From: "Nynaeve" TITLE: Debris Ascending 2: Up in Flames(1/1) AUTHOR: Nynaeve E-MAIL: scully@on-net.net RATING: PG-13 CATEGORY: post - ep "Closure" KEYWORDS: MSR, RST (implied) SPOILERS: Closure, Sein und Zeit, minor ones rest of show, just to be safe SUMMARY: Sequel (sort of) to Debris Ascending - what happened when they got back to D.C. DISCLAIMER: Chris Carter... yadda, yadda, yadda ... 1013 ... blah, blah, blah. Bottom line: not mine. FEEDBACK: Yup. Love it. Keep it all in little folders, specifically marked for each story. Respond to all of it too. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Anywhere, just let me know please where it's going so I can visit. Spookys - feel free to archive. DEDICATION: the usual suspects as always. Also, a huge thanks to everyone who's written in the past week. The last three stories generated such immense feedback. I was utterly overwhelmed by all of you! Thank you so much! NOTES: This story, in addition to being a post-ep to "Closure" is somewhat of a sequel to "Debris Ascending", a post-ep for "Sein und Zeit". You don't have to read the first one to make sense of this, but it would help. You can find it at: http://members.xoom.com/Nynaeve1723/postep.html Debris Ascending 2: Up in Flames We watched Harold Piller flee into the darkness. Mulder made no move to stop him and though I should have been more concerned, my primary focus was the man in front of me. "I'm free," he had said. His voice held such joy, such contentment, such wonder. The darkness into which Harold Piller ran was the same darkness from which Fox Mulder had emerged after nearly twenty-seven years. He brought with him a light I'd never seen before in his eyes. The smile on his face ran up and hid in those chameleon eyes of his. For the first time since I'd known him, I watched Mulder smile a smile that seemed to come from the bottom of his heart and not stop on his lips, but infuse his whole face with its radiance. His eyes held no trace of guilt or sorrow or anger, only release. I smiled back at him. We drove through the night. Victorville, California is pretty desolate. Not quite as desolate as some of the towns out in the Mojave Desert, but not exactly a thriving metropolis. It sits at the crossroads of a major interstate and some widely used state roads and that is probably its biggest appeal. The drive along U.S. 15 back toward Los Angeles was swift enough, if somewhat boring at long stretches. Mulder gazed out the window at the darkness rushing by. Eventually, he slept with his head resting against the window. It looked uncomfortable, but he didn't seem to mind. I glanced over at him when I could, reading the lines of exhaustion on his face, wishing them away in my mind. I wanted to know what had happened at "the end of the road", but knew he'd tell me when he was ready. I only hoped it was worth the toll the last few days had taken on him, on me. It wasn't quite over, the work of CBG Spender and his group. No matter what Spender had said about that, I didn't believe him. They still had things for which they must be made to answer and Mulder and I seemed to be the only people interested in seeing them do so. I know Mulder well and I knew that though the unifying question of his life, the fulcrum that levered his world, had been resolved, he would have more questions still. Now that he had one answer, he would demand them all and the taste of closure was going to be an addictively sweet one. The sun was shedding faint rays in the east behind us as we arrived at the airport. While Mulder returned the rental car, I managed to get us seats on a D.C. bound flight leaving about ninety minutes after we reached Los Angeles International. It gave us enough time to grab a hasty, and none too appetizing, breakfast from an airport "coffeehouse". The pastry was more closely related to cardboard than to any baked good and the coffee might have been brewed with actual ground coffee, but I had my doubts. Still, it gave us each a boost of energy, renewed the reserves depleted by last night's events. Mulder was quiet, pensive through our makeshift meal. He didn't say a lot as we headed for our gate, just pointed out the various directions we needed to go. We were able to board almost immediately. The flight, at this hour, was only about half full and no one sat in the third seat, nor indeed in our row at all. My father had been a Navy captain and my preference has always been for watercraft. I am rarely comfortable in planes during take-off or landings, being painfully aware of how easy it would be for Earth's gravity to choose that moment to exert its claim over this impossibly heavy object as it lifts itself stately from the ground or gracefully descends to meet it. Mulder knows this only too well and usually tries to distract me with talk of a case