AMETHYST(16/35) by: Annie Jennings(Auralissa@aol.com) Disclaimer in part one ********************************************** ********************************************** "To think of you now is a miracle to me. Your strength, your courage, your ceaseless kindness and your abundant passion, all springing from nothingness and mental disease. At times, I cannot help but wonder if all mankind shares this disease of nothingness and lack of caring. Are all so unsympathetic to each others' needs that we cannot even dare to save and protect our own children? "Though you know it not, your mother and father forgot you, and they forgot their duties and responsibilities as parents. Knowing this, seeing the eyes of your mother fill with guilt and shame, I cannot help but want nothing more than some way to turn back time and change the events that have hurt you so. But these events made you the magnificent, incredible man you are today. No matter what you ever believe about your life, you must remember that there is no way to change it. "Perhaps that is what is so sad about what happened to the both of us. While we recognize that nothing can be changed, our abusers have attempted to lift away the past, and to take away what we have earned. We earned these memories, the right to placing them behind us and moving on, but they stole our memories, and kept them away. And now, we cannot move from the past to the future, until acknowledging what has happened to us, and changing what will. "Together, we can embark upon that journey from old to new, and we must do so in order to survive. One who lives in the past has no future, Mulder, and we have no pasts. But what does that say about our futures? Can we truly finish our lives when we have no starting point?" The nipping of tiny teeth against her hand stopped Scully and pulled her away from her work, and she turned her head to see the puppy tugging insistently at her fingers, wanting attention, and Scully smiled. "In a moment," she promised, and the dog moved away. "There is always a way into the future, paved with the cobblestones, worn and difficult, of the past. But we must pave the road ourselves, with trials, tribulations, and recovery. I will help you lay down the stones, if you will but help me with my road." There came a knock at her apartment door, and Scully stood up, wondering who it could be, and if Mulder would come so many times in one day. Looking through the peephole, she found not him, but Elka Mulder, her white-gold hair wild, and her eyes darting around her nervously. Surprised, she opened the door, and the young woman walked in, putting her arms around Dana. "What are you doing here?" Scully asked, and Elka gave a faltering smile. "Um, Ivan kicked me out," she mumbled, and Scully heard the tell-tale slur of alcohol in her words and in her breath. "He told me that I was out of control... He found my stash of booze, you know, and he, um, he told me that I had to get help, and until I did, he didn't want to see me..." "Oh, Elka," Scully murmured, and she hugged the woman tightly. "And... The theatre fired me," she added. "They said that I was irresponsible, and that I had to sober up or they'd fire me. I came in late one day, and they replaced me with my understudy. I don't have any money now, no job... No Ivan. And I think..." Looking up with worried, tearful brown eyes at Scully, Elka bit her lip. "Dana, I love him. He's the first man I love, instead of just liking." "Why'd you come here, and not to Chaptico?" she asked, and Elka laughed bitterly. "Phoenix and Dad would kill me if they found out I got kicked out of the play. I don't want to tell them and make them worry, and they just overreact," she explained, and Scully closed the door behind her, taking the young woman into her apartment and shutting the door behind her. "And... I got evicted, so I don't have anywhere to go..." "Do you want me to call Mulder?" she asked, and Elka shook her head. "Fox? No, he just thinks of me like some irresponsible kid," she said, and Scully had to admit, she was right. "I came here cause you seemed to understand. I'll go if you don't want me to stay..." "No, it's all right," Scully promised. "You can stay here until you figure out what to do. There's nothing wrong with that, but I won't be here too often. We're working on something, but you're more than welcome." With another tearful hug, she pulled Scully to her, and the woman was more than slightly surprised. "Thank you so much, Dana," she whispered. "You don't know how much this means to me. I'll do whatever you want me to do, I'll help out, I'll do anything, just thank you..." Realizing that Elka was in worse condition than Scully had suspected originally, the older red-haired woman shook her head and passed her a box of tissues from the table. "You don't have to do anything other than get help for the drinking," she said, and Elka nodded enthusiastically. "I want to get help, Dana," she whispered. "I don't want to lose him. Ivan's the only person who's ever wanted more than just sympathy or parties, and he's the only one who I've ever loved. I can't lose him." "He must love you if he wants you to stop drinking," Scully reminded, and Elka nodded. "Stopping any kind of addiction is difficult, but I think that you can do it if you work at it. You can join a support group, check into a substance abuse clinic. There are options and choices