Oak Leaves in October

by Vehemently

It's evening, so I go over to her place.  We have fallen into that habit, in the months since it began, or rather, I have fallen into it, and she doesn't say no.  Tonight it is a relief to return to routine.  I turn up the radio in my little car.  At my right, a gibbous moon on the rise.  Traffic noises and night coming on, the sharp bite of the chill air.

I come from winter people.  Every autumn it should be like returning to the ancestral home but it isn't.  Cold hearth, frost on windows, cracking skin on fingers and nosebleeds from the dry air -- some days I miss the north but then I get over it.  She comes from California.  I don't know how she stands it.  I don't know how she stands a lot of things.

When he disappeared, after the fire in his office, I went to her.  In retrospect it feels like fate, but at the time it was just expediency.  He believed me, however reluctantly.  She believed him.  I had news I couldn't keep to myself.

I broke into her apartment, maybe it was habit by then, and raided her fridge while I waited for her to come home.  It was only as I heard her keys jangling outside the door that I realized I was thinking in male tactics, that I was planning to throw her across the floor and intimidate her.  Equal opportunity, joy.  I stepped behind her door as it opened; I breathed her perfume as she stood in the doorway, saying his name with a quiver.  It was only then I realized he was really gone, not in hiding, not haring off after some pipe dream, but vanished without a word.

After a few moments she shook her head and muttered a curse and walked in far enough for me to place the muzzle of my gun home between her shoulder blades.  She startled, but not as much as I had expected.  Up went her hands, and she hissed my name, "Krycek," as if to ward off evil.  We found ourselves on the couch, in the dark, the printouts still in my pocket, her breaths coming sharp through her nose.

"Look," I told her, "I had this for him but he's…  gone." I thought I saw her grimace, but in the dark I wasn't sure.  "You take it.  It will be useful."

She just sat there, like a statue, and then suddenly asked me coldly, "May I turn on a lamp?"

I didn't know what to say at all.  She stood, slowly, as if to calm me, and turned on the living room lights.  The thing I remember most about seeing her is her skin.  It was chilly white, bluish, a color that looks either ethereal or unhealthy.  Her navy suit didn't help, and she wore very little makeup.

It took me a long time to formulate the thought: she looked like a woman in mourning.

I was just beginning to count backwards in my head how long her partner had been gone when she said, "If you're here to kill me just get it over with."

What do you say to that? What do you say to her arms crossed under her breasts, and that line between her eyebrows? I think I made a choking noise, and then some kind of denial.  I know I said: "Didn't he ever tell you? We were working together, I mean, I was feeding him things, and…" My words tumbled over each other and fell silent.

Daggers in a pair of blue eyes.  "You're saying you had nothing to do with his disappearance?"

"Nothing." I was reduced to a whisper.

She wanted to cry, I could tell that, but she would never cry in front of the enemy.  Without thinking I gave her my back, and sat blinking on the couch, counting sobs.

I stopped when I felt the muzzle of her gun against my neck.  Cool, but not cold; she had been wearing it near her body.  Full circle, and no tears on her cheeks at all.  She searched me expertly, found the printout, and settled back to read it where she could keep me in her sights.

The perfect arches of her eyebrows rode high on her face when she began to comprehend.  "You see," I tried, "I'm with the good guys." She gave me the eyeball for that, and set her jaw, considering.  "He never arrested me because he knew I made a faithful source," I explained.  She didn't need to ask; I know what it looks like when you question your partner's trust.  With a disgusted sound, she turned away, and dropped her gun hand to her lap.

Past mistakes not to be repeated, I took the opportunity and fled out her front door.

Other jobs went on hold for a week while I tailed her.  She contacted a hundred people, met with a score of them, always in public areas at night and always stalking away with a frustrated frown.

She went home every night and double-locked her doors, checked all her windows and barricaded herself in her bedroom, phone by her bed.  She didn't use the printout as far as I knew.  So I took another few days, and sent out feelers, and while I watched the summer moon over her apartment I received the calls.  No.  Nothing.  No word.  Not a scrap of gossip about what had happened to him.

It was as if he had stepped off the planet.

I told her so, two weeks after our first meeting, and she spat in my face.  This time at least I had knocked on her door.  She still kept me at gunpoint, but she offered me a beer too, and asked, quietly, what had happened to my arm.

