Seraphim
Cold numbed the tip of Dana Scully's nose and her hands, just out of reach of the small space heater they'd provided at the Henrico County Coroner's autopsy center in Richmond. Her left leg had fallen asleep and she lifted her foot, shaking it to try and work some blood back into the extremity. She twisted her slight torso, enough to release tension, but not enough to disturb her work on the table. The autopsy hadn't been easy to perform. She had to stop every few minutes to wipe her runny nose on her scrubs or de-glove and blow it, walking away from the table and scrubbing in all over again before coming back. Her voice on the tape would be punctured by sniffles and sneezes contained within her sterile mask and her voice would sound even more nasal than it normally did.
It was late when she finally finished. Her notes were meticulous but still needed to be typed up. She'd do it the next morning. Now all she could think of was getting home and falling into bed, so exhausted she knew it would be dreamless. She could use some dreamless sleep.
Double Fantasy circled around on every radio station, throwing her back to seventeen. She mouthed the lyrics to the 60s-ish melody of one her secret favorites.
It's time to spread our wings and fly
Don't let another day go by,
And then the sound of the comma, the afterthought of my love. How neatly it all fit together.
"That was (Just Like) Starting Over, sung by John Lennon off his 1980 album Double Fantasy," the radio announced. "Fifteen years ago today, the young Beatle was shot by a desperate fan and killed in New York City. Double Fantasy was his last recorded album, and featured songs sung by him and his then partner Yoko Ono."
Of course. December eighth. She remembered Melissa's copy of the record, leaning against the dirty couch in her apartment by the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, a loft she shared with her then boyfriend whose name Dana forgot. Some pothead who worked in a record store and played guitar while Melissa continued her weird paintings and waitressed for change. Dana remembered her sister in that messy living room, swaying to the music in a vintage dress she'd traded for a domino bracelet, torn leggings, those spike-heeled pumps from Goodwill. Why can't I be more like her? she'd thought at seventeen, visiting her sister after all her college applications had already been sent in.
Double Fantasy, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Dana thought they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever really loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list. She liked the pictures of Yoko and John in their white bed, their frizzy hippie hair.
Out her car window the poor area of Richmond by the interstate, the matchbox apartment buildings with towels and laundry out to dry even at night in December, the low slung bungalows, the odd playgrounds tumbled beside the road like a child's bedspread scattered with toys. Dana tried to keep her eyes on the road as she headed south toward her own apartment and thought about the guy who'd shot Lennon. Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. The saddest thing was that she hadn't even been shocked. To young Dana and her older sister, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greenheads running everything...
She drove back to Laburnum in the rattly Volvo, a dry-blood red relic she'd been forced to rent that morning when her own car's engine wouldn't start. It was normally a fifteen minute drive, but she hit a line of cars with their lights on snaking down the exit in front of her. Why were they going so slow? She honked a little, feeling vulnerable as her car didn't quite make it onto the exit and stuck out into traffic. Things began to move a bit and she wove and passed, reminding herself a little of Mulder, until she saw that it was a hearse. Mortified, she turned off into the parking lot of a convenience store and stopped, red-faced. How was she supposed to know -a line of cars crawling along after rush hour with their lights on?
She drove the rest of the way under the speed limit, parked in front of her apartment, took the mail from the front box, and turned her key in the lock. It squeaked and scraped in its usual way. Finally inside, she dropped her keys in the red coin bowl and mumbled, "Honey, I'm home" to no one.
Silence. Empty sofa, framed photographs and art that had fit in Georgetown looked spaced out and lonely on these walls, through the door to the kitchen were empty chairs. The only sounds came when she slid off her low heels on the uncarpeted wood floor of the entryway. It had been two years since she'd seen him, standing in her kitchen in Georgetown, making coffee. Telling her he was going away. "It'll only be two days," he'd said.
She'd stopped and looked up on her way in from living room, finishing her lipstick, accurate even without a mirror. "Where?"
"To see my mother," he'd said, "she's not doing so well and I should...I should really go see her, make sure everything's okay."
It was uncharacteristically thoughtful of him, she'd thought, then corrected herself, made it seem less crass. He had never been what she'd call family oriented, unless you counted an all-consuming obsession with finding his missing sister. She'd only ever heard him mention his mother or father on rare occasions, and as far as she knew didn't visit on holidays. This past year alone he'd spent Thanksgiving with his F.B.I partner and her mother, and her younger brother Charlie's family.