that you can make, or you can attempt to quit drinking on your own. I don't keep any alcohol in my home, just because I don't like to have my thoughts muddled, and I never have anyone to drink it with." "That's not true," Elka started, but Scully refused to allow her to go on. "I'm a busy person," she rushed, and Elka noticed the sudden spilling of words, and knew the cause. For a person whom so many believed to be disoriented, irresponsible, and petty, Elka was deductive and intelligent, and the knowledge in her eyes made Scully slightly uncomfortable. "Busy with work," she wisely conceded, and Scully clenched her jaw for a moment, her eyes fighting with Elka's. "Yes, busy with work," she tightly said, and Elka continued, crossing a line that Scully had never really drawn. "And busy with Fox," she said with a lilt in her voice. "No, not busy with Fox," she corrected, and Elka let out a little know-it-all smirk. "Of course not," she said, and the silent agreement was made between their gazes, that Scully was not involved with him, but they both knew that she wanted to be. "If he wanted you to give up something that had been a comfort to you, even if it was destructive, would you do it?" "If it was destructive, yes," she replied. "And I think that Ivan loves enough not to want to lose you to alcoholism. It's a disease, Elka, like AIDS, or cancer, or anything else. It kills, and Ivan knows it. He doesn't want to lose you to it." "Maybe you're right," Elka murmured, and she looked down at her hands. "But that doesn't make it any easier, does it?" "No, it doesn't," Scully agreed. "But it does make it more important." Smiling tremulously, Elka looked up, and hugged the agent again. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you so much." After Scully had brought the younger woman a blanket to sleep on the couch with, she sat down across from her, and Elka began to talk, her voice beautiful and charming, and it was easy to see how Elka had started a career in the theatre. There was a certain quality of fluid ease in her voice that marked the voice of a singer, and Scully listened with captivated ears. "I started drinking after my mom disappeared," she murmured, looking down, and Scully was reminded of her own experience. "I was terrified of what would happen to her, and of what might happen to my father and this family, and it made me think a lot about how much my mother meant to me. She was a great source of comfort to me, and I think about her a great deal. She was a very important person to me, and now I wonder how I'm managing to go on with my life. But I have this belief that there is no such thing as dying. Certainly, there's such a thing as death, but dying... You live, and live, and live, and at the end of life there is death. Living, yes. Dying, no. I don't know exactly how to explain it..." "No, I understand completely," Scully agreed, and Elka remembered that not too long ago, Scully had been reaching the end of life due to the same cancer that had killed her mother. "When I was diagnosed with cancer, for a while I let the thought of dying consume me, until I realized that I was not dying of cancer, I was living with it." "Yes," Elka murmured. "It's hard to think of losing someone you love, of never seeing that person again, and of not being able to reach out and touch that person and take the pain they're experiencing away." "It's the same for the person with the disease," Scully pondered, and Elka tilted her head. "How so?" she asked, and Scully spoke with drawn-out words, with careful phrasing, and startling recollection of memory. "Of all of the unexplained things Mulder and I have seen, I still believe that the most haunting one is death itself," she mused aloud. "We see people die everyday, but know nothing about the process of dying. There are theories of what happens, of the reported returns from death and a great light, but they are only theories. I thought a lot about death in the time I was ill, and about what would happen to me, if there would be a light, or darkness, or Heaven or Hell. And I wondered about if you truly do meet others in the afterlife, or if dead is just dead. And I was afraid... Afraid I would never see those so dear to me again. My mother, my family... And especially Mulder." Fascinated and touched, Elka spoke again, her voice serene. "We never think about the fears of the dead, only the fears of the survivors," she added, and Scully looked over in her direction, surprised by the weight of those wise, true words. "Sometimes, I suppose that that's true," Scully quietly agreed, and Elka nodded, the lights low and warm. "Do you ever wonder about those who didn't make it?" Elka asked, and Scully was taken back by the question, and suddenly realized that she had never once thought of the other ones, so wrapped up was she in the celebration of the regaining of her own life. Had she forgotten about the children in the hospital, the pamphlets that Kristin Pohaski had created, and the activism that she had tried to create in order to fund research into the disease? "I should," she realized, and Elka tilted her head. "I should." ********************************************** ********************************************** After Elka had fallen asleep, Scully herself lay in bed, the puppy approaching and licking the palm of her hand with a persistent wet tongue, causing her to chuckle