Title: Crop circles
Chapter 4: Dèja vu
Summary: Mulder investigates a case alone, while a healthy Scully is in a coma. Unfortunately for him, Fox Mulder isn't alone for long... MSR in later chapters, set sometime after Amor Fati.
Archive – Really? You like it that much? *eyes shine* Yeah, just ask and be sure to link back to my site.
Contact – Yfandes10@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: They're not mine. They belong to 1013 productions, Chris Carter, Fox, and probably some other people I forgot to mention. But my birthday IS coming up soon, and I have no objections to owning Mulder…
Goal: This WILL be a long chapter, this WILL be a long chapter, this WILL be a long chapter…
Notes: Revised/Edited from original but basically the same. Oh, and the brain things? Made it up. Except that when you dream, it really does only last fifteen seconds or so. And you do have dream cycles.
------1------
It'd been a month. Four weeks, thirty long days, seven hundred and twenty long hours since Mulder's disappearance. And no matter what her previous resignations, her questions, her disbelief, she was now sure, more than ever, that Mulder had been abducted by the aliens he so blatantly claimed to believe in. That what had claimed him and her health had been most certainly extraterrestrial. She couldn't explain it, couldn't explain it anymore than the countless cases in which medical and scientific explanation and the very laws of physics themselves, as Mulder so aptly put it, "rarely seemed to apply." She wondered if he was alive, if he was conscious, if he was even aware of what was going around him. It didn't make much difference at this point. A month of fruitless searching had gotten her nowhere. The duo had become separated, each walking their own path, each living their own life, somewhere unbeknownst to each other. They were the X-Files that they had worked so long with, devoted so much time to.
And they were separate ones.
-----2-----
If he'd been in any condition to feel his body, he wouldn't have liked it. Wires of some unknown element had snaked their way into his mind, accessing his memories, latent and known, recording them for some unknown purpose. Unknown to him, anyway. But then again, everything to him was unknown at this point. Fox William Mulder was currently undergoing an interesting copying of his memories onto a chip so technologically advanced humans wouldn't see it for another fifty years. Had he been aware he'd be having a field day, reveling in the solid proof of aliens he was being exposed to. Silver needles, real and phantom, prickling, poking…
Amidst it all, he dreamed. Things that had happened, things he imagined…all seemed real to him, as when you are asleep and you don't realize that what you're seeing, feeling, hearing isn't real. Anyone else would have gone insane from the sheer madness and grief produced from this experience. But not Mulder. He'd seen too much in his life, had grieved for his entire family, had wounds that would never heal. Never. So he lived, he survived. And he dreamed.
-----3-----
He watched, as if he was hovering above her, all the while being her. He felt her thrash, felt himself thrash, saw the beads of sweat on her forehead, could reach out and touch them with his translucent hand and feel them just as surely as he could upon his own brow.
In his mind he felt another mind, another life, another person. A mind in a mind, memories in a hallucination. Or was it?
Carefully, delicately, he touched her awareness, touched her thoughts. Coldness flooded his limbs, numbed his body, which was soon thawed by an onrush of fire coursing through his veins. While his body froze and flamed, his mind raced, flashes of images, snippets of words, screaming, screaming, screaming. He jolted himself out, screaming himself, or at least he thought he was screaming, shouting, falling, falling, falling…No one was there to catch him.
-----4-----
I felt him. A brush on my mind, like a whisper in your ear, lips brushing your skin. I tried to reach out, my thoughts no longer coherent but scattered meaninglessly until all you could discern from the smattering was emotion. I felt him recoil, felt him struggle as he fell, faster, slower, faster, slower, inevitably sinking toward a deep abyss, a pit from which none returned. I tried to reach him, tried to free myself from the prison of my own mind to save him, but I couldn't even break free, couldn't… I lost him.
-----5-----
"She's gone into a coma again."
Agent Skinner paced the room, ten steps to the wall, pivot, ten steps back, pivot, ten steps to the wall, pivot, ten steps back…
"Do you know why? What about those tests you wanted to run, on her temporal lobe, did they turn up anything?"
"Well…not exactly."
"What do you mean not exactly? You either did or you didn't."
The doctor glared for a moment before masking his emotions.
"There appears to be some sort of accelerated activity in her brain, the cerebral hemisphere to be more precise. It's not that there's not supposed to be activity there, it's just happening so fast…The only think I could think of. . ."
"What?" A.D. Skinner prompted.
"Well…she could be dreaming."
"What?"
"Well, when you dream, the dream itself only last ten to fifteen seconds, but your brain drags it out, per se, makes it seem longer than it actually is."
Skinner would have told the doctor not to patronize him if he hadn't needed the man's cooperation.
"So…she's asleep?"
"Well, yes, I suppose…a kind of deep sleep, without the normal dream cycles. Trying to wake her up would probably be fruitless, not to mention hazardous to Agent Scully's health."
"So what do we do?"
"What we've been doing. We wait."
-----6-----
I opened my eyes to a field. Memories lingered, as dreams do when one first awakens, but like dreams, the memory scattered, fragmented, became nothing more the shards of glass strewn haphazardly. The field seemed familiar, as if I'd been here before, in this life and in past ones, but could not remember. Was I awake? Was this real? I raised my hand. It appeared normal, illuminated in the moonlight, pale as snow. I shook my head slowly, from side to side. Who was I? I concentrated, forehead creasing as a name which eluded me slowly came into my grasp. A simple name, really.
I am Sullivan Biddle.
---------------------------------End Ch.4 ----------------------------------
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