Disclaimer- these characters don't belong to me. No harm intended or profit gained by their use. pairing- Mulder/Doggett
rating- R
summary: post-colonization. Two men come to an understanding. Originally written for the 16th X-Files Lyric Wheel.

---

I was torn away form the sweet oblivion of a deep sleep when someone called, "Hey, Boss! We're back!" into the doorway of the room that I'd commandered for my own. There wasn't a door so much. Just an old blanket tacked up to the battered wood frame, to give me some pretension of privacy, about the only such privacy that I got.

Thank the God that I still didn't believe in, I hadn't been pulled from a dream. It would have meant remembering the dream probably. It was just better not to remember those.

As for this place, this room that I called my own. It was in the ruins of an apartment complex somewhere just inside of Indianapolis. Half of the buildings had been smashed flat, but just under half remained livable. Because the small group of refugees I'd gathered around me were exhausted and because it already had a tall, mostly intact chainlink fence around it that we could guard, and because I could admit to myself that there wasn't going to be any place that was more intact, less splintered by the hammer that fell from the sky, I ended up deciding to settle us here. We would survive, maybe even more. Already sometimes during the day, you could hear the sharp pipings of children's laughter.

But not now. It was deep night, past the witching hour but not yet approaching dawn. We sent out scouting parties, volunteers only, to find supplies: medicines, canned goods, anything really. And survivors. I was clear about that, that anyone we found be given the chance to join our community. We didn't find many people, at least not many living ones.

On our way to Indianapolis we'd discovered a number of gristly surprises, remains of the camps that FEMA had hearded survivors into- before the authorities too had sucumbed and the locked camps had plunged into the worst kind of chaos, the kind of inhumanity and cruelty that you'd hope not to find but inevitably did. It was always soul-rending, coming across one of those, and after a while, we avoided them. We hadn't yet found the one that had to be in the Indianapolis area, but we just hadn't gone looking. Every major city had one just outside it.

I rolled out of my bed accompanied by the usual crinkly sounds. It was a leaky old air mattress that I had stuffed with fall leaves to inflate permanently. I'd built a frame of boards scavenged from one of the collapsed buildings, just enough to rise it off the floor. I probably could have claimed one of the mattresses we'd taken from a nearby mattress store, but I'd left them to the families with children. I couldn't see making someone do all the work of carting one here by hand, just for me. The makeshift mattress, my winter survival weight sleeping bag and the extra pile of blankets and some extra clothes were about all I laid claim to owning these days. Those things and the fact of my continued existance were enough for me.

I shoved me feet into my boots and was through the blanket door in thirty seconds, my only grooming was running my fingers through my hair. I thought for a brief moment about what my mother had called that- an Irish comb. Well, if she survived, and I doubted she did, she'd have laughed a little and just gotten on with it, like I did.

Goddard was in the hall. He'd gone out a week ago with Gonzales, Comstock, Jackson, Chalmers and Divakaruni. I hoped it would be all of them that came back. I was prepared for some of them not making it. As recently as a month ago, it had been a team of eight.

"I assume you waking me at," I stepped in front of the window and paused to look at my watch. Just enough moonlight came in so I could read it. It was the only thing I owned that was close to a luxury anything any more. I'd liberated it from a smashed jewelry store only because it was one of those watches that wound themselves from regular body movement. It'd never need a battery and would always keep time. "Three-thirty five in the morning, means that you've go something to report, so report already."

I couldn't see Goddard in the dark hallway other than his bare outline. His dark skin just blended into the night. We'd gotten so far that we had electric generator light for a few essential functions, but lighting my hallway was not one of them. Not that either Goddard or the hallway were much to look at, so perhaps it was kinder to my eyes that I couldn't see. Goddard was prone to keloid scarring and so his face was a mess- his left cheek particularly a mass of lumpy pink against skin the color of good, dark chocolate. The hallway was similarly a mess, its cheap wallboard stoved in here and there, scrawled over with graffiti from before we got here and its unsalvageable carpet torn away long ago to reveal bare concrete floors.

He was a little too slow to answer, so I started to ask questions. "Are you all back? Is Divakaruni back?" I asked, that foremost on my mind. Not out of any personal consideration. Actually, I thought she was a bit of a bitch, but she could afford to be. Because before the hammer fell, she'd been just one board examination short of being Doctor Divakaruni. Our only doctor. It was foolish to let her go out on these trips, but it was even more foolish to try and stop her. Let's just say she earned her nickname.

"Yeah, the Diva is back," Goddard said. "And all the rest of us. We found a Starbucks. We've got nearly two hundred pounds of coffee. It's all sealed. It should be still good. And..."

"And what?" I demanded. More coffee was good news, but not enough for me to be enthused about being woken this early.

"We found something. Not the camp," Goddard said, but he still shuddered a little. "It looked to be a lab of some kind. In one of the big office towers on the north side. There were survivors."

