ordinary things by wen summary/a taste of things: in the darkness of memory and ordinary things, M & S try to rebuild their lives and each other in the wake of the anatomy of failure. for sarah ellen parsons, one of the loveliest people i have the privilege of knowing. and tara, always, who is an angel, and *for* the angels. strong R for language, implied sex, dark themes. contact: nocturne@mailandnews.com please ask to archive or link from my site. an immense amount of thank-yous to follow in end-notes, to the world's most incredible beta crew- loa, kate, sabine, fialka, livia-jood, and ali. the saving graces. ~*~ My hand won't hold you down no more The path is clear to follow through I stood too long in the way of the door And now I'm giving up on you. - Fiona Apple, 'Love Ridden' . . . . . & SCULLY & What surprised her the most was her skin. Scully blinked into the mirror. The mirror blinked back. Hello, my half-won child- enemy of my adolescence, glass splinter of my heart. made me beautiful only at angles. She saw fine lines and cracks. The water and soap had shriveled her skin, left it to dry and fracture. Around her mouth and nose she could see each individual frayed dry skin cell. The skin bunched and clustered in fine white patterns - when she looked closely it looked as if she were growing a second skin. Something thin, dry, and detachable. When she put her hand up against her face, it stung softly. She was touching something rough in texture, bumpy and fine all at the same time. Scully was fine sandpaper. A rough edge to smooth down rougher edges, fading and chipping and cracking in the trash. Her fingers slid from her face, gripped the cold wet surface of the sink above the counter. With her pinky, she knocked over a small container of floss. 'An all new fresh mint taste!' leered sideways at her. Scully didn't floss every day, like she was supposed to. She felt a sudden tiny bite of guilt inside her chest, then tried to shake it away. She felt strangely ridiculous, staring faintly at her face under the fluorescent light. Vaguely she remembered that soap was supposed to clean skin, not steal it. She breathed a sigh that curled inwards. She backed away from the counter, pulled open the tiny drawer beneath, and pulled out the bottle of face lotion. When she twisted the bottle open, it gave an immediate reverse pressure reaction, spitting out a glob of lotion all over her hands. This irritated her. She had wanted to squeeze the lotion out by herself. She had wanted to be able to regulate how much she needed. Instead, she spread the uneven white glob between her fingers. Then she smeared it against the cracking white patterns made of skin. She could feel water rushing back into her veins. It clung and stung, and when she worked her jaw up and down several times, it moved fluidly, unrestrained by dry skin. New skin glowed back at her in the mirror. The sting remained. She washed her hands quickly in the sink and picked up a sullen white toothbrush from behind the spilled floss container. She smeared a minimal amount of gritty mint toothpaste against the surface, then slid it into her mouth. The bristles scraped against her gums. She gave quick downward scrapes at a 45 degree angle to the front of the teeth; once on top, once on bottom. Then she turned the toothbrush around and gave soft swipes to the insides of the teeth. Soft toothpaste foam tickled her tongue unpleasantly- she grabbed a cup and quickly rinsed her mouth out, a hard swish to the left, then a hard swish to the right. When she spit, she ignored the thinlined traces of blood from having brushed too hard, blossoming like small red flowers in the sink. She unbuttoned her pajamas quickly, letting them slide into a soft puddle on the ground as she stepped into the tub. Then she turned on the water full blast so that each shower drop felt like an ounce of lead. Hard water in a hard land. Pain like Chinese water torture. This was what he always felt like, to her. This was what he felt like now. She slid into the corner of the tub, hugged her knees close until her chin pressed a soft chink of bone beneath skin. Hair dripped into her eyes and made their edges sting madly. She felt dizzy with inertia, a pull. Her pull. His pull. Their pull, with dizzy little dashes of weightlessness. It was like waking in the middle of the night to feel the sensation of falling - jerks and pulls, the sudden terrifying touch of flight replaced by simply solidifying. She wasn't crashing. She didn't crash anymore. She no longer had the capacity to shatter. When she fell, she solidified, condensed, like a milky white star. A black hole. She felt the rush of the fall, but not the pain. Not the bones, broken like sticks. Not the heart, broken like glass. She felt the water beat against her back. In her imagination, there's another her, there's another end to the scene. She strides into the room and slams the door behind her, confronting him. She demands to know why there's been another woman in his bed. Ha. Another woman. She was never really the first woman to begin with. She and Mulder have never...... and she isn't sure that she wants to, anyway. But in this denouement she is angry. He feels his betrayal to her like knives. He realizes that he has snapped the thin tethered chain between their hearts. He begs her forgiveness. She forgives him. But what really happened was this: Mulder sits at the desk. She comes into his hotel room, opening and closing the door as softly and crisply as folding a piece of paper. There's lipstick on the collar of his shirt, against his collarbone, and she knows that he knows this. She knows that he wants her to know, and she can feel that lipstick like a solid acid, jammed up straight against her heart like a scrap of bloodied glass. The sheets on the bed are rustled and worn out. She feels sick when she looks at them. She's looking at the crime scene of her murder. Sheets and pillows strewed like mutilated bodies. From the indention of the sheets pressed against the mattress she can see fingerprints of the frantic movement of bodies. This is the reality- the noises and screams and moans she heard through the thin walls in the night were not a dream. Not a nightmare. She lifts her head back up to look at him. He's keeping his head upright, but in the tiny tremble of his throat she can see that he wants to duck his head, to fold it under his arm and protect it from her. And then he looks at her. She realizes how beautiful his eyes are- soft blue specks, gold traces, smooth green undertones. She hates him for it. Her heart crushes from the inside out, turns corners like a black hole and collapses, and for the first time in her life, she feels old. His eyes don't leave hers. He is hurting her, willingly, he is rustling like paper beneath her skin and leaving paper cuts along the organs and shell of her body until she falls apart. She clenches and unclenches her fist in the cold to keep the fingertips from trembling from fear and rage and pain and the deep down ragged hole of betrayal, and imagines the sensation of punching him, of taking him down, of leaving black and blue marks on each place on his body that touched the other woman. But then her fist unclenches, and all she can feel is a tired sigh whispering down her body. His betrayal hollows her out like a reed, scrapes her insides clean and empty. Winner take all. The only thing she is left with is a dull cold pain in her chest and throat, and she turns away. Then she walks back to her room and into the bathroom. She throws up into the