From: "Ambress" Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 12:20:40 -0500 Subject: xfc New: All the Places 1/1 by Ambress Source: xfc TITLE: All the Places AUTHOR: Ambress EMAIL: wendavd@mindspring.com RATING: I'm not sure. I think somewhere between PG-13 and R. I think it depends on how perverted you are. CATEGORY: MSR, A, S SPOILERS: Biogenesis post-ep SUMMARY: Scully comes to get Mulder out of the funny farm. THANKS: to bugs and Meghan for holistic beta, to my husband, David, for discussion of looney bins, and to Jeff B. for discussion of drugs, (Here's a box of Edy's Lime Fruit Bars for you, honey. With these babies, you don't need friends ;)). You guys are the experts. FEEDBACK: I accept both constructive criticism and overblown flattery with gratitude. DISCLAIMER: Everybody has their own Mulder and Scully doll; this is what I did with mine. Oh, but the characters themselves all belong to Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen, and Fox. ARCHIVE: Gossamer, Xemplary okay, anywhere else, please ask. In this house of make believe Divided in two like Adam and Eve You put out and I receive Down by the railway siding In our secret world we were colliding In all the places we were hiding love What was it we were thinking of? --Peter Gabriel, "Secret World" He could hear her as she entered the building three stories below. He was slumped against the wall, but when he heard her, he sat up straight and was suddenly attentive. It was as though a distant flashlight had started bobbing in the darkness, with the promise of imminent illumination. It wasn't as easy to read minds as Gibson Praise made it look. Sometimes Mulder thought about that cartoon mouse, Pinky, and his "Narfs!" If only they knew; everyone was like that. Few people thought in a linear movement: one thought clearly articulated following another, like ants carrying seeds to their hill. Most people were easily distracted. They read signs in the middle of their thoughts. They registered their stomachs growling. They didn't finish one thought before they moved on to the next. They cataloged their own movements . . . swish, swish, swish, goes the mop against the floor-- the patient--what a gorgeous hunk of flesh--is delusional--spaghetti for dinner maybe--don't forget to pick up dog food on the way home--I can't let go of it- -hope I'm not pregnant--this pen isn't working--Dr. Hart: asshole--home--floral wallpaper--put it in this little cup here--you will do it--like to fuck--look at this mess--no not more paperwork--oh their eyes, their eyes!--Fat, disgusting slob--He tried to kill me first!--Maybe I should get my haircut--that's it-- Enough--Let it pass--hot--I grieve, I grieve, I grieve- -Don't think about it--Three times a day--I can't believe how much he is jerking off--Daddy thin and smoking--hole in the floor--vacation--Am I drinking too much? no. Even putting it into words falsified the experience. Mind-reading was a misnomer. How could anyone read anything so essentially illegible? The contents of the human consciousness are not only words, but color, sound, taste, emotion, association, memory, imagination . . . It was difficult, sometimes, for him even to tell individual minds apart. Every mind produced its own cacophony, together they were unbearably discordant. But now, through the chaos he had been trying desperately to assimilate for the last few days, he felt something so familiar he wanted to weep. Her mind sounded like Bach. Sounded wasn't the right word, but it gave him the same feeling as Bach's Concertos. Each note of her thoughts was clear and discrete, yet it cascaded into the next with an inevitability that belied its complexity. Her thoughts wove in and out of one another dextrously, with cool surefootedness. She made leaps she didn't even know she was capable of. She judged distances, and followed her reason over chasms. She was a mountain goat of thinking. The smell of cleaning fluid and fear that permeated the hospital, the disjointed anger and panic of the other patients, the mixture of hostility and compassion from the staff, all faded as he focused on her--walking down the hall, getting in the elevator, pressing the button for the third floor-- He could feel her coming closer. Then she was just down the hall and he could hear the music of her mind change. It was no longer Bach; it was Wagner. Scully was arguing with the doctor, whose intellect sounded like a tinny harpsichord compared to her symphony. Mulder had learned that he preferred to listen to the cleaning lady, a little androgynous gnome-like creature with a blonde blunt haircut, and tight Capri pants under her smock, whose mind had a ragtime-like beat. She, at least, unlike the doctor, thought something funny once in a while. She was not only Mr. Mulder's physician, Scully was telling the doctor, but she had durable power of attorney for him. She would report him (the doctor) to the AMA for his irresponsible over medicating of Mr. Mulder. He could hear the phrase "barbiturate coma" in her head as clear as a bell, but with heat around it. She would have the doctor's license revoked, and his head on a plate. She would see Mr. Mulder right now. She was coming to get him. She was almost here. Then the door to his cell was opening and she was standing there. He had a recording of Mercedes Sosa's first concert in her home country, Chile, after returning from the exile necessitated by General Pinochet's reign of terror. When she starts to sing, there is perfect silence in the spaces between her notes. It isn't until she begins the second verse of "Gracias por la vie," that the crowd