I didn't wait to hear details. I just reached back into my room and grabbed the parka I had hanging from a nail in the wall and started walking even as I pulled it on.

Still, Goddard supplied those details as he followed me. My building had no stairs and I was on the upper floor. I climbed down the rickety aluminum extension ladder that we had propped against the floor that ended where the stairs to the ground would have been.

"There's just three of them. Everyone else was dead already. These ones are in pretty bad shape. They must have endurance like you can't believe. They're in the infirmary and the Diva is doing what she can for them," Goddard said. He'd been a Marine, but when the invasion happened, he'd been a law student. He was young, solid and tough, but I'd also seen him weep like a baby before.

I hit the ground and started running to the building that held our small infirmary. It was a cold night, the sky cloudless with a huge yellow moon parked high in the blackness. It was bright enough that I could see my breath puff into clouds, making me wonder for not the first time this winter why I hadn't stopped our wandering much sooner, say, when we were in Texas.

Texas hadn't been right though. I'd just known it wasn't.

The squat and ugly buildings of this apartment complex had been clustered around a sort of pond, just a dip dug into the ground and filled with water. We used it as a kind of cistern in the summer, the water being safe to drink so long as we filtered it first. But now it was frozen a layer of snow on top of it, the moon turning it into sparkling crystals. The infirmary was on the far side of the pond, but thankfully we'd cleared a path through the snow that had fallen yesterday. It was a brutally cold winter this year and I thought that it would have been better for Goddard's crew to bring back canned goods rather than coffee and three more mouths to feed.

I had to stand in the anteroom to the infirmary for a moment, blinking. There was electric light here. My eyes, accustomed to pulling as much of the moonlight out of the darkness as possible, protested at this sudden, brilliant flooding.

Divakaruni and the three new arrivals were in the main examining room of the infirmary. It used to be someone's living room/dining room. Their art was still on the walls. It was at times like these that I was aware that we'd perched ourselves in the middle of the ruins of someone else's life. The art was all Monet posters, matching the pink painted walls. Divakaruni had taken down big wreathes of silk flowers because they were dusty- an invitation to being unsanitary, and we'd moved out the couches, but otherwise the former inhabitant would have recognized the ruins of her house. Even her antique oak table had been appropriated and put into use.

Divakaruni was bent over a slight form that was stretched out on that table. All I could really see of her was her black hair pulled back into a pony tail. She'd once been slightly plump, now just this side of too thin, and her hair was no longer shiny, but more lank and slightly greasy. All of us were reduced from our former circumstances.

It took a little while for me to realize that she wasn't working, but weeping over the body.

"Hey," I said to her. She looked up and I could see that her brown face was dirty, but that runnels of tears had cleaned away tracks of the dirt. The slight form underneath her, the body, had belonged to a red headed woman.

"I thought for sure I could save her," Divakaruni said.

"You can't win them all," I said. "At least she didn't die in that place."

It was only after she stepped away from the body that I got a good look at it. From a distance, I wouldn't have known. Her face was sunken, emaciated, bruised, the eyelids closed on eyes that knew to be a brilliant blue.

It was Dana Scully.

I couldn't believe that it was her. It was a wrenching, searing irony that it had been so long since I had seen anyone from my old life, the one before the invasion, but that now I'd found one of the faces that would have been most welcome to see, and she was dead.

"I knew her," I said, surprised that I could find a voice. Maybe that's how I'd ended up the leader of our little community- because I had been the one to find it in him to speak when horrors that should render you speechless were all around us. "Her name was Dana Scully. She fought against them. We'll bury her with all the honors. What about the others?"

I turned to see that Divakaruni had already abandoned Scully and was carefully examining another of the three victims. I looked, but I didn't recognize this one. He was a child, a little boy that reminded me a little too much of Luke for comfort, but then, what boy of a certain age didn't, I thought. I turned away and let Diva do her thing. If she could save him, that was well and good. One of the families here would take him in.

The third victim was going to get Diva's attention last, an obvious triage. Even my untrained eye could see that he was unhurt except for that severe malnourishment had reduced his always slim body to near skeletal. I wasn't surprised to see him as I would have thought, not after seeing Scully. But it made sense. He was the salt shaker to her pepper, the Jeff to her Mutt, Moose to her Squirrel. It was Mulder.

He was starting to come too, moaning, opening hazel eyes that weren't really seeing anything and trying to sit up.

Maybe it was just gratitude at seeing some familiar face from my life before. Maybe I was doing it for her, because it hurt so bad to have her then lose her immediately. Maybe I was just crazy. But I took charge of him.

I knelt by him and called for water. I was given it in a salvaged sports bottle. I tipped it a little up to his mouth and he drank through lips that must have been painful, they were so dry and cracked. After that, he settled down again, too weak to do much more probably. I thought he might call for Scully- he seemed to move his lips for a moment as if thinking about speaking, but he didn't. He just closed his eyes and feigned sleep. I don't know how I knew that he was faking it. It wasn't like I'd ever watched him sleep before, but I knew. He didn't relax, didn't breath deeper. Diva didn't come to look at him, but eventually one of the others she was training came to look at him, and pronounced what I'd already assumed, that he was unhurt and not apparently ill, other than weakness from lack of food and water.

