Fathoms Five
by Penumbra
X-Files/MSR/Rated R

- Never is a very long time -

Warning - this story contains a graphic depiction of suicide.
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'...  One can't believe impossible things.  But the White Queen has her own principles.' ~ Alice, in 'Through the Looking Glass'
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'Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.'
- Tennyson, 'Tithonus'

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When Scully was 56 years old, her faith in the natural order drew its rational conclusion.

She arrived very early in the morgue basement of the chief coroner's facility, in the county of Los Angeles, bearing an old .38 Smith & Wesson that normally resided in her car. It contained a single wadcutter target bullet.

Somewhere off the coast of Washington State, the U.S.S. Waccamaw, late of N.S. Miramar, moved south, unladen, decommissioned, propelled by salvor tug.

Scully paused just inside the swinging doors. The long room was empty and the refrigeration units hummed. The smell of coffee, a sweet note above the stuffiness of formalin and decay, and the presence of a body bag waiting on a gurney told her someone alive was about the premises.

She quickly chose a cold storage chamber at the back, turning on the light as she shut the polished steel door. The cold made the skin prickle over her shoulders. The bodies on the shelves in their black bags were silently intent upon her. She sat down at the very back of the chamber, her eyes on the drain in the floor. She had seen people use garbage bags, tarps, thinking about what would come after, but Scully was not prepared to think any further ahead.

It was the ship she kept thinking of, trying to keep herself detached. It was the desolation of the miles and miles of ocean, and it was the emptiness of the ship, the dying ship, unpiloted, plunging on dead through the waters.

She'd lain awake with the experiment before her like an overdue assignment, and despite her fear and her despair she also knew the old burn of curiosity. Only terror was left now.

The .38 Super Police was room temperature and incredibly big and shiny, far bigger than the job at hand required. The muzzle like a black eye looked as big as a teacup.

Scully pressed her shoulder blades against the wall, getting dry mouth. Do it fast. Naturally there was no window in the room. She wanted a window to look at. She switched the gun to her left hand so that she could cross herself with her right, and shut her eyes, breathing so hard that the gun barrel rattled against her temple. She considered the angle, seeing the coroner's diagram of entrance, trajectory, exit. Often people missed, or lived to tell, nicked the frontal lobe, lodged a bullet in the optic foramen.

At the last moment she jammed the pistol in her mouth, hands wrapped around grip, both thumbs through the trigger guard.

She tasted machining oil. *Click* said the double-action as her thumbs got the message.

The crash overtook her and through the endless ricochet of noise she only saw darkness, with eyes open wide. She couldn't feel her body - she was dead, head blown off. Nothing but death could be this far beyond endurable. The loudness inside her head was a bell of agony. The pain was so unbearable it was beyond pain. She was dead, brains on the wall, she was a pulpy glob that had once contained life; she quivered as the nerves played out, but the peace she had anticipated didn't manifest.

She began to see colors, all sprayed and smeared, and then she could see herself down below, lying folded over in the small well of a room, blood circling around her head like the solid disc halos of medieval angels. A muddy splatter on the wall. She could see the wear on the bottom of this dead Scully's shoe, see the white hand limp beside the bloody gun. A streak of smoke hung in the air above her. A mist of atomized blood settled. Her body seemed a distant thing, and for a time she gripped the hope that she was, indeed, dead.

All at once she was diving, and the cold concrete floor smacked her cheek as if she had just landed hard inside her head. It was devastating to admit this to herself. Where was her death? The terror became more intense than her massive trauma. Terror and panic and her inability to move.

She could only lay frozen, her head resonating in great outward ripples, eyes unable to focus, blood warm in her mouth. Worst of all was the percussion pain in her ears. Then the desire to breathe came to her, overriding everything else. After a terrible struggle, she suddenly opened her mouth and the blood poured out as she inhaled. She could feel her shoulder and her hip, heavy as stones, her head still pressed to the floor, cheek glued to the cement with cooling blood.

Worst of all, she was alive.
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Scully was so cold she didn't notice the traffic lights suspended in a green swag before her until the cars began to honk. The noise was terrifying, and it was as if she had been caught out, illuminated. People on the sidewalk turned to stare. There was probably a law about driving around with a gunshot wound to the head. California had a law for everything. She plucked her foot from the brake and the car hitched forward in the raft of commuter traffic.