begins to cheer, and you realize that she is singing to a stadium full of forty thousand silent, grateful, expectant people, whose joy has suddenly overflowed into a roar of sound. The silence as Scully stood in the doorway was like the moment before the cheering starts. It was full of potential, of harnessed energy. The space between them was taut with power. "Mulder," she said calmly. But as she spoke he felt a rush like champagne bubbles, or stars, a tingly sensation that drenched him, flowing from her to him. It was a sensation similar to the one you have when your foot falls asleep, only intensely pleasurable. There was a burst of Beethoven from her. It swept over him like a wave, making him gasp for breath. Every muscle and sinew in his body was overcome by it. He thought he could hear bells ringing, and wondered if Clarence was getting his wings. "Are you okay?" she asked. He looked up at her, but couldn't speak. She crossed the padded cell and squatted on her haunches next to him. She touched his hair. In the time it took for her to cross the room the Beethoven faded back into Bach. Her thoughts were like a school of fish, glinting as they darted away into the dark waters. "It's Scully," she said. "Do you know me?" 'Always,' he said to himself. He hadn't spoken aloud since he stopped screaming. Stunned by her presence, he wasn't sure he could speak now. He tried to smile at her. "I have a lot to tell you," she said. She didn't know that she already was. Each leaping, sliding, playful note in her mind teased him like the touch of her hand. They were like a flock of birds that swooped around him and turned in unison, fanning out in the room. He could feel her fear for him, sharp and pungent as Gruyere, her anger, hot and caustic as napalm, her guilt at leaving him like sour milk. He could feel her faith, like an heirloom china teacup, beloved even with its cracks. She was determined, anxious, cautious, glad, tender, calm. She was planning her moves like Attila the Hun playing chess. She would sweep the fucking board or she would die trying. He admired her so much for her guts. She was much braver than he could ever hope to be. He nodded. "Scully," he said finally. "I'm going to get you out of here, Mulder," she said. She was checking his eyes. "What have they been giving you? Ativan?" Her thoughts played over him like tickling fingers--the small oval pads of her fingertips touching him everywhere. Like bodies in space, including the earth, he was marked wherever the meteors of her thoughts touched him. He could listen to them--feel them-- forever, trying to find a way to describe their gorgeous complexity and their individuality--their reassuring Scullyness. A line of poetry came back to him--it was Roethke, wasn't it?: "The shapes a bright container can contain!" She checked his wrists and ankles. "Did they restrain you?" she asked. There was another burst of Wagner from her when she saw the chafing on his wrists. She leaned forward to check his pulse, searching for his carotid artery with her cool fingers. Her face was inches from his. He could see the freckles on her nose, thought he might fall into the greenish blue of her eyes, and he closed his own eyes in fear of a sensory overload. But as he did, something else in him opened, and she slid into him completely, as easily as her gun into its holster. He gasped as the feeling went through him, his body galvanized. His back arched away from the padded wall: Pure unadulterated Scully penetrating him to his farthest reaches. Jesus Christ. He was pierced through and through by her. There was no part of him that wasn't touched by her, reshaping him to accommodate her. Oh, she was huge inside him. He was a canyon filled with sunset. It took all his control not to cry out with the agonizing pleasure of it. She touched him in all his most sensitive places, rubbing him raw, and then soothing him like aloe. She worked her way deeper inside him, until he no longer knew where he left off and she began. He was trembling all over, like a dog at the vet's. She thought he was in shock. When her consciousness moved within him, he bit his lip and stifled a moan. He could feel her intense desire for him to open his eyes, look at her, and be coherent. He didn't want to open his eyes, though. He was afraid that this connection would be broken, that she would slip away from him, and he would never again feel this incredible feeling--Scully's whole interior self, like fingers wiggling their way into a glove, inside him, stretching him in ways he didn't know were possible. He could feel her heart beating, a throbbing throughout his body, pounding at his nerve endings, licking at his veins. "Scully, please--" he groaned. Something liquid, dark, and sweet as wine bubbled up from within her, and into him, at the sound of his voice. He whimpered at the delicious sensation. He was lost, lost, lost. There was nothing left of him but Scully, filling him, the pressure of her presence in his head intolerably good. He cried out. . . . . He could float forever in lush verdant landscape of Scully. He was weightless in the palm of her psyche, limp and helpless as a newborn kitten. His name punctuated her thoughts. He realized that the silent, insistent, "Mulder, Mulder," in her head was an unconscious attempt to call him back to her. She didn't know how close he was to her. Some part of her, however, believed that she could call him back from whatever wilderness he was lost in with the force of her will. That belief touched and amazed him. He knew that she would kick open the Gates of either Heaven or Hell with her size seven