WALLPAPER (1/1)
By: Annie Sewell-Jennings (Auralissa@aol.com)
DISCLAIMER: The characters of Mulder and Scully do not belong to me.
They belong to Chris Carter, who needs to hurry his little butt up
and push out the season premiere. Also, the lyrics at the beginning
of the piece are from David Byrne's "Dance on Vaseline", which can
be found on his 1997 _Feelings_ album. I have no permission to use
these lyrics, but I find them fascinating for this subject.
SUMMARY: Scully attempts to redeem herself and Mulder.
CATEGORY: VAR (Mulder/Scully Romance).
RATING: PG-13.
KEYWORDS: MSR. Alternate Universe. Serious angst alert, folks.
SPOILERS: US5. Big ones for "Memento Mori".
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This piece was inspired by a series of odd nightmares
that became literary when I started making sense of them. This is a
tad bit darker than my usual fare of angst, but I thought it was
interesting enough to share with the rest of you.
THANKS: Thank you to both Kristin and Heather for beta reading and
pointing out where I strayed. You keep me honest, but that doesn't
mean I'm going to put the moves on y'all in hallways... Yet.
*****
"My baby saw the future
She doesn't want to live there anymore
It's lousy science fiction
Gets on your skin and seeps into your bones"
--David Byrne, "Dance on Vaseline"
*****
It used to be that he wore his heart on his sleeve. Anyone who touched
him was special to him, and anyone who dared to love him was
remembered as a saint. But those were old days, past days, days that
were nothing but tattered memories that she kept close to her heart
when he became the man that he was today. Kind, gentle memories.
Thoughts of his hands, how soft and tender they had been when they
spread over the swell of her back or how they barely whispered across
the underside of her breast.
These little memories of him, of how good he had been, were what
brought her back from her insanity.
Fractured, broken, tainted and shattered; Dana Scully was not the same
woman she used to be.
During her more desperate moments of delirium, she wondered if she was
still a woman. And when she resurfaced into clarity, she wondered if
her demented notions were perhaps the ones that made the most sense.
Such a possibility was not so difficult to fathom in these times. In a
world so mad, concepts like equality or gentility were laughable.
Everyone had a value based not on their purpose as a human being but
as a genetic component.
And genetically, she was worthless. A barren lunatic. All physical
properties long stolen away, and all mental value chipped away at with
every passing day. She was nothing to everyone except him, and she was
beginning to wonder if he still loved her.
Scully was beginning to wonder if he still had a heart to love with.
Eyes glassy and hair dull, she lay strapped to the bed, the tightness
of the restraints lessened by the lamb's wool around her slender,
malnourished wrists. She was usually a still madwoman, but there were
instances lately where she fought it, where she lashed out and became
a screaming demon before falling into tranquilizers and then slipping
into catatonia. Then, when she finally returned, he was always there.
Always with her, staring fearfully into her eyes with the most concern
he ever showed these days.
Oh, around her, he was nothing but silk and velvet. It was only when
he stepped outside of the door that he became metal and steel.
So maybe he did still love her.
It didn't matter anyway.
She thought that she still loved him. She would always love the memory
of him. The remembrance of a man who was so hurt by the slightest
injustice, the man who would cry a river over the degradation of the
human race. When the end had come clear to him, he had wept over the
outrage of it, over the unfairness of the situation. Over his hellish
fate, torn between his moral conscience and Scully's life.
Her hands clenching back and forth in loose imitations of fists, she
remembered when he found out. Sitting at the kitchen table in her
apartment, hands folded and ankles crossed. Poised, elegant, calm.
The picture of stoic tragedy. This was the woman she presented to him
when she told him that she was dying.
And that was when he had wailed.
Closing her eyes again, Scully bowed her head. It didn't break him
then. No, it had taken a gradual period of years of monotonous death
and savage brutality to wear down Fox Mulder. His insanity had been a
quiet one, too. Not one that was expressed with fits of violent
dementia, but rather a controlled lunacy. She wondered what was
worse - her catatonia or his degeneration.
Either way, they were damned.
She didn't think that he broke when they told him his solution,
either. Work for them. Leave the Bureau. Leave the truth. Kill for
us, and we will cure Scully. We will keep her alive. But Mulder, in
his passionate eagerness and anxiety over her increasing sickness,
had been manipulated yet again. The negotiators were brilliant by
never detailing what "alive" meant. And so when they promised to save
her life, they never promised to cure her.
Weak, sick, but still lucid and definitely living, Scully had been
kept in her house for years now. There was no cure in sight, but they
promised that if Mulder were ever to fuck up, he would come home to a
vegetative partner and no promises of resurrection. She had felt
terribly guilty when she had first indulged herself in her madness.