People were only honking out of impatience, not because she was a mangled freak of nature. She'd rinsed the blood from her hair and finger-brushed her hair over the back of her head, pressed paper towels to the squashy spot on her skull until it began to harden up. It didn't hurt and yet it hurt in the manner of unbearable psychical outrage, like being conscious during surgery.

She had an initially grave intra-oral wound, a neat hole in the posterior oropharynx she could feel with her tongue. The explosion of propellent gases in her mouth had ejected unpleasantly through her nasal cavity, ripping along her sinuses. The tinny sound in her ears came and went, and she was, she judged, in considerable shock, the full complication of her situation still sinking in.

She nosed her car into the shade of a billboard, and sat steeped in the heat that washed from the roof of a car dealership. Before her, a small space between the weeds and a stucco wall yielded an interminable gush of humans tramping a given bit of sidewalk. She waited for the space at the top of her palate to occlude so that she would be able to speak properly, fading in and out, sleeping deeply through the numbness in her ears and waking with a jump, panting like a rabbit run to ground.

It was not that she wanted to die, but she wanted to be rid of herself, this part of herself that she could not shake. She wanted the option of being rid of it. She had only herself to look forward to, like a bug on her hand that she could not shake off. She had come to hate this aspect of herself, the lack of choice, the endless wearying prison of herself.

She hated this hot, false weather that belied mood or despair or the sleaziness of life, the place of plastic perpetual youth they'd all had to move to because of her. Mulder, a born Easterner, missed the east coast the most, but Scully missed it too, the snows and rising waters and clear delineation between the seasons. They missed their Maine slate sink, and the Washington Post, the milky blur of salt on the windshield, and the taste of Poland Springs.
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In the early afternoon she drove up the long curve of the slumped dusty hill with her car windows open. Their house was wedged into a shoulder of the hill, camouflaged by madrone and low brush, forest fire smoke and valley smog.

At the top of the driveway Scully jerked the door handle and hung out of the idling car. Along the bottom of the lawn a bit of the retaining wall had tumbled into the road, and William was sorting out the stones, trying to fit them back into place.

"Oh!" Scully cried. The dog was watching her from the lawn, a wad of black wool, panting, his eyes on hers like he knew what she'd done.

"I've almost got it," said William, straightening up and smiling at her with his father's sly, sleepy eyes. "The car's okay," he added.

She turned off the ignition and stood in the road among the loose chunks of andesite. William replaced the stones methodically, in no hurry, making a puzzle out of it, placing shims to keep everything even. Periodically he hummed a heavy riff that descended until his head nodded sharply three times, marking time. His knees were grimy and he was wearing a horrible pair of salt-rotted sneakers she thought she had thrown away.

"It's just that your father built that wall," she said.

Her attention was caught by the view. Half of their property's value stemmed from this view of the San Bernardino Mountains and this immense valley, often obscured in smog or fog sprizted with sunlight and caught, humming, in the circling-to-land area of a nearby airfield,  a skirl of the Santa Ana winds. It was a dry, dusty sight, but the sense of expanse was gripping. She stood with her mouth open, breathing to calm herself. The view was wonderful, when the atmosphere cooperated.

The old dog's tail thumped against the ground beside her. He pushed his head against her leg. William was copying her stance, she noted with exasperation. William was too much like her - it was a difficult way to be. He was scientific to a fault. As a small child he had soothed himself by counting. He crossed his arms in a way that was pure Scully. She had long passed it off as a phase. With him, she thought of everything as a phase. Music was a phase, Arable was a phase - even physics was probably a phase. Still, William had grown up with his Scully-imitations intact, his serious grey eyes, and a tendency to pronounce himself fine.

At first people overlooked William because of his quietness. His chest was thick for someone nearly nineteen, and his legs were scratched from racing through the chicory after basketballs. There was a fake tattoo inked around his wrist, in Arable's writing.
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Mulder came out of his study, barefoot, smiling, a pencil behind his ear, and put his fingers under her chin and kissed her several times on the mouth. "Hey, where've you been -- there's a mystery," he said. The pencil landed with a cedary ring upon the Mexican tile.