I shrugged it off and she asked how he had handled things and I shrugged that off too.  Somehow she guessed that I was the one who had sent them to Wiekamp, back in March.  I have been so effective lying to everyone else.  I don't know why it didn't work with her.  Before she let me go she charged me with bringing her more data and finding word of him.

Heavy with my twin tasks, I turned away so I wouldn't see her frown collapse into tears.

Two months and the summer solstice came and went.  It didn't get dark till almost nine, but she didn't get home till after then.  She had given up on the gun, after she realized my information was legitimate, and we argued over Chinese whether to go public with what we had or not.  Rancor disappeared with the wontons, and after a silence, she asked me again for news of him.

The official investigation had turned up nothing except his abject lack of social life and a cache of porny pictures on his hard drive at work.  No half-finished letters, no callbacks undone; no ominous messages left on anyone's machine.  My gossip mill had turned up a little, but not much.  His movements on the Sunday before he was reported missing.  The woman who had given him her number at the grocery store, who laughed and said she didn't suppose he'd call anyway.  I had nothing new, and she knew it.

But she wouldn't accept my noncommittal shrug.  She made me say it: "Nothing." She shaped the word with her mouth after mine: Nothing.  There were another two months on his lease, and anyone who had been gone this long was probably dead.

She started the litany of rationalizations while I threw away the white cartons of our food.  I straightened to look out the kitchen window at the stars, listening to her voice.  "He could have gone underground.  He was declared dead twice before, once without telling anyone where he was.  He could be --" I stiffened but I didn't turn around.  I knew and she knew that to be missing for three months does not obviate one's survival and return.  She had suffered the very same fate at my hands, and right then surely she was remembering that fact.

So when I felt her hand on my ribs, I was sure she was going to break my back, or at least feel for the best entry point for her sharpest butcher knife.  It would have been right, after all.  It would have been a rough justice.  But her hand just rested there, while I breathed and she breathed behind me.

I don't know how long we stood like that.  I only know that I watched the evening star move in the sky while I breathed into Dana Scully's firm grip.

I remember when it happened, but I don't remember exactly how.  It was early autumn, in the oppressive crush of August humidity, as we were preparing the documentation for her to present to the FBI board.  There were papers all over her coffee table and she wouldn't let me touch them in case they were dusted later for prints.

In the back of my mind, then as later, was the loose thread of his disappearance.  There was no sense to it - if they had decided to kill him for silence, they would have killed her too.  If they had wanted to expose me I would already be dead.  I kept on, as always, like a badger burrowing through blizzard snow, looking over my shoulder to see only the path I had cleared.  I wanted to bring it up with her, wanted her to turn it over in her mind like a strange new kitchen implement, wanted her to weigh it and and give it back to me with all its measurements, but of all things I could not talk to her about him.

So I leaned against the kitchen counter, and translated some of the memoranda into English, or read aloud to her as she sat cross-legged on the floor, absently tucking her hair behind her ear.  She wore her glasses, which I had never seen before then, and when she looked up at me her face was owlish and observant.

After several hours my voice gave out and cracked like leaves in a brushfire.  She took off her glasses and came to the kitchen and drew me a glass of water.  She asked me if I was all right and gave a harsh chuckle when I said I was fine.  I felt her eyes on my throat as I drank but she had turned her back to me, rooting in the fridge, before I lowered the glass.

She removed a little carton with small triumph and set it on the counter.  I watched her perfect hands remove the crinkling plastic, mesmerized.  I swallowed again and she was watching me as she lifted a small red fruit and touched it to her lips.

Raspberries.  She was eating raspberries in the last days of summer.  She was standing at her kitchen counter and tearing them apart with her fingers, staining her nails a brilliant red, licking the seeds and juice.  She was eating raspberries and staring at me.

That is the last linear memory I have of that night; sometimes I can articulate a moment in time, but they do not, like beads, string together into something coherent.

Her hands were cool, and her cheek was warm.  I remember the gasp she emitted when I found her earlobes.  I remember the air conditioning, cold against my hot scars, and her calm hands tracing across my empty shoulder.  I remember the array of veins, blue against the white skin of her thigh, like suppliant fingers reaching towards the crease of her hip.

She pressed her helplessly shuddering body into mine.  She sobbed and sobbed, crying out against me, as if my weight were torturing her.  I would have pulled away, I would have fled, but she clutched me convulsively as she wept.

It was a circumstantial case, and the majority of our evidence would be inadmissible in any court.  I was, after all, committing industrial espionage to obtain it, when I wasn't committing treason.  There was no way to secure convictions of the guilty.  But she looked at me one Monday, right after the autumnal equinox, and said:

"We could always try them in the media."