"So?" I asked Diva's student. "How do we take care of him?"

"Re-hydrate him and get him back onto food slowly. Too much of either too soon and he'll get sick. We've got that low-sodium chicken broth stashed away for just this sort of thing. Or we'll have Maria make up some squab broth."

Squab, or pigeon rather, was just about the only meat we had besides canned. Sometimes someone trapped squirrel, wild rabbitt or racoon, but I couldn't get used to the gameyness of them, my Southern roots notwithstanding. It'd been easy enough to live trap a big number of the feral birds and they settled real well into one of the buildings that we'd converted into a giant dovecote. There was always talk about heading out into the countryside and trying to find some feral chickens or goats or something to redomesticate.

"We should try to rehydrate him quickly," Diva's student continued. "Wake him up every hour or so and give him some more fluid. He doesn't really need to be here though. I'll see if Antoine can take him in."

"No," I said quickly. I wasn't about to let Mulder get out of my sight. Not that I didn't trust Antoine, who'd been a nurse. But I had a need to take care of him. I couldn't do it in my barely habitably aerie though. "I'll do it. We can move him to the Dorm."

The Dorm was one of the larger apartments. We often moved people into it when they first joined the community, usually just until we could get one of the apartments ready for occupants, but sometimes a single person might not want to bother with their own place, so over time, it'd gathered five semi-regular occupants. I'd have settled there myself except for my need for the little bit of distance and privacy I got from living in a mostly abandoned building.

"Okay," the student said doubtfully, but she wasn't about to question me. Authority did have its uses occasionally. "I guess we could move him now."

Mulder hadn't been moved from the trailer they used to bring him in, so it seemed logical to keep him on it and just wheel him out again.

The trailer, we actually had several, was made by Jackson and Gonzales out of old bicycle parts mostly. It could be pulled by a person or by a person on a bike. I noticed that Mulder was lying on top of a lumpy, plastic covered surface. I poked at it and it gave way a little.

Jackson was nearby and I looked at him. "The coffee," he said.

"Which one of you is claiming the salvage rights?" I asked. Usually they went to not the one that found the stuff, per se, but to the one who bothered to haul it back. There was still plenty of stuff to salvage. Indie had turned out to be a rich trove of it and entirely uninhabited except for us as far as we could tell. It was just a matter of who was going to make the effort to haul it back.

"We're splitting it evenly, half to the community first," Jackson said. He'd grabbed the other side of the trailer and along with me was pushing it out of the infirmary. He and his buddies were good about bringing stuff back for the community, as if they recognized that they had an advantage over a lot of community members in that they were young, fit and brave, probably a bit too brave.

"Good man," I said.

It was easy enough to bring Mulder over to the Dorm. We were met at the door by Gonzales. She was one of the five permanent residents, and sort of the self-appointed house mother. I think, like me, she found meaning for her own life in taking care of others.

Before you go picturing her as the earth mother type though, let's just say that its a good thing I'm no longer in law enforcement, knowing what she's told me about her former life in a girl gang. She was tattooed, complete with the black teardrops under her eyes. Tough as coffin nails, that was how Jackson described her, sometimes in awe, sometimes in irritation.

Still, she bustled around, making up the double bed in the one of the empty rooms. It was actually the dining room once, I thought, because it was near the kitchen. The electric stove obviously didn't work, but we'd gotten good at cobbling together woodburning stoves out of whatever we could find.

It was disconcertingly easy to lift Mulder off the trailer onto the bed. I could have done it alone. He must not have weighed much more than ninety pounds. He started shivering uncontrollably and didn't stop even though we threw on blanket after blanket.

"He probably can't regulate his own temperature," I said. "He just doesn't have any body fat left."

And that was how I climbed into bed the first time with Fox Mulder. It wasn't anything but me giving him my spare body heat. We did it a lot around here, myself being unusual that I mostly slept alone. We had all the fires in the place going, but the room was still drafty, and probably a good job it was too, because otherwise I'm sure we would have been killed by carbon monoxide.

It was disconcerting, snuggling up to a being that was little more than a living skeleton. His bones pressed into the few soft spots my body had left and I wondered if his points and burrs were working their way into the few soft spots I had left in my soul. He gave something that sounded like a sigh and shifted slightly so that somehow, his angles fit into mine and though it was still unnerving to hold him, it wasn't uncomfortable. Then he truly did drift to sleep. I could feel his very sinews grow slack, his breathing slow and I could feel his heartbeat under my fingertips easily as it slowed to an easy rhythm.