"What do you mean, 'not doing so well'?" she'd asked, trying to be delicate, but knowing there were far fewer lines between them now.
He set the coffee to brew and leaned on the counter as she walked in, setting her lipstick on the table. After watching her for a moment he smiled at the little concerned line on her forehead and went forward, put his arms around her in his sleepy morning way. She turned her cheek to his chest to spare him a lipstick-stained tie. "Don't worry about it," he murmured into her hair, "I'll be back in two days." He kissed the crown of her head.
In her memory, she held onto him, her eyes closed, drinking in his smell, pine and some peculiar chemistry of his own. In her memory he held her for the longest time, crushing her to him, she could feel every rib in his chest.
She missed him like fire.
Four days later she threw the mail on the table by the door in her Georgetown apartment where the phone sat silent. She'd called him five times already, but he hadn't answered. If he didn't call or come home soon, she was going up there, she didn't care how much he didn't want her to worry about it. Two days was one thing, but four without an explanation was another. Two days had been the weekend, and now she'd had to answer to Skinner that morning as to Mulder's whereabouts. Used to covering up for him, she'd explained the situation and hoped Mulder wouldn't mind her revealing some of his personal information, and hoped her own concern hadn't bled through too much in the meeting. She'd managed to remain busy downstairs, but all she was doing was waiting for him to come back.
It felt strange, now, to be in their office alone. There was barely any evidence of her presence here. It was all Mulder. Without him, it took on the quality of a stage set where the actors hadn't yet come on. She sat in his chair, spun it idly counterclockwise.
She went to his apartment that night and lay on the bed, the fragrant linens that smelled like Mulder and her perfume pooled together. She kicked off her shoes and crawled under the covers, white on white in the colorless light. It was almost Christmas. She needed to buy the rest of the presents for her family. Mulder wanted to buy the tree together, this week. His present was already hiding in its spot in her top dresser drawer. Maybe he was hiding something here for her. Maybe that was why he'd wanted a tree, when he normally didn't care about things like that. Last Friday he'd cut her a paper snowflake out of the first page of a botched expense report and grinned at the expression on her face. Of course he'd be back. Just another day. They were going to buy the tree together.
She was thinking about snowflakes when the phone rang in the dark. Flinging herself out of bed so fast her head reeled, she got to her phone and grabbed it before the third ring. "Mulder, thank God, where-"
"Excuse me, this is Inspector Brooks…"
"Oh."
"I'm from the Henrico County Coroner's Office. To whom am I speaking, please?"
Oh, Mulder, not again. "This is Dana Scully. What happened?"
"Your phone number was found on a motel registration. We're in the process of running fingerprints, but tell me, has there been someone missing?"
"Um, I-" Scully's voice caught, dry, in her mouth.
She heard the shuffling of papers. "White male. Registered as Fox Mulder."
All she heard was the roar of blood in her ears.
"Miss Scully?"
She could barely hold the phone. All the strength had gone out of her arms.
"Do you have any idea who this person might be?" said the voice on the other end, as if nothing had changed.
"Yes," she said. "No." She stumbled and sat down on the edge of the bed. "I don't…"
"This person you're thinking of, how old is he?"
She gripped the sheet and tried to be Agent Scully. "Thirty-seven."
"Height?"
"Six feet."
"Weight?"
She didn't know his weight. "Average."
"Eye color?"
"Green." Please, let him say brown.
"Scars or tattoos?"
She thought of his body. She ran her mind over it like fingers. "A gunshot scar on his right shoulder." She rubbed her face, trying not to drop the phone, trying to listen through the roaring static in her head. "A freckle, on his left hand. Between the thumb and first finger." She made her living on cataloging bodies. It worked independently of her mind, which had shut off. It couldn't be.
There was a pause. "Is there someone who can come with you? We'll need to see you downtown."
Her mother? God, no. "I live in Washington. I'll come myself."
"Miss Scully, I think you should at least have someone drive you."
She stood on the sidewalk outside Mulder's apartment holding herself together with both arms, as if her guts would spill out onto the concrete if she let go, watching for Skinner's car, which she'd never seen before. It was raining. The road glowed like surface of the moon as bright headlights crossed it, pockmarked with rain, then a car stopped in front of her. Skinner got out, walked around quickly.