pumps if she thought he were inside. He realized that he knew her better than anyone in the world, and that he didn't know her at all. He could rummage around in here and discover Scully in all her permutations: a toddler in a green silk kimono her father brought back from Japan, a fourteen-year- old--elbows and knees and braces--smoking her first cigarette, losing her virginity at seventeen, cutting into her first cadaver, shaking his hand, saying, "Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you," standing in front of the mirror this morning, checking her breasts for lumps before she dressed, one elbow back and behind her head, and an intent, serious look on her face as she pressed her fingers into her own flesh. How could he ever forego the pure intimacy of this? Looking at her face in the mirror of her memory as though he were she, seeing her the way she saw herself, remembering through her the soft feel of her breast under her fingers, even the dizzying sense of anxiety she felt as she conscientiously performed the necessary ritual, gave him a sense of euphoria he had never known before. Nuh-uh. He was staying in Scullyland. He wasn't going to go back to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and their drab, colorless Kansas. This was the place. She was talking to him. "Listen to me, Mulder. You have to listen. There is a court date scheduled for you tomorrow. A competency hearing. I am going to testify that the drawing of the artifact had some kind of neurological effect on you that needs to be treated somatically, but it would help if you could speak on your own behalf. Can you do that?" Could he do that? She sounded so tender and urgent. "Yes," he said softly. He could do anything she wanted him to. He opened his eyes and there she was in front of him-- once more always just out of his reach. The tears welled up from within him, slipping out over the barrier of his eyelids, as if they wanted to go after her. Four weeks later Mulder was depressed. Well, really just more depressed than usual. He kept forgetting to eat. He slept less than usual, but he didn't care to get up in the morning either. He felt like his body was floating in space. When he walked down the hall of the F. B. I. Building he couldn't feel the floor. His own face looked strange to him. He looked in the mirror to shave in the morning and wondered who it was that was looking back at him. Every pore in his face was magnified a hundred times. He thought he could see each individual cell making up his eyelashes. Sometimes he would still get flashes from Scully, whether of emotion or thought. But they came and went as quickly as the smiles she suppressed at his jokes. It wasn't nearly enough to feed his hunger. He was like an addict. He wanted that feeling back. He wanted more Scully within him, expanding like a starry night. Now he knew how junkies felt. One hit and he was a slave. He was jonesing uncontrollably for the narcotic-- Scullycet, Scullyvan--whatever you wanted to call it. The shit was chronic. He needed it like he needed salt in his food. Without it, everything was tasteless. Now, sitting in the basement office weeks later, he watched her reaching up to grab a file from the top shelf. She could barely reach, even with the step, and her blouse pulled away from her skirt, exposing an inch of her midriff. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he'd seen, and if he was going to make some smart remark. When her eyes met his, he felt a tremor, a little aftershock, of that tingly, dunked in champagne feeling he'd had at the hospital. Suddenly, everything seemed clear to him. He could feel his chair under his ass, and the desk under his elbows. It was all clear, solid, tactile. What had been illegible and inscrutable was suddenly resolving itself into something comprehensible, like that drawing that looks like an old woman's head when you look at it one way, and when you look at it another you see a young girl. The eye's camera clicks one more time, refocuses, and you can see what you've never seen before, but wonder how you could have missed it. He had the key--the Rosetta stone--which cracked the code of what he had read in that padded cell. "What are you grinning about?" she asked him. "You love me," he said, astonished, and unable to edit himself before he spoke. "Are you okay, Mulder?" She looked genuinely concerned for the state of his sanity, a familiar look on her face, but one that no longer had any bite in it for him. "You love me," he repeated, ignoring her question. She blinked at him, first her right eyelid lowering, and then the left following it, so that she looked like a fluffy russet owl. "Of course I love you, Mulder," she said, a studied coolness in her tone. "You're my friend, and we've been through a lot together." She brushed nonexistent lint off of her skirt. "That's not what I mean. You're in love with me, Scully." He was astonished, but certain. He had no doubt, no fear. "Don't be ridiculous," she sniffed. He just kept grinning. The End. I can imagine the moment Breaking out through the silence All the things that we both might say And the heart it will not be denied 'Til we're both on the same damn side All the barriers blown away --Peter Gabriel, "Talk to Me" Notes: The Mercedes Sosa recording is on the CD, "Transplanet." The line from Theodore Roethke is from his poem, "I Knew a Woman." Feedback to: wendavd@mindsping.com For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south >From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. --W.H. Auden "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"