Chapter 29: Hallelujah
March 31, 1998
11:00 a.m. Rural Guatemala
When Scully had asked how to get up to Uaxactún, the concierge had replied, “You want Tikal. Bad road after that.”
She finally persuaded him that she did, in fact, want Uaxactún, but he shook his head. “We can shuttle you to Tikal. But Uaxactún is going to be a chicken bus, and that little spot she’s pointing to in the forest? Good luck, senorita.”
Which was why they were bouncing along the road to Uaxactún, surrounded by chickens, goats, and a variety of humanity ranging from nursing babies to bent old men. Joshua was fascinated. At 11:30, Scully pulled out a bottle for him, and he took it. A child across the aisle was nursing, and she could feel his curiosity, feel him reaching out with his mind to investigate what the child was doing. After a little while, the baby sat up, exposing his mother’s nipple, and stared at Joshua.
She felt a strange little interchange, the baby looking at the bottle in Joshua’s hand and Joshua staring at the baby. He looked at her, and she suddenly had an image of him, at her breast, nursing. She said, out loud, “Your milk is in the bottle, sweetie.”
The image, again. She looked across the aisle, and the baby there was back to nursing, and Joshua sent her the feeling of sleepy contentment, how the milk felt to that child as it ran down his throat, how it tasted, even. Then Joshua threw his bottle on the floor of the bus, filthy with animal droppings, and Scully said, “Oh honey. I don’t have milk.”
Maria picked the bottle up and pulled a plastic bag out of her pack. “I’ll wash it for him later,” she said. “We have more if he needs it.”
Scully sighed. “He’s asking to nurse. The baby over there gave him ideas.”
Maria laughed, and said something to the woman across the way, who smiled and said something back. “She says that you should let him. It won’t hurt.”
“He’s almost a year old. I have no milk.” Scully said.
Maria translated this to the woman across the aisle, who responded, and Maria said, “She says that her babies all nurse two or three years, and that he will be curious until you let him.”
“But there are so many people...” Scully said.
Joshua pushed at her chest and flashed the image at her again.
Maria rolled her eyes. “Look around you.”
Scully looked. One infant was nursing, another toddler, and the baby across the aisle. The only person who seemed to be noticing was her.
She looked down at Joshua and sighed. “Whatever am I going to do with you?”
He flashed the image again. She sighed, handed Joshua to Maria, and reached around to unhook her bra in the back, under her shirt. “This is crazy,” she said. She lifted her shirt awkwardly and exposed as little of her breast as she felt like she could get away with.
“You know,” Maria said. “If he did that a lot, I bet you would have milk for the new baby by the time it was here.”
Scully blinked. “The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”
Joshua was staring at her breast. “You’re worse than your father,” she scolded.
He glanced over at the baby across the aisle, got that listening look, and then leaned forward. He put his mouth around her nipple almost gingerly, and she said, “It’s bouncing too much.”
Then he latched on. She blinked, and cocked her head at him. “How’d you know how to that, child?”
The woman across the aisle said something and Maria laughed. “She says he knew what he wanted.”
Scully looked down, a little amazed and a lot bemused, at her son, nursing at her breast. She thought at him, no milk.
He thought back an image, a sensation, and suddenly she had the peculiar sensation of knowing exactly what it felt like to suckle at her own breast, and she stopped questioning it.
By the time the bus pulled to a stop, she was feeling a little drowsy and very warm. *So different from how it feels to have his father there.* It wasn’t sexual. Just warm and pleasant, in a way that didn’t feel wrong, just incomplete. He let go to sit up and look out the window, and she pulled her shirt back down. The woman, standing with her baby still at the breast, leaned over and spoke to her directly.
Maria translated. “She says that she has seen grandmothers take children in and nurse them, and it only takes a few days when they have to, more if it’s not urgent. She says to trust it. Your body will make milk if you need to.”
Scully looked up and smiled, and said, “Graçias.”
They got off the bus and found themselves in a small town that seemed populated by a strange mix of Mayan Indians and bespectacled Americans. Scully smiled, and said, “Look, we fit right in.”