with the warmth that she had managed to conceal so many times. Allowing the little dog to jump up on the bed, it nestled itself at the foot of her bed, little paws twitching as it fell asleep. There had once been a saying that dogs having peaceful dreams twitched their paws, as though peace had taken them over, and Scully wondered what the sign of humans having peaceful dreams was. "Mulder," she murmured, her hand slowly fluttering to her amethyst necklace, and she wondered if he was dreaming that night. ********************************************** ********************************************** Wrapping his hands in her hair, the threads of ivy and red contrasting with enticing beauty on the brown, languid fingers, he brought his mouth to her hair, caressing the strands with his lips. "Do you want to leave?" he whispered, and she suckled on the smooth skin of his neck, wanting nothing more than to remain here forever, for the rest of eternity, and in his arms. "Never," she confirmed, and he slowly released her hair, ivy dangling around her face like a halo of twisted and worked green, and he breathed a sigh of appreciation at her. "You are exquisite," he breathed, and she ran her hands over his face, as though her fingertips were the imprints of memory. "As are you," she deemed. The fingers which flowed over his lips were met by eager kisses, and she moved her face into his, his eyes searching hers hungrily, and ivy wisping over his face... ********************************************** ********************************************** Apartment of Dana Scully Annapolis, Maryland 11:01 AM, July 8, 1997 Woken from her slumber by the ringing of music through her apartment, Scully looked up, her eyes dimmed by the lingering sleep. Elka was moving around the apartment, her eyes bright and healthy, and there was music blaring on the stereo. She recognized it as Live, and the songs blasted the apartment. "Elka!" she called, and there skipped in Elka, with a cheese and green bell pepper omelette. "For you," she cheerfully said, and Scully looked over her new roommate, who was dressed in a black tank top, covered by a thin, see-through purple frilled tuxedo shirt, and blue-jean cut-offs. Her belly-button ring shone silver through the shirt, and there was a tattoo revealed through the purple cover-up. "Good morning, Dana dear, and here's breakfast. I was wondering when you were going to wake up!" "Can you turn down the stereo?" she bluntly asked. "It would be a shame if I had to arrest myself for disturbing the peace." "Sure!" she chirped, and skipped to the stereo, turning down the volume a considerable amount. "What's on the federal agenda today? Busting some crime lords from Venus?" With any other person, the remark might have seemed mocking or arrogant, but the remark was simply conspiratorial, and Scully chuckled. "Drug dealers from Neptune," she corrected, and Elka laughed as well. "You slept well," she commented, and Scully stretched a pleasant smile stretching on her face. "Yes, I did," she admitted, and Elka raised one elegant, slim eyebrow, which was pierced on the end of the arch down. "Good dreams, I hope," she added, and Scully nodded, rubbing the base of her neck with a habit that had come to be familiar. "Care to share them?" "They aren't those kind of dreams," she assured, and this only egged Elka on, making her pose a question which trapped Scully completely. "What, not the kind of dreams that are supposed to be spoken, or not the kind of dreams that would carry enough interest to be spoken of?" she wisely worded, and Scully knew that either answer would reveal the romantic connotation of her dream. It was nothing that she wanted anyone to know, especially with the fact that the other person involved in this dream had been the cousin of this young girl's father. When Scully did not reply, she realized that she had given the most revealing answer of all. "I see... You don't have to hide anything from me, Dana. I want us to be friends. I really do admire you. I think you're a strong, determined, intelligent person, and I think that you have some issues that you need to sort out, just like me. We're not that different in a way." "How so?" she asked, interested in spite of herself. "I'm trying to put to rest my alcoholism to save the only love I've ever known, and you're trying to put to rest your inhibitions to do the same," she answered. "I'm not an idiot, nor am I blind. I admit, the drinking blurs these thoughts, but I'm not a naive kid like my family has come to believe I am. I took a course in psychology, and aced it with flying colors. I'm a smart girl, Dana. And I'm a trustworthy one. I'm not going to go blabbing the secrets of your heart to Fox. I'm just going to help you find a way to do it in your own time and in your own way." Trying desperately to salvage that long-concealed secret, Scully stumbled over her defense, losing her case with every stuttered syllable. "Why do you think I have this love for him? I, I mean, he's just my partner, my friend, not, not some romantic love interest or anything like that," she tried, and Elka just crossed her arms. "It's in the way you look at him, the way you say his name whenever you can, like you're revelling in the knowledge that you're talking to him and he's talking to you, the way you want to touch him, to feel him, but hold back as though you shouldn't," she answered. "If