I woke a few hours later. It was a struggle not to turn over and curl up under the blankets again, but as usual, I did what needed to be done. And Mulder's angles were uncomfortable again, his razor sharp hips pressing into my belly. Gonzales handed me a cup of warmed broth for him and the sport bottle of water again. I shook Mulder's shoulder until his eyes opened, then manuevered him to a partially upright position, leaning against me for support. He drank the tepid broth and water wordlessly.

It continued like this for days. He'd sleep a few hours, then some fluids, working his way up to watery oatmeal before too long and other mushy, easy to digest foods. His body slowly was recovering but he didn't speak though. I might have wondered if something had been done to his mind except that his eyes still shone with his usual relentless intelligence, though it was now through a veil of despair. Fox Mulder was still in that body and just waiting for the right time to speak. I didn't worry about the despair, because the fire I saw under that was something I'd seen again and again since the invasion- the will to survive. Not just in him, or myself, but in everyone who had made it here to this enclave.

Daytime, he seemed to manage to hold his temperature just fine, especially on the clear, bright days where sunlight streamed into the north windows of the room, reflected from the snow, but at night as the temperature dropped, he shivered and I found myself wrapping him in my arms again, becoming accustomed to his emaciated frame. In the day time, I could leave him, so that I could do the things that needed to be done, the hundreds of myriads tasks that needed to be seen to in the name of survival.

One night, about a week after his arrival, I tried to leave him for the night. I handed his care off to Gonzales and the other residents of the Dorm and headed off to my own room. I think maybe I didn't want to get too used to cuddling up with Mulder. I was uncomfortable with the fact that holding him was too comfortable. That it meant more to me than just being needed, than just being the caretaker. I mostly tried not to think about it too closely.

I ignored the fact that compared with the warm, even pleasant confines of the Dorm, my room was a dank hole in the wall. I'd boarded up all of the rooms in the apartment but the main one off the hallway, so that I only had the one room to heat. My heat stove was a makeshift affair, the stovepipe punched right through the ceiling. It was out cold now, had been for days, but I started it up again, kindling a fire right on the ashes of the dead one. I could hear the familiar noises of the buildings few other occupants. I was comfortable on my bed of old leaves and sleeping bag. But I didn't sleep. I stared through the grating at the yellow and orange dancing flames and thought about Mulder. I decided to spare the power and turned on the battery operated short wave radio. I listened to people far, far away, inaccesible, calling out over the staticky distance, hoping that someone like me was hearing them.

Once a very long time ago, or least it seemed very long, even though it was only ten years, I'd watched him drive away into the desert with Scully. I had no clue what had happened to him in the time since them. I expect it was something like what had happened to all of us. The aliens didn't win, but it had given humanity a blow which we'd be hard put to recover from.

It started to rain, but it'd been a bitter cold day and I could tell from the hard spatters that it made on the roof that it was freezing rain. In the morning, everything would be covered with a layer of ice, tree branches even. Sidewalks would be slick and everything would tinkle and crack in the wind. And the soft drifts of snow would be buried under a hard crust.

Sometime after midnight, Gonzales pushed aside my curtain and slipped into my room. I stayed in bed, waiting for her to say or do something.

I wouldn't exactly call it a relationship, but Gonzales and I slept together sometimes. It wasn't love, but it was comfort. At first it was regular- several times a month. It only occurred to me that she was trying to get a child out of me when she asked if I shot blanks. When I told her the truth, that I did, it became far less frequent and regular. I didn't mind. Either. If I could have given her a child, I would have. As for sex with her, I enjoyed it, but not so much that I suffered when it was taken away. I figured she was sleeping with someone or someones else. I paid careful attention to not finding out who that might be. Other women were willing to share their bed and body with me, but I had chosen her precisely because she didn't let me get too close to the real, vulnerable her and didn't seem to care that she wasn't seeing my soft underbelly either. For both of us, since I couldn't be the father to her child, it was simple- occasional comfort without complications.

She wasn't pretty, not with her tattoos too many of which were crude and primative. But she was soft in the places that a girl was supposed to be soft and hard enough to survive without me everywhere else. Though she bound them tight with cloth when she was out on scavenging trips, her breasts were full and round, each of them just perfectly sized one of my hands. She growled like an animal when she came and clenched me tight with both her arms and legs when I did.

I thought maybe that's why she might have slipped into my room tonight but before I could say or do anything, she said, "He's asking for you."

I might have just told her to tell him no, then rolled over and tried to sleep again. But this was a man who I'd attained an uneasy respect for once, and who was now the last link I had to a life that was gone forever. Yes, his bony irritations had made their way into my soft spots. If I had been drifting into and out of sleepiness, I bolted awake at hearing that I was needed.

I rolled out of bed and started dressing for the cold. She stood near my fire, holding her hands, warming them, nearly touching the metal of the old oil drum. It was then that I remembered we'd picked her up just outside of El Paso, that to her, this was the great white, frozen north and she was almost never warm, though you would never hear her complain about it. I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her. I took her hands into mine and rubbed them. They were cold as ice. She didn't relax into my embrace but I didn't expect her to. She didn't push me away though I almost expected that.