file, the local weather, even recent sporting events if all else fails. Once or twice he's been known to tell some really bad, off-color jokes that I have had to pretend to find horrid. This morning he didn't say a word as we were pushed back from the gate and began that long, lazy turn toward the runway. This morning he took my hand. His touch was firm, yet, as ever, gentle. As we made our way down the runway, gathered up the requisite speed that would provide lift to the metallic wings now glinting in early morning light, I grew tense. I was staring straight ahead, at the seat back in front of me. The words of various prayers tumbled in a heap through my head. I wondered if the rosary beads my mother had given me last Christmas were still at the bottom of my purse. I felt Mulder turn his head to look at me. He held fast to my hand, reaching across his body to raise the arm rest between us. With that barrier removed, he leaned closer to me. At the same time, he pulled me the smallest bit and I seemed to fall against him. My head lay on his shoulder. Our clasped hands rested on our thighs, which touched comfortably. His lips whispered against my hair. "Shhhh...." Nothing else, just that sound, that feeling of his breath falling past me, wrapping itself around me, protecting me. I let out a pent up breath and let my mind focus on the feeling not of the earth pulling jealously at us, but of the closeness of Mulder's body, the delicate pressure of his fingers against mine, the warm security of his breathing next to me. I still didn't know what he had found, but I felt safer, more at peace than I had for years. I waited, once I realized we had escaped the ground's assault on our winged freedom, for Mulder to pull away, to loose my hand from his own, to re-establish some physical distance. He didn't. I smiled and fell asleep with my head resting on his shoulder. The gentle touch on my shoulder prompted me out of a dreamless sleep. Opening owlish eyes, I looked at the flight attendant. She spoke softly and I became aware of the fact that Mulder was also asleep, with his head resting on top of mine. "Do you two want breakfast?" the flight attendant asked. "Umm...." I pondered groggily. "No, thanks, we're fine." She nodded and moved quietly away. "Not hungry, Scully?" Mulder's voice floated over me. I turned. "Mulder! I thought you were asleep." He sighed. "Drifting," he said sleepily. "You want me to call her back?" I asked. He shook his head, brushing his face along my hair. "No. If it's all right, I just want to wrap my arms around you and stay that way until we land." He drew a finger along my face, tracing the line of my cheek, flowing around my chin, slipping softly along my lips. I smiled, letting him feel what I doubted he could see. He shifted, leaning against the body of the plane cabin, pulling me with him. I felt the strong, solid warmth of his chest against my back. He kept his word and wrapped his arms around me. I rested contentedly in the circle of his embrace and closed my eyes once more. "You haven't asked," he said after a few moments had passed. "You'll tell me when you're ready," I replied. I felt his lips brush my hair in a kiss lighter than air. I folded my hands over his clasped ones as they rested on my abdomen. "Rest, Mulder." "Yes, Dear," he teased in a whisper along my ear, his breath sending shivers along the length of my body. I shut my eyes and drifted into a light sleep, feeling the rise and fall of Mulder's breathing against me. This pleasant dozing lasted until I felt Mulder stretch, begin to sit up. I pulled myself forward, turning to look at him. He was smiling softly. "We should be landing soon," he said. I leaned over him and looked out the window. Below us D.C. glinted in the afternoon sun. The newly cleaned and unwrapped Washington Monument glowed in the light. For the first time in years I felt the child's delight at being up in the air, at seeing a city I know and love laid out below me. We were coming home with fewer questions than we left and that was a novelty in our lives. The prosaic, mundane details of getting luggage, making our way to where I'd left my car occupied us. As we left Dulles Mulder suggested lunch, sandwiches or something, and I agreed. We stopped for bagels in Georgetown and took them back to my apartment. I changed out of the clothes I'd been wearing for longer than bore remembering while Mulder laid out what we'd bought and sodas from the refrigerator. I took a few minutes to splash water on my face in the bathroom and to put my hair up. It's too short really; it gets all wispy, but I wanted it out of my face right then. When I was done, Mulder pulled some clean clothes out of his overnight bag, which he'd brought up because it contained Samantha's diary, and went to change. We ate, not at my almost-never-used