He can feel the earth moving beneath his back. It's an odd feeling; one he remembers well from his childhood, when he'd lie like this on the grass of his grandparents' river paddock and stare into the star-scattered sky above, with nothing of earth to block his view.

He's drunk. Not just drunk; really drunk. Monumentally drunk. Supremely, utterly pissed, in a way he hasn't been since he was fifteen and his best friend ran over his cat. It's stupid, he knows; especially now, when there's not only his erstwhile employers to outwit, but also Walter, lover-become-enemy; and Mulder, partner-turned-hunter. Not to mention however much of the FBI they can drum into action between them. Downing a bottle now--especially now--is the epitome of idiocy. But having just thrown his life away, he can't quite bring himself to care.

A star shoots, far above, blazing a trail across his mind. At the edge of his vision a tree hovers, dark and swaying slightly in the wind that blows across his skin, dries the tears as they slither down his temples. It's all he can see; that tree and the stars, so far above and yet when he reaches up his arm, he could swear he feels their heat blistering his fingertips. Heat like that which had encased him as recently as that morning, when he had woken curled safe in the embrace of a man he will never be able to kiss again.

Deep in the grip of the alcohol sluicing through his veins, he wonders how long it will take him to regret this. How long it will be before all traces of the man he is now will vanish; sanded off in the harsh realities his life is about to become. Will this love endure? Will he?

The tide of melancholy washing through him assures him that by the time the world is safe again, there won't be anything left of his reason for saving it. If Walter doesn't hate him yet, it's only because he has still to fathom the extent of this betrayal.

And, oh, it hurts. The stars blur beneath the salt-sweet taste of tears on his lips; but drunk as he is he doesn't think to question how he can taste his tears when their tracks flow down his temples to the thirsty earth beneath his back. Such irony, he thinks, that he should throw away his life to help save a world, and in the process destroy all he thinks worth saving. And the words echo through his mind, through his soul, through his heart; tremble on his lips as he shouts them to the sky, "I will come to you at night time!"

His cry echoes in the air about him, lodges deep inside his soul, where the pain of the separation he has initiated this day is a raw wound still, bleeding sluggishly inside his chest. "I will raise you from your sleep!" he tells his phantom lover, and drunk, tired, lost in a morass of emotion he can't even begin to sort out, he lets the alcohol take him down into his dreams. "I will kiss you," he whispers to the ghostly form solidifying above him, "in four places," and he suits actions to words, raising his head and laying his lips against the smooth skin of his lover's palm, the soft stretch of his neck, the solid curve of his chest as clothes vanish beneath the force of his need. He lays a soft kiss, finally, upon the lips curving so gently, so tenderly above his, and somewhere deep inside his soul a piece of his very essence breaks and dies.

"You will never forget me," he whispers to the ghost of his lover. "Someone has to remember the boy who dies this night, and it sure as hell won't be me, Walter." He lifts his hand, not surprised when his fingers slide through the shifting surface of the figure he addresses. The alcohol is dissolving inside his bloodstream, now; he can almost feel it as he sobers, increment by increment. And he can feel himself dissolve with the alcohol; devoured by the mask he'll need to live, from this day forth. The remaining cigarettes burn a hole in his pocket; through his clothes, through the skin of his thigh, through his heart and his self and his soul; hotter now than the remnants of his lover still sticky on his skin; than the fires of the living hell he condemned himself to, when he planted these telltales for Mulder to find. Hotter than the last spark of defiance inside his mind, than the last regret he swallows inside him now, to be buried with the last of his dreams deep in the bleak pit of his future.

But not hotter than the pain in his soul when he considers what the fate of the world will be, if no one acts. Not hotter than the recriminations he would heap upon himself, were he to abandon the earth to its fate.

And not hotter than this final embrace from his phantom lover, for this one moment solid in his arms as he listens to Walter's deep voice whispering in his ear: "throw your arms around me, and I will hold you dear....", as he slides softly into sleep.

The sun rises to a paddock now empty of the grief that had haunted it; and the soulless mask of a man who has given all for love, even unto his very self, is all that remains of a dream that could have been, were he only just selfish enough.

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