"The girl we buried, was she your lover? Before?" Gonzales asked, sounding a little jealous. At times I almost forgot that she was a woman, not much more than a girl really, young enough to be my daughter though I tried not to think about that. Guadalupe was her name- Lupe. I never used it, nor did I talk about my past with her. But I did now.

"No, Lupe," I said. "Mulder was her lover. My lover was a woman named Monica Reyes. She died long ago, before the invasion."

I thought about that, the sudden squeal of tires, then the burst of gunfire, then her crumpled body in a pool of crimson on the asphalt of the truckstop we'd been at. It didn't hurt now. The hard edges of memory had been worn smooth by frequent examination.

Monica was pretty, a beautiful woman. Educated, unlike Lupe's native street smarts. Utterly unlike Lupe, and yet they reminded me of each other. Not because they shared the same Mexican heritage, but because they were both utterly fearless. Once, I'd never have considered Lupe as a lover, but everything had changed, not just in the world, but in me.

"I don't think he knows she's dead," Gonzales said. "He talking to her."

"I'll go to him," I said, but I didn't move.

"You should let me go," she said, though she didn't move out of my arms. "I should tell you something. I'm embarazada."

Sometimes, when excited or emotional, she slipped into Spanglish, peppering her English with Spanish. I didn't quite get it, but she slipped one of my hands lower until it touched her abdomen and I could feel a slight swell there. Yes, she had achieved the goal she'd tried to reach with me.

"Shawn's," she said. That was Jackson's first name. "He wants to marry me. Make a proper family he says. That means no more booty calls for you."

I wasn't hurt or even surprised. I knew that reproduction was on her agenda and it was merely a matter of time before it happened. And she and Jackson had been close. It made sense. Certainly a lot more sense than me and her.

"You love him?" I asked.

"Yeah, I think so," she said, bashfully, happily. The first I had ever heard her be. "But I worry about you, Papacieto."

It was her only nickname for me. It meant something like Daddy, I thought, something that cut a little too close for comfort.

"I worry that no one in this camp has a heart big enough to plug up the hole in you," she said.

"I should go to Mulder," I said. This kind of talk was precisely the kind that I always tried to avoid. "Be happy, Lupe. I'm glad Shawn can give you what you wanted."

It was a perilous trip down the ladder. The aluminum leached warmth from my fingers as I climbed down, but it was so slick I didn't dare try and grasp the rungs in hands covered by gloves. The icy rain beat against me as I felt my way down the ladder, rung by rung.

Mulder seemed to be sleeping when I arrived at his bedside, but half a second of me staring down at him and his eyes opened.

In the week since he'd arrived, he'd made great progress, almost unbelievable progress. He was still emaciated, but he'd lost the bag of bones look. Flesh was being laid over his bones and he could now sit up on his own, though he hadn't to my knowlege, walked on his own yet. Or talked.

He did now.

"Doggett," he said. He didn't look me in the eye at first and I wondered how much of his soul had been crushed by that place they'd found him in. But then he looked me straight in the eye and asked, "She's well buried?"

His voice was rough, as if he were still dry, dehydrated, but it was clear and lucid enough.

"I'll take you to her grave once you're walking again," I told him, even as I wondered what Gonzales could haved meant about him talking to Scully. He certainly knew she was dead. "I'm sorry, but we couldn't wait to bury her. It's just not reliably cold enough to store her."

He nodded. I wondered if he needed anything else or if he'd pulled me out of my bed in the middle of the night for this one question. As if to answer, he said, "I know it's unmanly to admit, but I don't think I'm going to able to sleep without someone in here. I just can't seem to get warm. And when I close me eyes..."

I nodded and without comment, I started toeing off my boots. Obviously, I hadn't been doing too hot in the getting sleep alone department myself.

"I didn't get you out of someone's bed, did I?" he asked as I climbed in beside him.

"No," I said, which was the utter truth, as pathetic as it sounded to my ears at the moment. "Only my own."

"I don't know why, but I could sleep when you were here," he said as I wrapped an arm over his shoulder and let him back up against me.

"It doesn't mean anything," I lied. It was a good thing it was dark. No moonlight pouring into the room tonight. If he'd been looking, he could have seen the lie, read right from my eyes. "Everyone one else you knew from before is dead. It's just the 'put 'em through hell together' effect."

He just nodded. I somehow expected him to ask, to want the details. And because I needed to tell him, I started talking. About Monica and that truck stop she never left. About Skinner and how he'd died taking out the replicant who'd replaced the Vice-President, how he'd sacrificed everything, because he was the only one of us who had a hope of getting close enough. I told him about the death of his three friends, not that he didn't know, but I don't know if he'd heard the details. I told him everything I knew, even as I talked wondering where the words were flowing from.

