A/N ok, I sorta jumped the shark a bit here, but the suspense was even killing me, so I decided to cut the crap with this chapter. Anyways, do enjoy it!
He hated seeing her like this. He needed her to be strong. He needed her now, more than ever. She was his last tie back to life. He went over to where she was, and cradled her head, gently murmuring to her, trying to get her to sleep. She was so vulnerable at a moment like this. All he wanted was to be able to protect her.
And he hated the fact that he couldn't. That she could hardly sense his presence, and even when she did, wrote it off as some strange thing, a figment of her imagination. He needed to find out what had happened to him. And he couldn't do that without her.
He had to do something though. She fell asleep, sprawled out on his couch. He got up, and walked out of the apartment. He knew he had seen a book, one that might help him, at the local library, when he had been there a few weeks previously.
He found it slightly different going completely on foot. But nonetheless, he got there, and found that being able to bypass the doors was a great help. He fought to remember where he saw it, and finally found it. A book on ghosts, and how probable they were.
He quickly leafed through it until he found the spot that he was looking for, and bookmarked it, before bringing it back to the office, and leaving it on the desk. Being dead had one advantage. He didn't have to sleep. It reminded him of that time a while ago, with the Vietnam Vets.
He found it too early to go back home, it was almost dawn. So he sat in the office, and tried to figure out what exactly had happened to him. he knew his body was dead, that to anyone who looked on, he was just another corpse. But yet, there he was, sitting in a chair, trying to come up with why he was out here, and his body lay in a refrigerator, waiting for Scully to work up the nerve to perform the autopsy.
***
She awoke the next morning on his couch. It took her a moment to remember where she was, and how she got there, and when she did, she had to fight down the wave of grief that washed over her. she was so upset, she was nearly ill. She fought it down, and let her cool-headedness take over.
She drove back to her apartment quickly, and changed into something comfortable. She didn't want to be bothered with something too hard to put on right now. before she knew it, she was back at the office, preparing herself to face the autopsy that was looming in front of her.
She knew Skinner had told her to pass it off to someone else, but she couldn't. She needed to find out for herself what had happened to him. she pulled the body from the refrigerator, and wheeled the cold metal table back into the middle of the room.
She turned around, to grab the small tape recorder that was on the desk behind her. she found a book there also. Curious as to where the book came from, she picked it up, and looked at it. It was all on ghosts, with one section bookmarked. She flipped to it, and read it over.
"Not every ghost is a so-called 'spirit of the dead'. Some ghosts are a projection of a body's subconscious onto the astrophysical plane. Many times the body, minus both the conscious and the subconscious enters a state of extreme torpor and stasis." That was all she needed to read.
She walked back to his body, and gently opened an eyelid. She shined her small penlight into the eye, and all but gasped when the pupil constricted. No dead body reacted to any form of stimuli. She broke into a wide grin, not being able to do anything else.