Hello all ;-) 

So my actual computer is broken, and off in Gateway-Land, and the new
chapter of WADV is trapped in my harddrive (mental note: always
back-up your files...) so I've been virtually computer-less, and
fic-less.  However, when the entire family left today, and the office
computer was finally free, I realized I had nothing to write.  So I
brought out an old disk and rifled through the contents, and found
this little old story I had never finished.  So I thought - while it's
still quiet - I might as well finish it.  So here it is.  I'm hoping
to get my computer back next week (or the week after - we'll see) so
hang in there.
----> J.L 

Title:  Anonymous People Are the Only People Here
Author: Jaime Lyn
Email: Leiaj21@hotmail.com OR UCFGuardgirl@aol.com
Rating: PG
Keywords:  MSR, angst
Feedback: Yes, sure, oyu know I love it.  ;-)
Archive:  Anywhere, just let me know so I can keep track.  
Disclaimer:  Own nothing, don't sue.  Thanks.  
Spoilers:  Post Existence, Pre William
Summary:  When you're alone...

---

Thanks, JET, for making me laugh through the holidays, and for
prodding me to write something - keep the tree up through March, and
give yourself a present every friday.  Who says the holidays end in
December?

--

For Laura, who is very sick.  Hang in there, kiddo.  There's still too
much to live for.


---

Anonymous People Are the Only People Here
By Jaime Lyn 
----

     He has a grainy picture of her, a four-by-six snapshot, torn and
weathered at the edges, and in the very center. Photo Scully has long,
under-curled red hair, dark liner below her lids (back when she still
wore liner below her lids) and one of those wide, fetching smiles; he
doesn't remember this particular smile, and so knows he couldn't have
taken the picture.  Bill or Maggie or some errant Scully probably told
his Scully a joke, and then another one of them, maybe Melissa or
Charlie, standing only a few feet away, maybe four feet or five feet
to the back, called out her name - "Dana, over here!" and then, right
when her head turned, mid-laugh, with a lock of hair flicked into one
eye, the shudder was depressed. Click.  And Dana is forever smiling
that beguiling smile, at least here.
     This is one story: what he tells himself when he needs to tell
himself something and the subject doesn't matter.
     So far, he's had two hundred and five nights alone on a broken
cot, with only her picture to talk to, and subjects frequently come
without tethers; these stories matter to nobody but him.

     Dana has his books all to herself, these volumes of dog-eared
hard covers he'd piled up in lopsided stacks and pushed, on hands and
knees, into her hall closet, the day before he left.
     She likes to think the books are extensions of him; each worn
title is a half-opened window, glass panes gazing into the very core
of him, into the parts she likes best.
     Some days she'll pull open the closet door, tug on the
light-string, and bend at the hip, hands tap-tapping the wall. 
Leaning at such an angle cements a kinship with his books; she too is
misaligned, asymmetrical, shoved in some closet, waiting for her
reader, her interpreter, her match, to come and open her up.
     She examines the titles: Lore of Transylvania, Accounts of
Real-Life Wicca, Sightings, When UFOs Touch Down; anonymous,
paranormal hogwash to the untrained eye, but whispered promises and
feathery kisses of text to her.
She falls to her knees and pulls a book from the top.  Her back to the
wall, the light faint: a swinging stripe across the page, she reads
and reads and pulls her knees in close, and thinks of him.
     When the baby cries, and jostles her from hiding, she slips the
book back onto the lopsided tower he'd left for her, and rises to her
feet.  She shuts off the light and locks the door, imagining his voice
like a hand at her back, nudging her forward.
     The hardest part is going forward.  
     No matter how she cries, she always remembers to lock the door.  