Joshua planted his feet on her hips and stood up a little, looking over her shoulder from the carrier. The ground was hard earth, gravel, and the buildings were small. Maria caught the arm of a seller and spoke to him rapidly. He smiled, and pointed up the street, then spoke to her again.
Maria led them up to a man who had several mules tied to a hitching post. She spoke to him, and Scully understood pesos. She said, “Tell him we can pay in dollars.”
The man looked at her and said, “Dollars? Twenty Dollars.”
Maria spoke sharply to him.
“Ten dollars,” he said.
“Twenty if we are safe at the other end. I have a gun,” Scully said.
The man smiled. “Done.”
When he saddled up the mules, Scully looked at them dubiously. Maria said, “You don’t have the right shoes to walk that far in the jungle, and this will be faster.”
Scully frowned. “I haven’t ridden anything in a decade. Longer. And I never had much opportunity.”
“Safe,” their guide said. “Very safe.”
She decided, half an hour into it, that “safe” was one thing, but “comfortable” was another thing entirely. Joshua seemed delighted by the whole thing, and Scully thought with some amusement about the irony of riding with him, compared to the fanatic safety the expensive car seat. Between him bouncing like a maniac on her back, and the swaying bump of the mule, she was almost seasick by the time the tunnel-like track through the jungle opened up to a small clearing, and a cluster of three stone houses. She cocked her head. “They aren’t huts.”
“My aunt married a gringo archaeologist,” Maria said. “He needed something a little more enclosed for his computer and papers.”
“I thought your grandmother was poor,” Scully said.
“She is. Aunt Sarita helps her, but her husband is not very good at making money. Most of this was created when he first joined the family. They get by, but with my mother there, it’s very tight. The women weave.”
“What she means to say,” said a man coming out the front door of the middle house, “Is that my sponsor decided I was crazy and cut off my funding, so I went native.” He put out his hand. “Niel Juaréz.”
Scully shook his hand, bemused. He was tall, with a disheveled mop of sandy blond hair bleached by the sun and a tanned face, glasses that looked like they were so at home on his face he might sleep with them on. She said, “Anna Miller. You must be Maria’s uncle?”
He nodded and spoke to Maria in Spanish, She snapped back, “In English please. Anna does not understand.”
“I told her,” he said, “that her mother was out back with the chickens. Let me take your bag, chica, and you go tell her you’re here.”
Maria hesitated, and Scully asked, “Sweetie? What’s wrong?”
She looked down. “I... She will think...”
“Maria, I will explain if there’s a problem,” Scully said.
Maria nodded, handed her bag to Niel, and walked between the stone walls of the houses.
Niel said, “Come on back to the patio. They will want to meet the woman who brought the prodigal daughter home.”
Scully followed him through the stone house to a spreading cobblestone patio. Trees had been cleared for several acres beyond the patio. He said, “We will plant maize there in a month. Rice over there, in the wettest season. We’re mostly self sufficient here, the women weave and trade for what we can’t grow ourselves.”
She nodded, “So what do you do?”
He gave a deprecating shrug and said, “I putter around my ruin and work on translations. And plow the fields when it is time. Oh, and I school Sari’s nieces.” He pointed. “And there we have the grand reunion.”
Maria was sandwiched between two women exactly her height, wrapped in a tight hug, all crying. She turned and said to Scully, “This is my mama, Françesca and Abuela.” She turned and spoke to them, and Abuela came over and gave Scully a hug and spoke in Spanish to her. Niel and Maria started to translate at the same moment, and then he stopped and gestured for Maria to continue, amused.
“Abuela says thank you for bringing me home. She knows it was very far.” Maria stopped, and listened to her grandmother. “If you like, you can put your burdens down and she will make lunch.”
Scully smiled, “I’d like that.”
Lunch turned out to be tortillas, beans, rice, and vegetables from the expansive garden behind the house, eggs, and a goatmilk-based cheese, served at a long rough-hewn wooden table outside. To Scully’s surprise, Joshua was delighted by the fiery salsa, snagging it before she could stop him and then begging for more. Over lunch, she and Maria tried to explain the situation as best they could.