table, but sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, watching CNN, catching up on the world around us. We exchanged the sort of comments we tend to make when we watch the news together. Observations, disgust, curiosity, expanding on the reports when either of us had knowledge not presented on screen. There was a time when this might have felt awkward, when an event the magnitude of that which had occurred in California, might have lain between us like a boulder, hiding us from each other's view. This was different. We talked of the news, of the world around us, not to avoid what had happened, not to trivialize it, but because it was so vital, so essential, it deserved our full attention and that couldn't happen until we'd had some food and a bit of time to wind down. The flight back had been a new experience for both of us and had calmed us both, but I could sense Mulder's edginess return the moment we arrived at the gate. It was as if he was coming to an entirely new place and in a way, he was doing just that. He had come home for the first time without mother or father to care, but also for the first time with some of the answers denied him on every previous trip. He carried with him a knowledge that had changed him and it changed everything around him as well. Mulder finished eating before I did and sat staring at the news reports. When I finished, I gathered up the debris of our meal. Mulder made motions to help, but I stopped him. He protested. I insisted and he gave in. When I came back from throwing everything away, Mulder was sitting on the couch, his right elbow on the arm of the couch, as he stroked and pulled at his bottom lip with his fingers. His left arm was flung across the back of the couch. He was staring at the TV screen still, seemingly engrossed by the financial reports flashing by. I picked up the remote and turned off the television. He looked up and gestured with his head that I should sit with him. Samantha's diary lay on the coffee table, open. I sat down close to him, though not right next to him, giving him some space, letting him be in control of the situation. He leaned forward and the motion drew his arm off the back of the couch. His hand fell on my shoulder lightly. He picked up the diary and settled back, leaving his arm around me. He was silent for a while, gazing at the open page, not reading, just looking. "He claims he was her father," he said after a while. "Spender?" I questioned. "Mulder, no." "I heard him, Scully." He looked at me. "In my head. When I could ... when you were in Africa. He stood by my bedside and I heard him." "Mulder, I don't believe it," I insisted. "Why not?" "The things she, your sister, wrote about. Mulder, I don't believe any father could not only stand by and let them happen, but could go even further as to offer his child up to that." "Hm," He nodded slowly, his eyebrows raised in thought. "He claimed he's my father." I licked the corner of my lips, thought about the fact that bastard had been in my apartment, regretted not killing him. "He's not," I stated. "He's just playing mind games with you." "You can't know that," Mulder reminded me. "I can feel it," I told him. "What if that was one of the things my mother could never bring herself to tell me?" "Mulder," I said softly, taking his hand. "Does it matter? Even if he might be, that doesn't change who he is, what he's done." "Does it change who I am, Scully?" His eyes were pleading with me. I gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "Not at all, Mulder. Not one bit." He was silent for a long while, looking down at our hands. I watched him swallow convulsively a few times before he raised his eyes to meet mine. He laid his head against the back of the couch, eyes open, searching the patterns in the plaster above him. His voice was soft, full of wonder when he spoke. "I saw her, Scully. Samantha." "Mulder ..." He ignored me. "In the starlight. They were there. Dean. Amber Lynn. Piller's son. My sister." He paused as a tear trickled down his face. "She was beautiful. Happy. They were all happy." I looked at him. His face was serious, yet serene. "It was as if everything they suffered in this world, all the things they might have suffered, didn't matter. All of that was gone, behind them." He lowered his head, took my other hand in his. "Do you think it was real, Scully?" I took a deep breath. "I don't know, Mulder. There are things ... experiences I can't explain. Some of them you call unexplained phenomena. I call them miracles. I know my faith teaches me that with God all things are possible." "I wasn't certain," he started, "didn't really believe Piller. I knew the theory, the concept of the walk-ins, but ... this idea of bodies being taken away in 'starlight', in the form of pure energy. Do you believe any