Scully smiled wanly, and followed him into his study. It was her favorite room in the house, everyone's favorite room, with its long flange of sunlight and the wall of bookcases, the organic shape of the adobe fireplace, swept out, and currently storing a box of plastic binders. A cedar Klickitat canoe lay across the beams overhead, its hull cracked and delicate as a husk.

"There is?" she asked.

"Yeah, L.A. County Morgue called - they have you on camera coming in at 5:30 this morning, you didn't check in, and they have no record of you leaving." Mulder leaned over a map on his desk, penciling rapid marks that looked like football plays. Half of his concentration was on South America, she was relieved to see. "What do you think it could be?" he asked. He stuck a sunflower seed in his mouth, and she heard the shell crack. In the middle of the room, a ping pong table held stacks of books and folders and manuscript reams; Scully suspected that the net down the center delegated a primitive sorting power.

In the last decade Mulder had published two modestly received books, the second of which, Prosper Athena, had been reprinted in trade paper. Scully had surmised that he was the first author to be simultaneously reviewed in both The New York Times and Fortean Times. From his X-Files days Mulder retained a small but devout cult following. Nevertheless, the book found a larger audience than he had expected, and he had done a signing at the Strand and received a small grant from an obscure New Mexican literary fellowship which mainly seemed to champion Guatemalan witchcraft.

He was Casteneda with a twist, he was Jung and Campbell and Guirdjieff, and his books were incantatory, like Mulder's mind condensed, like a Norse saga pouring out. Everything that she savored about him was in these books. She had read each of them several times, keeping it rather secret, because it made Mulder feel strange when he saw her reading his book. They were magnificent, life-changing books, and it saddened her that they weren't that widely received. William thought they were okay, but he seemed to read them as he would an assigned text, without real enjoyment. Scully knew someday he would read them again, with terrible grief and anguish and wonderment, and then she knew that Mulder's books were important beyond measure.

"That's strange - they have no sign of me leaving?" Scully set her keys down by the answering machine. A tendril of grape vine had grown in through the top of the open window, and was feeling for traction on the wall. For a moment she considered the possibility that she couldn't be captured on film, then recalled that she had departed through a service entrance, stumbling to her car with a dampened towel held to the back of her neck. She was no unreflective vampire or ghost. She wasn't like Leonard Betts perambulating around decapitated. "Are they sure it was me?"

"Yeah, well, like I said, it's a mystery. And I was thinkin' - maybe it's like some kind of weird interference. But, where were you today, Scully? They called about the problem with Arable's passport."

At least the morgue hadn't noticed the pock in the wall where she had picked out the bullet. The flattened chunk of lead was still in her coat pocket. She had shoved a steel gurney against the wall - they probably hadn't moved it yet. She had not done the best clean up job. At the time, she had been dealing with different repercussions. The true aloneness she had always suspicioned in herself was now verified.

The need to keep a low profile had grown with every passing year, and she'd learned to tone down her brightness. She had been groomed to be exceptional. Hardly anything was as important as standing out, making a name for herself in her selected field. But now as time awkwardly continued to pass, the need to keep a low profile grew, and she pursued this just as decisively. Scully could be low key; no longer a true authority, there were others who easily outshone her. She had learned to be mediocre.

Mulder had stopped what he was doing, and he had noticed the way the heel of her hand pressed against her pocket.

Scully swallowed. "You know those hermits who talk to themselves, but it's like there's two people inside them, two sides to the conversation? Well, I'm starting to feel like there's this me, the me that you know, who's out here in the world with you," she said, staring hard at his face.

The light was going out of him.

"...And there's this other me who has stopped."

Mulder's bright black eyes had a terrifying stare. Scully had not thought what the rest of the day would be like following her finger on the trigger. She had known, deep inside, that she could not hope to get away with putting one over on Mulder.

"Scully, what's happened?"

Her head hurt terribly. She brought her hand out of her pocket with the flattened slug sitting in her palm. "I think you know what has happened."

Mulder's hand came over hers, folding it shut. Something came up inside him, a horror, a rage; she had a glimpse of his eyes as she stepped out of his way. He was gone from the room, and she heard his feet on the stairs. She put her hands on her hips and threw back her head to keep her eyes from brimming over.

