Ever Since Ellie

It was a dingy day.  The sky swelled with white--a dirty white like a bachelor's laundry, the lowest common denominator of all the colors washed together. A sullen sky.

The man looked up and shivered, flexing stiff hands only partially protected by fingerless gloves. He hoped the bus was on time today, but it would surprise him if it were.  At least the bench was dry for once. Amazing. He huddled into the collar of his coat, seeking its flimsy shelter from the gnawing wind.

Checking his watch impatiently, he swore. Ten minutes--if it came on time. Some days he wondered why he went to so much trouble to save the air from his tiny car's exhaust. But he'd been doing it for so long now... ever since Ellie.

Ellie... the former Mrs. Frohike. How long had it been since he thought about her? She had mattered so much to him, once. So vibrant, so sincere, she could convince him of anything. His friends had always laughed when he started some new kick--no nukes! No meat! Make love, not war! She had never wanted him to drive anywhere--he could remember her saying, "When you need to go somewhere, walk. If it's too far to walk, bike. If you can't bike, take mass transit." She had streaked across his dark life like a meteor, brilliant and beautiful. His adoration for her had been intense and hopeless, cherished from a distance until the night when Scotch and desperation had forced him to make his admission. He had imagined every scenario, every possible reply--except her acceptance. Nobody knew her reasons for giving herself to Melvin Frohike; if she had known herself, she had kept it a close secret. He had been afraid to let himself believe that it was really happening, until the day he had woken beside her with an unfamiliar weight on his left hand. If he closed his eyes he could still feel himself there. She had curled beside him, warm and soft and fragrant, and when he stroked the bright hair spread over his chest the satisfied sleepy noise she made had penetrated to the core of his heart. She had filled his existence with the incandescence of her passion; in return, he had given himself to her without restraint.

There is no zealot more devoted than the lonely man who finds himself suddenly and inexplicably loved. So for her he had labored to save society, endangered species, the environment, and a thousand other things. She had wanted to save everything, it seemed--except their relationship. Perhaps, after all, that had been inevitable. She was always brimming over with zeal for her latest project, cause following cause with breathless haste. For six years he had been a constant in her life, the one project she always went back to. And then one day in June it had ended. They had gone out to dinner that night, after a rally protesting about something--he could hardly remember, but he thought it had to do with sewage. In hindsight, he supposed that was appropriate.  She had cheesecake for dessert that evening. He had divorce papers. He had stared at them for a full five minutes before he could trust his voice.

"But why?"  he had asked her simply.

"Come on, Mel," she had said, the quaver in her voice betraying her false flippancy. "You know me better than anyone. You know that I don't stay with anything long. It's just the way I am."

"Oh, don't give me that crap," he had replied. "I'm tired of making excuses for you. You don't stick with anything because you don't want to. If you had just once--"

"Shut up. Shut up."  She was angry, a rare occurrence. "You don't understand. I wanted to stay this time. I tried, Mel. But it just... didn't work. I'm sorry."

He had seen her only once, after that, when they had finalized the divorce. Every day of their marriage he had immolated himself in her. When she took her fire away, he was left with emptiness and ashes. He tried to remember her sometimes, now, but her features had grown fuzzy in his memory. He had burned all the pictures he had of her, and done his best to obliterate her face from his mind; now all he saw when he tried to remember were blurred shapes and indistinct outlines. That much he had forgotten, but he could still see her gestures, her mannerisms, the way she used to bite on her thumb when she was thinking or push her hair impatiently out of her eyes. He couldn't see her face anymore, but he could still see that hair, slick like smooth water, shining with cinnamon flame. They used to argue about her hair all the time. Every week or so she would threaten to cut it off, but he had begged her not to. He had loved her hair long. Bobs, in his opinion, made women look like a Shakespearean page in some amateur production of As You Like It. He wondered if she had cut it after the divorce. She probably did, for the same reason he had smashed that absurd ceramic ashtray she had made him for their first anniversary. A silly present, when you think about it. He didn't even smoke...

Years after she left him, he had realized that she influenced him in absence even more than she had when they were together. After the divorce, he had forcibly removed all the evidence of her influence from his life. She liked him to be neat; he became disheveled and scruffy. She was practically a Luddite; he became a hacker. She was open and trusting; he taught himself paranoia like a craft. Throwing his wedding ring into the Potomac was only an outward manifestation of the systematic rewriting of his soul.

For years he had drifted from one activist group to the next. At first he had gone back to the ones they had frequented together; eventually, the reminders of her had driven him ever deeper into the fringes. If he hadn't met Byers and Langly he would have likely ended up as some kind of technological terrorist.

His work on the Gunman had saved him. Bizarre as it was, that fact remained. He had forgotten what it was like to have true friends, comrades in arms, united for a cause. It gave him purpose again; and, though he wouldn't admit it, it eased the aching place inside him where he had ripped her from his heart. He had begun to feel comfortable again, the pain not gone, but considerably dulled. Sometimes, when he was hacking a particularly tough system or caught up in the frenzy of a publisher's deadline, it would cease altogether.

Then Mulder brought his partner to the office.

His first sight of Dana Scully reopened a wound that had closed but not healed. She didn't look at all like Ellie, at least as much as he could remember, but she was like her all the same. She perched by the window, vivid, resolute, her bright hair piercing the gloom like a brand. In place of Ellie's restlessness she radiated purpose and ability. He had finally managed to salvage his dirty old man persona with a few remarks, but for the most part he had been uncharacteristically silent during the meeting, choosing instead to watch her and remember.

At first he had been afraid for Mulder, worried that she would burn him with the red heat of her beauty and the white heat of her soul, leaving his friend like him, consumed and hollow. But as he came to know her better he realized that Scully was less like Ellie than he had first thought. Ellie had been his Aurora Borealis, beautiful, captivating, but ephemeral. Scully was Mulder's lighthouse, steadfast, devoted, and true. Frohike began to see in them what he and Ellie might have been, once, if things had not been as they were. He saw in Mulder the passion he wished he could have shared with his wife; he saw Scully burning with the fierce light of honor Ellie had never known. He cared for them in secret, mourned for them alone, and again and again, when they clung together by some miracle, he felt an exultation and a wistful ache.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he almost missed the bus when it came. He sank gratefully into the last empty seat. The bus was crowded today, probably because of the dismal weather. He murmured a polite greeting to the woman next to him and relapsed into his thoughts. Suddenly, for the first time in many years, he admitted to himself how much he missed Ellie. He wished that he could see her, talk to her, find again that part of her that brought him heat and light and life.

The bus pulled up at his stop, and he gathered his belongings and began the walk home.

His seatmate watched him through the window as the bus pulled away from the curb. "You didn't recognize me, Mel," she whispered, her low voice catching on his name. "You didn't even know me." And she bit her lips to keep from crying as she pushed her short gray hair back from her face.