"Jesus, Scully, it's freezing out here. Get in." He opened the passenger door and bundled her inside.
She was still closing the door as Skinner started driving. They moved silently onto the freeway. "I'm sorry, Sir. You're the first person I-"
"It's all right. Don't think anything. It could be anyone."
She hoped to hell it was. Anyone else.
They drove in silence, just the sound of the heater blasting and the repetitive squeak of the windshield wipers against what was becoming a torrential rain. An hour and a half into the drive, when her teeth had finally stopped chattering, the words fell heavily from her mouth.
"We were going to do Christmas together."
Skinner bit the side of his cheek and said nothing. Don't think anything. It could be anyone.
The coroner's office wasn't up at the hospital, it was down at the bottom, with the trucks and industrial light, a boxy two-story government building, the lettering painted right on the side of the building, HENRICO COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CORONER, Medical Examiner, Forensic Laboratories, Public Services.
Skinner left the car parked in front and they went in together, him in hastily donned dress pants and a clean shirt, her in the leggings she kept at Mulder's place and one of his sweatshirts, no bra. Without her coat and shoulder pads, faced scrubbed clean of makeup, she looked ten years younger. There wasn't an ounce of F.B.I in her tonight. They dashed into the foyer, all brown marble and beige linoleum and patched acoustic ceiling, like the lobby in a building full of cheap dentists. At the counter, a heavy woman looked them up and down. Skinner's serious professionalism, Scully's raccoon-wide eyes, the grey Quantico sweatshirt wet on the shoulders.
"I got a call," Scully said.
The woman just stared.
"An Inspector Brooks, he said -"
"Across the breezeway." The woman pointed to the twin building out the smudged glass doors. "I'll tell him you're here."
They waited on cloth chairs in a smaller lobby, Scully's hands white-knuckled on her knees, her whole being reduced to a pinpoint of fear, like the nucleus of an atom about to be split and blow up the world. She had no mind at all, just the tremor in her right foot that would not stop. It could be anyone. But he had used his real name at a motel, and left her number. And wasn't he in Massachusetts? Oh, God, shouldn't she have called his mother to ask where he was? How stupid! She started reciting the periodic table under her breath from rote memory to give some order to this.
Skinner cleared his throat awkwardly. He was uncomfortable, and scared not by the situation that had brought them here but by her behavior. At four AM he had learned that Dana Scully and Fox Mulder were more than work partners. She wanted to be picked up at his house, wearing his clothes, and told Skinner about their Christmas plans. This wasn't the straight-laced F.B.I agent he'd seen in his office that day, calmly explaining her partner's absence from work. This was a star-crossed lover.
They watched the heavy door into the hall, a little caged window. Before she had even gotten through the noble gasses, a black man in a blue blazer opened the door and stepped into the lobby.
"Miss Scully?"
She stood up.
"Can you come with me? Both of you."
They walked down the hall, the fluorescent light bathing them in its weird green glow. Inspector Brook's office was windowless, small, vomiting books, papers, folders, the walls covered with charts and a list on a blackboard, initials and magnets. They sat in two cold metal chairs, and he took a seat at his desk. "Are you all right, Miss Scully?" he asked.
"Agent Scully," Skinner said softly next to her. She looked up at the title and sat up straighter, practically puking inside. Thank God he hadn't patronized her and called her Dana. She would have crumpled into tears.
"When was the last time you saw your boyfriend, Miss Scully?"
She tripped over her words. "We work together. I last saw him Friday."
"And when did you realize he was missing?"
She just stared at the nameplate on the desk. How long was he missing? She hadn't known he was missing at all. She had just let him go. "I didn't. I still don't. He said he was going out of town. He wasn't even supposed to be in the state."
The man pursed his full lips together and pulled out some white cardboard. "I'm going to have you look at some photographs," Inspector Brooks said. "I want to warn you, they're pretty disturbing. But it's important to know, for everyone."
She didn't bother saying she was a pathologist. She didn't bother saying anything at all. She didn't matter here. Anyone but him. Anyone but him.
White squares in his hands, the backs of two photographs, as he went on talking, talking, explaining about what she would see, the bullet entered the mouth and exited the back of the head, effect of the gunshot wound...She nodded, not listening. She wanted to rip those pictures out of his hands. Finally he laid them in front of her on the desk.