toilet and flushes it tastefully. She cleans her face off with toilet paper. She throws up again, the dry retch of it burning stomach acid up her throat, leaving a sour taste to remind herself that she's still there. She flushes. She feels the pain of him somewhere behind her stomach. Then she scrubs her face again and again with the cheap motel soap. When her face dries, she notices the skin. . . . . . % MULDER % On the corner of the dresser was a smattering of black buttons. They had come off her shirt when he'd ripped it open. What-was-her-name hadn't even noticed in a fervor of hurry to get dressed. She had left before he'd awakened. He could still smell her in the room - cheap perfume and the antiseptic smell of alcohol. The lower half of his body ached. He hadn't had sex in years. He wondered if it mattered. He pulled himself out of the chair, and into the bathroom. Against the wall were tacky green tiles, speckled slightly with whitish brown soap scum and old steam. He ran his hand beneath the water of the sink, then swiped it against the tiles, leaving a trailing handprint of dark wet green. In a tiny basin by the sink sat a small wrapped bar of soap. He unwrapped it with his fingers like a candy bar, and small flecks of soap slivers dropped off into the floor. The soap was small and hard, off-white and hollowed with a smaller rectangle pressed into its surface. He unbuttoned his shirt with one hand and threw it back into the room, then threw his boxers after it. He climbed into the shower, turned the hot tap, turned the cold tap, and threw himself under the coming tide. In his imagination, there's another him, there's another beginning to the scene. He walks into Scully's room. She's curled up in the bed half asleep. He doesn't disturb her, and slips into bed spooned up against her. When the sun leaks through the windows the next morning, she smiles, and they drive back to Washington D.C. in comfortable silence, stopping every so often for gas and food, exchanging snacks so that their hands brush together. His heart aches for her and all she does is smile and occasionally thread her fingers through his, the way she usually does. This is comfortable. This is them. This is what being in love with Scully is like. But what really happened was this: Mulder walks into Scully's room. She is distracted, off-center, irritated with him. She had wanted to be back in D.C. a week ago. His theories fell through. He's a waste of her time, he's an embarrassment to be around, she's better off without him. She never says this, of course, but in her alley-cat pace he can hear every word. She's under stress. She's cracking. He tries to calm her down, puts his hands on her shoulders. For just that moment he catches her off guard, and suddenly, he realizes just how close their faces are. How warm. Then, abruptly, he feels as if he's being drawn to her like a string tugged from his heart to hers. He leans into her, but when his lips touch hers, she jerks away as if he's struck her with a live electrical wire. She slaps him, a hard cold streak down his face. "Get out," she says in a low voice. He opens his mouth. "GET OUT." she says again. "GET OUT OF MY ROOM, MULDER." Her voice cuts him like jagged glass, a swift stab through the throat. She severs his jugular with small white words. He leaves. The gravel and broken glass in the parking lot shimmer and shiver, sparkle and crackle beneath the soles of his shoes. He doesn't remember how he got to the bar. There's no good reason to get drunk. No one's died. Nothing's exploded. The X-files weren't taken away. His life moves on. He only wants one glass, but when he feels the burn down his throat warming his chest he, he can't remember anything. But he can remember Scully, cutting herself off from him. Hadn't she started leaving him years ago? Systematically drawing herself away, bit by bit, piece by piece. The only thing that gave her back to him had been the cancer. She had gripped onto him like a life preserver in its long sky-tinged aftermath, and now, she's letting go. She's drowning. He's already drowned. The alcohol burns. Straight up down vodka, a shot glass through his heart. In the haze of the bar, he sees a flash of almost red hair? A voice talking, low and soft, he can't make out the words. Once upon a time he'd almost been happy, Scully so irrevocably his soulmate that he thought he could do anything. Go to the moon. Go to Antarctica. Red hair beside him, the soft touch of a hand, and suddenly, he's holding onto it. Somewhere he can feel that this isn't Scully - a replacement for Scully, all the things about her that he can't have, she won't let him have without disintegrating but he wants and lusts for and has wanted for so long - and then something swims in and she's there beside him. He doesn't remember how he ends up in bed with her, but he does, fucking her as hard as he can and screaming and moaning and yelling Scully's name again and again and again, all the while aware and unaware, swimming from drunkenness to lucidity back to drunkenness again. Passion and pain have always been the same thing. One moment he's with Scully, love choked solid by lust and want and need and fear, and the next, he can feel her in the other room, opening and closing her eyes in the darkness, listening to him thrash inside the body of another woman, hearing him scream her name. . . . . . & SCULLY & Scully is thirteen again. Down the stairs she can hear the hushed voices, smothered anger like dead flowers choking her throat. The whispers cut her little girl heart in two, like scissors. She should feel angry or sad. She is surprised when she feels nothing at all. As she walks down the stairs, she can feel the carpet whisper cold synthetic beneath her unsocked feet. She steps down hard on one of Charlie's Legos. The plastic corner cuts into the bottom of her foot like a knife. When she sits down to look for blood, she finds nothing but the sharp inverse print of a rectangle, 6 tiny circles. This disappoints her. At the bottom of the stairs she can see the edge of the kitchen, her mother, the newspaper poured out over the table, her mother's hands flat on the cheap newsprint. She can see her father, his fingers gripping the small wooden chair back so hard it might break. They're both whispering frantically, angrily. Every so often, her mother motions up towards the ceiling, the second floor, with her hand, with a panicked, angry, guilty, heartbroken look. The children will hear. Dana doesn't even bother to cover her ears. Dana can see her father now, as she walks for the kitchen. She knows what they're saying. Several months ago, Dana left school slightly sick one afternoon to come home early, walking the short distance so that she wouldn't have to call and bother her mother to come get her. A street away, she saw a man leaving their house hurriedly, a man that looked so much like her father that at first she thought that it *was* him - only that her father wouldn't be back for three months. When she got into the house she saw her mother coming down the stairs, dreamily smiling and humming, then jumping guiltily, almost horrified, when she saw her daughter standing in the door. And Dana understood why her mother didn't get sad anymore when her father went away. She stalks into the kitchen. The whispering stops abruptly. If whispering had been cutting her heart like a pair of scissors before, the sudden silence shreds it. There's a half eaten Oreo on the floor. She fingers the handle of the refrigerator and pulls it open, mulls over