A simple idea, really; I don't know why it didn't occur to me.  But I live in darkness, and fear scrutiny, while she seeks it as professional approval, as consensus, as proof.  She is wiser than I: I wanted the perpetrators rendered a liability inside their professions and eliminated.  She just wanted them to stop breaking the law.

We argued about contacting Geraldo, or some radical fringe activist organizations: I chuckled at the notion of the civil rights and environmental and paranoia parties all banding together in outrage.  She overruled me.  We went the way of the Pentagon Papers instead.

I didn't understand it at first.  I believed that she had seduced me, that I had succumbed to her and was her victim.  But every night, when I ask her what she wants, she offers herself up to me as if she were a sacrificial virgin.  She growls and yelps and gouges my skin with her nails and emits a cry of triumph.  I, foolishly, have misunderstood.

Harder, she mutters, harder, when I am sure I am hurting her already.  She bites her lips and whimpers.  That I should be the instrument of her self-punishment is an unutterable burden.  I don't want to go any harder, but her hands and her chin and her breasts heaving against me demand it, her cold, cold eyes skewer through me.  I was her enemy, once; with me in the dark she proves herself traitor to law, and to conscience, and to him.  I have no right to be in love with her.  I have no right to worry what she thinks of me.

This is what I do, the inescapable pattern I have been given: I hurt her.  No matter my intentions nor her cries of encouragement.  I plumb her sea-gray eyes for ways to remove her anguish; she will not say what tool I could use, nor would she thank me for trying.  Every time I leave her bed intending it to be forever and every time, craven, I return.  I don't even know which choice would hurt her less.

We broke the scandal to the New York Times, about an hour after the FBI laughed her out of the conference room.  I stuck to the shadows, as always, but took pride in her clear, warm voice relating the details.  We had sat on her couch, she and I, our legs twined, while she practiced her speech and fretted over being wooden.  I had cautioned her that the Bureau wouldn't listen.  I had made the inquiries for a ready ear attached to an ambitious pen.  She sat in the lunch room in the basement of the National Gallery with her briefcase of inadmissible evidence and impressed the hell out of the investigative reporter.

We made the front page, above the fold.  She went on record, by name, with all the paperwork I had gathered and she had interpreted.  They quoted the line we'd worked so hard on, where she said "A catalogue has been built, of every American who has been vaccinated against smallpox.  I ask you, is that not a violation of our civil liberties?" Wondrously, they believed us.

Or rather, they believed her.  She'd told Skinner her strategy, but the rest of the FBI jumped on her with both feet.  Newspapers called her office, then her house.  It came out quickly, her association with Spooky Mulder, and the tabloids asked her for prognostications.  Finally in the second week of October she got a Congressional subpoena.

She sat in front of the Senate committee and refused to say where she had gotten her information.  She was on television, her bearing precise and righteous, her hair the perfect eye-catching shade, just a little bit brighter than the dying oak leaves which clung stubbornly to their branches outside.  She banged her fist against the table, making a point, and all the Senators blinked obediently.

The name nestled between us.  The first time she called it out I froze momentarily.  I think I wasn't in a position conducive to freezing, but I betrayed myself even so, and I knew she would dive further into self-recrimination even as I started moving again.  But then, when I kissed her, after, she looked at me with those hooded eyes, as if seeing through a glamour, and she inhaled his name and swallowed it.

My lips formed the same syllables and it didn't hurt as much as I had thought it would.  I said his name and bestowed it on her with a kiss.  She tucked her head under my chin and we pretended she wasn't crying.  That way she couldn't see me doing the same thing.

Ever after she said whatever came to her lips, and if that name has never been mine it doesn't matter.  She says his name, calls out to him, as if invoking a pagan god, and I repeat back the sounds to her in marveling echolalia.  We whisper it into each other's ears like an endearment, like a promise, like a litany.  She can smile at me, if it is through the sounding of his name.  If this act could have created a child I know what we would have called it.

I had to spend a few days in New York and missed her more than I should allow myself.  I closed my eyes while I waited outside the chamber of the high council and felt her hair tickling my throat.  I didn't want to think of her there, not then.  They made me wait a long time.