of it, Scully?" I had been thinking about this since our encounter with Mrs. (find the name of that inmate in SUZ). It had sounded so implausible, something Missy might have gone on about along with her crystals and auras. But, while cleaning up after lunch, my gaze had fallen on something my mother had given me. It was a datebook for the 'Millennium'. At the time I had thanked her, refraining from pointing out this year was not the turn of the millennium because, as Mulder had astutely observed, nobody likes a math geek. The book had lain open and the picture facing me had caused me to catch my breath. A Raphaelite drawing of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary... it had brought back Sunday School lessons in a rush. "Mulder, when I was a child, in Sunday School we learned about the things God can do. We learned about miracles He performed. Have you ever heard the stories about Enoch? or Mary? even Elijah?" He looked puzzled. "Doesn't the Bible say something about Elijah and a flaming chariot? A lot of ufologists claim that account proves the existence of aliens." I shook my head, smiling at that. I had heard those arguments and found them less than compelling. "Once upon a time, I could probably have found the scripture for you, but that was a while ago. What I'm talking about is in Catholic dogma. Catholic belief states that because he was God's faithful servant, Enoch's body was not buried, did not decay, was not subject to the predations of scavengers or the work of insects. It is said, instead, that God translated his body straight into heaven. The same is true of Mary. The Catholic Church long ago found it unsettling that the natural processes of death should befall the mother of Christ. For centuries, they put forth the belief her body had been taken straight into God's Kingdom. About fifty years ago, the Church made it official, even set aside a day to observe this. It's sometime in August, I think. The story with Elijah is a little different, but the general idea is because he would have suffered tremendously in life, he was spared so that he could continue his mission at another time." "And this never troubled *you*?" he asked with a little grin. I shook my head. "I guess it didn't as a child and as an adult, it just didn't ... cross my mind. Until now." "You think what I experienced was real then?" "I think with God, all things are possible," I repeated. Very softly, he quoted, "Suffer the little children to come unto me." I chuckled. "Well, I hardly think walk-ins and the starlight would be the typical interpretation of that verse." He returned my smile. We sat quietly for a few minutes, looking at each other. His eyes held mine, seemed to look through me, inside of me, in ways no one has ever done before. I felt like Mulder could see things I couldn't even see myself. I thought of the other night, before we had returned to California, before we discovered those graves, before any of what followed. It seemed like ages had passed instead of a few days and I hoped the moment we had postponed had not been lost all together. He spoke again, with the calm and contentment of a man who may not have everything he needs, but has far more of it than he did in the past. "She embraced me." "Your sister?" He smiled again, the soft, dreamy one. "She ran toward me and hugged me. I didn't know what to do at first, how to react. It took me a moment to accept it, to believe. She pressed her head against me and when she looked up at me after that, she had the most radiant smile... She touched my face and then hugged me again. I stroked her hair, Scully. I could feel it. It was soft, silky, fine as it flowed from the crown of her head down her back." He stopped, eyes lost in his memories. I don't think he knew he had brought one hand up to my hair and was stroking it slowly, gently. "Ever since that night, I've needed ... to know..." "To know what, Mulder?" Air huffed out between his lips. "To know she forgave me. To know she loved me. To know she remembered me." "And now you know," I said. He nodded. "She remembered having a brother. She put that in her diary. She hoped someday he would read it and know. She knows, Scully, she knows how I've spent my life and she came to tell me it's all right, I can stop. She freed me. She gave me permission to lead my own life." I looked at him, tilting my head slightly. "What about the rest of it, Mulder?" "My mother? The Smoking Man?" He had lowered his head and now looked up at me from beneath his eyes. "There's still things I have to know, we have to know. Things we have to do, stopping them and destroying all their plans. But I don't have to save her, anymore, Scully. She's beyond my help. I have to focus on the world in front of me." "Are you okay with that, Mulder?" I asked him. He pursed his lips