Title: Sightlines

Author: Zuffy

Email: zuffynuffy@yahoo.com

Homepage: https://zuffy.tripod.com/index.html

Rating: G

Category: MSR

Spoilers: Requiem

Date: November 2001

Archive: Yes, but keep my name on it and let me know

where it is, please.

Synopsis: Mulder looks for the ship.

Feedback: Yes! Gratefully received and read aloud to

complete strangers.

Disclaimer: I'm not so deluded as to believe that Mulder

and Scully are mine.

__________________________________________________________

Sightlines

"So, in other words, we can tell where our world ends

rather than where theirs begins?" he says hopefully,

watching her move around his bedroom as he sits propped

against the pillows.

They'd figured it out: you locate the invisible by what is

absent rather than by what is present, by what the hidden

object denies rather than by what it asserts. And from

there it's easy. Her hands, small and quick, pack the

equipment in the foam-lined case as she speaks

dispassionately of lasers and quantum optics in the clipped

multisyllabic vocabulary that fortifies her against the

unknown. Her faith in the consolation of physics is

greater than his. She says "I should be there," then

bites her lip, not looking at him, and he suddenly

wonders about the life they haven't lived together.

She runs her fingers across the polished metal cylinders

one more time, leaving smudges as if to impart a protective

layer of herself. "You think it's madness," he says and

she half-laughs though he hadn't meant to be funny. The

bag closes with a sharp click. When had he stopped knowing

where his soul leaves off and hers begins?

*

It's a simple mission. He connects the dots into a matrix

of red beams, the intangible twine of a cosmic cat's

cradle. A perfect Scully web, the lines laid out like

Cartesian logic and all he needs to do is follow them to

their ineluctable conclusion, to the point where they stop

and the unknown must, by definition, begin.

She'd made him promise to do no more than look, to test the

existence of the ship, trace its contours and step back,

but he needs to know what the edge feels like. He can't

come this close and not touch the heat and texture of

another world, the living surface of a ship marked with

words of cosmic creation and destruction. He's sure that

she knows this about him, so he puts out his hand.

The wall he violates is not solid but vibrates like the

ether that used to fill the heavens. How little separates

known from unknown, security from danger, present from

future, love from mourning. 'We have always been

together,' he'd told her once, but had they ever reached

the edge of the world before? He remembers how she

shuddered under him that last night and how the moonlight

later striped across the alabaster of her back. He wonders

if they are connected in some way that neither of them

understands, if she feels the vibrating pulse that pulls

him away from her now.

End

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