I finished with, "But you're safe here now."

"Where is here?" he asked. "There was a while where we were transported a lot from place to place. I was never sure how or where."

"Indianapolis," I told him. "We've been here nearly two years. There's almost two hundred of us. I'm hoping we'll be self-sufficient in a couple of years. If not, its a good city to live in for the post-apocalypse. The stores were all nearly full when we got here."

"Your people are tough," Mulder said. "The girl, the one with the tattoos."

Mulder indicated Gonzales' tear tattoo with a finger just under his eye. "She killed five men bigger and better armed than her."

No one had mentioned that they'd engaged in armed combat to rescue Mulder and Scully, but it didn't surprise me. Especially not to hear that about Gonzales.

"She's a survivor," I said. "We all are."

---

He was playing Darth Vader when I first realized that I loved him.

I was able to find my courage not long after that first night that I'd asked him to stay with me. I no longer needed his solidness as a bodily reminder of everything that there was about the world that made it worth while to stay alive. I found those reminders in myself before long and could sleep by myself. But oddly, though he no longer slept in my bed, he ended up bringing his sleeping bag and extra clothes and setting up a bed near mine in the Dorm. It was, apparently, something so unprecedented and unexpected from him that it incited no end of comment in the community. He shrugged it off. Some things never changed and one of those was that John Doggett could give a shit about the talk about him. It was the only reason he'd survived the X-files.

I got better, stronger. I had little choice, it seemed. Any time I seemed on the verge of giving into despair, there were my beloved dead, cajoling, scolding, loving me back to life. Spring, then summer rolled around and though I didn't join the crews that scattered through the city, claiming the abandoned riches of a once major city, I worked as I could in the gardens and with the pigeons, gaining strength and peace of mind.

It bothered me for reasons I couldn't quite understand that John's silent strength had never once cracked open, not since that night. There were times where I could sense swirling tidal currents beneath his surface, but always when one talked to him, attempted to gain access to those depths, the surface was inpenetrable, smooth and rock-hard. It was as if his peace of mind was only as deep as his impenetrable surface. If I moved towards him, it was as if he moved away. He was a good man, a good leader to this barely controlled chaos that was no longer calling itself a camp, but a village. He was impartial in his judgements, but sometimes I wondered if that was only because he let himself get close enough to none of them.

He, as all of us did, worked hard, even to the point of exhaustion, all day, then at night, without comment, he folded himself into bed and slept the sleep of the just. Alone.

Fall followed, then winter and suddenly, we had little to do other than drive each other crazy and huddle in together against the cruelness of the cold and icestorms. We had books, of course, looted from a branch library that had been found intact.

I read voraciously and got to know the curious cast of characters that had assembled itself in the ruins and started to paste itself together into a community. John, of course, had been the core around which it all had coallesced. His lieutenants seemed to be the five who had rescued me from hell. Goddard, a big black man who reminded me of my one time informant, the man I knew only as X, had a painfully ugly, scarred face and an even more painfully beautiful soul. There was little Lupe Gonzales, who John was always oddly solicitous towards, even though she could spit nails and send a grown man scurrying just with her stare, and her husband and father of her baby, Shawn Jackson who seemed to be able to make just about anything out of broken bits of metal and cast off parts. There was Diva, Dr. Divakaruni who reminded me so much of Scully that it pained me to be in the room with her. There was Boom Boom, otherwise known as Raymond Chalmers, who was a tough, flinty man who said little, but who was always seeming to be doing something. And Andre Comstock was the cut-up of the crew, self-appointed head of the entertainment committee.

It was he that had smashed together Star Wars and King Lear and somehow managed to convince John to take a place up on center stage. We had something like a theater in the old pool house and community center, and Comstock always staged his little productions there. All the children were gathered there that night that I first realized I loved John. I hovered in the back, watching.

The youngest of our children had never seen television, those slightly older remembered it only vaguely. But even the teenagers who could remember the magic of television and the movie theater quite clearly were entranced, because there was nothing else even close.

With no props besides sawn off broomsticks and no set at all, everyone in the room was entranced by a scene that was something like the climax of the Empire Strikes Back, where Luke is in a deadly struggle against Darth Vader. John was Darth, Comstock, younger and fair of face, dressed in dirty Karate pajamas, was Luke.

John must have been enjoying himself, though I wouldn't have guessed that he would. He swooped across the stage in a makeshift black cape, making his own sound effects of heavy breathing, the clanks and clicks of clashing broomsticks a regular rhythm. Then, the dramatic revelation of Luke's parentage. More clashing. A turn so that the final blow seemed deadly, but hidden so as to not spoil the illusion, and then, the end, at least for the evening.

Looked at objectively, it was not much of a performance. John was no actor. The costumes were pathetic, the props even more. Comstock, though more enthusiastic wasn't much more an actor than John and the dialog he had come up with was laughable. But I had been entranced for a moment, forgotten where I was even. And the children especially had been caught in the moment. There was a moment of stunned silence as the adults started lighting more candles, then the children exploded into cheers.