Niel stared at her. “Maria is carrying your child. I’m trying to get my mind around how a 15-year old girl is the vessel for the child of an adult woman.”
“It was not her doing, Tio,” Maria said. “The men who caused it to happen stole her fertility from her, and made babies without her knowledge. They told me that they would send money to Abuela, and I believed them, and then they would not let me go. Anna saved me.”
Scully nodded. “I was kidnapped three and a half years ago, and almost died of a cancer they caused. When I found out about my children, we moved heaven and earth to find them. We lost several of the girls trying to get them out. Maria is lucky to be alive. So am I.”
While they were talking, Maria’s mother was translating in a whisper to Maria’s grandmother, then listened and said,
“So what, she will have this baby, and then what, you will disappear? Will you take her from us again? Where will you go? You are here three days, but it has been three years since we had her.” Françesca paused, then said, “I wanted her to be an American, to get an education, to have a future more than scratching out an existence on a farm or selling trinkets to touristas.”
Scully nodded. “I would want that for my daughter too. Please understand that we are committed to helping Maria any way we can. But there is danger to her until the baby is born, and we need to make sure she is safe, that our child is safe. Our intention is to make sure that Maria can get an education, to make sure that the broken promises are kept where your family is concerned. I have money with me now for you. Can she get her education here? Can she birth safely in this jungle? We could take another person with us when we go, but we cannot take all of you.”
Niel’s wife, Sarita, sitting across the table, said, “I plan to have my baby here in this jungle. My husband educates my brother’s children, who were all born here, at home, safely. You have money. Why don’t you stay here, let her be near her family in this time? We can speak English. You can learn Spanish.”
Scully pressed her lips together. “We had to flee so quickly, my husband could not get to us in time to come with us. I am supposed to meet him on Sunday in Oaxaca. We have plane tickets back. But we can bring Maria home if that is what she wants, as soon as the baby comes. If someone wants to come north, we can facilitate that. We have connections and resources that would make it almost trivial. We’ll be in Oaxaca for a few months, until the baby comes, anyway.”
Abuela listened to the translation, and then spoke intensely. Françesca listened, and frowned, and said, “My mother does not want to leave her grandchildren. And I doubt my brother in law would be willing to leave his ruin. I would go with you, but I will want to come home later.”
“I can’t leave,” Niel said. “The work I’m doing... if I really am right about what I’ve found, it has far-reaching implications and ramifications for many people. I need to finish my translation.”
“Husband, you will never finish the translation, it is too big,” Sarita said.
“Sari, I love you, but yes, I will. It is a life work, what I want to be doing. You know that.”
Scully dug in her fanny sack, and brought out the roll of bills. “I can safely give you four thousand dollars now,” she said to Françesca. “We can send more later.”
“Give it to my mother,” Françesca said. “She has more use of it.”
Scully handed the money to Abuela, who took it, thumbed through it, and raised an eyebrow, then tucked it away in a little pouch at her waist.
“It is time for our siesta,” Françesca said. “We have two guest beds made up, if you care to partake.”
~~~
2:00 p.m.
Scully lay down with Joshua with a bottle, on a wide mattress in a stone room. He sipped it for a minute, then tossed it over her head and pushed at her chest. She shook her head, and he whined. It wasn’t just an audible whine, she could feel it in her bones, as he projected heartbreak at her. She sighed. “I am in so much trouble, little boy.”
He head-butted her chest and pulled at her shirt. She raised an eyebrow, sighed, and then lifted her shirt up. “You’re really serious about this?”
He latched on. She said, “You know, it might be a while before there’s anything in there.”
The feeling he sent back to her was not defined, but had all the sense of, “Don’t care.”
Drowsiness overtook her, and she fell asleep with him still attached.
Exactly an hour later, she woke up to find him patting her breast fondly. “Hello to you, too,” she said, and pulled her shirt down. He sent her a powerful image, and she rolled to her feet, picked him up, and went to find a bathroom.