     
     Mulder wonders at his own memory, and realizes he knows very
little.  Memories are not facts because facts are unshifting,
unchanging objects, and memories are merely bags of emotion gathered
by a pull-tie, exaggerated and twisted over time, until they're nearly
unrecognizable as the moments they had once been.  What, then, does he
know for certain?  If he can't even trust his own brain to recall
exact moments, precise, and in measure, how can he trust himself to
not forget?  The unreliability makes his memories tainted,
untrustworthy.
     But he remembers anyway. 
     The night he left her is of course the loudest memory, first and
foremost and put-together in his mind, and now he finds this somewhat
suspect.
     There stood Scully, rumpled in her blue silk pajamas and blue
cotton night robe, swaying, humming a melody to their week old son:
     "Will-iam was a bull-frog. Was a good friend of mine..."  
     She had no idea he'd seen her, and he liked that.  
     Her voice was lovely and soft, and touched only by the edges of
sleep.  He tucked himself close, right up by the wall, and imagined
the odds of a moment like this so unblemished; she could have been any
woman, any mother with child, but she was Scully, and the child was
his, and this distinction made them beautiful.  A million to one shot.
      "There you go," she whispered to the baby.  "There you go…"
     She set the baby down in the bassinet, and when she turned, her
pajamas swished at her ankles.  Her feet were bare. He brushed her
shoulder, and she faced him, calm but somehow ruffled.  Her blue eyes
were watery and unblinking; a few drops caught on her eyelashes, but
were as stubborn as she, and refused fall.
     "You'd have me go," he said, frustrated.  "Even though we don't
know for certain what – "
     "You need to go." She refused a single tear.  "Nothing is
certain, Mulder.  But you have to do this.  For me, for William, for
yourself..."
     "I would take you with me – " 
     She shook her head, said, "Frohike's waiting outside," in a
cracked voice.
     He said, "Let him wait another minute," and pulled her close; she
smelled of talcum powder and baby, and he wanted nothing more than to
stay and memorize these new smells, to awaken with them every morning.
     But the truth was the truth, and he needed to find the truth, and
defeat his enemies, or else he could never have his family.  He'd
created his own hole, dug it long ago, and now he needed to furrow out
the other side, or else bury himself.
     "You'll come back," she whispered.  
     "I'll come back," he promised.  
     Perhaps he cried; he wants to believe that he cried.  
     He bent to meet her lips, and touched his index fingers to her
cheeks. He brushed circles there, and felt an explosion in the back of
his head when she pulled in closer and grasped him.
     In his mind, the kiss was hours long.  
     "The world didn't end," she joked, when she pulled away from him,
her face wet with conjoined tears.
     Or were those tears hers alone? 
     He wants to believe so badly that he cried with her, but the
memory is grainy.
     He gazes at her picture, rubs his fingers over her young face.  
     Did she really get that last word in, or does he just imagine it
that way?
     "Say something," he says to the picture.  "Say anything.  Tell me
I'm crazy."
     Mulder, you're crazy.
     He imagines her words, feeling desperate, realizing he has
nothing left but an echo. He's drowning, and all he has to keep him
afloat are traces of a life raft, and his own two arms, scissoring
water like crazy.
     Crazy. 
     Mulder, you're crazy.  
     Mulder, you're crazy.
     Mulder, you're crazy.  


