~~~ October 13, 1998 ~~~ The moon appeared on the horizon like a giant bald head poking up from a black water bath. It rose slowly, lingering bright and low so that fat moonbeams rippled over the distant waves. Mulder stood on the edge of the chilly beach and watched the eerie glowing orb with only an ocean between them. Nights like this, when the moon hung large and close, the Earth became a new planet under the shining white sky. The fire cracked behind him, farther up on the beach. He heard a car door slam from beyond and turned around. With the moon, he could just make out a patch of her hair in the distance as she started down the path to where he stood. She stopped, her arms full, and tried to make out what he was doing down on the beach. He waved for her to join him and then watched her wend her way down between the grass-covered bluffs. He walked a few steps to greet her, the sand soft beneath his feet, and they met up by the fire. "I thought we could eat down here," he said. "Unless you think it's too cold." The wind was enough to chase her hair into her eyes, despite the shorter cut she wore these days. She had exchanged contacts for wire-rimmed glasses halfway through their first day here, when the combination of dust and chemical cleansers proved too much irritation. "It's fine." She knelt down near the fire and withdrew two submarine sandwiches and two bottles of soda, handing him half the bounty before settling back to open her meal. He lowered himself to the sand, dusting off his hands before unwrapping his sandwich. "I must've spent fifty percent of my time down here as a kid. It used to be I could draw a map of the ocean floor out there -- where the sharp rocks were, where it dropped off." He closed his eyes and curled his toes, recalling the feel of the stones on his feet. New England beaches were only for the most hardy folk, austere and cool, even in the summer, with more rocky shoals than golden sand. He opened his eyes and looked at her over the flames. "They say the ocean has no memory." She licked her thumb and scanned the paltry breaking surf. "I guess I can see that. The tide comes in, sweeps everything away and washes out again, only to reappear a few hours later. It makes the ocean seem immutable, as though no outside force can change it." "And change equals memory?" "Sure. Every memory changes you." He took a sip from his bottle of soda. "I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. To me, memory seems fixed, unchanging." He turned his gaze to the water again, but he could feel her watching him. "Having second thoughts?" she asked casually. He shook his head and reached for his sandwich. "No. It's past time for this. I should have done it a long time ago." "It's just the circumstances..." She sighed. "Mulder, we can always find the money another way." He looked sideways at her, amused. "You got a pyramid scheme going that I don't know about, Scully? Playing the lottery?" Scully smiled a little but she dropped her gaze. "You don't need to sell the house." Really, he did. His summer jaunt to the Antarctic and the resulting fallout had run him a cool fifteen grand, and now Kersh had hit them with a tab totaling nearly as much for their unscheduled trip to California. Actually, Kersh had billed Scully, as promised, but there was no way Mulder was going to let her shoulder it alone. He never visited the Vineyard house. No one did. His alternative to selling was to ask his mother for the money. She would give it to him willingly enough, but then she would know the truth: his father had died in debt, leaving half-empty liquor bottles stashed around a house mortgaged two times over. The only thing of value his father had left him was the deed to their family house. The old man hadn't been able to bring himself to sell it, and for years, neither had Mulder. "It's best this way," he said to Scully, testing the words out loud. "Some other family should be in there now, someone with a bunch of kids to run around on this beach all summer." "I remember our summers on the water. My brothers tried to build a submarine one year out of a couple of aluminum garbage cans. Charlie nearly drowned and Mom grounded them both for weeks. It was punishment for me too since I lost my partners in crime." "Melissa didn't play submarine?" "She was always lying around on the beach in some teeny bikini." "I bet your father loved that." "He wasn't around to see it." Finished eating, Scully drew up her knees and hugged them to her chest as she stared out at the water. "I used to hate the ocean for taking him away. I remember standing on the edge of pier when I was about six years old. Dad had just told us he was leaving again for a month and I started searching for rocks to throw at the water. I threw them as far and as hard as I could but they just made these disappointing little splashes, like I was tickling the ocean rather than hurting it." Mulder said nothing. His father had been away a lot for work too, but he hadn't known enough to be angry at the time. Scully turned to him, firelight in her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned up as she tried not to smile. "You want to hear something silly? I thought his job was to fight pirates." "Argh, matey," Mulder said, grinning back at her. Scully closed her eyes and shook her head in embarrassment. "I know. That's exactly what I thought. I figured he was out there battling guys with long black beards and a skull and crossbones flag. Once I had convinced Charlie that Dad had chests of gold buried somewhere on the base in secret. We spent two weeks looking for them." He leaned his hands back into the cool sand. "You see that lighthouse down there?