It was something about the way he looked at them afterwards, still draped in the black cape, still holding his broomstick sword, as if he keenly felt the humiliation but had decided that it was worth it, if only for them. Oddly, it increased his dignity. Something in me that I thought had died shifted within me, a funny little twist in my chest near my stomach, that place where you always felt heartburn.

Before long, he shed the accountrements of Darth and became just John again, but when I looked at him, he seemed as if I had found a window into his soul that I could look into. It was all so clear to me for just a moment.

The children were bundled off to bed, and because there was nothing else to do in the darkness, the adults followed soon after. I climbed into the bed that I'd used ever since I'd come to this place over year ago. We were the only ones currently living in the Dorm and I still hadn't gotten used to the silence and emptiness.

John wordlessly took his place beside me and it was at that moment that I understood yet again the strange loneliness of the human condition. As far as he knew, nothing had occurred. Everything was the same for him, but everything, every little detail of my world had shifted slightly, upended as I looked at them through the eyes of love. There was a word so fitting for this- lovesick, something that you don't realize is literally true until you shake as try and fall asleep next to a man who doesn't and can never know of your torment.

It had stormed last night, an icestorm again. Then the temperature had plunged to near zero. We had the woodstove burning salvaged scrap lumber until it was red hot, but still the room retained an edge of icy. Outside, a cruel wind blew, setting the bare scoured limbs dancing. They sounded like bones, I thought, the ice that encased their branches cracking and knocking.

After a long, wakeful hour, or at least wakeful for me, John sat up in his sleeping bag. "You okay, Mulder?" he asked. It wasn't that he didn't care for me, but it seemed always to be lumped in with his care for everything else, that I was just another part of the civilization he was trying to preserve. That he cared for me because I happened to be illuminated by the same candle that he held up against the darkness.

"Its like that night that we first talked about Scully being dead, isn't it? Reminds you of it, doesn't it?" he asked in the face of my silence.

It did, but that was far from the cause of my restlessness. Simple tragedy had dogged my steps all my life and it was almost a friend, albeit a painful one. I couldn't answer him.

"You must get lonely," he observed. "I know none of them are Scully, but you know, you don't have to be sleeping alone in the Dorm like this."

My pulse quickened for a moment before reason and common sense spoke up and pointed out that he was talking about the numerous women around the village who would have taken me in. And indeed, as if adding salt to my wounds, he confirmed it, saying, "You don't have to be stuck as roommate with an old loner like myself."

Worse than the slight sting of being rejected, though unknowingly on his part, was hearing him speak about himself like that. To learn that every bit of the barrier that kept me out was felt keenly by him, just as isolating from his side. I ached for him and to be the one that could find the doorway into his soul.

"You're the last person I'd call a loner, Doggett" I said. I thought about how every minute of his every day, except for sleep, was spent working. He hardly kept a moment to himself. This was the man that volunteered for baby duty and diaper changing when he had a spare moment. "Believe me, I know loner."

I thought about the apartment that I had spent so many solitary years, now probably smashed to atoms along with the rest of DC. I think maybe I was glad it was gone, no, not the world I had known nor all the billions of people in the world who had died. But I was glad I no longer had that shell to contain me.

"Yeah, I guess you do," John said.

"You know, you don't have to sleep alone either," I said. I could have meant the same thing he'd been trying to say, that any number of women would have welcomed him into their bed, but that wasn't what I was trying to say and hoping desparately that he would hear.

"I think you're over estimating my attractiveness to the opposite sex, Mulder," he said. "And I don't have anything I can offer a woman."

"I doubt that," I said. Again, I ached to hear his alienation expressed so plainly. But mostly I shivered inside my pile of bedding. In certain ways, I don't think I will ever fully recover from my ordeal in that lab, and losing my ability to stay warm was one of the lasting consequences. I think it must be that I haven't managed to build up enough body fat to keep warm. As I had laid in bed, I had grown colder and colder until I couldn't conceal it.

"You okay over there?" he asked, always the one concerned, even when he was bleeding himself.

"I just can't seem to get warm tonight," I said. "You think we could spare the wood to build up the fire?"

"No, better not, but it is colder than a witch's tit tonight," he said. "Hold on."

He slipped out of his sleeping bag and crossed the short distance between our beds. To my stunned disbelief, he crawled in with me, not waiting for an invitation. He wrapped himself around me, legs drapped over mine, torso on top of mine.

"Jesus, Mulder, you're freezing," he said, as he started to rub my hands. He gave up after a while and just guided them into his armpits. That must not have been comfortable for him but I was intensely grateful. "Your hands are like ice."

