TITLE: Simple AUTHOR: Susanne Barringer EMAIL: sbarringer@usa.net ARCHIVE: Anywhere okay with these headers attached. CLASSIFICATION: V KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully UST SPOILERS: The Unnatural RATING: G SUMMARY: Post-ep for "The Unnatural." Short. DISCLAIMER: Characters and scenario borrowed from David Duchovny, Chris Carter, 1013, and Fox. No infringement intended. This one is for Suzanne Schramm with endless thanks for your wisdom and enthusiasm, which never fail to make my writing better. ________ Simple by Susanne Barringer Tonight you gave me an invaluable gift. You shared a piece of your life with me, your private life, something important to you. You let me see a part of you that is usually separate from us, and then you shared it with me and turned it into ours. For that, I love you. I loved your gift. I loved the moment when I was in it. It is only while looking back that I become unsure. It scares me. Not the physical closeness so much, although that is certainly scary for its own reasons, but us, together, laughing, forgetting about conspiracies and X-Files and expensive suede coats and everything else that makes up our lives. Just us, you and me, outside, alive, hitting balls across an empty field and into the night sky. An adorable Cupid, hired at ten dollars an hour, loaded baseballs instead of arrows and worked his magic on us in a park empty of spectators but full of silent angels. Like I said, scary. Utterly and totally terrifying. But only after the fact. At the time, it was simply the difference, the unusualness, the absolute abandon of a single moment wrapped up in warm arms around me and hot breath against my ear and a tight shared grip on a bat. Sharing the swing, the motion, the power, hips before hands, making contact, sharing. Now, later, the fear sets in. What was that? What has happened to us that we can stand there, so close, so in tune with each other, and not only love it but indulge in it, without fear, without doubt, without consequences? I sit here now and marvel at how simple it was, how it took no thought, no decision, it just was. We just were. We have never been that simple. Never. Not even in the first moment we met, the psychological baggage we each carried already lined up by the door in neat rows. My science, your beliefs--an inevitable conflict that has never disappeared, although it has certainly grown and sprouted and changed direction a million times since that first confrontation. "Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?" I can still hear you as though it were yesterday. Our conflict was a primal one, compromise seemingly impossible. But we have come to manage it, to work our differences into one whole. One bat. One ball. Hitting together over and over if only to see how far it will go, how close to the stars we can reach. Tonight was simple. Simple needs, simple love. Simple us. Simpler than we have ever been. Wood against leather, the tight crack of the union, the echo of it drifting through the air, rumbling up my spine, vibrating between our bodies. The scent of fresh-cut grass, of you. The large comfort of your arms around me, the edges of your hands against mine on the cool wood, the warmth of you taking me into your world. Our power and movement joined together as one, sending baseballs out into the depths of the night, an endless dark curtain behind the lights of the field. The stars beckoned the two of us as they have always beckoned you. How could we suddenly become so simple? Complexity becomes simplicity and now there is only curious fear. Where do we go from here? END __________ feedback always cherished: sbarringer@usa.net All my fanfic available at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dreamworld/2442