     The baby is at home, asleep, blissfully ignorant of life and
truth, and Dana has never been so jealous of anyone in her life.
     Her mother insisted they needed to get out; Dana, Maggie Scully
said, in that way mothers use when they look at their grown children
and see the five-year-olds the adults had once been.  Dana, you can't
shrug off the world and act like nothing else exists.  If it's not
work then it's a lot of nothing, and you can't possibly be happy with
nothing.   Let's make a date.  Let's go out.  Let's be different
people.
     Dana barely knows how to be herself. 
     But they went to the theatre, and sat in a private balcony, and
fanned themselves with glossy playbills, and pretended that pretending
didn't feel so wrong.
     Two minutes after they sat down, Dana lost track of time anyway:
the blood red seats, soft and plush, the wooden railing, the yellow
curtain pulley on either side of her – she'd gotten caught in a
nineteenth century oil painting. Before conspiracies and aliens and
men with agendas – this was what life was like.
     A life similar to hers, and yet not.
     Thoughts drifting again, between acts, she wonders about Lincoln;
what if Lincoln had come down with a cold the morning he was supposed
to visit the theatre, and decided not to go? One germ from one outing
one week earlier, and he would have lived, and all because of
something microscopic, an entity virtually undetectable.  One moment
in time folding the timeline in at such an angle that it shoots
everything out one way, instead of another, and the writer of history
can erase and begin again.
     How could Lincoln have known?  
     Her eyes hot and tired, Dana spends the intermission obsessed
with moments, and tries to pinpoint the exact the flux of time that
lead to this moment for her, in a darkened booth, in a darkened
theatre, her child asleep at home, and her partner gone.  What if
she'd gotten up five minutes earlier three years ago, and caught the
first elevator to the basement instead of the second?  What if she'd
gone and done the expense report for that one case, two years ago,
instead of filing it for later?  What if she never went for
in-vitro-fertilization?  What if she slept with Mulder after that
first case, and got pregnant in Oregon, instead of finding out, years
later, when they returned to their first case, that children weren't
such impossibilities?  What if she'd said yes to Mulder instead of no?
 What would have made the difference?
     The lights dim, leaving the booth a shadowed, lonely alcove.  
     "Isn't this wonderful?" asks her mother, waving her playbill at
the stage.  "I told you all you needed was to get out."
     Dana's head is heavy with regret.  Out loud she says, "It's very
nice."
     "Shh, darling.  The second act - " 
     "Why doesn't the wife have a name?"  Dana's words sound loud to
her in the hushed booth, and she swallows some of them back, feeling
put-out, and airless, as if she's sharing the wrong stage with a
mismatched conglomeration of play-actors.
     "I don't know, honey," says her mother.  "It's a play.  Let's
just enjoy it."
     "She should have a name," mutters Dana.  
     Dana's mother turns, and folds her arms, and the bubble of
pretend that once cocooned them bursts.  "Why does it matter?"
     Silent, Dana wonders about Mulder.   Does he think of her, does
he dream?  Can he ever forgive her for not knowing, for getting up
five minutes too late and catching that second elevator, for missing
that expense report, for going about her day, and somehow, someway,
setting into motion these events that would eventually separate them?
When should she have turned right instead of left?  She's not sure,
but she's positive somehow, she is to blame.
     Her mother gazes at her, expectant, and Dana feels alone.
     In a room full of nameless corpses and numberless files, she was
real so long as he was there to make her so.  But here, with Mulder
gone, with only her mother, her well-meaning but ignorant mother, this
woman who can never understand her life or her work, Dana is a
floater, a drifter; she's wandering blind, and anything real has gone.
     Swallowing, Dana refuses to cry. She wants to leave, but can't. 
She's trapped by Lincoln's red seats and his red curtains.  "This
character is meaningless," she says.  "No name, no identity, just…
meaningless. Anonymous.  Doesn't that bother you?"
     "Dana – "
     "Here."  Dana flips through her program, and stabs her finger at
the names of other characters, as if their very existence is a
personal affront.  "And here.  And here.  Look.  The husband is
nameless, too.  And the narrator.  And the Steward.  What the hell
kind of a thing is that to do to people?"
     "What on earth are you talking about?"
     "I don't understand it, Mom.  Why? Why don't they have names?" 
     "What?"  
     "Names!  They need names!" 
     Music lilts up to them from the stage, dizzying and sickening,
alternating melodies and harmonies, and Dana comes this close to
screaming, to leaning over the balcony for everyone to shut up.
     Just stop.  Shut up, shut up.  Fucking shut up!
     Her mother's face is pink, a shadow of confusion and annoyance,
and there's no way to explain this.
     "Dana?"
     Dana feels herself crashing, nameless and faceless, into that
well of truth her partner had been chasing, except there's no bottom –
just the well, no water, no floor - and since he's fallen first, she
will forever follow him, groping, waiting to catch up, just falling
and falling.
     "Nothing," says Dana, her hand at her forehead, rubbing. 
"Nothing.  Just nothing."
     "The second act," her mother says, tight lipped.
     "Yes, I'm sorry."
     Nothing.  


     It's ludicrous, the amount of time he spends searching for the
unforseen.  At this point, the truth should be something tangible: a
dumpster, a plate, a dishwasher.  He wants to hold the truth in his
hand, examine it, turn it over and over, poke at it, hold it to the
light, and say, "Ah, so this is what you look like."
     All these years, and this is what you look like.
     Words inside a computer, or on a disk, or on paper – this isn't
enough.  Ions of fruitless searching, of trying to prove what cannot
be proven, of giving up multitudes of possible lives and
opportunities, all to find the truth, to get at it in any way
possible, and in the end, he just wants to look it in the eye.  He
believes he deserves this much, this one time-deal.
     Just give him a room, and five minutes alone with the truth, and
when one of them comes out alive, he can go home.
     To Scully.  
     To his son.  
     Crumpling at this, he presses his face into his hands.  
     Jesus, what is he doing out here?  Just what does he think he's
doing?
     Someone taps him on the shoulder.  He turns.  
     "Mister?" says a young boy.  The boy is short and round, and
holds a bottle of water in one hand, and some change in the other. 
"You going to be long?"
     Mulder blinks, and feels as if he's just come up for air after a
year in a reservoir.  All the other tables are occupied, filled to
capacity with mind-numbing chatter and net lurkers, and there's a line
curling around the cashier booth.  Cyber Cafes get crowded this time
of day, which is exactly why he had come.  Anonymity is precious, is
key.  He blends in here, with the faceless people: businessmen,
teenagers, grandparents, parents, babies crying –
     Scully, in her pajamas, humming to William, her red hair kissed
with sleep, hovering over the bassinet: "Will-iam was a bull-frog..."
     How long has he been staring at a blank screen? A cursor blinks
ferociously at him.
     Say something, decide, decide, talk to her, you coward, you - 
     "I'll only be another minute," he says to the boy. 
     The past ten months, it seems, have been the world's longest
minute.


