

Same person, but this was a woman's voice.

Mulder was watching her from the door.  Melissa and her mother were
watching him watching her.

"How you feeling?"  Even his voice was graveled, his eyes heavy.

There was something at the back of her mind, something in the weight
she felt in her belly.  There was something about a face and a sea of
glass globes.  A dark hand.  Pain.

I don't remember, she heard in her mind, voice over voice, like
water rippling.

She could see something in his face by the hospital room door,
something hopeful.  Then some version of his face that was not his
face.

She could smell the ocean, and she was afraid.

I don't remember, she seemed to hear.

"Mulder," she said.  "I don't remember anything..."


END