Date sent: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 18:51:46 -0400 From: Rhondda Lake Subject: NEW: Forging Steel (1/1) Disclaimer: To follow. Spoilers: Up to and including Gethsemne. Category: C, A Rating: PG-13 Keywords: MSR Summary: A soul must pass through fire to be tempered strong. Forging Steel by Rhondda Lake I'm somewhat taken aback as I step out onto the patio. The scent of the sea surrounds me and the crash of the waves whisper to me of secrets and agelessness. That is not what gives me pause. No. What makes me suck in my breath for a moment is how very alike the two men on the patio look from here. Turned away from me, they talk quietly as they lean forward over the railing. Both are enveloped in long, black trench coats, though there is no chill in the air. I think they wear those damn things for effect. Secrets. Agelessness. As timeless as the sea. The thought frightens me. It fills me with a nameless dread, a faceless horror. It has been a year. A year since I walked into the apartment of the one man who meant the world to me. Walked in, and looked down at the neat little hole in his right temple, and the not so neat gaping wound in the back and side of the left side of his head. It was a grotesque mockery that his beautiful face looked so peaceful despite the damage. Little blood at the entry wound. Death had been instant. "Yes." I had to choke on the words. He'd done it. Despite my pleas, my begging, my cajoling. Despite the utter lunacy of the very idea, he'd gone ahead and done it anyway. I was furious even as I was swept into despair. I felt nauseous, fought back the bitter, stinging bile as it rose in the back of my throat. "It's him." In the year since that day the image of his suicide haunted my nightmares. But he was right. It bought me time. It bought me a cure. It bought us a few answers. But not enough. Never enough for the sacrifice of his life. Of our future. The few answers I'd learned were empty trinkets. Foil covered chocolates scattered to the starving poor. They were meaningless, hollow. The source of those few answers was surprising. The bastard. The cancer giving, partner stealing motherfu... I shake my head. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't forgive it. But I had to learn to live with it. My only other choice was to rage at a man now beyond my reach, my vengeance. To allow the rage to burn away any joy or hope in my life. And if I fell into that trap I'd allow him to win. I He had handed me those pitifully few answers. The location of Samantha Mulder's grave, the name of the man supposedly behind it all, I had asked him why. I had lain there in the hospital bed, too weak to move, just waiting for them to pull the crisp, white sheet over my head. The pain in my head was enough that death looked like a blessed release by then. And yet I had feared the sacrifice had been for nothing. I didn't know a cure had been administered through my IV at the worst point, while I was delirious with pain and dreamed Mulder had visited me, raging against my death. My weakness. As I had begged him not to kill himself for a delusion, now he begged me to live for an impossibility. In my dream our friend dragged him away. Mulder protesting as the other assured him they had given me the cure and to wait would destroy everything. Secrecy was foremost. Secrecy. The damned veil of it was suffocating. It destroyed people, lives, nations. The secrets would never leave us. Never leave me. Now I am part of the secrets. I awoke feeling as healthy as the proverbial horse, and the doctors were swarming over me. Vultures to carrion. Tests. More tests. MRI, CT scan, X-ray, blood work, poke, prod, scratch their heads and wonder. I was cured. No sign of the death that lurked behind my sinus just days before. I was ready to go home. I should have been as surprised as they were. However, in my heart, I had trusted Mulder beyond rational thought and realistic expectations. Not very scientific of me. In the heart of the pragmist screams the soul of someone who wants to accept miracles. The hospital room had been sterile and cold. The flowers around me were from my family, from the Gunmen, some from Skinner, a bouquet from a friend I'd met only five months prior. It smelled like a funeral home. Cloyingly sweet, with the sharp undertone of sterile wash. Like a morgue. He walked through the door. I had expected a confident stride, a smug gloat. I had not anticipated the stooped shoulders, the sorrowful lines on his face. Maybe the light of the room sapped his strength. He seemed to feed off shadows, the light must hurt. He handed me an envelope, yellow, office style, non-descript. No words. His hand seemed to shake a bit. I took the offering and opened it in silence. Names, addresses, an accounting of Samantha Mulder's life up until her death, when she had tried to escape at the ripe old age of thirteen. "Why?" One word. I looked up at him, killing him a thousand times with my eyes. "I've made many mistakes in my life, Agent Scully. I'm not ashamed of most of them. I accept them. Part of the game. Part of the price I paid for what I believed was right." His eyes tore away from mine and he looked outside my window. "But the biggest mistake of my life was in misjudging how much he could take. He had a core of steel. I