For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – thus, an emotional implosion is balanced by an outburst.

* * * * * * *

Moments slide from the haze of memory as liquid tears that I strive to brush away. They collapse from the comfortable hold of repression with a volume and intensity that frightens me even as I bask in the release it offers.

I am a scientist. I categorize what I feel and analyze it as though it were nothing more than a slide of bacteria situated beneath the probing lens of a light microscope. I search for linear and identifiable patterns in that which serves to confound me, to cause reactions previously unimagined, wholly unpredictable due to the simple fact that no observations had previously been made. No prior hypothesis could have been drawn.

This comforts me. Those wild and aching feelings that flutter not from my mind but from something completely separate can then be tamed. The pain of their truth is distilled by the detachment I utilize when viewing them.

It is not enough, though.

I have remarked to Mulder on several occasions that he would be the one to drive me past the brink of insanity into a full-blown institutional case. It was always an offhand and flippant comment in response to the crazy logic he follows. It was never meant to be a premonition.

Had the case required intense emotional involvement on either of our parts, I’m quite certain that the situation would have been delayed. It was the lack of mental occupation which caused unwelcome thoughts to seep through the filtering mask of long-standing denial and into the dangerous arena of jaded whim. I wish that something had occurred to give me pause, some tragedy greater than any that had previously befallen me, so that I would be so busy adding to or eclipsing my emotional burdens I would not take notice of previous offenders. Or that something similar would happen to Mulder; something to rip open his old scars so that I might bury myself in the enormity of comforting him, losing myself in the task.

Mulder is the one who is supposed to have breakdowns. Scully is not.

He has seen me cry on few occasions, and those have thrown him enough. For him to bear witness to the crumbling of my every defense must scare him in the most bone-chilling sense of the word. I wish he was not here. I wish he had never come here, and I could have wallowed in the haven of emptiness.

These thoughts run through my head dually with the memories of times before. Their constancy is unnerving, their rapidity frightening. That I can be so cool and clinical and observant and rational even as I am reexperiencing the trauma of loss, played in slow-motion and continuously rewound and replayed on the surround-sound OmniMax theater that is my mind, fuels my need for release.

He abandoned the attempted comfort of an embrace when my trickle of salt tears turned into unabashed bawling. But I am doing more than just crying. I am screaming through the curtain of my tears, my words hammering at the vacant expression in Mulder’s eyes as they try desperately to work their way into his psyche and there find meaning.

He has grasped my wrists, his thumbs hovering above the slight bulge of my veins as they whisper back and forth across the skin. It is a movement that could be construed as a caress, were either of us interested in anything resembling romance. The fine hairs that he is smashing with his fingers are struggling against the pressure, wanting to rejoin their fellow soldiers of stimulation in a ramrod stance of rapt attention. He refuses to grant them that luxury, instead increasing the contact. He is trying to absorb my pain, to gather it as his own, to build a new fountain of eternal guilt over the foundation of my fears and unshared anxieties.

I abruptly cease my shouted tirade a choice expletive phrase, culled from my years spent at various Naval bases across the country. I have been looking into his eyes for the duration of my outburst, drowning in the shifting colors that fade into view as the shadows of my apartment change. They have been in stasis while I ranted at him out of an unjustifiable anger; his own refusal to express a reaction mirrors my own, earlier, and my hatred intensifies. I can no longer even attempt to vocalize what I feel.

We are standing less than two feet apart, fairly separate considering our usual proximity. But nothing about this impromptu encounter has been usual.

The flood of tears had slowed midway through my listing of all the ways I had been maligned in life. The only barrier now is splayed molecules of oxygen and nitrogen floating between us, gaseous granules that could do little to impede upon anything we decided. They no longer resonate with the vibrations of my torrential thoughts, no longer jerk with a movement that would come between us. They have evaporated some of the liquid pain that flowed from eyes earlier, tentacles of chained atoms brushing against my skin and whisking away an occasional, needed ion.

His hands are still around my wrist. We are bound in a circuit, the positives and negatives alighting in the inevitable spark.

I want to close my eyes, to shut out his penetrating gaze, to halt the questions that the swimming flecks of gold in his irises beg. I find that I cannot. I am trapped.

Another circuit.

We should have blown out the fusebox by now.

He expels a long breath, and in that moment of distraction I find the permission for my eyelids to descend.

His breath reaches me, touches my cheek in soft tendrils of rawness. My own sigh catches in my throat at the honesty of this instinctive expression. The carbon dioxide I was about to respire claws at my larynx, begging an outlet. I breathe only due to necessity, ragged tufts of air emanating from my parted lips.

His thumbs continue to glide across the smooth expanse of paleness at my wrist. He no longer even thinks about it – it is just understood to be.

I can feel his eyes on me once more, but I do not allow myself to respond to their power yet. This is too primal. More thought is needed. Rational thought. Logical processions from Point A to Point B.

My veiled lucidity reveals to me that the only rational thought I am capable of is the constant reduction of our inflamed passions to scientific metaphors.

The desire – his unquantifiable need for me – is transmitted in his every touch of his thumbs. Each grazing of the calloused pad is a promise, and a request to see it fulfilled.

He has done this before. When I had cancer. The tension that we thought dispelled returned, with severe undercurrents of longing. A good-bye that we each forbade the other to give.

The anger dissipated into disillusionment when I found out I had a daughter destined to die.

The desperate edge returned to Mulder when he nearly lost me twice in one night – once, due to my own resignation; and again, immediately after that threat had proved deceiving, due to the machinations of a single Africanized honeybee.

His protectiveness has become cloying and intrusive. I told him that already. Now he is waiting for me. We are poised for a fall, I tell myself. This cannot be made to happen.

But I wonder if it has become to late for doubts.

His confessed devotion compounds my indecision. I cannot leave him alone at this precipice. I cannot allow his scar tissue to be burned so entirely that nothing is left of him but a skeletal echo of what he once was.

Besides, this is mutual.

He has been looking at me with a piercing and unwavering gaze while I have been processing, pondering, ruminating. What I know is hidden – is it even hidden anymore, I wonder – in that gaze slowly unravels my shroud of cynicism.

I open my eyes and look at him. We are so charged, made intoxicated and heady by the impact of what I had said. I had yelled at him, and he had welcomed it. I had shouted and screamed and vented and raged and he had stood there, knowing that he was but a replacement target, easily available and willing to bear the brunt of my pain when there was no one else left.

We stand, crystallized by habit. We are far too familiar and comfortable with one another to allow ourselves to get carried away. We rode the pendulum in one direction, and the trip was wild and damaging and wondrous and necessary enough.

Our heads drop to our chests in seemingly practiced unison, the hesitancy absurd after such electricity has flowed between us. But we cannot help ourselves. That last step, that final lifting of flesh-bound muscle and bone from which we can never return, does not come easily. This episode of emotional honesty has to become the standard before we can do anything else.

We are scuffing our feet at that edge, acknowledging its inevitability yet not ready to accept it, knowing that more preparations must be had before our singular presence is enough to drown out the impact of once more hitting Earth.

* * * * * * *

NOTES: Well, I wrote this fairly quickly, in one sitting, without any editing or premeditation. Basically I typed with the idea of somehow reaching “Mulder grasping Scully’s wrists,” and then progressing from there. It’s a lot… moodier than I intended, but hey, it’s probably therapeutic. Considering this is extraordinarily rough, constructive criticism equals eternal gratitude.