For list only...WAKE
UP...
Fair Isle
*
"Wake up, lover."
Mulder gave a muffled sound, and his head moved in a sleeping attempt to nod. Moved on his pillow. . .pillow of. . .pine needles?
One eye forced itself open, and it was a long window of bemused speculation on the landscape its owner went through before the world righted itself and tilted details clarified themselves. Orange brilliance still low in the east broke the forest trees with many fingers, streaking across a carpet of shed pine and crackled leaves, right up to his very body.
It was so quiet this might well have been the afterlife, but when he felt his mislaid body--damp, aching, hungry--he guessed it wasn't. He sat up slowly, graceless and cranky, turned his body counterclockwise and winced as things he didn't care to identify popped and sprung in his body's interior. He blinked at the readjusted field of his vision. More trees--thin whiskers of pine and birch--were woven gradually into distance as they stood still, light mist settling around their ankles. Quiet.
And then another turn of the head--rusty swivel on a stiff neck--and there was his man, lying flat out on the mist-soaked ground, his thoughtful expression falling somewhere down the scale between gruntled and disgruntled. A crumpled leather jacket lay between their bodies, and Mulder's memory in brief reversal told him that it had been draped across his own body, thrown off as he'd woken and risen. He sighed inwardly. Damn chivalry, anyway.
Alex caught Mulder's eye, smiled beatifically, startling Mulder even more awake.
"What?" Mulder said, then coughed as his voice husked out roughly.
"You've got pine needles in your hair, babe. And the worst case of bed hair I've ever seen, considering we're not even in a bed."
Mulder scowled and raked around up above, knocking needles out and playing the sleep-knots loose. "Where are we?"
"I have no idea."
"No idea?"
Alex looked equable. "Well, do *you* have any idea?" At Mulder's wordless blink he added cheerfully, "Then don't blame me."
"I've had hangovers and I've had hangovers," Mulder said, looking around. "But I've never woken up in a strange. . .forest."
"Funny, I don't have a hangover and I don't know how we got here either."
"I don't have a hangover," Mulder said, somewhat irritably. "I was just. . .never mind." He rose with ungainly movements, stood and stared around him a minute, then abruptly began to jog in place. After a moment, he was accompanied by Alex's laughter. It sounded loud in the quiet forest. "I'm cold," Mulder said, his words chuffing out with a mild blush of white on the air.
"God, you're gorgeous." Alex's complacent tone might have been irksome another time, but life was short and they were in a strange wilderness. He rolled forward and grabbed at Mulder's ankles.
"Stop that." Mulder jogged out of his reach.
"Mm." Alex stood, stretched, a grungy pixie with a cryptic soul and the worst run of luck since Odysseus set out for home. After another minute of idling by and watching Mulder, he grimaced, sighed, and took up jogging along next to his lover.
"We could be going somewhere with this," Mulder huffed lightly after a few minutes.
"Sounds good." Alex bent, snagged his jacket and after a brief debate, they set off east, where the trees were looking thinnest.
They ran in step over the forest floor, which was not dense. Leaves scuffed away from their feet, and fallen branches were no more than bare fragments of the ruined choirs above, easily evaded. Sun poured over them, honeyed manna; both, without communicating, were in a rare communion. Running into the sun without past or visible future, stripped down to their bodies in which the blood of their exertion was streaming faster, they had no reason to speak because happiness was this simple.
And then they reached the forest's edge, broke free of the tree line and scrambled breathlessly to a halt on the edge of a rolling swathe of deep green, which was flung like a huge tattered blanket across the world and gilded by early sun to stunning effect. Here and there its patches threaded into grey-white masses of low rock, and somewhere at the far horizon sunlight gleamed on what might have been water. No trees lay beyond this point as far as the eye could see.
As one, Alex and Mulder turned to stare astonished at one another, then looked back across the map that was their world.
"I'm. . .clueless," Mulder said finally. He sounded stunned.