Little men in dark suits hurried in and out, but I in a shell of leather was denied entry.  As the morning progressed the men's foreheads gained beads of sweat, their mouths tighter and tighter lines.  Something had gone wrong and nobody could tell me what.  Voices were raised behind the hallowed oak doors.  One of the little men let slip at last who they were waiting for, why his absence was so troubling.

Fears of betrayal, always, among people who have no trust.  If they resolved to blame him then I might escape this battle with my skin.  But word came that an accountant at Roush had gone state's evidence, no, that the CEO had fled to Asia with a suitcase of valuable information, no, that the entire Chicago facility had gone up in flames.  The secretaries stumbled in their heels while they packed boxes of their paperwork.

The oaken doors boomed open and emitted a stream of terse elderly men.  Each in his own dialect cursed and muttered, straightening his expensive tie on the way out the door.  Two stared venom at each other while waiting for the elevator, before stalking to separate staircases.  A functionary hurried up to me, too anxious even to bother with imperious attitude, and told me to return to Washington and await instructions.

The times of greatest opportunity are also the times of greatest danger.

The first taste of winter, driving back from New York.  It has been seasons since he disappeared.  There are apple pies now that were blossoms on the bough the last time he was here.  There are marriages begun and ended, laws enacted, and a scandal of our making that has broken since he went away.

He is waiting outside her door when I arrive this evening.  

Sitting on the floor, legs crossed, incurious.  He has his head leaned against her door, but he leaps unsteadily to his feet when he sees me.  My brain still does not register his presence, rendering him periodically as a blank space, as empty air in front of her door.

He is thinner, haggard, with hair like year-old thatch.  He stares at me the way I must be staring at him, like a drawing suddenly come to life, like an animal friendly but frothing at the mouth.  His long lean arms hang at his sides, and I watch as his hands quiver at the ends of his wrists.  His fingers are long and bony, unlike mine, and the tremors that shake them mind me of the oak leaves outside on the trees, rattling in the wind now, clinging dead to their branches.

He draws together his eyebrows, in that face weighted with sorrow, and asks me, "What are you doing here?" Not an accusation; not a query even, but a plaintive protest against the injustice.

He looks every one of his forty years and I struggle to answer.

"After you --," I can't say it, so I wave my hand like a magician.  "I still had information.  I brought it to her instead.  We brought down Roush Pharmaceuticals."

He reaches up to scratch at his jaw and I can see scrapes all along his knuckles.  I know the signs of captivity when I see them.  I bite down on the gasp of recognition, but he sees my eyes widen and splays his hand of front of his own face.  "I was a prisoner," he says, examining his knuckles, before he turns his fingers to show me the damage.  "They refused to kill me.  It was the order of a man…"

I know who he means.  I was the one who restored that man to his position of power.  I knew it was a mistake when I parachuted into Canada; I knew it was a mistake when I received the order that it should be done.  The man in front of me closes his eyes and shudders, and then his eyes snap open as if he has seen something terrible on the insides of his eyelids.

"I killed him, the man with the cigarettes." His hands, between us, allow us not to look at each other.  We focus on bruises and he can speak.  "I did it with my bare hands.  I broke the lock on my cell and pried open the door and I strangled him."

I am supposed to say something now.  I don't know what.  And then suddenly I am able to place his new-formed scabs into the context of the last few days.  I open my mouth but nothing emerges.

"He told me it was over, that his people would brush off some bad publicity, some feeble attack, and then they would kill her as they should have done." He is frowning at me and I frown back.  "He came to taunt me, to break me down.  I think he was trying to convert me to his cause."

"You killed him," I hear myself say, a little hoarse, "and the organization is falling apart.  I came from New York City today.  We're turning the tide."

It is a fact, basic, something so startling in my mind it maintains a certain restless neutrality.  And somehow I expect him to smile nonetheless, or burst into exhausted tears, or do something more than nod his head with a combination of anxiety and resignation.  He hunches his shoulders before he dares look me in the eye.  I drown in the clear gray depths of his gravid fear.

"Is she still alive?" Hardly a whisper.

"Yes," I blurt out, too loud for this hallway, a little outraged that he should think differently.  "Of course she is.  You don't think I would ever --"

We both look away and shift our weight from foot to foot.

"Anyway," I say at last, "we need to get you inside.  You look beat.  And I don't guess it's safe for you." As if to prove me right, he stumbles even as he is shaking his head.  I push him up against the wall and dig for my key -- I keep it separate from my other keys, inside my wallet.  His eyebrows take off for the heights when I unlock the door, but he doesn't say anything.