and chuckled softly, as a wry grin turned up one corner of his mouth ever so slightly. "You told me I should be careful what I was looking for because I might not like what I would find," he said; his voice low, almost monotone. He sighed and shook his head slowly, gently. "I wanted her to be alive. I wanted her to be all right. I wanted her story to be the ones the clones told me ... what I found ... Scully, once I thought my whole purpose was to get my sister back, to prove to my parents it wasn't my fault. Once I would have been content with nothing less." He stopped. He looked at me, wanting to see, I think, if I was following his somewhat rambling monologue. I've known Mulder too long not to be able to follow him. I nodded at him. He gave me a little smile. "I used to be convinced there was one set of answers. Mine just usually happened to be paranormal. But you've taught me to look for all the possibilities, Scully, to look beyond what I want something to be and to see it for what it is. Those weren't the answers I was looking for in that grove, but they were exactly what I needed." We were quiet again. He was stroking my hand rhythmically. I had to breathe slowly, deeply, not to betray the feelings that aroused in me. "Mulder?" I said after some time had passed. "You told Piller he could see the others but not his son, that he needed to look for his son." "Something like that," he agreed. "Do you think there's a reason he could see the others but not his own child?" Mulder nodded. "He isn't ready to let go; he isn't ready to understand. He still wants his son back." Mulder tilted his head back again before continuing. "I wasn't ready before now, Scully. All the things I've seen, but I wasn't ready to see her. I was afraid to let go of her, afraid I would be alone." "What changed that?" He smiled at me and it lit his eyes again, making them spark green. "You," he said softly. Wordlessly, I arched my eyebrow at him, not in disbelief for once, only needing to verify what I'd heard. He nodded slowly. "Life is a path..." I whispered. "What?" I smiled at him this time. "Something Missy said to me once, when I was questioning my decision to join the Bureau. She told me to follow the path and it would take me where I needed to go. She also told me the journey wasn't really about the destination, but the people you meet along the way." He touched my cheek and traced the line of jaw softly. "Any regrets, Scully?" I laughed softly. "The flukeman thing, Mulder. Really, I could have lived without that. And the goatsucker ... and that sea thing in Florida last year ...and ..." "Anything else?" he teased, grinning ear to ear. I pretended to think diligently. "Well?" he asked, feigning impatience. I gave it some more thought, then shook my head. "Those were the big ones." "Good," he said. "Why?" "Because there was something else we were going to do besides that seance," he told me, an almost-leering expression decorating his face. This time I was genuinely puzzled. "Wh-" I started to ask. He interrupted me, his voice rumbling from deep inside his chest. It sent chills down my spine and I felt considerably hotter than the ambient temperature would account for. "We were going to play Spin the Bottle. Remember?" I looked down at my lap for a moment, blushing furiously. When I looked up at him again his eyes took me by surprise. They were hot and wild with desire. I realized I probably wasn't hiding my own needs too well either. I slid into his arms, which he coiled around me, pressing me firmly against him. "Do we really need the bottle?" I asked. His lips answered mine with a kiss of unbelievable passion and desire. His hands ran up my back, over my hair, along my face, as though he were memorizing me all over again. I didn't even realize I was tugging at his shirt until he shifted so I could pull it off of him. Superheated flesh greeted my own exploring fingertips. We never did spin any bottles. END NOTES: First, if I offended anyone in Victorville, my apologies. I lived near there for 5 years, so my description is based on some observation. Second, Catholic school was a long time ago, so if I have any of my details wrong, my apologies. I did as much research as I could. On that note, thanks to J for providing details on some of those Biblical examples. Anything I got wrong is my error and mine alone. Last, the title of these stories comes from a line in Paul Alexander's "Rough Magic", a biography of Sylvia Plath. Once, in a fit of emotion, she burned many of her papers, including a manuscript of a novel she had planned to dedicate to her husband, before she found out he was unfaithful. It seemed to fit the first story. In my mind, I could see the pages going up in flames and in a way I think she thought she was set free, so I felt the added tag applied to this story.