After he was done, she told him, “If you keep that up, we might just be able to stop with the diapers.”
Maria was up, talking to her uncle, and said, “Would you like to see the ruins? I’ll hang out with Joshua.”
She smiled. “Sure. I haven’t done enough crazy lately.”
Maria raised an eyebrow at her and said, “When’s the last time you did something that wasn’t crazy?”
Scully grinned. “You may have a point. Are my shoes good enough?” She looked down at the sneakers she was wearing.
Niel looked, and said, “Where we’re going, it will be fine. I’ve beaten a good track up there.”
She looked out at the jungle plain and said, “Up?”
He smiled. “There’s a low hill, the ruin is at the top of it. I think it’s a temple, but I’ll let you be the judge, as everyone who hears what I think it is tells me I’m batshit crazy.”
“I have quite a bit of experience with batshit,” she said, and handed Joshua down to Maria.
~~~
3:30 p.m.
The lush green of the jungle wrapped around them. “We’re at the end of the dry season,” Niel explained. “In another two months you’d want hip waders to get up here.”
They reached a small hill, and Scully cocked her head. “Is it just me, or is the hill square?”
He smiled. “Good eyes. Follow me.”
They walked around the corner of the hill, and the side of it tumbled in almost regular steps, lush, growing things everywhere, obscuring the ancient stairs except for a bare path. She followed him up, and they found themselves at the top of a broad plateau. Not huge, and she thought perhaps from the sky it would look like little more than a bump in the vegetation, but large enough to have a small pond, and a little waterfall cascading down. They walked along the edge of the plateau, between trees, and he moved ahead to a gap in the surface they were walking on. She looked down, and where the water was flowing, she could see an almost metallic surface, with regular markings.
He smiled. “Do you see it?”
She said, “The metal?”
He shook his head. “The markings.”
She nodded. “It’s really down in there, isn’t it?”
He climbed down to the edge of the water. “It’s not just here. There are signs on three sides of the plateau, and that island in the middle?” he said, pointing. “It’s the same stuff.”
“What are the markings?” she asked.
“Navajo,” he said. “Cree. It’s bizarre that it’s here, although not unthinkable. The thing that got my funding yanked and my sponsor calling me a fraud is what is written on it.”
She cocked her head. “And what is written on it?”
“Things that no Navajo would have a way of knowing. I’ve found at least thirty bible passages under the waterline. I’ve found whole segments that seem to be a code, very repetitive. And the craziest thing?”
She cocked her head. “Yeah?”
“I’ve fallen here at least a dozen times. Cut myself pretty bad. Even broke something, once. And by the time I get off of this thing, it’s gone.”
She stared at him. “And what do you think it is?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” he said.
She climbed down to the level he was at. “Maybe I won’t,” she said.
“Why, do you have a guess?” he asked.
She reached down and put her hand through the water, to rest it on the metal, the writing. A familiar warmth spread over her body, and she closed her eyes. She sent her awareness down, feeling the surface of what she was touching the way she’d felt the outline of her baby in Maria’s belly, and she felt the outlines of the object underneath her. Something shifted, something expanded, something tingled, and when she withdrew her hand, the only sensation that remained was a little bit of a buzzing in the root of her skull, in her abdomen and in her breasts.
She opened her eyes. “Have you noticed other physical phenomena when you were here? Or mental?”
She felt a rush from him. As he said, “Yes,” she kenned his broader answer. it has to be alien they couldn’t have done it, no one could have faked what this says, we didn’t even know, but no one will believe that there is an ancient spaceship lying in the jungle of Guatemala, no one.
She smiled. “I believe you.”
He frowned. “Believe what?”
“You think it’s a ship,” she said. “You think it’s alien.”
“How...”
“I’ve had experience,” she said dryly.
“I’ve been transcribing and doing rubbings for nine years,” he said. “I had a grant, and I managed to make the money last the first two, which is the only reason I have the sourcebooks I needed to translate it at all. Thank god for email, it’s gone faster the last five years, but my computer is so old...”
