Four Hallways
by Leigh Alexander
leigh_xf@geocities.com

First posted: March 21, 2000

RATING: PG
CATEGORY: VAR
SPOILERS: Memento Mori, the movie, Final Extinction: Amor
Fati and Closure
KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully Romance
SUMMARY: Scully reflects on the hallways in her life.

DISCLAIMERS:
1) Dana and Fox belong to Chris and Ten Thirteen Productions
and the other Fox. Absolutely *no* copyright infringement is
intended - I'm not doing this for money, I'm doing it for
love. I *love* these characters, I wouldn't want to hurt
them! :)
2) OK to archive, but if it's going anywhere other than
Gossamer, please drop me a line just so I can keep track.
3) Feel free to distribute and discuss this, as long as my
name and addy remain attached.

INTRO:

This is one of those rare birds -- a story that seemingly
wrote itself. I had the idea on the bus on the way home, sat
down at my computer ten minutes later and within an hour it
was finished. Well, the first draft at least! I realise that
the main idea itself isn't an original one, but I hope that
I've managed to tackle the topic in a new and interesting
way. It's been almost exactly a year since I last posted a
story and I'm hoping that getting this one done will inspire
me to finish off at least one or two of those dozen-or-so
incomplete stories choking up my hard drive. Of course,
feedback is always a great incentive too. :)

Big thanks to Meredith for her *extremely* helpful editing.

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Four Hallways
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When I was in the eleventh grade, my English teacher gave
the class an assignment. He wanted us to write a three-page
paper on an inanimate object -- any object just as long as
it didn't live, breathe or feel. We could tackle our subject
matter however we chose but it had to be the sole subject of
the paper. And it was due in two weeks time.

Thinking back I have no memory of what I wrote about. I
suspect it might have been Melissa's clarinet. Still, the
lesson has stuck with me all these years and I will never
forget what it taught me.

We can personify anything.

If pushed, every object around us can be humanised --
demonised all too often -- in short, made real, living and
powerful.

I enjoyed English classes. Even though it was quickly
apparent that my natural gifts were for sciences rather than
humanities, I still clung to a love of words. Reading had
always been a means to escape, but the end result was that I
learned. Not just ideas, history or the theories of Einstein
and Freud; also the depths and detail of the English
language. Words would flow from the page straight into my
memory, stuck there for hours, months or years after the
book itself had long been discarded. Occasionally I bring
them out again. Numinous, inveigle, obfuscate -- beautiful
round vowels intercut with sharp, staccato consonants. Words
whose meanings are known only by a few, thereby giving them
a secret covenant all their own. My English teachers used to
tell me not to use such flowery language, that it lessened
the impact of what I wanted to say. They didn't understand
that that was my exact intent -- that I *wanted* to hide
behind those words; that I needed to shield myself from the
exposure my writing would otherwise invite.

I still keep a journal, just as I did throughout my teens.
"Keep" is the important word there; I don't just have a
journal, I claim to possess one. Now *there's* an inanimate
object about which I could write a thousand papers. But I
won't. Not today. My journal sometimes bears witness to
those thoughts that I find hard to vocalise. Where's the
surprise in that? What is the point of a journal if not to
hide the words we want to scream to the world?

No, it is not the journal that I want to write about today.

Today I want to write about hallways.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There have been four hallways in my life.

What I'm really saying is that there have been four
occasions in which my life has been altered in a hallway. If
I was really carrying this analysis to its stretching point
I'm sure I could come up with more, but for the moment, I'm
going to stick with four.

That's four times that Mulder has picked me up, shaken me,
and set me back down on my feet again; an aching, shaking
mess of a woman who always at that moment wants nothing more
than to step outside the shell that is Scully and reclaim
the other woman floating somewhere above.

Hallways exist in the margins of our lives. Like the
postman, the soles of our feet or our first love, they are
always there, at the back of our mind, something that
occasionally has meaning but more often than not is simply
absent from our consciousness. It's no surprise to me that
all of the significant moments in my life with Mulder have
occurred in a hallway; existing in the margins is what he
and I do best. We do it in life and we do it with each
other. Yes he is there, but on the very edges of my being.
He is constant... just like the hallway outside my door.

A hallway is a passageway. It takes us from one point to
another. When we walk down a hallway we leave something
behind and in return we gain something new. We have
progressed. This progression happens in two stages: first,
we walk -- or run, or skip, or jump -- down the hallway;
second, we reach the end and we have progressed. We are
different, we are older, and maybe we are wiser.

In my first hallway I left behind grief and I gained
acceptance. And he was there. He held me and he kissed me
and he made me feel better not because of those comforts but
because he continued to look at me as if I were Scully. Just
Scully. Not Dana-with-cancer, or dying-Special-Agent, just
*Scully*.

A hallway is a link, connecting two extreme ends of a
building or a house. But for there to be a connection, there
has to be some kind of separation. Hallways link, yet they
also divide.

My second hallway was exactly that: our bond so close we
were nearly fused together. Bound by words that soon
devolved into silent, strong gazes that spoke our hearts
more eloquently than our mouths ever could. Only to be
fractured by a poison-feeding insect that managed to
separate us more effectively than all the shuffled papers
and power luncheons had ever done. The all-too-brief
connection instantly shattered by our separation.

A hallway is transition. A suspended moment in which we can
choose to go forward or head back. A dance through no-man's
land, thumbing our noses at precaution, or creeping along
with our backs pressed to the wall. This is a mercurial
instant -- yes, I choose that path; no, I refuse that option
-- a point in time that will elongate or telescope depending
on your state of mind.

This was my third hallway and I chose to go backwards. He
said touchstone and I said it back to him. It was love, and
we knew it, and I shrank from its glare, allowing myself
only the treat of fingering his lips. Still, there was
transition. It was an infinitesimal change, but I shifted
slightly in my skin; I felt closer than ever to the woman
who hovered nearby. So close I could see the creases of
anxiety that pressed into her forehead. I tried to reassure
her -- reassure myself -- as I walked calmly away, back down
that hallway. It will happen, I told her, just not today.

The problem with hallways is that they are exposed. I have
never liked exposure -- of any kind. I knew this even before
the FBI therapist pointed it out to me with her smooth, deep
voice that reminded me so much of my own. Why did I speak in
the third person? To distance myself. Why did I feel the
need to distance myself? To avoid exposing my true feelings.
And why can't you expose those feelings, Dana? Because I
don't want to get hurt.

Doorways, rooms, walls... those are the structures that I
would much rather have my life defined by. Maybe if one of
my hallway moments had been a fortress moment, the end
results would have been different. Unfortunately, there
aren't too many fortresses in D.C.

A hallway is an exit and an entrance.

You must exit *from* something in order to enter *into*
something else. And vice versa. Sometimes you don't know
what it is you're entering into, even though you have come
from a place that is so familiar you would know it by its
scent alone. Knowledge can only get you so far. Beyond that
you have to rely on instinct.

My fourth hallway was my own.

Mulder came to me after he lost his sister and told me he'd
found what he was looking for. His palm was cool against my
cheek, nearly as icy as the wind that blew outside, and his
breath buffetted me like a winter storm. I held on to his
arm to keep from falling and he held on to me to anchor
himself down. His eyes fed me warnings, which I embraced
with a smile and when his lips came to meet mine, I met him
halfway.

From then on, we left hallways behind us.

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THE END
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Thanks for reading!
leigh_xf@geocities.com

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/8850