the 3 williams

There is a room. There is smoke and mirrors and men.

“What about this one?” Blevins asks, and tosses the file to a man with a cigarette. “Scientist, young, works at Quantico.”

Of course, I'm his fucking father, Mulder wanted to scream, still wants to scream. Why the hell else would I be here twenty-four hours a day, living here, sharing her Goddamn bed, kissing her when no one else is around, getting up with the baby in the middle of the night, if I'm not William's father?

Still holding the picture, staring out over snow covered monuments, he reflects Winter is only remembered for its bad times. Summers are different. They stay jewels in memory, seasonal diamonds that bookmark the forgetful haze of age.

It isn't like a fog exactly. More like she is watching things with binoculars, or talking over static, long distance. More like she became unhooked, somewhere, from her life. This cannot be her, spewing the metaphysical at every turn. She has become someone else, someone she doesn't recognize, a bundle of sluggish synapses, ineffective education, tears.

Sometimes at night she wonders if the two of them just blinked into existence fully formed like this, which is to say she wonders if they’ll never change. If they’re just here to play these parts. The streetlights whistle through the blinds like film noir and here she is in his bed, on his bed, next to him but not touching, with whiskey on her breath. Tomorrow or yesterday she’ll put on red lips and they’ll work another case they never solve.

Agent Scully is already in love, Agent Scully does nothing about it but still asks Agent Mulder to sleep beside her. Agent Scully keeps going and going and

“Did I die?”

[link]

Was there something in here with him? He paused, face expressionless, his entire body listening. No ... probably not ... definitely not. This time there was no thrill along the nape of his neck, no prescient frisson of intuition and warning to make him reach for the gun, as he sometimes did, and prowl carefully around his lair, searching for signs of unwelcome visitors.

After running through his wake-up routine, he drifted a bit, gaze spooling absently across the littered surface of the coffee table, where case files, congealed pizza, a half-empty beer bottle, and a damp TV Guide reflected a stark but grayish strobic light, their irregular cover blanketing a lower strata of older and dustier debris—skin mags, mostly, shuffled in with stacks of comics. Vamperotica. Squee. Sisters of Mercy. The latest Fortean Times, bookmarked with a section of last Sunday’s Times, folded open to the crossword, fully filled in with anal-retentive ink, annotated with a cryptic "18 m" along the margin. A Patricia Cornwell novel. The Complete Works of Gaius Petronius. An egg of Silly Putty. A water pistol realistically modeled after a police handgun. Two empty burrito wrappers. The Washington Blade, opened to the personals, dotted with red balloons and doodles of flowers. A necktie dotted with goldfish and tomato stains, still loosely noosed.

“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she said.

Travers' eyes were racooned, like a man who hadn't slept for days, maybe weeks. A dark stubble of beard roughened his face, but it was those eyes - burning, Nostradamus eyes - that gave Mulder such a chill.

That, and the blood on his hands.

"Lew?" Detective Cooper had gone very pale, very still. She drew her sidearm in a gentle, quiet motion and held it down at her side. "Lew, it's Detective Cooper. Is that blood?"

"Huh?" Travers looked around. A red drop glittered on his glasses, slid down and dripped on his white t-shirt. "Where?"

"On your hands, Mr. Travers." Mulder had drawn his gun, too, but he followed Cooper's lead and kept it pointed down. "You have blood on your hands."

He looked down, shrugged, and wiped them on his t-shirt. Bright red smears, handprints. When he was finished, Mulder's chill had become a real cold shiver down his spine.