She realized that she sensed something else from him. “Your name... Juaréz.”
“It’s a joke, really,” he said. “A Spanish approximation of my birth name, Daniel Jackson. I took it to fit in better. My wife did not need to be saddled with a gringo name in her home country. And how psychic are you, anyway?”
She looked down. “More psychic than I was an hour ago, apparently. It’s a recent development. Two days ago I encountered a group of aliens. My son was altered in utero long before that, and could already read minds fairly easily. When they saw what he could do, they changed me.”
“You met aliens,” he said. “Real live aliens?”
She sighed. “Meet me halfway here.”
He nodded, slightly distracted. “Oh, right. Sorry. It’s just... I’m an archaeologist. I deal with old things. Everything I do is about the past. It’s entirely different to think, ‘They were once here,’ than it is to think, ‘Oh god, one might come over to dinner.’”
She chuckled. “I spent almost six years denying the possibility of paranormal phenomena. Now I’m psychic, and friends with an alien. God has a sense of humor.”
“Keeps you humble,” he said. “What happened just now?”
“It... I have to ask a friend of mine. In fact, may I use your phone? Oh, and do you need help with the translation?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yes, to both questions.”
She smiled.
~~~
5:00 p.m.
Back at the house, he showed her to the phone, and she called Mulder’s cell first. No answer. Then Frohike. No answer. She frowned. Skinner? No. She tried Gwynne. “I can’t reach of the boys,” she said, without even bothering to say hello.
Gwynne said, “I’ve got a few more ... than you do. Can I ... your number?”
Scully read the number off the peeling paper, and Niel waved his hands. “What?” she asked him.
“Really intermittent, it can be hard to get incoming calls,” he said. “We were really lucky the other day. It works far better at night.”
She put the phone back against her ear. “We may have iffy reception here. They should call back at night.”
The line crackled, then Gwynne's voice came through, “...’s up?”
“I need Mulder and Joe to meet me in Guatemala,” she said. “And if it’s possible to reach Albert Hosteen or another codetalker, I need them here too. Flown, if necessary. Flores airport is closest, then Uaxactún, and ask for a mule ride to Xepa.”
Crackling, and then “...xact coordinates for Xepa?”
She asked Niel, who scribbled them down on a piece of paper. She relayed them to Gwynne, who was saying, “Mulder... Guatem... Hosteen...night...” and then the line went dead.
Scully frowned. “I don’t know how much of that she got.”
He shrugged apologetically. “It’s hard during the day to get any kind of reception. The radio relay works better once the sun is out of the way.”
“I’ll call back tonight,” she said.
~~~
4:00 p.m. Pine Valley Inn
Mulder stared at his face in the mirror. He’d actually almost gotten used to the beard. But the blond hair... He cringed a little. It wasn’t a bad dye job, it was just... *I look like a beach bum.*
Someone pounded on the bathroom door. He sighed, and opened it. “Gwynne called,” Langly said. “Apparently Scully has just asked for your presence in Guatemala. Yours, Joe’s and Albert Hosteen’s.”
Mulder looked baffled. “Hosteen? Why the hell would she need a code talker in the jungle?”
“I don’t know. Gwynne lost the line before she could get much more than that, and hasn’t been able to reach her since. Bad connection or something. But if you can get Mr. Hosteen to go to high ground, we can pick him up. And she made it easy for us, she gave us the coordinates. But hey, at least she’s asking for Hosteen and not, oh, I don’t know, a dozen armed men.” Langly smiled.
“Hosteen,” Mulder muttered. “Why Hosteen?”
Langly shrugged. “I don’t know, but everything I’ve read says that if your wife asks you to bring a Navajo code talker to the jungles of Guatemala, you best do it, lest there be no nookie.”
Mulder shot him a look and Langly backed up with his hands in the air, “I’m just saying, it might be a good idea to humor her. Scully is smart. Scully is often right. You should listen to Scully.”
“Good mantra,” Mulder said. “Now get out of my way so I can find a phone.”
