Reality Dreamstates


There are no words. They don't speak and they stalk away in the rain without a goodbye or hello or even I'm sorry.


The answering machine is blinking, the red light short and frantic, illuminating the room and the masking tape X he hasn't bothered to take down. Maybe he's out there someplace, helping him along from the great beyond.


The mirror was shattered and the shelf on the floor, but that was before. Now the man outside the window is in the closet or in the ceiling, and her blood is boiling with spies that send her hurtling into car trunks or places nobody goes.


The voice on the answering machine whispers through his dreams, and he listens, just one more time, in a morbid obsession of the beauty of pure terror. Then he sleeps again, her voice screaming in the back of his head and he dreams of life in the stars and how grand it used to seem.


She sleeps in silence below the stars outside. The trunk is warm and the cold seeps in from outside; it feels like she's camping again. Sooner or later they'll see the monster he whispers, and she whispers back,- he's already here, he's already here-


Others talk in the front and passenger seats, and he is haunted by the haze of the evening. He doesn't say much. The others will use him when they need to sacrifice. They always liked her red hair more than they liked his brown.


They greet each other in the morning with terse hellos. He shuts the door and she purses her lips, hangs her head and pretends to read the file on his desk. He knows if he mentions anything, she'll stalk away, the Ice Queen again, and she'll be fine forevermore. But she doesn't say a word, only looks away haughtily to hide the fear and shame. After all these years, she still hates to open up to him.


They've never admitted to the other how much their trials have broken them. It's only through nightmares and panicked phone calls made in sleep that they really see.


She called him in her sleep, screaming into the receiver, no words, just anger and sorrow and terror and grief that breaks his mind into tiny pieces. They rearrange themselves while he dreams, and he's off on every case involving her all over again in infinite combination. He dreams that night of fear and loss, it's her, always her. It's not his sister anymore, only her.

Somehow, she realizes that it was only their subconscious needs and longing that caused the evening to dissipate into shadows and terror. Somehow, their brains decided to try to show them that they did need each other; they couldn't afford to fight. Fate was giving them a way to reunite, happily, in relief, in the other's arms.

That, she thinks, is the cruelest way of all. They didn't come together because of happiness or shared joy; they came together because they were wronged. She loves him in a way, as he does her, but it is cruel and she hates every minute that they try to convince themselves otherwise. The world has forced them together and taunts them daily that they need each other like oxygen.


She needs him and wants him and vice versa but it is only because one time they suffocated together—and when the world in their minds exploded the other was all that was left.


Night comes again, and they drift off in anger that they've hurt the other and cannot do anything to alter the past. They are here in the present, and they can pretend and can comfort the other, but no amount of Future can alter the Past.


He tells her goodnight on the way out of the basement, and she tries to breathe with her head in a pillow.


A/N: Please review. X-Files not mine.