suppose it was my own pride which made me unable to see the flaws. Tempering is supposed to make the steel harder, keener, more sharply edged. But in flawed steel it can cause a shattering." "Mulder. You're giving me this because of Mulder? Why? So you can laugh that the answers came too little, too late? You sick son of a bitch." He looked at me sharply, then walked to the door. He turned to me at the last moment. "He was my piece of immortality. I tried to forge him into what he needed to be to survive the game he had become lost in." "You manipulated him, to what end? To make him like you?" I refused to let the tears fall. "Better. Stronger than me. With him gone it all seems so... pointless now. All I did was for him." I had to admit that statement had me struck speechless. I think it was the rage choking off my oxygen supply. The white hot lump of anger strangling me where I sat in that adjustable hospital bed. As he left, I allowed him to have the last word, in my shocked fury. Over his shoulder he half whispered the worst and darkest of the secrets and lies. "He was my son." When the nurse walked in fifteen minutes later it was to find me standing in the midst of the carnage I'd wrought. Broken flower vases, strewn petals, ripped sheets. I went a little mad, I admit. I accepted the sedation. It only kept me in the hospital one more day. I learned later that the bastard had used the same method as Mulder had. I felt nothing at the news of his death. Not joy, or sadness. The emptiness frightened me. Before me, on the patio, they leaned together, their dark heads almost touching. Their words were washed away on the waves. Two dark angels. Harbingers of death and chaos. Pawns in a game I was having difficulty comprehending. But I had to understand it. Because I loved one of them, hopelessly. His fate had become part of me. His path, no matter how twisted it would become, was mine. You see, six months prior to his suicide Mulder learned something. His own secret. Something I flatly refused to believe, even when scientific proof was vivisected before my eyes with the flash of a knife and the splaying of flesh and muscle. A gruesome case. Serial slayings or cult activity with that paranormal bouquet he always loved. It pulled us both into something darker, and older than we'd ever suspected. Something mysterious and cosmic and... spooky. The lead suspect wove a tale out of a child's fantasy. The Brothers Grimm does one better. To hear it was one thing, to witness it another. To hear him proclaim Mulder was part of the whole vicious cycle was intolerable. It chilled my blood to ice even more than hearing my doctor pronounce my death sentence months before. I inhale the sea, the salt air. He'd let his hair grow long. Maybe to try and disguise himself. Maybe as a last act of rebellion against dress codes and bureaucracy. I didn't think he'd try to emulate our friend. No, He wasn't the copycat type. At least, I didn't THINK he was. His shoulders were broader from exercise and training. He was still lanky, but I think, under that trench coat was more definition. We had seen each other before now. Snatched moments in shadows. Hurried phone calls kept short against tracing. Brief moments stolen to hold one another, to silently vow we would not be broken or defeated, moments of passion grasped frantically for too brief intervals. Trying to fit a lifetime into five minutes here, a half hour there. He'd always been there. Where even I couldn't see. Watching over me. Making sure it all fell into place. From the day after his suicide I had known, and was forced to accept this horrible truth. I had helped pull his cold body from a sterile metal drawer. "If this doesn't work, I swear to God I will kill you myself, no matter what it takes," I had glared over Mulder's sheet shrouded form at our supposed friend. He had pulled the sheet back to show me the pale, lifeless face, devoid of any bullet wound. I had gasped before running trembling fingers over the spot. Just before Mulder took his first agonized breath in twenty four hours. He proved to be a hell of a solid ghost. Solid enough to hold me that very night in the privacy of a no tell motel. To make love to me for the first time with a fevered passion. To make promises he had no power over keeping. Fox Mulder turns from his companion and smiles at me. Acknowledging that he knew I was there. I haven't seen him in a few weeks. His eyes, always haunted, seem so much sadder now. Older. Deeper. But they spark to life as they fall on me. He turns completely and opens his arms. I step into his embrace. Inhaling the scent of him, ageless as the sea. Primal as the wind. Salty and masculine and all mine. For as long as I shall live. "It's over." He holds me so tightly I think I might bruise. Our world was turned upside down long before I gave him that envelope and told him what the cancerman had said. That little bombshell was just one more whirlwind in an endless vortex. Meaningless in the scheme of things as they stood now. "I handed in my resignation yesterday." I cling to him, needing the solid force of his presence. Not caring that we have an audience. I had wrapped up loose ends. What I could, anyway. I had just walked away from my entire life, as he had a year ago. Now I was going to disappear. Not