TITLE: Another Miracle
AUTHOR: Shoshana
EMAIL ADDRESS: shoshana1013@excite.com
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Gossamer, Spookys site, Xemplary,
etc.
SPOILER WARNING: Eighth season episodes through TINH.
RATING: PG
CONTENT STATEMENT: MSR
CLASSIFICATION: VA
KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully Romance
SUMMARY:  Post ep for TINH.
DISCLAIMER: These characters do not belong to me.
NOTE:  Huge thanks to Keleka for beta reading!


Another Miracle
By Shoshana

I have failed you Mulder.

Failed to look in all the right places...

An amateur UFO buff knew where to look; I didn't.

Failed to believe once again...

If I had taken Jeremiah's plea seriously, I wouldn't have lost him
to the skies.

Failed to save your ass one last time...

It only takes one failure to tip the scale--one failure to lose the
long battle to keep you alive.

We never discussed the possibility one of us would survive the other-
-even when I had cancer we never allowedd oourselves to speculate...

Just one more reason we resisted intimacy so long--becoming too
close would devastate us more so--or so I believed.  That belief fell
away last spring when I realized losing you would destroy me--
intimate or not.

I tried to be you Mulder.  I tried to approach the world from your
perspective, keeping an open mind when the Lone Gunmen would fax me
pages and pages of UFO sightings, unusual atmospheric conditions,
suspicious hospital admissions.  

I kept working, trying to reconcile tried and true scientific
methodology with the circumstances of the work, your work.   

I don't think I was a smashing success.  Doggett could have solved
some of those cases without me; I began to feel superfluous beside
him, a symbol of what you once were, what I never could be.  Lately,
I'd felt more and more useless--I couldn't even back him up in the
field, couldn't risk...

The baby.  The only thing I live for now.  If I didn't have this new
life within me, this lasting reminder of the love between us... I
think my shaky Catholicism would be sorely tested.  

I have been walking a fine line between belief and non-belief for
years.  So much has been taken from me--I'm tired, so tired of having
faith in a kind and benevolent God.

Seven days ago, the day we found you, I shouted to the heavens,
screamed at a deity I used to believe in unconditionally.  Yes, my
convictions had changed over the years.  I could accept that bad 
things happened to good people.  I accepted the notion we all must
bear some burden--had I not borne mine well enough, Lord?

Apparently not.

I have failed you Mulder.  I have failed myself.  I have failed our
child.  

I will face my failure, I will try to make peace with a power I
still acknowledge as the creator of all that lives and breathes.

There's only one more thing.  I have accepted we found you with no
vital signs, no breath respiring through your tortured, still
beautiful, shell of a body.  I have accepted that we buried you six
feet below, beside the bodies of your mother and father, beside the
symbolic resting place of your beloved Samantha.

What I can't accept is that you're really gone.    

In the quietest hour before the dawn, I can feel you beside me.  I
can feel you walk over to the bed, sit down, then lie beside me.  You
embrace me, draw me close to your side.  I can feel the warmth of
your body, the aspiration of your breath across my neck.  If I lie
very, very still, I fall back asleep in your loving arms.  

The first night I dismissed it as a wishful remnant from one of my
dreams.  The sensation was clearly not from one of my nightmares--I
remember those all too well.

I am insane, Mulder?  If I wrote these thoughts down in my journal,
if someone should find them, would they commit me, take my child away
from me?

I saw you, Mulder.  You reached out to me before you died.  It's not
the first time I've seen an apparition, but it may be the first time
I'm willing to accept their plausibility.  

I have rationalized all those visions in the past, written them off
as hallucinations or wishful thinking.  I don't want to now.  I want
to cling to some slim hope, some crazy extreme possibility that
things are not as they appear to be.

Your soul haunts me, Mulder.  If it didn't I would be so alone. 
Please stay with me.  Stay with me while our child grows inside me.  

I'm praying for another miracle, Mulder.  Don't disappoint me.

fin

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