I sling his arm around my shoulder -- he hisses as I take his battered hand -- and together we stagger across the threshold into her apartment.

I don't even hear the key in the lock as we sit in the living room, on the same couch where first she held me at gunpoint.  He hears it, though, and stops in the middle of a speculation about our future moves.  I only look up when he falls silent so I see the terror in his eyes as the door opens.

She just stands there.  She doesn't say a word, she doesn't drop her briefcase, she doesn't rush to his side.  She stands on the threshold of her own apartment, her face ashen, expressionless.  Her eyes are all him; she doesn't see me at all.

He says her name, like a token, like a code word, and somehow we are all loosed from the spell of immobility.  Listless, exhausted, he puts his hand over his eyes and his shoulders shake -- but he doesn't get up to touch her.  I put my hand on his knee and stare at her enormous, terrified blue eyes and after a moment he wipes his face with the back of his hand and says, "I'm glad you're all right."

Her chin wrinkles as she frowns the frown of withheld tears.  "I," she says, and stops because we all know her voice will crack.  "I'm glad you're back," she offers at last.  I can tell how banal she sounds to herself.  I stand up, a little unsteady on my feet, and usher her inside with my hand at her lumbar spine.  I close the door and rest my head against it for a moment, listening to her cross the room and stand in front of her old partner.

"Your hands," she exclaims, happy to have found a focus.  Before he can wave away her concern she has fled to the bathroom for her first-aid kit.  He gives me a long-suffering, amused little look and he almost resembles himself.  It's shocking, as much to him as to me I think.  We stare at each other across the room until she returns with her gauze and her ointments.

The only sound as she tends his injuries is his occasional grunt of pain.  She lets out a little breath every time he does it, but I don't think she notices.  He can't bear to watch her so he watches me, and I find myself twitching and pacing under that gaze.  He seems to be unconscious of the fingers of his free hand patting her orange hair as she bends over him.  When it becomes too much I flee to the kitchen to make us all coffee.

Presently he joins me in the kitchen and I feed him coffee.  I don't know what else to do.  He doesn't know either.  "Mulder," I say, and he blinks at me.  I begin to realize, with a horror, that he has no idea what his name has come to mean.  "Mulder," I say again, the blood warming my cheeks, because I can't say anything else.  Scully, coming in from the living room, says nothing.  She stares at me with her enormous autumn-ocean eyes and I stare back till we both jerk and turn away.

He nods his head dully whenever I address him.  His bandaged hands tremble around the mug of his coffee, from cold or something else.  I stand up to get away from that bleak gray gaze and I put my hand on his shoulder.  He is all bone now.  He lets out a sigh, and then reaches up and touches my hand.  His fingertips are freezing.  "Thank you," he mutters, or it might have been 'fuck you,' with the same lack of intensity.

So I pull away, whatever it was he said, and snatch up my jacket.  I step past him and he wraps his hand back around his mug -- he needs every bit of warmth he can get.  She is standing in my way and I have to nudge her with my hip for her to move.  Slowly, as in ceremony, she stands aside, her face turned up to mine.  I want to kiss her then, in all her disheveled royalty; I want to drop my jacket and hoist her up to twine her legs around my hips.  I want to fall at her feet and worship.

Instead I turn away, and pull open the door.  She makes a noise behind me, and I look back into her tears.  I don't glance at the kitchen, where he can surely see us.  I don't glance at the bedroom.  I look into her round, round face and can't think of anything to say.

She is reaching for my hand when I step away from her.  She stops, caught in the act, pale instead of blushing.  "Come back," she utters, her voice strangled in her throat.  I can hear her breath catch as she inhales.

"I will," I tell her, with all of the truthfulness I have ever withheld.  Then I clamp down on my own reactions and say lightly, "We've still got conspiracies to bring down." I can meet her eyes when I turn it all to a joke, and if her expression turns my insides to broken glass, well, I can stand that too.  He is still sitting in the kitchen, but he looks at me thoughtfully, with a widening of his mouth that might be a smile if it's not a grimace.

He nods at me just before I turn to walk away down the hall.  He ducks his head twice, a small gesture, it could mean nothing.  I don't hear her rush to be with him as I leave, but neither does she chase me to my car outside.  Just as well.  There are still things to do.  I inhale the cooling scent of the city stink, that sharp tang of winter air.  I can't even remember what spring smells like.

End

Like what you've read?  Send feedback

Main Page