The form and motion of his desire sparks pain-bright on the insides of his eyelids, is writ large in the exalting tremors of his limbs within their bonds. He feels everything; the whispering air, the heat of arousal, and all the deep, dark brightness of his need. Take me, he thinks. Use me. Make me yours alone. He has no doubt that Mulder can do this for him; redefine him and wash his past away, carmine blood swirling down the drain and out into the wide, wide ocean. He has faith, and his God is watching over him with a thousand sharp-edged benedictions gleaming eagerly in the palm of his hand.

He lets himself drift as his God reconfigures him and his pleasure grows. He imagines platelets being driven away from each other in the chaotic stream of water, a raging torrent on their microscopic scale. In his mind’s eye he sees them disperse further, and further still as the outflow meets the sea. They drift apart on the deep currents, coming slowly to rest; in the belly of a shark, on a continental shelf under a thousand feet of mud, lodged deep within the slow-beating heart of the oceans under frozen Arctic wastes. Little pieces of himself, scattered over the surface of the globe. As he drifts, he wonders how much blood he would have to shed, to turn the oceans red. If finally, that would be enough to make him clean.

Then the blessing pain calls him home, and the voice of his God cries out in ecstacy. He rises with Mulder, faster and faster, until they break the surface together, and enter oblivion in a rainbow of glittering shards.