waffles or an apple, trapping herself between half squeezed bottles of ketchup and mustard that only Billy eats. She slides the refrigerator door closed. The newspaper clippings and magnets rumble softly. Billy has ball practice on Thursday. Pick up Missy at 3. She walks as if it's an ordinary morning. She bends next to the cabinet and opens the door, rummaging through plastic wrappers of cookies and chips and snack mixes. All she comes back with are a few cookie crumbs that have clung to her fingers. She sucks at these crumbs thoughtfully, and they leave a tiny burst of aftertaste in her mouth. Her parents are frozen solid by her sudden intrusion. Her mother breaks the silence, suddenly, almost croaking "Good morning, honey. Are you hungry?" Dana says nothing, and reaches over her mother for the newspaper. She finds the comics, and snaps them open, and tries furiously to read them. Charlie Brown sighs, "Good Grief," and she suddenly realizes that even this sad little cartoon boy, even this storybook character knows nothing about grief. Her father says nothing. He looks at her, and tries to open his mouth, and tries to say anything at all, but nothing comes out. He looks back at her mother. It's the only time in Dana's life that she'll see that look in her father's eyes, like his bones have been broken like sticks. Like his heart has been broken like glass. Then he leaves. When the house stops shaking from the force of the accidental slam of the door, Dana folds the comics back down. The newsprint leaves a faint outline of Garfield's face upon her palm. The insides and corners of her eyes sting wildly. She wants to cry. She wants to scream. Instead, suddenly, she wants a cigarette, badly. It's an ordinary morning. It'll only take three months for her father to forgive her mother. But it'll be a long time until Dana can forgive her mother again. In her imagination, there's another her, a stronger child, preteen, teenager, girl. The one that wasn't numb to life. She strode downstairs and saw Charlie's Lego coming. She stepped around it. When she got downstairs, she strode into the kitchen, pressed her hands against her ears, and screamed "STOP IT! JUST STOP IT!" The last word of the scream was so loud that Billy came padding down the stairs, Missy behind him, Charlie tumbling behind them. Another denouement. Her mother and father stopped the clandestine whispering. Didn't they know that it wasn't just a problem polarized to the two of them, it was their problem, too? They all sat down at the table and pushed the newspaper out of the way. They talked about what they were going to do, solved all their problems, knit their family back together like a brand new sweater. But this was not the way it was. The sins of the father. The sins of the mother. Scully, Dana, Scully, promised herself when she was thirteen, that she'd never grow up to be like them. She'd never grow up to live in a marriage or relationship built out of denial, out of children and uneaten boxes of cookies and a house to be cleaned. She wouldn't grow up to be an ordinary thing. She would find the soulmate love of her life, and he would understand. He'd never be like her father, leaving her behind and still expecting the most perfect love after the ditch. He'd never be like her mother, looking for her father in another man. He'd be the storybook come true that sometimes happens. This was the hope she'd clung on to for years. Especially when she thought she'd found that almost-soulmate in Mulder, years and years ago, back when he was the mythic pathos, the truth seeker, the person who could make her life into a storybook come true. But she was no longer thirteen, or even twenty-nine. She was almost thirty-six, crammed down into the dirty corner of a motel shower, hard as nails on the outside, but as broken as ever. . . . . % MULDER % The sun burned into his eyes as he opened the door and hauled his bags behind him. He hated the way his bags were constructed. He'd never really figured out how to carry them without dragging them behind him so that they banged hard and painful into the backs of his legs with every step he took. Only Scully knew how to carry bags, her fast steps ahead of his luggage-beaten legs punctuated like a clock-beat. Usually she'd get irritated with him for whining about the luggage slamming into his legs, for lagging so far behind her, so much that every so often she'd just grab the bags away from him and make it to the car/ motel room/ his apartment in half the time and none of the bruises it would have taken him. Superwoman. Made of glass. Glass shatters easily. He crunched over the gravel again - the broken shards of everything in the parking lot glowed too brightly, blinding him for just an instant. When he got to the car, he opened the trunk. Trunks fascinated him. He'd always wondered how it would feel to be trapped inside of one, rocked back and forth, pummeled when the road was hard, bruised when it was soft. He'd always wondered about the inside tunnel scraped terror. Sometimes he had dreams where he'd rushed to Scully's apartment just in the nick of time, five years ago, just as Duane Barry turned the key in the ignition. In those dreams he always shot Barry, strode to the back of the car in horrible urgency, and opened the trunk, to find Scully about 30 seconds into terror, pupils dilated, blood pumping through her veins like cold water, but safe. He closed the trunk and closed his eyes. Then he walked over to Scully's room and knocked softly. The wood and paint rasped into his knuckles. He was terrified of seeing her. He was terrified of spending three hours in choked silence in a car with her. This was the way he felt the finality. The bond between them had been cut like an umbilical cord, and his half was rapidly shrinking away in his hands, ready to drop off and be forgotten. Ready to leave nothing but a hole. And he wondered who it was that he had wounded deepest. Himself, or Scully? He knocked harder. Still no answer. When he tried the knob, cheap paint coming off into his hands from it like a second skin, it opened easily. The room was dry and clean, empty. Free of her things, suitcase, purse, half read newspaper, it looked as if it had been gutted. As if he'd been gutted. He tried with rising shock to keep down the relief that he couldn't believe was flooding his system. He walked back out into the parking lot. He realized that she had left him forever. Angry at himself, he tried to shake the melodrama from his head. His head pounded bitterly in response, a light hangover and second-hand sex shaking at his system. When it cleared, he walked towards the motel office. As he opened the door, a light bell tingled, and the fat, docile faced clerk turned towards him. "Did you see a red-haired woman, about this height, leave any time this morning?" He heard himself saying the words- he was dimly aware of not stringing them together, but they came full force, tumbling from his lips like a scream for help. "Yeah, sure," the clerk said, smacking his lips around a wad of gum. "Left about an hour ago with all her bags in a taxi. Probably headed for the airport." As he walked back towards the car, Mulder was fourteen again. In the dim stifled emptiness of his room, a 90 degree angle from his bed, glow-in-the-dark stars shimmered too softly in the darkness. He hadn't left the light on long enough for them to shine the way they could have. Equally muffled, he could hear his father screaming downstairs, and his mother screaming or crying, screaming or crying, but about bills or other small things. The wrong things. If he closed his eyes hard enough, he could hear Sam's ghost passing through. Then he heard the slam of the door, and the car starting. His father was leaving. There was nothing he could change about this memory. There was no imagination strong enough. He knew that if he'd chased after that car, going skitterscatter downwards in the rain, he would have only been a tiny dot in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller, fading into the distance. . . . . . & THEM & Scully is waiting to be entirely herself again. Hand crushed against the leather of the taxi seat. I am the decimal part of a logarithm. I am the tiny hard sweet nucleus. Shoot cells and electrons through her- bet she thought they'd go right through her, didn't her? Sometimes they bounce straight back. 