Immediately, his body heat started to melt into my icy core and slowly, my shivering stopped. At first, I didn't protest his presense. I couldn't resist the warmth, the small animal mind in current control of my body would not give up that comfort. But as I became less and less likely to expire from hypothermia, I started to squirm away from him, for obvious reasons. I didn't want body contact to cause a reaction, nor to betray it if it did.

As I stopped shivering, he pulled away on his own, as far away as two men sharing a twin bed can at least. We both laid on our backs, spines straight as rods, shoulder touching shoulder. I stared up into the darkness. I imagined that he did the same.

"You know, I never apologized," he said.

"For what?" I wondered what he could have thought that he'd done that could have given me offense.

"For throwing you against that wall, you know, long ago, back when," he said. For a moment, both of us were silent, lost separately in memories of a world now disappeared, one that we had shared only briefly long ago. I thought of small, cluttered offices, narrow hallways and what I had thought to be narrow minds.

He began to speak again, tentatively, "You know, we found Luke's killer. I'm sorry, that I took out some of my rage on you. I finally had no choice but to realize that Scully was right. That I was just afraid to look beyond."

We had, by the time I had to leave DC, reached a certain detente, a kind of mutual respect, but before that, both of us had given offense to the other and never apologized formally. There was regret there in his voice, also the resonances of a wisdom hard earned. And though I had hardly given it a thought in years, especially not in this last year of us living and working side by side, I, in turn, owed him the matching apology.

"I'm sorry too," I said. "For shoving you in Skinner's office, for accusing you of those things. It was too easy for me to see treachery and betrayal at every turn. And Scully was right, you are worth the effort."

He huffed, a little sigh of relief. I thought of the things I had accused him of, that he'd deliberately gotten a man killed, that he was burying information about the coming invasion. I couldn't have been further wrong about him.

I continued, "Your only fault was not being far enough along the same road that I had travelled already. I used to ask too much of people, that they make leaps that they weren't prepared to make."

"You have no idea how much you used to piss me off," he said. "You wouldn't let anyone just settle for the status quo while I didn't want any one to remind me of all the things I was afraid of and you did just that with your insistance."

I felt the sudden urge to hold him, just lying next to him was not enough.

"You okay now?" he asked. "Maybe I should go to my own bed."

No, stay, I wanted to scream. As he drew in a sharp breath, I realized that I hadn't just thought that, but said it. Yes, I had said it in a soft, pleading tone, my memory supplied.

"I'd better not," he said, but didn't move.

"Why not?" I asked.

"We're getting along so well. I don't want to push it," he said. "I should go."

But then again, he didn't go. There was a long silence from him, spent in uneasy motionless tension beside him, my body rigid, my mind forcing myself not to reach out for him, not to beg him to stay just a little while longer, because that small animal brain wanted that, and more. I waited for him to go, wondering what kept him here, hoping against hope that the reason that kept him in my bed was something akin to the reason I kept praying he would not go. Finally, something happened. He moved, but he moved towards me.

"God, please don't hate me if I'm reading you wrong," he said, then suddenly he was on top of me again. But this time it was not the purposeful embraces of earlier, a sharing of mere body heat, kept as sexless as possible. No, this was an exploration, a questioning. He touched my face with his face, hesitantly though. I answered his question, my mouth seeking his mouth.

Then we kissed, long and slow, more at my insistance than his. He was firey passion unlike anything I had quite encountered before, something he had always managed to keep well concealed under a veil of melancholy. It was tempting to give way to his fire, but I wanted to draw it out, to give him any time that he needed to come to his senses and realize what he was doing, then back out if he needed to. Plus, I wanted to draw this out. There was so little pleasure and luxury left in the world and I would take all that was my due, starting with his strong arms around my body. He laid me back against the bed and eventually, we claimed some joy together.

But a minute after he was so silent I worried. I could hardly hear him breathe.

"John," I whispered. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said. The moment had taken on a kind of crystalline silence that seemed sacreligious to break. Something of momentous importance, at least to the pair of us, had just taken place. Though it was total darkness, I could see him looking into the window of my soul.

Only the wind spoke after that, tossing the tree limbs and wailing against eaves of the building. But in our secure nest of blankets, with the coals still glowing in the stove, and the bonds we were slowly forging with each other, we were safe, for the moment, against it, and against all the troubles in this broken, scarred world. This was too big, too important to be contained with any declaration or mere words, so we kept silent, allowing our bodies to express themselves with an eloquence that I could never hope to possess otherwise. We had given the lie to the strange loneliness of the human condition, and broken through the boundaries that kept us apart. We fell asleep in each others arms together.

END

And I Moved -- Pete Townsend (off Empty Glass)

And I moved
As I saw him looking in through my window His eyes were silent lies
And I moved
And I saw him standing in the doorway
His figure merely filled the space
And I moved
But I moved toward him

And I moved
And his hands felt like ice exciting
As he laid me back just like an empty dress And I moved
But a minute after he was weeping
His tears his only truth
And I moved
But I moved toward him
 

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