SECRET BIRD
by Politic X

Fandom: The X Files

Pairing: Dana Scully / Monica Reyes

Summary: Monica throws a loft-warming party; Scully attends. It's a follow-up of sorts to 'Night Ride Across the Caucasus'.

'Wait a minute, baby

Stay with me a while

Said you'd give me light,

But you never told me about the fire...'

-Nicks

Prologue

I want to go home.

When I was a child, I lifted my arms to the sky and let the breeze wash me spotless. But I can't come unsoiled in this dirty town; I'm too stained. There's too much nicotine, grease, sweat and semen to wash away. And I cannot come clean.

I escape to my best friend, Stephanie, when I can, because she lives in a small town between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where the trees are thick and the grass is so green and wild and fragrant that I wish I could bottle the scent of it. I want to inhale that place and hold the sweet air in my lungs long enough to render me weightless, airborne, sky high. And when I go there, I never want to leave.

But I do. I return to my city of vultures. I know joy must be here, or else this town wouldn't be home to anyone, but I can't find it. It's dusk right now in D.C. and it's my favorite time of day, when the world goes soft and the sky lambent. Dreams and love and happiness are in the air, in the smell of the Greek restaurant a block away, in the sound of laughter and shouting, in the subtle flirtations of the couple sitting on the worn stone steps of my building. I stand on the roof and look and listen. I know joy must be here, it must soundtrack the evening with car horns and street music, but when I lift my arms to the wind like I did when I was six, the breeze doesn't blow through me and it doesn't cleanse me and it doesn't carry my soul to heaven and back.

And this place doesn't feel like home.

I wish an extra wish this evening, as the layers of the sky grow darker above me. It's my secret wish, one that I just discovered recently, one that I try not to think about, one that I keep buried. I wish that Stephanie would go ahead and marry Raney and get it over with, and that we'd all go to Louisiana and live in her little cottage. It's always in a state of disrepair, but it sits on a piece of land so wide that it takes part of a day to walk it. There's no sound of car horns or street music, just cicadas and every kind of songbird you can imagine.

My father once told me that a wish is a bird in your hand, and it can die or it can fly, whichever you choose. You can neglect it and watch it starve to death or you can smother it or even crush it. Or you can nurture it and set it free. I don't want this wish to die.

I want it so badly that I see it when I close my eyes. The only thing similar to my dream home and this place is that it's dusk there, too. Raney's working on the piece-of-junk lawn mower, maybe. Stephanie's covering her Harley for the evening and she's probably singing or making some other soulful noise, because she's never quiet for long. And I'm preparing dinner. I watch them from the window for a while, until the broth of the pollo tizatlan is simmering, and then I move out of the heat of the kitchen and into the coolness of the mild November. I walk to the car that has just pulled into the long, dirt driveway, and wait in the dust for the ignition to turn off. Then my hands are opening the door, taking the baby and kissing his sweet, round head, and Stephanie is coming and pulling him from me. She knows just how to hold him because she had babies once. So I watch her carry William to Raney, and they make a big fuss over the little miracle. And I turn and look at the miracle's mother, and pull her into my arms and make her stay.

I make her stay and see that life isn't a cold concrete city of soulless, faceless vulture people. Life isn't gray buildings, gray sidewalks, gray parking garages, gray cars, gray clothes or gray air. Life isn't false truths or empty searches or conspiracies or power. Life isn't this emotional wasteland.

I make her stay and see what life is. I make her see that life is a growing child and that life is a family of friends standing on a dirt driveway at twilight in Louisiana or Mexico or wherever there's love, and I tell her that this is why we live. And I tell her how I once dreamt of this life from my rooftop in D.C.

And when I share this secret with her, she shares her secret with me.

I feel heavy and I know that it's my need that weighs so much. I don't want to need her. But I do, and I wonder why I want to take her away from here. I wonder why I want to hold her in my arms on a dirt driveway in Louisiana. I wonder why I want to promise her that when we tire of that place, we can move on. I can take her somewhere where the history is poured into clay, to a place where the land is long desert until it's broken by water or volcano or lush grass. It's a place where I can tell her a different story every night because the myth and lore around us are so rich that even the trees have tales. It's a place where I can sing Spanish lullabies to her child while she rocks him to sleep. It's the place where she's happy and unafraid, the place where she will let me lick her wounds and feed her love and nourish her soul back to health.

It's home.

I lock my wish away like I always do, but I won't continue keeping these thoughts to myself. I will not. I cannot. I cannot be Emily Dickinson and wrap them up in tidy little packages and pile them in my seclusion and cage my love like it's a secret bird, because I cannot cage my love like it's a secret.

Because I cannot cage my love.