'It was like shooting a gun at a tissue and having the bullet come right back at you.' Usually she's strong, but sometimes she comes right back at you, destructive, swathed in pain like bandage gauze. Her exhaustibility choking on a hurriedly half eaten bagel, memories of bad coffee, the taxi driver braking this way and that, screaming at the traffic blocking the road, screaming at all the years of pain blocking the arteries to her heart. She feels horribly sticky, her stomach clenching and unclenching angrily. Her period started this morning, an empty spitting out of nothing since she can't have children anyway. Her body is still rebelling, more in denial than she is. After years of rolling and unrolling goddesses, suffragettes and feminism stomach-pumped into the public conscious vein, the peak of womanhood, is, apparently, to leak out blood between legs. Lovely how her body can sense just when that peak can be worst for her. The taxi driver opens the window and screams something incoherent, waving his fist, and she drops her head against the window and closes her eyes. * Somewhere a few lanes over he can hear someone screaming. When he glances over, all he can see is the very front view of a taxi cab- the rest obscured by a gleaming white Lexus- and a taxi driver leaning out of the window, waving a fist around in the air and screaming at someone. Road rage. Lovely. Mulder just wants his feet to be warm again. Braking the car. Hand tapping at the handle of the door. Opening and closing life like a slinker-taped blackhole with hinges, waiting and watching by the circus flap, looking for that flash of red hair in the audience, waiting for someone to notice his act. Pedantic, like a fucking coward. In the harsh glare of sunlight, a cross shimmers from the corner of an office basement church, electrified fluorescent lights flickering in and out, sadly, like Scully's cross in the darkness, on her chest after a long cold, or after death, or even after Pfaster. Scully, manna on his tongue, sweet and substanceless. All he'd really need to survive on his own. And he just wants his feet to be warm. He doesn't know why they're cold, curled under, frozen at the brake and gas pedal in all their glory. But he's looking for an answer. All he has to do is figure out how to make his feet warm again, and then everything will be okay. Beside him, on the seat, is his cell phone. He edges for it nervously with his fingers. Traffic isn't moving anywhere, anyway- over the hissy string string string of the radio, someone had muttered boredly about an accident backing up the freeway, and when he closes his eyes, far away he can hear the sounds of emergency sirens, someone running to untwist twisted metal and make everything right again. Nokia glares back at him, and he pushes the button to almost speed dial Scully's cell, but then his fingers stop. Terror washes over him, dark brown and stingy, like the grey dusty motor pollution infested sky hanging over the freeway like a smothering safety blanket. He draws his breath in and out, slowly, like drawing huge water coloured beads one by one out of his throat, out of his larynx. Then he picks up the phone again, and dials her home phone number instead. * The vein is running dry for her. When she looks closely, the blue vein doesn't jump and flow in her arm. She imagines that it bunches up like a varicose, isomorphous, horrified. She's in a different state of mind now, heightened, head fuzzy full of sharp edged stars, a heady buzz like more tequila than cola. Maybe if she shakes her arm, it'll jangle- her veins are full of little sharp edged glass shards, her veins are full of him. Is she that obvious? Has she always been that obvious? Waiting for him to find his way into her, so long that he found his way into her through another woman. Fuck him. She didn't. She's been predestined to drip like protein through his veins. Sad and quiet as a gurgling brook. She hates that term. Gurgling. Like a baby. Like blood. The taxi driver's window slides shut, finally, and he manages to calm down a bit. Despite the screaming, he has the nice, old friendly face of a tired man, a powder keg ready to explode. He turns around. "Sorry, Miss," he says, apologetically, and looks contrite when she can only incline her head slightly. She feels guilty for looking sad, for making her taxi driver feel guilty over something that isn't his fault at all. The traffic begins to move again, a slow trickle, then the rush of automated power all that horsepower can bring. She shifts up in her seat, looks carefully around her, behind her, with veiled eyes. There's a fluorescent cross blinking sadly in the daylight from some underground basement church, and she touches the cross at her neck. Then, in the brightness, for one small moment, she almost sees something in the cars behind her- Mulder, like a shutter-shot gaze, one tiny frame inserted lengthwise into the movie, appearing at the cracks, small and lonely and silent, terrifying. But then she sees nothing. It was like waiting so long that when you woke up you realized that you had nothing at all. The hours slid by like swallowing pills, one by one. She tasted the flight like a martini. She let the flight attendant bring her a drink for the first time in years. There's no such thing as drowning your sorrows, she thought. But sometimes you can soak them. When she dumped her bags back into her bedroom in her apartment, the answering machine beeped a quiet "18 messages waiting." She pressed 'erase all.' Then she called his cell phone. He answered at half a ring, then spoke, hesitantly, uncertainly. "Mulder." She closed her eyes and let it all cut away. "I'm giving up on you," she whispered. A heartbeat fluttered, followed by the gently crashing sound of imaginary breakage. Then she hung up the phone, pulled the cord from the jack, and turned off her cell phone. . . . . . % MULDER % Mulder brushed his teeth. He swallowed the toothpaste. He liked the way it tasted. It made him feel mindlessly reckless. WARNING: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional assistance or contact a Poison Control Center immediately. Sometimes he imagined a hollow burning in his stomach after swallowing toothpaste foam the way he'd swallowed bubble gum when he was a kid. Get me my doctor. Doctor Scully. He set the toothbrush back down on the shiny porcelain counter, on the dirty water and dusty half-used bottles of hair gel. Then he walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He never left the bathroom door open. If he did, he could see through it, to the darkened mirror from his bed at night. Darkened mirrors in the night terrified him. He sat down on the bed. It squeaked and bounced lightly in reply. He