~~~
Hosteen listened, and then said, “The hogon. Meet me there.”
Mulder said, “An hour after sunset.”
“7:30?” Hosteen asked.
“Yes. Pack for a few days.”
Mulder hung up and looked at his wrist. “Less than two hours to sunset,” he said to Langly. “Get everyone ready.”
They drove in the van up the mountain, and waited as the sky shifted from blue to yellowish to a murky dark. Mulder watched the white light hover over their heads, and was bemused at how easy it was to get used to traveling in flashes of light in the night sky. As the light faded, leaving them in the cargo hold, he said, “I can see why the military likes it.”
Mike was waiting for them, and they explained the side trip. He nodded, and less than half an hour later, they were standing next to the hogon Mulder had stayed in, healing, so long ago.
Albert looked curiously up at the ship, said, “Nice ride.” Suitcase in hand, they appeared a moment later back in the cargo hold.
Mulder said, “My wife says we need you. I don’t know why, but thank you for coming.”
Albert looked around the cargo hold and smiled. “I would not miss this for all the world. And when did you marry?”
Mulder gave a half smile and said, “About three and a half weeks ago.”
“Agent Scully?” Hosteen asked.
Mulder nodded.
“Good. She has loved you for a long time.” Hosteen lowered himself to the floor, and sat cross-legged. The rest of them followed suit.
Langly said, “I wish this thing had windows.”
Mike put a hand down on the floor near where he was sitting, and a large section of it became transparent, including where Langly was sitting. He yelped, and scooted over to where the floor appeared more solid. “Maybe not!”
But he shifted onto his stomach and looked down at the landscape rushing by. “Is that Mexico?” he asked.
Skinner looked, and nodded.
Krycek looked once, and then said, “So we’re going to Guatemala. Is there a way to call the ship back once it’s dropped us off?”
Mike nodded. “It should not linger, but I have a way of causing it to return.”
“We’re flying lights off?” Mulder asked.
“Of course,” Mike said. “Unlike your military, we see no benefit in alarming the populace.”
“Why did you kill so many?” Mulder asked.
“They are making too much progress. They are on a timeline and so are we. We cannot let them succeed, and they must not be allowed to speed up their process. If you can give us another way of countering them, we will try your way.”
~~~
8:30 p.m. Xepa
After dark, Françesca lit torches around the patio, and Abuela brought out little corn cakes with fruit for the evening snack. Scully sat on the patio, feeling strange, even a little achy, while Joshua tried to catch a chicken. Maria brought a thick woven shawl over, and spread it around Scully’s shoulders. She looked up and smiled thanks, and crossed it over her front against the growing chill.
The whole family was out, including the occupants of the third house, who had not been home most of the day. They sat around the patio on the ground and on benches, two children wrestling in a hammock.
After a while, Joshua walked over and crawled up into her lap, pushing at her chest. She didn’t bother arguing, just unhooked her bra and resolved to pick up something a little less fussy in that department, and lifted her shirt under the manta, exposing her left breast to him.
The sensation as he started suckling was intense and completely different from what it had been earlier in the afternoon. Her eyes widened and Maria looked at her, questioning. Joshua patted her chest and sent her a feeling, and she realized that she could hear him swallowing, feel the milk sliding down his throat. She said, her voice a little rough, “I think I know what it did.”
Maria said, “Oh?”
“He’s swallowing milk. Is it supposed to feel that way? Rushing?” Scully asked.
Maria’s mother chuckled, and said, “That’s the fun part. It’s why we don’t throw them into the chicken house when they try to stand on their heads while nursing.”
“Why are you surprised that your breasts give milk?” Sarita asked.
“We only found him a few weeks ago. He just started asking to nurse today, after seeing another baby do it. It didn’t occur to me to even try.” She looked down, where Joshua lay in her lap, eyes closed, an expression of pure bliss on his face.
“It is good, if he will do it a lot,” Françesca said. “It is harder to get pregnant, when you are nursing. And you will have two young ones in a few months. You do not want to be pregnant now, not if you want to nurse the little baby coming.”