you were friends in the truest sense of the word, Dana, then you would be able to touch him with ease, or to forget to say his name, or not have to mask your emotions from him every time you got the courage up to bring your eyes to his. It's the little things that make something big." Finally, she gave up, reluctantly concluding that everything that girl had said was true in her mind. It was all true, and if it was so obvious to her, then what... Oh, God, what must everyone else think? No wonder rumors were flying around the Bureau like wildfire... Christ, what Skinner must think, what her mother, her family, oh... What he must think... "Yes," she admitted. "I do love him. And he... I don't think he knows." "No, my dear old Fox has no clue whatsoever," she responded. "You can take some form of comfort in that, I suppose." She knew that Mulder had no idea that his partner was desperately in love with him, because she had no idea Mulder was desperately in love with her. Oh, but these two were an interesting project indeed. A nice diversion from her life as the theatre slut and boozehound. It was just what she needed to keep her away from the bottle... Watching a romance come together. "I suppose I should be happy about that," Scully murmured. "And maybe that's a good thing. I need to tell him one day soon, but it's a thing I don't have the courage for." Shortly, Scully laughed, and Elka tilted her head. "Funny, how I can face any adversity except myself and my truth." With the slight smile on her face and gold hairs streaming in her eyes, her hazel eyes held more than just good humor. "We are often our own worst enemies." There was a silence, and then Elka plopped down on the bed, the musing philospher gone, and the playful, sisterly confident with a fiery sense of humor returning. "So, sweetie darling, any dreams you have, just tell me. Nothing can surprise after what I've dreamed about our mutual acquaintance, the scum-bucket with the heart of gold, but then aren't most men that, Ivan Michaelangelo, whose real name happens to be Eugene Oliver Ivantowsky. Isn't that a laugh, our Ivan, a Eugene? I suppose that Eugene Ivantowsky wasn't artsy enough for him, so he changed his name. Me, I was born Elka Adelaide Mulder." Realizing that she had been going on and on about herself, Elka stopped, and gave a wry smile. "Spill the beans; I know you want to. Besides, dreams are a window into the subconscious, and the subconscious, therefore, must be a window into our dreams, so on, and so forth..." Scully sighed, and reluctantly began to speak, relating the details she remembered of them. The way he spoke to her, the way she spoke to him, and the way she could feel the heat of his skin, even though it was just a dream. She described the surroundings, the way he had been dressed all in black, how they both were barefoot and her hair had been pulled up with ivy. "Ivy?" she asked, and Scully nodded, which prompted Elka to roll up her purple sleeve, revealing the tattoo that Scully had noticed earlier. It was a cuff of ivy around her upper arm, winding around and simple, as well as beautiful. "I got this done after meeting Ivan, because of his name. And recently, I learned that ivy was used in ancient Druidic and Wiccan wedding ceremonies. And the so-called groom wore black. No shoes, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were wearing a long white dress, were you?" Surprised, Scully nodded, and Elka smiled. "Your dream describes the ancient rituals that Druids and witches use when they marry another, or when two people are in true love. There's a connection between the two of you that I saw when I first met you, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some significance in this dream of yours." When Scully had a skeptical look on her face, Elka just laughed. "Oh, lighten up, honey! It's a beautiful dream. And I bet your hair looked lovely with that ivy in it, huh?" "I wouldn't know; there wasn't a mirror," Scully dryly reminded, and Elka gave one bubbly laugh, swinging her legs off of the bed and going to her suitcase. When she returned, Scully groaned to find her bearing a vine of fake ivy, with bobby pins and combs. "No." "You need to lighten up, Dana my dear," the other woman chirped, running her hands through the older woman's incredibly red mane of hair, and then brushing it out. "Just relax, I'll take it out, and no one will see you with it. But just let me play for a while. I'm bored, I want something to drink, and there's nothing else for me to do until I find work again." Breathing out her reluctance, Scully closed her eyes and allowed the woman to go to work. ********************************************** ********************************************** Apartment of Dana Scully Annapolis, Maryland 12:32 PM, July 8, 1997 Knocking on the door, Mulder shoved his hands in his pockets and waited anxiously for her to open the door. He was tired, weary, and running out of hope of ever finding the damned way into the fucking facility. It was starting to seem like pointless folly to the Gunmen, who had excersised every different way to break into any security system, and though he refused to give up hope, it would be impossible for him to continue without help. The door swung open, and Mulder opened his mouth, a weary smile on his face, preparing to greet her. "Hey, beautiful..." he started, and there she stood, an