A face. Black eyes, like they'd been in a terrible fight. Swollen closed, though they weren't completely closed, God, they should have closed the eyes. Whoever's eyes they were. Not his. It couldn't be. She could only see a little of the hair, there was a sheet all around the head, and those black eyes, a slight rim of blood around the nostrils, the mouth, no, she didn't recognize him, it wasn't Mulder, and yet, how could she be sure? How could she know? He was alive the last time she saw him. "I can't tell. I just don't know," she whispered.
The inspector looked to Skinner, who gave him a curt nod. The inspector looked at them grimly, then said, "I'm sorry."
Skinner led her out. All she could see was the image from the Polaroid, the black eyes. This wasn't real. Mulder was alive. He was up at his mother's house, making sure everything's okay. She pictured him there, painting all the detail she could muster. The trees outside the window. The brightness of the winter sun. How they would laugh about this later.
Inspector Brooks came across from the other building and let them through a doorway in the brown marble. They walked down a dirty hall, pinkish beige, the doors all had black kickmarks at the bottom. They came to an elevator, Inspector Brooks held it for them, got in and turned a key in the operating panel, the door shut and the elevator descended. She stared down at the streaky linoleum. Please, God. Let this not be happening.
The doors opened, and right there, against the grey wall, against a busted water fountain, on a gurney, lay a human form under a white sheet. The smell was different from anything she had ever smelled before in all her days as a medical examiner, dirty, like old meat, and Inspector Brooks was saying, "He's not going to look like they do in the funeral home, they've cleaned him up some but he's going to look like the photos, all right? I'm going to lower the sheet now."
He folded back the top of the sheet. The body lay wrapped in another one, a knot like a rose at the chest, the arms folded in, the head covered, there was blood on the sheet, don't look at that, don't look, only the face. The bruised eyes, the bruised mouth, lips dark as if he'd been drinking ink, the dark stubble, the handsome eyebrows, the eyelashes, his eyes were not closed. It was him and yet it wasn't. Because he couldn't be dead. She slipped and Skinner caught her, but not in time. "His eyes…" The most diabolical thing she had ever seen. She threw up, on her knees, on the floor. I should really go see her, make sure everything's okay.
He picked her up and helped her into a chair. She sat with her head between her knees. Skinner crouched next to her, holding her, vomit all down her chest. Inspector Brooks was covering him again, she got up and yanked down the sheet and laid her face against his sweet horrible one, then recoiled. It was hard, cold. A thing. He'd turned into a thing. A thing. "MULDER! GODDAMN IT, MULDER!" she was screaming into his face, but it didn't change. He didn't wake up. He just lay there with his black eyes and the whites showing, and Inspector Brooks covered him up, his hand dark and alive against the sheet. Skinner tugged her away from the gurney.
"Let's go." His voice was hard, final. She started tumbling through all the things they still needed to do, rambling at Skinner. Open an investigation, there was something behind this, he wouldn't do this himself, call his mother, he's up there with her now, I'm sure of it.
On the way to the car Scully fought the urge to vomit again. She wanted to wake up as Dorothy and see Mulder's face peering over the side of the bed, laughing. Why, you just hit your head. But it was no dream and there was no Kansas and he was never coming back.
In her apartment in Richmond on December eighth, Dana hung up her coat on one of the pegs by the door and walked into the kitchen, opening the cabinet and pulling out a can of lentil soup. Two years ago she'd opened an investigation into Mulder's death. He was buried as Fox William Mulder, she'd stood by his mother on that dreadful day and tried not to blame her. He hadn't even showed up. That, or he'd lied to his partner and gone off to kill himself, leaving her there in the kitchen in the moment after he'd pressed his lips to her head, when she was content and filled with warmth.
Events came in twos- two days gone turned into four days -two missing, two weeks later the funeral, two months later the X-Files had been closed. Skinner wouldn't let her use F.B.I resources to look into her partner's death any longer, and she drove away the first partner he'd assigned her after only two days. She couldn't believe that he'd done it. It was never real. When Skinner asked her why, she'd said, 'because he loved me', like love had anything to do with it. Suicide was a selfish act, and love was a selfless one. The X-Files were closed and Quantico only needed consults so she moved to Richmond to take up their conveniently vacant post of the county medical examiner in that same cursed building.