     Evenings are either hardest or easiest.  She feeds the baby, and
sings to him, and presses more kisses to his forehead than any poor
baby should have to endure from his mother, and then she puts him down
to bed.  Sometimes, she hums to him.  Other times, she works his name
into an old, familiar song, thinking Mulder would find her funny if he
could only hear her:
     "Will-iam was a bull-frog, was a good friend of mine…"
     The baby has bright blue eyes – Scully eyes, her mother once said
proudly, which Dana found disappointing.  At first she'd thought maybe
the color would turn green, or light brownish-olive.  Perhaps the baby
would have Mulder's eyes, since the shape of them was Mulder's shape,
and the baby sometimes had that wry, concentrated look which was
solely Mulder's look, but the baby's eyes remained blue.
     It still disappoints her.   
     Some nights she sleeps longer than others.  Her dreams are
stunted, tattered patches of memories remembered backwards.
     First they sat together on the living room floor, she and Mulder
back to front, he with the baby cradled in his arms, she
spread-eagled, spotting him from behind.  A bottle in Mulder's right
hand, and the baby's head cupped by his left, as he bent forward and
asked, "Am I doing this right?  He doesn't look very confident with me
doing this, maybe you should – "
     "Gas," she said, laughing, leaning her head into his shoulder. 
"Just gas, Mulder."
     "Ah," he said, not taking his eyes off the baby.  His head
cocked, eyes squinted; he looked perplexed, as if he felt he'd
spontaneously grown a baby from a pair of scissors and a paper-doll
stencil.  "All these years, and I thought that look was irritated
uncertainty.  A little less fiber in your diet, Scully, and we could
have been saved at least three arguments, and a gunshot wound or two."
     Then she was on a hill, out of breath, gazing up at the sky,
screaming his name, just his name, over and over:
     "Mul-der!"  
     Her heart pounding a staccato rhythm, pushing out fast breaths
from her lips, straining each heartbeat, as if the heart itself knew
by instinct where Mulder was, and it would find him without her
because the rest of her had failed.
     You coward, why haven't you found him, yet? He would have found
you, God damn it!  Remember? Remember when he found you, you failure,
you -
     Her shirt stained with sweat, face caked with dirt, she let tears
track a muddy route down her cheeks, and she called for him:
     "Mul-der!"  
     A child inside of her, pressing her on, forcing her to go
forward, when she only wanted to cover herself with sand and sleep;
where was he?  God, oh God, where was he?
     Last came a blanket of curious evening silence.  His fingers on
her cheek as she slept, drawing circles over her cheekbones, pressing
hair over her ear, drawing the hair forward, and pushing it back
again.  He spoke to her in the deepest crevice of night, when he
thought she couldn't hear:
     "You'd never believe me if I said I loved you, so I won't say it.
 I'll just think it to you, and maybe I'll whisper it – like this -
and hope you'll believe me through osmosis."
     She awakens when the baby wails, and reaches out over the
cavernous bed, disoriented, to ask Mulder for some help:
    "You get him, because I feel like I haven't slept in - "  
    But her breath catches when she finds the sheets are untouched,
the pillow empty and cold.  Suddenly, she's ripped apart, as if he's
still whispering the words, disembodied, into all the broken places
inside of her, "I love you, I love you, I love you, you'd never
believe me..."