quite like Mulder had. No. If I shot myself in the head I wasn't going to come back. I wasn't going to have two friends there to pull my body from a metal tray and watch as I struggle with the pain of rebirth. If *I* shot myself in the head I'd stay dead. I was finite. I heard a throat clear and I spared a look to our friend. The person who had both saved and destroyed Mulder by speaking the first truth he'd heard in a long time. "I have passports, driver's license, credit cards. You're all set Dana, or should I say Donna? Sorry, we couldn't get a solid ID with the same first name." He smiled slightly and shifted on his feet. "I've also arranged a flight to Paris. I have a place for you to stay there. I'll be popping in to visit every few months or so, and another friend to keep giving Mulder here the lessons he needs." I nod. "It's a boat Scully. I told him you'd love that. I might need to stock up on dramamine, but you'll love it." Mulder keeps one arm around my waist as we face our friend, our compatriot. "I think your days of seasickness are over, Mulder." He grinned. "Thank you. For all you've done for us." I tried to sound happy. I am, really. I was going to live to a ripe old age. I was going to Paris. I was going to spend my life with Mulder. Putting together the pieces. Tempering the steel. Strengthening him to face the long cold night when I finally had to leave him. Death wasn't't going to wait for me. Not like it would for Mulder. I was going to grow old, get arthritis, sag and wrinkle. I was, eventually, going to die. I looked up at Mulder's face, noticing the reflection of my own sadness there. He was beautiful, and he would never grow old. I had to help him forge a new life. Forge himself. The loneliest man I had ever known was going to live forever. If I could make sure his core of steel had no flaws. If I could help temper him into what he needed to be now. Duncan MacLeod seems to see the sadness as well. His own smile is a little sad. I remembered that case eighteen months ago. Mulder had pieced together what was going on from some hundred year old pictures of men bearing uncanny resemblance to the victims of a series of decapitation murders. That and the evidence of some sort of electrical discharge. We had MacLeod in custody. All we had to do was file the paperwork and hope no one locked Mulder up for this cockamamie story. But MacLeod just informed us we couldn't do that. Cool as you please. "Oh and why not? We saw you kill the last victim. We have enough here to put you away for life." Mulder crossed his arms. "Oh, I doubt that. But you won't press charges, Agent Mulder, because you know Drogan was the killer you were after. I killed him in self defense, and all your precious evidence supports that. My lawyer will have me walking out of here in less then twenty four hours. You also won't press charges because sooner or later you are going to become part of what we are. You have it all figured out except for one thing. You're one of us. Or you will be, the moment you die for the first time." Duncan MacLeod's eyes were as intense as Mulder's as they bore into him. "Yeah, that's right. Are you scared? You should be." Mulder was. I could see it in his eyes. I didn't want to believe MacLeod. I had seen, with my own eyes. I'd seen the fight. I saw the sword slice deeply into MacLeod's side. After the fireworks I had tried to help. I'd seen traumatic incisions before. This one severed flesh and muscle, laid bare intestine and liver. And as I worked to try to staunch the flow of blood as Mulder called for an ambulance and police backup, we both saw the wound reknit before our eyes. As if someone hit a film in reverse. It was amazing. It was unbelievable if I hadn't seen it. Felt it. My God, my hands were covered with MacLeod's blood and gore. I'd smelt the damage to his intestine. The evidence of the old photographs. Immortality. An eternal battle to the death. Centuries of loneliness and isolation. Being part of the world, yet separated from it. People wanting you dead at the drop of a hat. The whole concept was horrible. I'd tried to convince Mulder that MacLeod was only saying this to make him drop the charges. For a while he agreed with me. Even if he didn't press charges, because MacLeod was right, we had no proof, and our own testimony that the killing we witnessed was in self defense. But I hadn't realized Mulder thought about MacLeod's words almost constantly. Until that fateful night. Until he bet his life on the words of a stranger who had every reason to lie. Until he pulled the trigger after calling MacLeod for help. That it had worked out was paltry consolation. Now MacLeod smiles at us. "Good luck to you both. I'll see you in a few months." He starts to walk away from us, out onto the sandy beach, pausing he calls over his shoulder. "Mulder, try not to drop your sword." Mulder flips him the finger as I laugh. It's the right thing to say. I'm not dead yet, and we both have to learn to laugh and appreciate the time we have. With any luck that could be sixty years. As much as any couple can hope for. -Finis Disclaimer: FOX, CC, 10/13 own X-Files. Panzer/Davis/Gaumaunt own the Highlander universe. Yeah, I know there are a lot of HL/XF crossovers out there, but as a fan of both shows I had to try. Feedback appreciated.