It was a measure of Alex's own awe that he did not tweak this remark into a joke, but simply nodded, running a hand across his hair. The look on his face suggested he was cogitating a great problem whose solution at any moment he would impart, but his ragged breathing slowed to deliver no words, merely a stretching silence.
"Definitely not Kansas," he said finally.
"Looks like Ireland," Mulder said with a doubtful frown. He tore his gaze at last from the gleaming mesmer of the sward and ran it around the near vicinity until it bumped to rest on a small tumble of what looked like rubbish. He went to it--it was a tumble of weathered boards--and kicked it, then reached down and flipped over the battered mess where it lay in the grass. "What the--"
Alex glanced his way then slid up next to him. His astonishment erupted in a small, choked sound, a laugh that tried itself out then vanished. "What the--"
" 'Abandon care all ye who enter here. . .'" Mulder read. He gave Alex a blank look. "Okay, is it just me, or does this not help?"
"It not helps," Alex said blandly.
"This morning," Mulder said with a halting, hesitant voice, "when I woke up. . .I. . .no, this is crazy."
"What?"
"Well, for a minute I thought I was dead. . .but I'm too hungry to be dead." He paused. "Well, I *was* hungry."
"Exercise decreases hunger," Alex said briefly.
"Duh," said Mulder with even greater brevity.
They stared at the sign further, but it yielded no more than it had.
"I don't feel dead," Alex mused. "But if I am, this is a good dead."
"A good dead," Mulder muttered. "There's no good dead." As a significant silence ensued, he looked up at Alex, who was giving him a study of frank and sardonic fascination. "What?"
"I should have known." Unexpectedly Alex reached up and cupped Mulder's cheek and smiled--a tender smile softening a face nature had carved hard. "If there's proof atheists can go to heaven, it's you, lover."
"That's. . .ambiguous," Mulder said around his own slight smile. He covered Alex's hand with his own.
"That's you." Alex swooped in for a kiss, stole it, and broke away again clean. He looked around. "Where to. I don't see the bus stop." He affected a mild sing-song whine. "Where's the bus? When's the bus coming? You said we'd catch a bus--"
"Oh shut up." Despite his words, Mulder felt euphoric. Life had never been so good--so maybe it was death. "If I'm dead, we should be flying--I mean, assuming you're dead too. Which would only be. . .logical." The last word squeaked out by a hair's breadth. He couldn't really believe he'd said it.
Neither could Alex. "Hey, if Scully were an angel, I bet she'd try to disprove her own halo. Or her wings--can't you see her looking like *halfway* behind her and seeing these big feathery things--just the edges--she'd refuse to turn an inch further. Be like the guy who can't see his nose, so how can he be sure it's there. Complete denial."
Mulder frowned. "I'm trying to fly and I can't." He looked at his feet, frowning even harder.
There was a silence.
"How's it going?" said Alex.
"Not good. We might have to hoof it."
Alex smiled. "Maybe you have to say the magic words."
"Abracadabra?"
"Mm. Or, 'I want to believe'."
"Asshole. . .I want to believe--*hey*--"
Alex, who had dropped to one knee to tie his shoe, looked over, to where Mulder's shoes sat firmly planted on the ground. Minus their feet. He stared some more, just to confirm the lucidity of his dream, then raised his eyes to consider Mulder, who floated lightly as a cloud a good four feet off the grassy ground. He had twined his legs together like a pretzel and was bouncing his knees gently in mid-air. He looked absurdly comfortable.
"Bastard," said Alex. He stood, contemplated this impossible thing and several more while he was at it--hell, why not, he hadn't had his breakfast yet. "I want to believe," he said earnestly. "Whoa--"
"Cool," said Mulder, face easing into uncensored joy. His grin was as wide as the earth, and as bright. "Hey, Alex. . .don't look now, but. . .about those wings. . ."
*
Anna (This obviously
turned into a homage to Katy Deery's "Home", which I adore.