24
Hey. Well, not much to say (not much I'm able to say; I've been sitting at this computer for about eight , make that nine, hours straight.) besides that this is an X-Fic. Featuring our favorite female FBI agent. And if you say Fowley, I will hunt you down and impale you on a cheese-fork. Yes, there is such a thing. Anyway, you'll just have to read to get the gist of it. And no, I'm not revealing whether it'll be MSR or not. The main reason? Because I don't even know. So, enjoy!
Disclaimer: If I were making money off of it, do you think I'd be publishing it online? Hell no, I'd be getting paid, baby. Also, any lyrics used in future chapters belong to Jem. I guess the title kinda does, too, since it's her song title. Whatever, I don't think that she owns rights to the number twenty-four. Though it'd be awesome if she did. Can I get the rights to the number six? Yeah, thanks.
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Her dream was so vivid.
She was standing in a graveyard. It was cold, misty, unchanging gray. The grass was wet; she felt mud squish beneath her bare feet. Hanging onmiously still above her, the sky was clouded over, still and solemn. She glanced questioningly along the rows of graves.
Silence.
She found herself wandering among the stone monuments, as unalteringly gray as the heavens above. Names, dates, epitaphs. All of these people, all of these souls summed up in a few short words, a few generic lines etched into rock. How insignificant it made everything seem.
She saw, at the end of a row, something odd. She approached slowly, not out of wariness, but because somehow she could not move any other way. The image grew clearer as she neared, though Dana didn't know at which point she realized what she was seeing.
There was a figure sitting over a grave, the tombstone at her back. Her head was lowered, brown-red hair spilling around the thin shoulders and obscuring her face. Dana stood in front of her silently. For a few moments, there was a pause. Then the figure threw her head back, and Dana was struck by the pale skin and ice-blue eyes so like her own.
Dana touched her sister's shoulder. Missy gave her a long, solemn look. Then she stood, revealing the tombstone. The ornately carved branches circled the words, the thick foliage of a birch tree.
Dana Scully
Daughter, Sister, Friend
Our loss is Heaven's gain
And Dana felt no fear, only a kind of quiet surprise and an aching sadness. She looked at her sister again. In her eyes she read her fate. Their blue depths conveyed pity for her sister, a silent apology for things that could not be changed. Missy leant forward to her sister's ear. Feather light, she whispered into Dana's ear, her lips brushing against her skin and her voice soft and barely audible in the silence. "Twenty four hours."
The graveyard slipped away, plunging Dana into a black abyss. She was falling fast…
She tumbled through the darkness, silence ringing in her ears with the power of a thundercrack. The shadows screamed around her and she was thrown into a dizzying plunge on a downward descent, to where she did not know. She plummeted down, down, down, until she fell, gasping, into her bed. Her eyes searched the dark, but she found nothing except the ordinary in her bedroom.
She leaned back, tried to dismiss it as a dream, but…
The last faint echoes of her sister's voice floated through the darkened room, and she could've sworn that Melissa was there with her.
"Twenty four hours."
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Been given twenty-four hours to tie up lose ends
To make amends
Her eyes said it all, I started to fall
And the silence deafened