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the far-off beacon. She squinted and nodded. "Sure. What about it?" "We thought we could see to the other side of the world from the top of it. A buddy and I set out one day with the idea of climbing it. Took us the better part of a day to get there and then finagle our way inside. It was a clear day but all we saw was Massachusetts. I was convinced we were going to see Chinamen on bikes and stuff. Instead, all I got to see after that was the inside of my room for about three weeks. Mom had no idea where we'd gone, and she was not impressed with my little adventure." She tilted her head back as she polished off the last of her soda. "Speaking of your room..." "Yeah. Let me just put the fire out and we'll get to it." Scully cleaned up the remains of their dinner while he went to the water's edge with a bucket. He stood just out of the reach of the waves, listening to them crash and roll for a long moment. At last, he knelt down and scooped up some ocean to douse the fire. The flames died easily in the cold, wet night air, and Mulder walked back to the house with only the moon to guide him. Scully turned on most of the lights in the house and he congratulated himself on remembering to have the electricity reinstated before this little boondoggle. It would have been near impossible to get all the work done in a single weekend if they could only use the hours of shrinking daylight. Already they had ten boxes stacked in what used to be his living room and at least double that in trash sacks. He'd been surprised at how much stuff the house harbored since most of the important items had left with the family, either one half or the other, years ago. But here still was the ugly bubble lamp his grandmother had given them; the old vacuum his mother had pushed across the floor while he and Samantha held their legs in the air from the sofa and complained about not being able to see the TV; the framed oil painting by no one special, a seascape Mulder had never understood the purpose of, since they had an actual view of the sea from their windows and that was superior to a stagnant dusty picture. As these last mementos disappeared into bags and boxes the house became less familiar to him. It was stripped of the Mulder personality and became again just a collection of boards and nails, a place anyone could have lived. He knotted off the top of a trash sack and heard Scully moving about upstairs. The stairs creaked under his weight as he went to join her, and he paused on the third to last, making it squeal repeatedly the way it always used to do. He found Scully stretched on tiptoe, chasing cobwebs from the ceiling corners. She had covered her hair with a blue bandana and her voluminous work shirt hung nearly to her knees. "I can do that," he said, and she lowered her broom to turn and look at him. "No, I've got it. You can fill the buckets, though. The walls are going to need a good scrubbing." The bathroom still shocked him with how small it was. He remembered the claw foot white tub as enormous, but now he would have been hard-pressed to fit inside it. It looked sad with its missing shower curtain and a collection of dead bugs circling the drain. Mulder filled the bucket with cold water -- they had no hot - - and returned to his old bedroom where Scully was. Of all the rooms in the house, his had been the most empty. Even at fourteen, when he'd left, Mulder had been a packrat and prone to taking everything with him. He'd left half a deck of cards and a camp T-shirt in the tall wooden dresser, and Scully had found a cardboard sword, an old math textbook and a fossilized pack of gum in the closet. That was pretty much the sum total of his remains. "This room was always yours?" Scully asked as she swept. He dipped his sponge into the soapy water. "Birth to fourteen years." Scully paused and rested her chin on the end of the broom. "You know, I don't think I've ever lived anywhere for fourteen years in a row. Where was your bed?" "Right there where you're standing." She turned in place and surveyed the spot. "Near the window," she said. "Of course." It was black outside now but his mind could still conjure the view. He could see the Olsen's backyard and just a hint of the sand dunes beyond their fence. He always knew it was spring again when Mrs. Olsen started hanging her wash outside, garments blowing in the salty wind. He washed the walls until his arm grew tired, but the regular rhythm of the sponge over paint was also soothing. Years of grime disappeared, and the room smelled new again. When he reached the closet door to wipe it down, he stopped and smiled. "Check it out," he said to Scully. She sniffed, wiggling her nose, and came over still holding her sponge. "What is it?" "Proof that I wasn't always this tall." The door had periodic markings on it in pencil. "Fox 1963, age 2. Fox 1964, age 3." Each year had a tick mark until the last -- Fox, 10/13/73. This one was in his own handwriting. Mulder touched the faint line with his finger. It only came up to his breastbone. At 12, he'd yet to hit his major growth spurt. "Well, you clearly need an update here," Scully said. "What?" "I've got a pen somewhere," she replied, feeling around in her pockets. "We're just going to have to wipe this off in a few seconds," he told her. "Ah ha!" She held up the pen to him, victorious. "Now stand against the door." Mulder rolled his eyes but cooperated by pressing his back to the door. She stretched up in her sneakers to reach over his head, and he felt the pen graze his scalp. "Okay, step back." As he moved aside, Scully added some detail: Fox, 10/13/98. He stood with her and surveyed the new mark. All the previous lines were separated by mere inches, but the space between the last two equaled nearly two feet. "It's been a long time," Mulder murmured as he stroked the distance between the marks. "You grew up well," she said softly, and touched his arm. He nodded and then smiled. "You, on the other hand, still appear to be the size of a twelve year old boy." "I am not." He touched the line from his twelfth year and held his palm steady as he crossed the air to her head. "Looks like a match to me." She ducked him, laughing. "You moved your hand down." "Stand against the door then. We'll measure." He tried to grab her but she evaded him and escaped back to her bucket. "We have work to do, Mulder." "Do you need me to do the high parts?" he called over his shoulder. "Or I think we have a ladder in the basement... Hey!" He broke off as a wet sponge hit him squarely in the back. Scully might have been short, but she didn't throw like a girl. They finished his room around nine and moved to Samantha's. Her bedroom held far more junk, but they had cleared out most of it earlier in the day. "Her bed was here," Mulder said as he stood near the large window. He touched the low beam on the ceiling. "Mom was convinced she was going to knock herself unconscious on this thing by jumping on the bed." "Bill broke his ankle once jumping on the bed. Or rather, falling off of it." "No kidding," answered Mulder, unable to keep from sounding pleased. "How old was he?" Scully bit her lip. "What?" he asked. "Like five? Six?" She shook her head. "Ten." "Ten!" "Almost eleven, really," Scully said, trying not to smile. "He's lucky he didn't crack his head open while he was at it." They went to work on the walls, making good time until Scully called to him from inside the closet. "Um, Mulder?" His knees cracked as he got up to go look. "What is it?" She was inside down on her knees. "I don't know if you wanted to see this." He pushed the door open as wide as it would go to let in more light. As he crouched down next to her, he could make out some crayon markings on the wall. Samantha had been practicing her name but she had not managed to make the "S" face the correct direction. There was also a doodle of an orange cat with a big smile. Mulder reached past Scully to touch it. "That was Ginger, our cat," he whispered. "She died when Sam was six." He traced over his sister's crayon drawings as though they were long-lost cave art. Dimly, he was aware he was crowding Scully in the closet, but he was glad she got to see the markings. She was real at one point, he thought. She was a little girl with pigtails and buckteeth and crayons in her closet. "We can leave them," Scully said at last. "No," he replied, snapping out of his trance. "Wipe it off." "Mulder..." He touched her cheek, his fingers wrinkled and cold from the water. "She may be coming back, but she's never coming back here. It's okay. Wipe it off." He went back to the other side of the room to get the dirt from the high moldings. Behind him, he could hear the sound of Scully scrubbing in the closet. Later as she prepared for bed, he peeked one last time and the walls were clean. He gently shut the door and went downstairs to their sleeping bags. Scully shut out the last of the lights and shivered as she snuggled into her bag several feet away from him. Moonbeams slanted in through the blinds, painting the bare wall in a zebra patterned-shadow. Mulder tucked his arms beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. Outside, the sounds of his youth: waves hitting the rocks in a hypnotic crashing rhythm. "Scully," he whispered. "What if it's the opposite? What if instead of having no memory, the ocean has all the memories. The seas are all connected, washing up on distant shores and carrying molecules of earth away. No one person can alter the ocean, but what if we all change it just a little bit? What if we all leave a piece of ourselves inside it?" No reply. "Scully?" He turned to look at her, but she was on her side, sleeping. He closed his eyes then, fading once more into the past as he listened to the sounds of the sea. ~~~~ syn_tax6@yahoo.com Notes: Sorry for the long break between updates. I have been unfortunately felled by a nasty cold or flu virus. Thankfully I am on the upswing now! If you are one of the many wondering what happened to the Haven, it got hacked a few weeks ago. Rumor has it that it shall return in some form at some point. In the meantime, you can go here http://p076.ezboard.com/bhavensstillretreating to find out what's going on. Cheers, syn