Rescue. Rescue from the precipice we once again came so close to pitching forward over, tumbling into, open-eyed and blind. Rescue from the darkness.

The look in his eyes is too much to bear, and I close the door before he can ask to come in. Before I want to let him in.

He loves me.

I know it now. I see it. If I could feel at all, I am certain I could feel it. If I could feel anything, I would choose to feel this. I want to feel this.

I should be frightened, but there is only the hiss of dead air in my head, a deafeningly silent void. Empty space.

It startles me to realize I have pinched my forearm hard enough to raise a welt against my skin. The pain is a dull throb, the only reminder that I am still alive.

On my deathbed, I dreamt of him, crying silently, his face pressed into my hands, a prayer, a supplication. Then he told me he had come to me in the night, corporeal, blood and bone, and that was the instant I truly knew. He loves me, and if I could have felt anything then, I would've chosen to feel that. But my heart was wrapped already in shrouds and linen, a weak and distant light against the pale horizon, and though I smiled, my flesh was clay and I could not feel it.

I am in the shower now, somehow, shoes and all, and the blast of icy water hits my face in a stinging slap that makes me gasp. Cold. Alive. I want to be alive. I want to feel it. He would die for me. He would kill for me. Maybe he already has. He loves me. I want to feel it.

I thought I had been redeemed with one sweet word. Remission. I don't know if it was Mulder's gift to me, but I know that he tried with a singular tenacity to champion my cure. And I have been cured. Someone poured the life and the breath back into my tired and aching psyche, and I could feel it.

That, and that he loves me. I felt it then, along with the promise of time like grace from the heavens. All the time in the world.

I think I felt that I loved him too.

I want to feel it again.

A tiny casket and a cross in the sand can change so much.

I'm shivering. Cold, only cold. I want to feel again. I reach for the phone in my pocket. The water is still flowing over me in frigid streams, soaking my hair, running beneath my clothes and raising ripples of gooseflesh in its wake. The phone still works. It rings.

I can see him now as I saw him tonight. He was slumped over Linda Bowman, and I knew. I knew he thought that it was me. He touched her forehead, a small caress, and if I could feel at all, I would have felt it then. He loves me, and I want to feel it.

I need to feel it.

He answers. "Mulder."

Rushing water. Dead air. I can't. I have no voice.

I push 'end' and drop the phone numbly into the swirling turbulence at my feet. All I have is the chill.

The chill of shrouds and linen, and flesh of clay.