It was almost two years now, almost. In ten days he'd be dead two years. She felt his absence like a collapsed lung. For a few weeks after the funeral she'd been sick every morning and thought by some fluke she was pregnant. Her gut twisted with the irony. But no, her period came only three days late. It was selfish of her, but sometimes she thought maybe it would have been easier to get through had he left her a child. Because then she'd still have a part of him with her. But what if she'd accidentally planted an emotional burden on those small shoulders. Their baby would never know its father. Suicide ran in families. No, she was better off alone.
Her mother was her rock like never before. She came to help pack up his apartment with Dana, not questioning when her daughter wanted to keep old keychains, odd objects that had no relationship to each other, a blanket from his couch, a sweatshirt, and a framed photograph of a little girl Maggie didn't recognize. She didn't question her daughter when she decided to leave the F.B.I and move to Richmond. Dana came home for the holidays.
Her apartment now was a mixture of both of their previous ones. She'd kept her bed but taken his sofa. She'd kept her chairs but added all of his mugs to her cabinet, making space by donating some of her own on repeated trips to Goodwill. Mulder had left her money, left her almost everything, although she hadn't been immediate family. Teena Mulder had been gracious when Dana offered her the contents of his will. She'd gently said No, and they hadn't spoken again. His mother had killed herself earlier this year. Now they were gone. All the Mulders.
As she heated her soup and listened to the teenage girl playing Mendelssohn from next door Dana thought back to the first time he'd kissed her. Really kissed her. It had been at her mother's, of all places, on Thanksgiving. They both knew it would happen eventually. Neither had spoken of the fractured kiss in Mulder's hallway, but the arches of her feet itched whenever she walked down it. There, in the cold November night on her mother's screened porch, pleasantly full from the meal, they'd talked about family while her mother fawned over Charlie and Ginny's baby daughter in the living room. The fear of change twisted like holly in her belly as his beautiful mouth came near hers, sure as ever. He tasted like the spiced cider they'd drunk before coming outside, and when they were kissing the late-autumn cold disappeared. He lit her up. Rain rolled down the roof in a nighttime drizzle and a burst of Charlie's laughter from inside made her want to jump back, caught, like a teenager, but Mulder only pulled her closer, his hand tickling her hair, hers on his shoulder.
I've never really had a family, he'd said to her moments before. It made her immeasurably sad, and she'd taken his hand, squeezed it.
You'll always be welcome in mine, she'd said. She'd meant he would be welcomed at any holiday, but when it came out she realized it was a far larger statement. The truth rocked her. Now she closed her eyes and opened her mouth to him, and after a long, languid kiss they parted. He seemed unsure of how she'd react, but she was smiling. She took his warm hand in hers and squeezed, and then they went back inside the house.
That year he'd also come for Christmas, this time Bill and his family had been invited, too. He'd helped Matthew and Tommy, Charlie's older son, build a small, sad snowman in the front yard with the small amount of snow that had fallen and even Bill was tolerant of his presence.
"Why did you invite him?" he'd asked while Matthew played with Mulder outside. He leaned against the kitchen counter with a glass of wine while his younger sister painted egg yolk over the braided crust of an apple pie.
"I…" Dana looked outside at them and smiled unconsciously, although her womb felt even emptier as she watched him with her nephews. When she put the brush back into the egg yolks she caught her brother's eye and blushed. "Because he's family, too."
Something shifted behind her brother's eyes. Overall, after all that had happened, all he wanted for her was safety and happiness. If the man playing with his son outside offered her that, so be it. Tara had picked up a book for Mulder, one that Dana said he'd mentioned wanting to read, and in the afternoon Bill was the one to hand it to him.
That night Mulder drove them to her apartment and they went inside quietly. It was late, and they were tired from the excitement of the morning's presents, the large afternoon meal, it was like coming home from vacation. Yet they still made love in her bed, in the dark, slowly, deeply. After, she lay with her cheek to his chest and he traced his fingers over her back, where the shadows of falling snow danced from the window. She looked up at him with wet eyes and he put a thumb on her cheek, worry in his eyes.
I'm sorry I can't give you children, she'd said, and he pulled her up further so that she could bury her face in his neck. He shook his head, not letting her hide from him yet.
Never be sorry for that, he whispered, and she heard sadness there. He let her go and she pressed a long kiss to his throat, scratchy, he needed to shave. His large hand stroked her slowly from hip to shoulder and down her arm, and she closed her wet eyes, relaxing. I love you, just as you are.
Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words stopped abruptly and Dana looked up from stirring her soup and swallowed a spoonful. It was warm and salty, the slightly iron taste from being in a can. The white sky had hinted at it earlier, but now when she looked out her kitchen window she could see snow falling, thick and heavy. It made her smile.
She dreamed a strange dream that night. In it she was seventeen, she was humming (Just Like) Starting Over in her head, and Mulder was there. He was younger, too. The slouchy, boyish man she'd met in that basement all those years ago. He was holding her hand, pulling her from room to room in an old villa, telling her a story of the people who lived there. A woman and her crippled son. Recluses. She clung to each word that fell from his mouth, but they became difficult to interpret, like he was speaking in an aquarium and she was outside of it. His hand felt less solid in her hand, he was slipping away. Suddenly the villa was one of those tiny houses you buy for your fish and nestle in pebbles, a fake home to swim through. He said something and pulled her forward to kiss her, but when she opened her mouth it filled with water, and she began to drown. He watched her, perplexed, a merman, as her lungs filled with water and she screamed, clutching her throat, wondering why he wasn't doing a thing to help her.
The phone woke her, and she stumbled into the kitchen to answer it, checking the time on the small alarm clock she'd set on the mantle. Four.
"Hello?" she said, wiping a hand over her face. "Mom?"
A cough. "Dana, it's Walter Skinner."
She raised her eyebrows. "Sir? It's four AM. How can I help you?"
"Yes, I...sorry, I knew you'd want me to call immediately."
She pursed her lips. They hadn't parted on the friendliest of terms. His refusal to let her investigate Mulder's death further hadn't helped matters. You're looking for something that isn't there! he'd said. It was a suicide, Scully. And it's over.
"It's about Mulder. You should be the first to know." She could hear something behind his words, some strain of...a smile? What kind of sick bastard smiles when he's speaking riddles about her dead partner?
"Yes?" her voice trembled, but she stood up straighter, willing it to steady. "What about him, Sir?"
"Dana, he's back."
The words hit her like a gust of wind, and she actually lost her balance for a moment before furrowing her brows. Now there was anger. "I don't know what kind of crank call this is, Sir, but you know as well as I do that Mulder is dead. Dead and buried."
He chuckled, and she hated him for it. "He's not, Dana. It was a top secret, code black undercover job. He was in, well, he'll tell you when he gets there."
She started to cry. "Am I dreaming? What the hell is going on?" She felt her world spinning, it hurt, she was going to be sick.
A chuckle again. "You're not dreaming, Dana. He's on his way to your apartment right now." Suddenly she felt violated, and filled with birds. They were batting their wings, furiously trying to escape and fly into laughter or gut-wrenching sobs, she didn't know which. It was as surreal as the suicide, as real as the suicide. He'd been there on the table, it had been Mulder, and yet it wasn't. Those bruised, swollen, dark eyes. But deep inside, hidden and petrified, she'd let herself be unsure of the identification, leaving it to Skinner, who'd just admitted to lying. Lying straight to her face. But no, it wasn't real, he wasn't back, she was dreaming. She slammed down the phone and dashed into the kitchen, turning on the water and splashing it, ice cold, onto her face. It dripped down her neck and settled in her collar bones, more pronounced than two years ago. She was reaching for a kitchen towel to dry her face when she heard the slam of a car door outside, a pause, then footsteps on the front walk. She wiped her face, feeling more nauseous than ever, and closed her eyes as the footsteps stopped at the door to her building. The buzzer by her front door buzzed loudly, a swarm of wasps. Again, again, again. She pressed the button to speak and said, "Go away," although it came out as a broken sob.
The buzzer rang again. Again, again. "GO AWAY," she shouted into the box, leaning back on her door for support. Blissful silence, and then her phone started to ring. She had a new number, how Skinner even had gotten it was beyond her. She wasn't even in the phonebook. She slid down the varnished planks of the door and covered her ears with her hands. It was a nightmare. She squeezed her eyes closed against it as her phone began to ring again. This wasn't real, it wasn't. The cold hard feel of his dead brow against hers that night. Her number on the motel registration. If not him, whose body had they used for the hoax? No, none of it was real. It was a cruel fucking joke.
Author's Note: Old work from a couple of years ago. I cranked this out, then got stuck. I'll consider continuing it. Reviews are always nice!