pulled on his jeans. The cold that had settled into them from being on the floor burned the edges of his legs. He pulled a sweater over his head, and heard a gentle crackle of static electricity. He could feel his hair standing straight up on his head, the heightened awareness of it, like a pack animal. When he shut the door, the four slid away from the two and swung precariously, like a pendulum, like it was saying 'no, no, no.' He ignored it. It fell off, and he locked the door behind him. And when he got to her apartment building, he stood and looked up. There was nothing night about the night- the city lights had lit it inversely so that it looked like it glowed from the way up, fading blotches of purple, black, and blue. The color of a bruise. He couldn't see any stars, and this made him sad. The night was night. Just night. Night air cut and burned. Each time he breathed he could feel the molecules, nitrogen, oxygen, hard little edges of electrons and lies slicing him up inside. He opened her door as quietly as possible, and snuck into her room. The light from the city was spilling down onto her bed, onto the edges of her face. Then he crawled into the bed, and put his arms around her. He heard her eyes snap open in the darkness like a cracked leaf, he felt the shock race up the bumped slender line of her spine in a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond. She shed the groggy sheen of sleep from her body like a snake, and then she was fighting against him, angrily. He held onto her and swung a leg over hers to keep her down. He was aware that in her mind there was panic, flurries of motion and high high emotion strung like electrified kites, like she was fighting for her life. He felt only as if he was holding tightly onto a tiny broken bird, determined to trap it down with him even if he ripped the wings. She began to move like a trapped animal, hitting him hard and square again and again in the chest and soft organs of the stomach. She knew where to hit to injure. He knew that she knew this. He kissed the side of her face when it came in contact with his. He waited for internal bleeding. He could feel rage rising up from her like a wave now, crackling around the waves and blankets like an electric current. If he touched her face again he would have been shocked flying backwards five feet. She shoved him off of her and onto the floor with a hard angry punch that cracked into his jaw. He felt the crack and almost a snap, a burst of highswept red behind his eyes. Cold sharpness. In his mouth he tasted warm blood, iron, tasting like metal. The only strong part of him flowing all away. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, she stood on the other side of the bed, legs apart in a defensive position. Dimly in the back of his head he could hear someone from Quantico reading boredly from a textbook. Something about the stance. Do not give the criminal any indication of fear. You are in control. She looked like she was going to hyperventilate. In her flannel pajamas and tousled hair she looked almost ridiculous, standing over him with a gun aimed at his head, body heaving up and down slightly with deep gulping breaths, channeling anger and fear and a hurting lack of confusion. As if he was a known terrorist with a nuclear missile aimed at her heart. Maybe he was. His head sloped downwards until it came down to the floor, and ached on contact. He could see beneath her bed- an inextricably neat pattern of dust bunnies and slippers- and suddenly, he wanted to smile. This saddened her. He could see it in the softening curves of her face. But then she gestured towards the gun with a nod of her chin. Her eyes were reentering through the patch of cloth at his shoulder, back down into the scar, digging it open, screaming through the flesh, and lodging at the bone. "I did it once," she said. "I can do it again." . . . . . & SCULLY & The first time Scully held a handgun she knew she'd found the small clean touch point inside the sticky mess of her heart. A shaped block of metal in her hands- cool, the trigger so slender and light beneath her finger. She was twenty-seven years old and ready to take on the world with a gun hand that never shook. She was going to banish all the world's demons with one precise flick of her index finger. Its noise always exploded in her ears, even louder than the rifle she'd handled when she was ten years old. She never knew that gunfire was really that loud- in movies it was always a muffled shot, something loud enough to make anyone duck and cover, but not loud like this. This was loud like a supernova. She thought of pressure and rates and smoke, the bullet gaining speed and power, the physics of denial and destruction. One straight line- point A to point B, slicing through life like a knife. Flying through the years. Guns became a matter of survival, not saving the world. Guns became a matter of her. Scully liked to clean her gun. Leather and a well oiled trigger, clean black reflections. So shiny she could see her face in the corner of the barrel. It made her feel as if she were scrubbing clean all the possible sins, rubbing away all the things she could do and did and sometimes wanted to. It made her feel like a cat, desperately trying to lick clean her sins with a piece of leather and gun oil. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not do harm to any other living creature. Thou shalt not shoot thy madness-stricken partner in the shoulder. And now, she looked down at Mulder, his head level with the floor, his eyes opening and closing softly. There was a tiny spot of blood at the corner of his mouth. Her heart constricted painfully in her chest. Opened and closed. He wasn't watching the gun. He was watching her from the knees down, to her socked feet. "Mulder," she said. "I want you to get out of my apartment. Now." He didn't move. She wondered if he was drunk again, if he'd been with another woman, if he'd been screaming her name again. She breathed harder, gulping cold air in and out. Each breath hurt. Finally, he pulled himself into a sitting position. He was lucid, from his eyes and movement, but moving with reference to where she'd hit him. He rubbed his jaw. He didn't look surprised when his fingers came away with a small amount of blood. "I thought that maybe we could talk," he finally said, with some difficulty. "Breaking into my apartment and assaulting me in my bed doesn't qualify as 'talk', Mulder." She tried to sound hard, an edge in her voice. Eight-faced diamond, steel and glass. Don't fuck with me. All she knew was that when the words came out, they didn't tremble. He sighed, and ran his hands down his face. From where he sat under the window, the outlines of his hair glowed. Her foot was falling asleep. She wanted to stomp it, to bring back feeling from the cold rigidity she could feel setting in, but she couldn't bring herself to move. "Is it too much to say that I'm sorry?" he whispered. His voice blew in like a leaf and choked. He almost looked like a too big little kid, sitting on the floor, his head bent downwards, soft. Sweater pulled over his head sloppily, like an angel. She swallowed, a gulp down her throat. She could feel him burn all the way down. "Yes," she said. "It's too much. ...And it's too little. I want you to give me the key you used to break in, then I want you to leave. I'm turning in my resignation Monday morning." She saw him suck his breath in. She saw his heart crack. He got up slowly from the floor, wincing softly. He pulled the key from beneath his soft sweater, from his jeans pocket. He fingered it softly in his hand, put it down on her dresser table. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the key as if it was the last real thing in his life, the most important thing he was losing. Then he shoved his hands in his empty pockets, and she felt an empty pain swelling in her like a breaking balloon. When the door shut behind him, she locked it. The slide lock rasped sleepily. It didn't feel strong enough to protect her from anything. She collapsed against the door and slid towards the floor. The gun fell from her hands, and she balled herself up very tightly. She wondered which tense she was thinking in: forward, or backwards? Were they going forward, or backwards? She remembered a day in the office, half a million years ago, picking up the chattering teeth from Mulder's desk with all the intimacy of a lover. The toys in the office, the eternal child, grin on his face. She'd wondered if Mulder had a jellybean childhood, ever remembered the simple thrill of whirling on the tire swing, the merry-go-round, knowing that one moment in flight when you think you'll never stop flying. Then she'd seen his face, his shaking hands. No. Mulder had been born a thousand years old, the wasted light in his eyes flickering like a brief flash of snow. Now he was growing backwards. And she was growing forwards all too fast. Somehow they'd missed each other in the night. . . . . . % MULDER % He pulled the trigger. Nothing came out. He pulled harder. Then he realized that the cap was closed. Mulder was cleaning his apartment for the first time in years. He undid the cap of the Windex bottle, tried to smile sheepishly to himself. He pointed the Windex like a gun at the grimy window. A thin line of blue ran down the bottle, over his hands, from having squeezed the trigger when the cap was closed. A hard blue line shot out from over it, attacking the window, leaving a metallically clean rivulet of glass. He attacked that rivulet with a paper towel, scrubbing until his reflection blinked solemnly back. For the first time since he'd bought the apartment, he could see the street below it. A young couple walked down the street without holding hands, without touching, watching the cars go by. Watching their life go by. He attacked the next pane. His heart hurt when he scrubbed away the sticky 'X' shaped tape remnants he'd never managed to get off before. He heard a knock at the door. He crossed easily towards the front door. The junk that usually crowded the floor was all in the garbage disposal a floor down. This didn't make him feel purged, or even clean. It just made him feel empty. He peeked into the little circle of a hole through his door. Then he drew his breath in painfully. He set the Windex on the floor. He put his hand on the first sliding lock. He slid it open halfway, then stopped. He turned around. He sat down slowly, his back scraping against the door, his elbows on his knees, his hands over his face. The knocking continued until he stood up again, like trying to build a stone wall out of ripped feathers. He opened the slide lock and his door quickly before he could stop himself again. Scully's hair was swept back, tied in some kind of knot. Bound up. Away. It made her look suddenly soft, and desperately, painfully, he wanted to kiss her. To touch her one last time without the memory of a sharp blow to the face. She held out his key to him, in the center of her palm. It had a small sticker bearing the word 'MULDER' in capital letters. She was handing him back to him. "I wanted to slip this under the door," she said, softly, "but I'm not a coward." She looked over his shoulder into the apartment when he said nothing. "Wow," she almost whispered. Forced. "What are you doing?" Mulder picked up the Windex bottle at his feet. He didn't pick up the key. "I'm cleaning," he said. "Cleaning?" she said. She lifted an eyebrow, tried to look incredulous. Tried to look normal. The way she used to. She only succeeded in looking sad. "Why?" "Because," he said. "It feels good." He walked back towards the window. The couple had stopped, waiting for the walk signal to turn green. He sprayed another window pane and attacked it with a paper towel. Scully followed him in from the door, hesitantly, with the nervous look of a trapped animal. "Mulder...." she said. He turned back towards her, dirty paper towel in hand. "I know," he said. "It was over before it even began. I fucked it up. No- wait- I'm sorry. Wrong choice of words." He dropped the paper towel into the trash and sat down in the couch, covering his face with his hands. He could smell the antiseptic anger on his fingers. She didn't move. "No," she said. "It was over because it was over." She sighed, breathed in and out. "You have no idea how angry I want to be with you right now, Mulder. I wanted to break your jaw." "You almost did." "And I wanted to shoot you. I wanted to take you down. But I can't sit here looking at the jagged pieces forever, Mulder. If I'm still angry with you, you still have that hold over me. I don't want you to have that hold over me." Mulder dropped his hands, and looked up at her, surprised at the chink, the admittance to vulnerability. He didn't know if she was giving him an opening, or if she was just being honest, or if she was just too tired to care anymore. She wasn't looking at him. She had one hand at the side of the window, looking out towards the street. His key was in her other hand. He couldn't speak. He felt himself closing up, too far away from her. He was thirty-three years old again, sitting on the same couch in the darkness, waiting for the phone to ring from the hospital, waiting to hear that she was gone. Dana Scully, beloved daughter, sister, friend. 'The Spirit is the Truth.' "I want to be able to tell you that this isn't your fault, Mulder, but I can't," she said, suddenly, cracking through the time capsule he'd sealed himself into. "And I want to be able to tell you that it isn't my fault, but I can't. The truth is- the truth," she said, stumbling softly over the word- "is that this isn't about fault or no fault or anything at all. This is just what is. This is just what happened." "We didn't stand a chance," he whispered. "No," she said. He looked up suddenly at her, and from the glint of the light, wondered if her indestructible blue eyes had filled with tears. "That's just it. We did have a chance. And it's not that we missed it, or that we didn't." "Too long," he said. "Too late." He watched her until she turned. "I love you, Scully," he said. She closed her eyes tightly. He imagined tears coursing warm down her face, or under her face, since he couldn't see them. She drew her breath in, then let it out again. "Did I ever tell you that my mother had an affair with a man that looked almost exactly like my father, when I was a little girl? I never talked about it to her, or to my dad. They never knew that I really knew. I guess that they thought I wouldn't understand." He felt a sharp glare of pain in his chest. He closed his eyes, put his face back into his hands. She had turned away from him, was gripping the sides of her arms very tightly. She continued, softly, "She loved my father too. He just wasn't there. I was, Mulder. I was there for seven years." The pain grew stronger. He felt like she was crushing his chest in like a paper bag. "I know," he said, "But maybe just not in the way that you needed to be." She gave him an angry glare through the building veil of tears. "In your bed, Mulder? What makes you think that