Driving in the dark that morning she had told herself it had little to do with him and that she had to know - she had to know. But now at home her actions seemed completely selfish. She had not kissed him goodbye when she arose in the middle of the night. She dressed in the downstairs bathroom, the old dog behind her drinking deeply from the toilet bowl, something she would normally not allow. The thing driving her had an intensity like panic. Kissing Mulder and William goodbye would have been admitting to herself what she was about to do. It would be admitting she didn't want to come back to them, because coming back would mean the awful thing inside her was real.

She had looked at herself in the mirror, into the endless black horror of her eyes. The dog with his head in the toilet bowl chugged on and on.

She left the dog in the porch, turning off the light when he looked at her sadly. She had refolded the rug in his basket and then she went out into the night and coasted the car down the hill through the dimming stars.

She stood in Mulder's study with the eight-foot blue whale fin bone lying across the hearth and the cradleboard unraveling on the wall. She stood against the couch with sunlight slicing in through her retinas and enhancing her headache. She heard Mulder on the stairs and after a few minutes saw him cut across the lawn and plunge off the low wall, scuffling through the loose stones still scattered in the road. He wore shorts, running shoes without socks, and a t-shirt of William's that had been on the bathroom floor that morning. He had forgotten his knee brace. He stopped and pointed the dog back toward the house, and she thought that his eyes glanced across her window.

He ducked his head and set off down the dusty lane at a jolting trot. He bogged for a moment in a shoal of loose gravel, trod in place, then hit some hard caliche and began to move. White butterflies stirred up around him and then he was obscured by weeds and dust and the tears in her eyes. A great part of Scully went with him, breathing in the baked air, rolling with the momentum of the hill.

William's hand slid down the door-post. "Where's Dad?"

"He went for a run." Scully didn't turn around.

"I would have gone with him."

"I think he needed to be on his own."

She waited for William to leave her alone, her knees pressed into the old couch. Years ago she had sat on this couch and fallen in love with Mulder. The leather was polished and thin with age. At the corners it had cracked and the stuffing was beginning to protrude. Scully had thought about having it patched, but that would have been admitting that the sofa was getting old. When they moved it out to California, Scully had realized the couch was actually a dark green, something  impossible to tell in Mulder's shadowy Alexandria apartment.
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Mulder was back. He was out in the arbor; when she leaned forward over the kitchen sink she could just see his feet propped on the marble slab they used for an outdoor coffee table. They practically lived in the whispering leafy green room, geckos gulping in the vines. On the banquette opposite lay a paperback mystery; a tarp spread on the deck displayed a mountain bike William had taken completely apart a week before.

When Scully leaned closer to the screen and mouthed his name, the toe of his shoe wiped irritably back and forth. He drew his knee up; in the green underwater light she saw the long crossed muscles in his damp bare leg.

"Mulder, I had to know," she insisted.

He was silent; his leg jiggled slightly. On the window sill before her was a rusty square horseshoe nail someone had dug up in the flower bed, a Band-aid still in the wrapper, two unripe tomatoes, and a trilobite of the unlikely binomial nomenclature Paradoxes mulderii, fossilized in limestone. Her eyes went immediately to Mulder's feet.

"Damn it, Scully," he said, distantly. "What if we never saw each other again?"

"I think we both knew that wasn't going to happen, though, didn't we?" Scully said coldly. William came into the kitchen behind her. He went for the cookies on top of the refrigerator. Scully turned around and they looked at each other.

"What are you staring at?" she asked.

"You tell me." William raised his Mulderish eyebrows, chewing. "You left your car in the road. I put it away for you."

"Everything's fine. We'll talk about it later," Scully said. She felt too exhausted to go on. She dispensed ice into a glass and poured lemonade over the crackling cubes. "Could you take this out to Dad, please?"

He took it from her hand, letting his warm fingers rest against hers, as if he could tell more about her that way.

"You know, I know you don't think we understand what it's like for you," he said. He put two cookies in his mouth at once.

"Will, please, not now," she said.

"But we're here, too, Mom," he said, chewing. "We're right here, right along side you. Think about it."

Scully gave him a bitter smile. That was the hardest thing to think about.

She turned and went upstairs. She wanted to die, but maybe now it was just exhaustion. I want to give up, she thought. And even worse: I can't. I can't. In the bedroom the bed was made. An open suitcase on a chair contained a London guide book and a bottle of vitamins. The dog's cedar chip bed was empty.