     He has a hundred dreams of Scully, but one in particular he finds
most discomfiting.
     First, she's trapped up in a tower, calling down to him, her
words hovering, almost palpable, almost like text written with ink
into the air, but gone before he can capture just one in his palm. 
The tower is a beaten storybook, and on the spine of the book is
written the word, "truth."
     "Scu-lay!" he screams, gasping for breath, feeling his heart beat
faster, steadfast, on and on and forward, as he gropes at the tower,
because his heart seems to know something he does not.
     Then, just as suddenly as she is there, she disappears from the
window, and he is left wild with fear.
     Just to be sure, he calls her first name:
     "Day-na!"
     As if that will help.  
     At this point, he imagines clawing at the tower forever, or
ripping off a piece of spine just to send her a message.  Here, he
thinks in the language of fairy-tales: "I'm here, I'm here, Dearest
Dana.  Just look down.  I'm here."
     He'll send the letter up to her, the how isn't important – just
the why, always the why – and then he'll scale the truth, somehow, and
he'll find her inside of the tower, waiting, just waiting inside like
a prayer on the tip of his tongue, unreachable but there.
     Once, during one of their many email volleys, he joked about this
dream, about the absurdity of his own mind; "It must mean that you,
Dearest Dana, are my damsel in the tower, and I feel I'm rescuing you
from something.  Or else I have serious impotency issues and we won't
even get into what the tower represents."
     A week later, she joked back that she'd had the same dream,
except she dreamt it in reverse.  The first line read,  "Mulder, oh
Mulder, let down your hair to me."
     He tries to imagine what this would sound like, coming from her
lips; Scully never lets down her emotions and vulnerabilities to him,
not face-to-face, but only in email, where her uncertainties and
longings can flow unabashed, stretching over distances.
     He imagines the two of them as romantic heroes, as tragic figures
embarking on a splendid quest; before, they were simply Fox Mulder and
Dana Scully, ordinary and professional, just teetering on the brink of
more.  But now they're a sort of romantic epic, just two desperate
storybook characters, blank and anonymous, waiting on either end of a
modem for someone to let down a single rope of hair.
     He once said to her, while laid up in the hospital after a nasty
case, over a losing hand of Gin Rummy, "Someday I'll write a novel
about all of this, and call it, 'My Life: Pathetic, but True.'"
     He wonders if she thinks about the moments gone, and what she
would call their moments together, if she had to tie them up and give
them a name.  Just one name, a single word.
     "What if there is no truth?" she'd asked him over email, her
secret terrors emboldened in text.  "What if it's never safe?  What if
we're trapped in a sort of cosmic loop, an endless circle of
searching?  I don't think I could stand it, Mulder. Living this way
forever.   I think about when you left, and I'm afraid.  I'm
terrified, in fact.  I need you, Mulder, and I don't need anyone."
     When he closes his eyes, he imagines her voice.  
     Mostly, he wants her to speak these things he knows she would
never speak.
But now, his dreams turn quiet, shades of black and white, and nearly
motionless, like silent movie reels.  The timbre, the cadence, the
rise and fall of her chest when she says his name – these details are
fading.
     Memories aren't science, and they're not flesh either, but her
absence is the only thing real to him; if he remembers her wrong, if
he substitutes a voice similar enough to hers, just to jog his memory,
just to vocalize his dreams, then how can he know what's true and
what's merely forgotten with time? And what if he forgets entirely? 
Or what if his memories are just wrong to begin with?
     His entire life, a literary fabrication.  
     Pathetic, but true.
     "You'll come back?"
     "I'll come back."
     Mulder shivers, and remembers never telling her how he loved her.
 He'd only whispered it once in her ear, as she slept.  He'd said to
her, "You'd never believe me, so I won't say it."
     How stupid he'd been, stupid and pensive and filled to the brim
with ideas of truth.
     Why hadn't he said it to her, really and truly?
     Why doesn't he still?
     In a room filled with anonymous strangers, Mulder clutches her
picture to his chest, and gazes at a blank screen where her face
should be, and is as alone as he's ever been in his life.
     Hands shaking, he jokes his way through the subject header:
"Dearest Dana."
     And in the email, he sobs without tears, and speaks without
voice, and in black text, lets down his hair to her, and prays she'll
climb the tower.

----------
END
----------

Angst, angst, angst.   A little angst a day keeps the kleenex at
bay...

Well, no.  I think it's actually the opposite of that.  ;-) 

I suppose I started edits on this story (instead of the others I had
saved on this disk) because my mood is more melancholy than usual.  A
friend of mine is in the hospital in critical condition, and writing
something humorous just didn't feel right to me.  But I felt I needed
to write something, and WADV is temporarily MIA, so this came from my
fingers.

Thanks for reading, and if you send feedback, please keep my friend
Laura in your good thoughts - just for a second.  This girl has a lot
of good Karma coming to her, and I'd like to think well-wishes somehow
help.  Maybe we can do like the Stupendous Yappi, and create positive
energy.  ;-)