“I can’t...” Scully said, and then frowned. “I don’t think I can get pregnant. They took it...”
She tried to send her awareness into herself the way she had with the ship, and with Maria, but failed. She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
She turned to Niel, sitting off to one side, and said, “Do you people ever get sick around here?”
He said, “Yes, but I have taken to carrying the children up to the ruins if they are ill. Mostly we’re very healthy.”
Her right breast started to ache, and she said, “What’s the best way to get him to switch?”
Françesca came over and looked and said, “Slip your little finger in there, at the corner.”
She did, and broke the suction with a little pop. She fumbled a little switching sides, but he latched on to her right and she sighed with relief. “Does it usually ache like that?” she asked.
“Only if you go too long,” Françesca said. “Have you never been around nursing women?”
“I’m a doctor,” she said, “and normally I only do autopsies on dead people. I’ve done some clinic work, but that’s urgent care. Mostly I haven’t spent a lot of time with women with children at all, let alone breastfeeding. Most of my child care experience was babysitting.”
Françesca laughed. “You should stay here a while. Learn something new.”
Scully said, “I don’t know if I can, but I’d like to.”
~~~
9:00 p.m. Xepa
Mike said, “We’re getting close. But your town is three houses and a cluster of people outside. Should we put you where the people are?”
“Is there an open space nearby?” Mulder asked. “I don’t like the idea of suddenly going poof in the middle of a crowd.”
Mike nodded. They watched through the transparent floor as the craft slowed and moved closer to earth, the ground unrelentingly dark to the naked eye beyond the little glow of firelight.
Outside, sitting on the patio, Scully was thinking about taking her sleeping son inside and calling Gwynne, when a light flashed in the field beyond the house.
Everyone started talking at once, but Scully took Joshua off her breast and handed him to Maria. She hooked her bra shut while she walked towards the light, sliding her gun out of her fanny sack as she went. She shifted two injectors of the amber fluid into her pocket, and pulled out a flashlight. The light was gone, and she couldn’t quite tell where the light had been, but a smaller light, another flashlight flicked on in the darkness.
Niel came up next to her and said, “Do you know what that was?”
She shook her head, and walked toward the other light. Niel followed. The other light found her, and when she pointed her flashlight at its source, she found Mulder, standing with his hands up and a smile on his face.
“Don’t shoot,” he called.
She gasped with relief and put her gun away, and met him halfway as he picked his way across the field. “How?” she asked.
“Spaceship,” he responded.
She frowned. “Prove that you are who I think you are,” she said.
He smiled. “You’re my wife, and you’re paranoid, and I love you, and we married three and a half weeks ago in San Francisco. Oh, and you’re a redhead, normally, but I could get used to the new look. Now tell me what the wedding was like. ”
She laughed. “You sweet talked the priest at the church into marrying us without a license, and the archbishop was there. And you look goofy blond.”
By the time she finished talking, he’d picked her up and swung her around in a hug. “Come see the spaceship. You won’t believe it.”
She laughed, and kissed him. “Tell you what... You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
~
Fin
If I needed you
Misty River :http://cdbaby.com/cd/mistyriver
http://www.rhapsody.com/mistyriver/rising/ifineededyou
When I reach the place I’m going (I listened to the Tracy Grammer version, this is Winona Judd)
http://www.amazon.com/When-Reach-Place-Im-Goin/dp/B0013L724C
Farewell to Bitterroot Valley: Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-To-Bitterroot-Valley/dp/B000S3ZZAE
Mother I Climbed: Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer
http://www.tracygrammer.com/php/lyrics.php?uid=506
http://www.tracygrammer.com/audio/Flower_Of_Avalon/MotherIClimbed.mp3
http://www.tracygrammer.com/html/merch.html
(just get their stuff, it’s amazing.)
Dar Williams: Arrival
http://www.google.com/musics?lid=Pdjasb-LAaF&aid=dYHIckrGrNK&sid=AP83AfxerpD&sa=X&oi=music&ct=result