She went into the small, clean bathroom and opened the mirror over the sink, poking through the cough syrup and hand lotion and hair products, looking for painkillers. She plucked out a prescription bottle containing the tiny microchip Mulder had stolen from the Pentagon an age ago, back when they were young and crazy and so desperate to go on.

Scully held up the plastic bottle and shook it ironically. She had removed the chip from her neck a few years before, thinking of Marjorie Butters, hoping its minute integrated circuits were somehow responsible for her stasis. William had thought it a logical course of action to take.

Mulder, however, panicked at the idea. Scully wanted to throw the thing away, amusing herself imagining aliens tracking the chip through its sojourn in the Puente Hills Landfill, but she conceded it should be kept on hand. Just in case, Mulder said. As if, at this point, there wouldn't be some relief in the natural event of cancer.

What about deactivating it? Mulder had asked.

Scully dropped the compressed slug in beside the microchip and recapped the bottle.

A panic of her own went around and around inside her as she lay staring up into the high dormer eave, her head thumping with each compression of her heart, the day growing old around her. Worse than William going away to Oxford was the first whisper of possibility that she and Mulder might be forced apart.

As she lay listening to evening descend, she heard Matthew's awful old car managing the hill. The car door slammed, then she heard the frog that lived where the hose leaked at the side of the house. She heard the neighbors over the hill, who shared their driveway, returning home. The distant sounds of trucks on the grade and airplanes going down the sky into the airfield. By now the rusting Waccamaw would be nearing the coast of Oregon, making eight knots, perhaps, bound for Brownsville, Texas via Panama, bound for scrap.

Down the canyon a weed-whacker sputtered on and on, and she heard the evening crickets, thought about the possums coming down the hill for dog food...

Dark came at her quick as a sneaker wave up the beach.

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Mulder's books were destroying angels of intense matter dense as anti-matter. They had taken his best ideas and philosophies and sieved them like platelets from his blood, skirmished their way out of him as he yawned, late at night, waiting for the muse to leave him so he could go to bed. A book destroyed so much of him, but still there was nothing for it but to write it down, like X-raying his shadow to the wall.

Mulder was long lucky with near misses, and the luck itself bemused him. He'd busted through doors at the last second, known eleventh hour reprieves, gun in his hand and then the phone ringing, and maybe it was her.

He could be alone again now, but he wasn't.

Things had only gotten weirder after they'd quit the X-Files, contaminated as they were by some unnamable substance that dogged after them like footsteps down a hall. None of it appeared to surprise William, born adept at the family malediction.

In twenty years they'd learned to weft the ribbon of normalcy about the warp of moldy wet forest that sprang up wherever they went. William grew up on the California beaches and his mother worked unblinking over her corpses and his father wrote fondly of doubtful and unpronounceable things.

Mulder had sat down to write although he wasn't in the frame of mind required to summon each well-wrung thought and connect it to the next. Maybe he would never write again. He would tear away the keyboard and up-end the monitor into the India hawthorne above the lane, forget productivity and let the panicking seconds wedge themselves between himself and Scully, allow her give up on him and turn away. She was going to anyway, eventually, sunken into herself, forgetting him as each second that had made him real and made her not became another mote between them until the crystal flecks clouded into layers and layers of glass through which could be dimly seen what might once have been.

Mulder made his mind blank, idling in his carved chair with a bare foot on the desk, book open in his lap, gaze lost in the shadows of grape leaves on the ceiling.

In time he had grown to love the airy room that caught and held each day's sunny ration in its wobbling bowl. Hills fell away outside, hazy, bristling, smelling of forest fires; ice-flecked cirrus rode high above. The adobe fireplace looked soft as a flannel sheet. The redwood shelves bracketing it were stuffed with his favorite books and curios. His best thing, his canoe, would go to the Anthropology Museum of the University of California someday. He had once liked to think of Ishi there, living in the museum, but now the thought of that wild ingenuous life caught among the dry relics struck him as depressing.

Upon the move to California Mulder had thrown himself into the pursuit of place, refusing to dismiss Los Angeles County on the grounds of superficiality, although they'd forfeited the deep damp forests and steamy windows for a place of plastic perpetual beauty.