I'd... ever let you do the things to me that I *heard* you do to that other woman? What makes you think that you had the right to make me into a body, one of your porn videos? When you scream my name like that, it's not love, Mulder. It's almost hate." "No," he whispered. "It's not like that, Scully...." She put the key on the table, on top of the computer. For a very very long time, she said nothing. He imagined her memorizing the room, memorizing the slow attempted transformation of him, of them. She was waiting for him to say something, do something, something more. Something to knit them back together like a brand-new sweater. The silence hurt. He could feel it cracking her heart like an eggshell. But all he could see were the soft links of the carpet, the worn out dirtiness of his rug, and suddenly, he yearned for a rag, a bottle of carpet cleaner, something that he could physically take in his hands to repair the damage. Turn back the years. Anything was repairable with the best moderately priced cleaner, the best touch, right? When he finally opened his eyes, looking for her, wanting her, needing her, wanting to take her hand in his, make everything beautiful again, it was already too late. She hadn't even bothered to close the door on her way out. The tiny '2' on the door looked sad and empty and lonely. The '4' had cracked and broken when it hit the ground. . . . . . & SCULLY & There were tears streaming down her face now. She tried to gulp them in. WEAK! she screamed at herself. WEAK! She wanted to break out into a run. She restrained herself carefully, pressing her arms down at her sides, lifting them only to angrily brush rebel tears away from her face until they stopped and started crumbling her insides instead. She didn't stop when she got to her car. She kept walking. One by one she saw the pavement cracks and lines. Step on a crack. Break your mother's back. A young couple sat on a bench at the entrance of a park. This must have been the park Mulder came to run in habitually. She'd seen the couple from Mulder's window, crossing a walkway without touching, ignoring the crosshatched current that ran between them. Now they were hesitantly looking at each other's hands, each daring the other to make the first move. Along the pathway of the park there were huge trees flung out like Mulder's dirty paper towels, wiping all the clouds from the clear blue sky. She wished suddenly that it would rain. She stopped at the farthest one in the line along the pathway, then she sat behind it, feeling the heavy age and bark of the tree at her back. Then she let herself cry, not in empty gasping sobs, or a release of passion, but simply a drip of tears and water running from her eyes, down her face, down her neck, into her shirt. Beneath her hands she could feel a million blades of grass and dirt. She felt the empty sway of the tree above her, dripping leaves and ashes into her hair. When the tears stopped, she didn't feel relieved, or angry, or even aware of them. She simply wiped them from her face, leaving streaks of dirt and tiny pieces of grass. She turned her head, just a little bit. The couple at the entrance of the park were still sitting, side by side, not looking at each other, not touching, still caught in stilled indecision. Then, suddenly, the woman stood up, and from the looks of the motion of her lips and scared young eyes, she was making an excuse to leave. Then she walked away quickly. Scully watched from behind the tree, her head pressed through the leaves. The young man sat alone on the bench. Then he looked down at his hands, and sank his head into his knees. Scully closed her eyes and wondered how easily hearts broke. When she opened them again, the clouds were shifting in the sky, blowing in tendrils and delicate watercolour wisps. A sudden crunch of leaves at her side startled her. She almost jumped up from where she was sitting. She nearly did when she saw who it was. Instead, she folded herself back down, sitting downwards, cross-legged, pulling herself in the way animals do when they try to protect themselves, providing less surface area, less room to hurt. Mulder bent down next to her. She could see that this forced strength was a smoke screen she could poke holes through. She knew that he knew this. She could see how frightened and how small he was inside. She could feel how terrified and how tiny she was inside. They weren't part of some huge romantic tale filled with melodrama and passionate make-ups and break-ups, the hero running after the heroine, kissing her passionately and promising never to betray her again. They weren't part of a milk and oatmeal familiar advice column- Help me, Dear Abby. The only man I ever loved betrayed me in the worst way that anyone ever could have done. Even more than my own mother did to my father. And maybe in the exact same way my mother did. Broken in Washington D.C. Dear Broken, it sounds like all you two need is a little counseling. Didn't you know that all anyone ever needs is counseling to have happily ever afters for the rest of their lives? They weren't even part of a mythic balled up yarn of a tale, yin and yang, complete and completed, or broken and separated tragically by angry kings or gods, time and fate. They were real people, with real hearts, that broke in all the realest ways. Mulder's finger traced the dirt in circles. "I love you, Scully," he said, "And I don't want to hurt you, but I can't.. not hurt you. Because you've been gone for a long time from me. Maybe you weren't even there at all. And that night... at least most of the time, I thought I was making love to you. It was like you came back to me. Or that you were there for the first time. I was there for the first time. I'm not going to tell you that I don't lust after you, or that I don't want you, because I do, all the time. There's no such thing as the pure love I think you're looking for. But this was the closest it gets, Scully. Maybe that's why it didn't work." "We did have a chance," he echoed. "I don't know if it's there now, Scully. Maybe it never was. But that doesn't mean we can't try." He tried to make his voice sound strong, confident, almost cocky. It broke her heart. "There's nothing left to try, Mulder," she whispered. He traced his finger in the dirt one last time, pulled it back towards him. His head was downwards again, like he was waiting for her to make a sudden move so that he could hide away from her. "Scully..." he said. "Do you... not... want me?" She kept her head down, pushed her hands down into the dirt and ground and grass beneath her. "I don't know," she said. "But I know that when you want me and I.. I don't know.. you hurt me. You hurt me, Mulder." The dirt hummed beneath her hands. "I think I mean to hurt you," he said. His head was dipped towards the direction of the ground, his eyes closing, his eyelashes scraping skin. His voice trembled. "I think I meant to. I think I needed to. We couldn't... exist the way we were." "What do you mean?" "This way and that. Waiting for our perfect soulmate comic book relationship to... just *appear* one day. Looking at every single situation in our life together and imagining it different. Imagining it in a way that it could have been clean and pure and beautiful." She traced her finger in the dirt, following the circles he'd left. "But sometimes," she whispered, "that's the only thing that keeps us sane." "I know," he said. whispered. "I know." "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't live like this, Mulder. Everyday, I get up. I crawl out