TITLE: Ab Initio AUTHOR: Ana Vicente mailto:thorn17@mailcity.com RATING: PG CLASSIFICATION: V KEYWORDS: Pre-XF SPOILERS: There's are a few tiny references to one or two episodes, but you get it if you haven't seen them, so they don't really qualify as spoilers. SUMMARY: Special Agent Fox Mulder has just learned he is to have a new partner, a woman by the name of Dana Scully. AUTHOR'S NOTES: Just in case you don't know, Ab Initio means "In the beginning" or "From the beginning". It's from the gospel according to St.Matthew(19:4):"Haven't you heard," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female". Also this is my first attempt at a vignette. It came to me while I was ridding the bus home and was brewing in my head for a couple of days before I decided to put it to paper. Hope you enjoy it.:) +++++++*+++++++ Alone, he stood by the wide window, watching the crowd below, waiting to see her. People kept streaming in and out of the Edgar J.Hoover Building; men and women wearing suuits mostly, but also the obvious tourists and the schoolteachers with the walking-i n-pairs children behind them. Still, there was no sign of the one he knew would be arriving soon. They had told him less than an hour ago that Agent Dana Scully would be his new partner. He had known it for days now, thanks to Danny. It had given him time to do some checking on Scully. He had read her file, her thesis, but it hadn't told him what he wanted to know. So he had gone to Quantico. Alone, he had sat in the observation rooms of the academy's autopsy bays, safe in the darkness, while on the other side of the two-way mirror Dana Scully taught forensics. He had wathed her on the hallways, on the cafeteria, on the grounds. He had heard others talking about her, and had made some discreet inquiries. She was a brilliant scientist, a more than competent agent, someone who clearly had a promising career ahead of her. And now she was being sent to spy on him. Something he was sure would help advance her career even more. But there was something the one's sending her to him didn't know. Something he was sure he had seen in her. A sort of honesty, for lack of a better word, a passion for the truth as great as his own, an almost naif conviction of her ability to make a diffe rence. And that was what kept him by that window in eager anticipation of her arrival. Maybe she was the one to help, the one he would be able to trust. And maybe it was just the loneliness speaking, the need for companionship. The perspective of a propotion could do strange things to people, thi he knew. He had seen it happening to Jerry, he had seen Diana leaving. He couldn't trust Scully, not just yet. Then he saw her, coming across the street, her red hair gleaming like polished copper in the afternoon sun. She was forced to stop a few feet away from the main entrance, when a horde of eight-year-olds ran out of the building. With a smile, she started h elping their teacher bring the over-active children together. From the way they went around shooting their fingers at each other, they had just come from the shooting range. Scully pulled out her badge, and the children quietened. He smiled. "Now, what have you told them?" he whispered into the glass pane. She looked up, her gaze locking with his, and he startled. He recoiled, for a moment not remebering that he was standing behind a pane of mirrored glass. Scully couldn't see him. It was just a coincidence she had looked straight at him. Turning around, she walked into the bnuilding. Unwittingly, his eyes lingered on her body until she was out of sight. She sure looked a lot better than Jerry. He shared a quiet chuckle with himself and was about to leave his observation post when something drew his attention back to the street. A man about the age of his father was standing by the building, smoking. The man dropped the butt to the floor and squ ashed it, at the same time lighting another cigarette. But what had intrigued him was the fact that the man seemed to be gazing at a group oif small windows by the pavement, the windows to his basement office. The man turn around and walked away from the building's main entrance. "You're imagining things," he told himself, moving away from the window and dropping all thoughts of the cigarette-smoking man. Alone, he walked the corridors that led to his office, preparing to welcome his new partner. Mixed feelings struggled inside him, in the certainty that soon -- for better or worse -- he would be alone no more. --- Ana ****************************************************** I have become a brother to the dragon and a companion to the owl. ****************************************************** Walk through fire. Face the darkness. Calm the waters. Find the truth within yourself. ****************************************************** ALIEN ARTIFACTS: members.tripod.com/Thorn17/index.html THE TOWER: www.angelfire.com/biz5/TheTower/ ******************************************************