Adaptable, he revisited Bukowski and Steinbeck, trying to get at the heart of the feeling the area gave him. He reread The Day of the Locust, dabbled in Boyle, and scrounged up a copy of The Hawkline Monster. From Brautigan he divined the spirit of western ridiculousness. From Muir, he got its peace.

The traditional rogue's gallery had layered up on the wall above Mulder's desk like a spit-paper nest. Among the customary clippings and tabloid fare were family pictures, mostly of William at various ages: William and Mulder at Macchu Pichu, William on The Vineyard; and the framed Strughold Mining Company photograph of his father and the others, a picture both terribly powerful and at once faded and delicate, and in which he also found William's face.

There was a color Polaroid with a strong potential for blackmail Mulder had come into possession of while helping to move Scully's mother, and which was so hilarious that even Scully snorted when she saw it: pallid Dana Scully at sixteen, swathed in moire taffeta and half a can of hairspray, self-possessed, lip-glossed, gracing the nervous arm of her prom date.

Mulder pulled a sunflower shell from his tongue and flicked it out the open window, for once taking no comfort in Scully's misspent pumper truck youth.

The only pictures that had been taken of Scully in the last fifteen years were by the DMV. Just out of nostalgia he'd put up a somber picture of Mulder and Scully, FBI, all unsmiling, suited up, and offering no hint of the life they would eventually live together, combining checking accounts, picking out a puppy, watching TV in bed with a feverish child sleeping between them.

The sight of the picture brought Mulder to his feet, and, drawing himself together, he went up to check on Scully.

He needed more time, really, but time was not something he could bend like hot iron into useful form. Time came at one like a sword, and was past.

The bedroom was heavy with sunset and Scully lay gazing into the light, a bundle of baskets and a Turkish salt-bag hanging in the dormer above her. Her small bare foot just fit the length of his hand.

He remembered her face the first time they'd met, when she took his hand  and saw through his particular brand of scorn. He had watched hurt fill her eyes when their newly-retrieved toddler looked at her without recognition. And he remembered her face during those first, delirious episodes when he'd wrenched the perfect suit from her body and her composure had vanished, her expression shifting in unfamiliar orgasmic dissolves.

She turned her head now and met his gaze profoundly with her outer-space eyes. He watched her quick tabulation of his expression through the deep black specks of her pupils, like holes into her brain. Her arm was thrown out lazily, and her toes curled into his hand. "Oh, Mulder," she said.

He stroked the bony top of her foot. Scully ultimately belonged to Scully, and it had taken him twenty-seven long years to realize that, even though he'd cautioned himself from the beginning.

The same could be said of himself, as Scully had pointed out more than once.

"What are the kids doing?" she asked in her sleep-sweetened voice, the  damp pluck of her lips parting making her real again.

"Shouldn't you be in the hospital?"

She averted her eyes. "'S's not necessary." She gulped, looking limp but not entirely beaten. She sat up, wincing. The only visible bits of trauma were a glimpse of gauze at the back of her neck, the damp towel across the pillow.

"The kids are making lasagna," he said, turning away. "Matthew showed up with some bread and a bottle of wine and thou, beside me singing in the wilderness. William's cooking."

He could feel Scully staring at him as he fiddled with the apothecary scale on his dresser.

"What do I do about you?" she asked softly.

He turned his attention pointedly to her. "You mean, do you apologize? Do you give me space? Do we act like nothing happened? I don't know, Scully. How would you feel if I'd done that to you?"

"But you did do that to me," Scully said quickly.

Mulder was nodding thoughtfully. "You called me a bastard," he said. "And that was about as far as it went."

"You can imagine how I felt," she said.

Mulder nodded again. "I can now." He found some change in the pocket of his jeans and tossed it onto the scale. "I guess what this has made me realize is that I depend on you too much." To be perfectly honest, he had realized that he depended on her too much back in 1997 when she'd nearly hemorrhaged to death in the ICU, if not long, long before that. He'd realized it and hadn't done a damned thing about it.

"The vet called and said that Tash's hip X-rays look fine," Mulder said dully. "And you'll never believe it, but a big piece of Black Forest cake from that bakery you love has mysteriously materialized in the fridge."

"Maybe it's the best day ever," Scully said in a choked voice.

"Maybe it is," Mulder said sadly.

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