of bed. I brush my teeth and wash my face. I hate changing from my pajamas into cold clothes in the morning. But with you, there are only pieces of that. Life isn't a grand mysterious quest, Mulder. There's no such thing as whatever we're waiting to happen to happen between us. I thought that maybe, with you, we could be more than just.. an ordinary thing. Because if we were more than just an ordinary thing, we could have.. we.... we..... Mulder...... Mulder... Just because you... just because I love you doesn't mean that......." her voice broke off into the sky, crumbled. He looked up, first surprised, then sad. Finally, Scully whispered, "I think that I've waited too long for you to make us more than ordinary things." She folded her knees up to her chest, and whispered painfully "And now, I'm giving up on you." "You're not giving up on me," he said. "You already have." He folded his knees towards him so that he looked smaller. It looked as if the tree was leaning against him, dropping leaves and small golden glints in adoration all over his sweater and jeans. "I think," he said, "that we need to accept that life is made out of ordinary things. Out of each other." The leaves blew. Scully closed her eyes against the sky and tried to imagine turning away from him now, turning for the rain and other beautifully fit things. She saw herself broken into a thousand pieces. She saw him ripped away by time. She saw herself never forgiving him for the one night, the one other woman, the one slip that told them deep dark buried secrets about themselves. She wondered how long she'd really expected them to stay the way they were- untainted by the clouding passion of sex, fueled only by the passion of work and each other, in love in all the purest ways. The relationship everyone wants, sometimes. But when she opened her eyes, she saw only Mulder, watching her watch the sky through the veil of her eyelids. He leaned over impulsively, and put both hands against her face. He gently wiped away the dirt and grass, his fingertips warm, his fingernails soft at the angles. He wasn't a magical angel, or even a dangerous angel. He didn't fuel a storybook passion within her, the kind that she always thought she'd feel when she'd meet the love of her life. He was just Mulder- mortal and clumsy, sometimes brilliant, sometimes annoying, with a face full of angles and a long body full of lines, who loved her and worked with her and wanted her just much as anyone else could have. Maybe just a little bit more. When he cleared the last of the dirt from her face, he didn't take away his hands. Instead, he stroked her face, awkwardly. She slid forward, covered his shoes, his feet with her hands. Ordinary things, she thought. Ordinary things. "Mulder..." she whispered.. "If we're just an ordinary thing - then what's the use of trying?" "I don't know," he said. "I wish I could tell you.. anything. But this isn't some beautiful story with a beginning or an end or a dance in between. I can't make your life beautiful or suddenly free from all the mistakes your parents made, or my parents made. But I want to be able to stop hurting you. .....I want to be able make you happy. This isn't a fairy tale, Scully. It never was. This is just the keys to our apartments, the bench we eat lunch on sometimes with the ground and the ice beneath our feet, my broken apartment number. This is just... us." Scully looked past him and saw a long road stretched out ahead of them. An office with a door that sometimes jammed, a desk with a pair of chattering teeth, a dozen or more pencils stuck into the ceiling, a slightly torn poster. She saw her apartment, with the twenty-three salad forks in the kitchen drawer, the pillows with ragged tassels, the meticulously squeezed bottles of face lotion, the barely used boxes of dental floss. She saw her bed that had sometimes been waiting for him on the days that he'd almost made her smile, almost made her think he was her dangerous angel. She saw Mulder's apartment, with its naked window to the street, his key lying lonely on top of his Windexed computer. She saw Mulder. He wasn't her dangerous angel, but then again, maybe there was no such thing as a dangerous angel. Maybe there was only Mulder, clumsy, mortal, painfully human, but painfully in love with her. Maybe there was only Mulder, silly and just a little bit sweet, sometimes lighting her up inside like a candle, sometimes ripping her apart. Mulder, who she was painfully in love with. "Mulder?" she said. "Do you think we're going to be okay?" The tree swung and swayed above them. The sky rang like a clear bell. She didn't think that they were suddenly healed, or even that they'd really reconciled, forgiven each other. She didn't think that she'd forgive Mulder easily. But she thought that maybe they could be okay. She thought that maybe they could.. just..... be. She didn't know if this was a denouement. Maybe there was no such thing as denouement, coup de grace. Maybe there were really no such things as endings. Maybe there were only beginnings. "Yeah," he said softly. "We're going to be okay." ----------- finis ---------- "I might not see Angel Juan for awhile. But we'll see each other again. Meet to dream-rock-slink-slam it-jam in the heart of the world. Like we always do." -Francesca Lia Block, 'Missing Angel Juan' author's endnotes: angst!w killed hyper delusional shipperydippery!w with a shovel called reality and buried her in the backyard with it. but then sd!wen got resurrected by a 'closure' picture of M&S holding hands. it's pathetic, really. i always love to know if anyone out there's even reading this at all- nocturne@mailandnews.com fantastic beta thankoo thankoo thankoooos: @loa- for, as always, putting up with me, slashing through that iffy grammar (i spelled it right, heh heh), and being such a rare gem of an editor to actually go through every sentence and every number that should have been a number. @sabine- for poking me and making me completely change an awkward scene. for making me ask myself why this and this person was doing that and why. @kate- for the nitpicks. every other nitpicky thing that's still here is there because i was being an idiotic rebel and didn't listen to her. ;) @fialka- for forcing me to actually make *sense* in certain places, for letting me know that just because it makes sense to me probably means that most people have no idea what i'm talking about, for keeping me in scully-family character, for canon, for letting me know what was working and what wasn't. for trying to keep me from being redundant ;) @livia-jood- for support, nitpicks, and giving me ground to work with as far as the whole scully-family-blue plate special thing. we're psychically connected. and the mulderworship brownies. y'all are my saving graces. thank you thank you, this wouldn't have made sense and wouldn't have slid together without you. a note to the rest of the world: any errors are my fault, not theirs. the extensive thankyous: # sarah for being wonder-wonderful- anti-escapist-crap, bay-bee :) # indi, where are you? # caz & punkm for some really fast background info # tara for sharing the dangerous angels. and pillow fights. mulder lobotomy vignette? # sab-em for being absolument brill, and for the wonderfulness of the YV environment # kate- secrets, secrets. and i really am curious as to if and when someone's going to notice. # yesvirginia for talk & bios like the secret origins of superheroes # lorrie lorrie lorrie for incredible caring and help through a crisis. thank you, thank you, thank you.