angel from his dream, her red hair caught up in ivy and combs, and a breathless look on her face. All color drained from his face, and his jaw dropped at the sight of her, wisps of crimson blowing in her face, and ivy entwined with the vermilion strands. "Oh, God," she muttered. "It was Elka's doing. She needed a place to stay after Ivan left her, and she had been evicted and out of work, so I let her stay here when she came." Speechless, he found himself lost in how she had appeared to come straight from that never-ending fantasy of her, dressed in white, with vines of ivy entangled in her hair. Seeing the expression on his face made her feel even more ridiculous, and she reached up with one hand to start taking the ivy out. Immediately, he shook his head, shaking him from the awe that he had held for a moment. "No, it looks nice," he insisted, and she tilted her head. "Really." With a skip, Elka bounded into the room, and when Mulder caught sight of her, he just shoved his hands into his jean pockets, immediately uncomfortable in front of the young woman. "So, anyway, I just wanted to call you earlier, but there wasn't any answer anywhere. I was on my way to the Gunmen's, but things aren't looking up. Without a decent hacker, they can't get into the system. "I can do it," Elka chirped up, and the both of them turned to her, startled. "I took a bunch of computer classes in college, and got really good at breaking into stuff. I used to erase criminal records for friends who had gotten picked up by the police, and once, I destroyed evidence that a friend of mine had been possession of cocaine." "You hacked that deeply into it?" Scully asked, and Elka grinned proudly. "And I was drinking then, too," she proudly said. "Imagine how good I could be sober. What's the story?" The partners turned to face each other, and silent conversation ensued. <> <> <> Considering his second cousin's offer, Mulder then nodded, and looked over at the young woman. "Fine. But everything and anything that you see, anything that you find, does not get talked about in public. You do not breathe one word of what you see to anyone. It's extremely important that you take this as seriously as possible." With a serious expression on her face, Elka nodded. "You got it." ********************************************** ********************************************** Office of the Lone Gunmen Washington, DC 1:32 PM, July 8, 1997 Spinning around on her heel, Elka looked around the cramped, messy offices of Frohike, Langly, and Byers, and smirked. "I love it," she dryly said. "Classically nerdy, like three guys who can't get any jacking around in their basement." Chuckling in spite of himself, Mulder looked around at the faces of the three men of a beautiful young hacker in their presence. "What kind of equipment do you prefer?" Byers asked. "Macintosh, Microsoft, IBM..." "I work only with Mac," she replied. "It's a preference bred into me. And, I work only with music going, so get something good in here. Sneaker Pimps, Soul Coughing, Portishead, and anything and everything Andrew Lloyd Webber." Patting the stereo system of Langly's lovingly, she turned her head and flashed them all a big smile. "You guys are something else! Gotta respect that. And there's no alcohol, right?" "Nothing," Byers assured, darting his eyes in the guilty-looking Frohike's direction. "Not after Frohike's Fourth of July bash." The little man shrugged, and Scully let loose a small smile. "Anyway, how soon can you get to work?" "Immediately," Elka said, and sat down, pulling up a chair to an available Macintosh, and put her nimble fingers to the keyboard. "Get me to the beginning. Not how far you can get, but to the Web, and direct me to the jumping off point for hacking into this facility. From then, we can start working." Langly started typing, bringing her to the original site, to the remote access, and then she nodded. "Classified information, in the Department of Defense," she read aloud. "Very interesting, how an Infertility Clinic would be considered a part of the D of D, isn't it?" "Exactly," Mulder agreed, and Scully gave the two Mulders a look. "It should be under the FDA, or the Federal Health Program. The Department of Defense would have no interest in an infertility clinic." Typing in numbers and beginning to enter sequences, Elka suddenly froze. "I know this system," she murmured. "This is an old system. It's one of the most basic systems, used in the early ages of computers and security." "Why would they use a low-technology system?" Langly asked, confused, and Scully answered for him. "Because everyone else expects a difficult entry. If there's a complex expectation, there will be a simple solution. Just as we exceed presumptions, we can also disappoint," she reminded, and Elka nodded, beginning to type again. "We will need mainframe access to the rest of the files," she agreed, and Mulder looked down. "But we now have access to the security system. We have access to records of employees at this facility, the times in which these employees are working, and their service records, not to mention a way to control the security system." Triumphantly, she looked around the room. "Pack your bags, boys and girls, we're going to the Neville Clinc in Portland, Oregon." ********************************************** ********************************************** (end part sixteen)