WARNING: This is the follow up story to the drabble Outside the Window. It is about character death … if that sort of thing makes you want to send cranky letters to writers DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT!!!! 

Author's Note: This is for those of you who asked.

Behind the Door

by Mik

The story after Outside the Window...

I don't want to go back there. His place. Number Forty Two. Where we first kissed. Where I first held him. Where we first accepted our impossible feelings for one another.

But no one else could go. His mother wouldn't. Those three strangers he calls - called friends wouldn't. Only Scully. And she can't go alone. Not now, so lost in her grief that she can't see mine. So, reluctantly, I've agreed to come back and close up his place. Bury the last memory of him.

He's gone. It seems impossible. Three nights ago we were planning a daring weekend away. And now the weekend is come and rather than meeting him on a plane, I'm meeting her here. What happened?

One moment I was having coffee, pleasantly anticipating another night with him in my arms, me in his body. Then squealing tires, voices raised in alarm, sirens, and he was late. And I glanced out the window impatiently, and saw … no, I never want to think about what I saw.

He was running, one witness said. The sidewalk was slick and he slipped trying to dodge a car making a left turn, and was hit by the one behind it. There were no charges filed. It was an accident.

Charges should have been filed. Against me. I'm the one who scolded him constantly about being punctual. I made a rigor out of our rendezvous. If not for my insistence that he be on time, he wouldn't have run, he wouldn't have fallen, we wouldn't have buried him today.

I force myself up each step, my personal key to his apartment burning in my fingers. She's there in the hallway already, tears streaming down her face as she attempts, in vain, to straighten the crooked numbers on his door.

"It never stays up," she tells me numbly.

I want to reach out to her, share the last of his warmth with her, the last sensation of his embrace. But I'm too selfish to give that away. I'll cling to every shred of his essence I can keep. I push the key in the lock, and twist savagely. "Well, it's always been a dive. I never understood how he could live here."

She nods, fresh tears springing to her eyes. She attempts a watery smile. "Could you imagine him living anywhere else?"

Yes, in my house. In my bed. On a beach in the Florida Keys. In my arms. And always, forever, in my memories.

The place is in its customary disarray. His briefcase abandoned on the sofa. Mail all over the table. Dusty pictures and dead fish. This is what he left behind. In his bedroom, tossed across his bed, the suit he wore that last day at work. He had literally peeled it off to get into the jeans and sweater he was wearing when he … when …

I look around helplessly. What do we keep? And for whom? I want to wrap up each thing, even the water bottle in the refrigerator, and pack it away safely in my garage, a cardboard shrine to my memories, my love.

I have no right to do that. But I must keep something. Something more than the socks and toothbrush he kept at my place. Something that was uniquely and utterly him. In the corner of his closet, I find the basketball he was forever dribbling around the apartment when we talked, argued, planned. He did it to annoy me, not to mention his downstairs neighbors, but the image of that is indelibly imprinted on my brain.

I pick it up, hold it in my hands, turn it slowly. Feel his fingers wrapped around it. Feel tears burn.

I haven't let myself cry. I couldn't. How do I explain weeping for one of my subordinates? I don't. I had to get up and eulogize him today. I had to do it calmly, and dispassionately. How could they ask me? Couldn't they understand my loss? I wasn't just eulogizing one of my employees, one of my agents. I was saying goodbye to my life.

I suppose I haven't any right to tears. Does a murderer weep for those he kills? No. And no one weeps for him.

"Here's a box to take to the dumpster," Scully says. Her voice is more natural now. It always helps her to focus on a task. I should have realized that packing his house would become just another autopsy for her. She reaches for the basketball in my hands.

I jerk it out of her reach and then smile sheepishly at her astonished look. "I think I'll keep this. It's so … Mulder, isn't it?"

She nods and her eyes grow misty again. "Hard to believe he's gone." Her voice drops to a whisper. "He would have hated this."

I nod. The idea of anyone being forced to pick through his personal possessions to find something worth keeping was an anathema to him. Impulsively, I drop the basketball and pull the box from her fingers. "Leave it," I command, my own voice raspy with unshed tears. "Mulder's not in any of these things. Let's just take our memories and go."

The look in her eyes mirrors the dance of emotions her heart does; incredulity; anger...relief. She nods and returns to the kitchen to get her bag. She pulls a key from her keyring and leaves it on the counter.

Almost reluctantly, I do the same.

Outside the door I bid her farewell, and stand there just a moment longer. I can't leave without something of his. Glancing up and down the hallway, I pull out my nail file and pry the crooked numbers off the door. Let the rest of the world wonder about the enigmatic man that once lived behind this door. He isn't there, anymore. He's in my heart, my memories, my eternity of solitude behind my own door.

- END -