Leaving Mulder a half-dead bride was nothing that she ever wished him
to have.
But she never wanted to be the silent epitome of suffering, either.
She never asked to be a martyr. She never asked to be the tool. When
she agreed to work with Mulder, she did not agree to be his savior,
his angel, and his death all in one poignantly raw package.
He killed. His job was to kill. He was nothing but a pawn to them,
their wild cannon degraded into nothing but a janitor. There was
nothing more to his once-feared reputation. Mulder was simply the
guilty assassin with a woman who had lost her mind to two diseases:
her cancer and her own devices.
A cough wracked her body then, interrupting her from the refuge of old
memories, and she writhed on the bed, the ache of her sore stomach
muscles doubling into full-fledged pain as she spat out a wad of
phlegm. One of her many attendants crossed the room to clean the
pillow, and she did not look at him. Nameless guardians to make sure
she did not die, either by her own hand or by her sickness.
Maybe it was the crying that had started the coughing again; it had a
tendency to do so when she was upset. She cried sometimes, when she
remembered her thoughts during her madness and realized that she made
more sense unbalanced than when she was lucid. And she also cried when
she found more evidence of the disappearance of the Mulder she used
to love.
A couple of months ago, she had stood at the window and watched him
kill a young boy. The dispassion on his face when he fired the trigger
had been enough to kill her inside. It would be something else if he
had liked killing the boy. That would simply prove that he had gone
completely mad, and she could sympathize with that. It was Mulder not
caring about the dead child that stole her breath and made her ill.
It was seeing the most emphatic man she had ever known in her entire
life slaughter a ten-year-old boy without any thoughts to the horror
of the act.
It was as though his soul was missing, and she could not find it.
She had dropped the curtain, letting it flutter to brush the
windowsill, and gone back to bed. For the rest of the day and night,
she chased away her migraines with morphine and entered a fantasy
land filled with a solacing mixture of tranquilizers, memories, and
her own personal brand of insanity. For hours on edge, she lived in
the captive moment in which he had touched her hair in Donnie
Pfaster's parlor. Nothing else. Just her hair. Just the twining of
his finger, so light and fragile as if he might ruin her, just the
feel of his skin upon her hair.
It was the first time she needed the restraints, because when she
came to the first time, she tried to claw her wrists open. It was
then that she realized the severity of her situation, and then that
she discovered her solution.
Death.
And of course, when she came to the next morning, he was gazing upon
her worshipfully, and there was passion in his face again. In his
eyes, she found her sanity, but she did not think that he could save
her.
"Hello," she had whispered, and he kissed her cheek.
It was not the first time that she hated his mouth.
And it was not the first time that she wished they were dead.
But it was the first time that she began to contemplate killing him.
The entire room was on suicide watch, on order from the Consortium.
It was not that they were concerned for Mulder or her own health, but
they had to protect their greatest player. As long as she was there,
the tattered remnants of a woman that once contained Mulder's driving
force, they owned him. The instant that she either succumbed to the
cancer or managed to kill herself, Mulder would kill them all. They
used to doubt that it was in him to do such a thing. Homicide was too
irrational an act for the morally conscientious Mulder, but he would
gladly assassinate them all now.
She never thought about just killing herself and leaving him to
wander the earth avenging her death. It would benefit them both much
better if she were to kill them both. It was why she had taken his
spare weapon one night and was now searching for the best hiding
place for it.
When she had the chance next time, Dana Scully was going to kill
herself and Fox Mulder.
It was all for the best, really.
Her insanity told her that, and its logic was never fucked-up
anymore.
And she thought that today might be the final day.
Poised, calm, rational. She was the stoic picture of tragedy again,
in her pale green pajamas that vaguely resembled peppermint stripes
on candy. Lying underneath the thick comforters that he was always
bringing her, she turned her head to the door as he walked through
them. Closing her eyes, she whispered his name to herself. Ah,
Mulder... No matter what time did to them, it could never take away
the fact that he was simply beautiful. Especially when he came to
her. Then, he managed to regain himself, find his soul again, and
put together some pathetic imitation of who he used to be inside.
He would sloppily mend his fractured spirit and sit by her bed for
hours, telling her that he meant none of it.
She used to believe him, but she only thought of the ten-year-old
boy. The dead boy that her partner had killed. The dead boy that gave
him no grief.
He rarely spoke to her anymore. They used to talk for hours, him
holding her hand and keeping track of her heart with his palm rather
than depending on the electronic monitors. He used to stand over her
during the numerous scans and spinal taps, but now he could only be
there when she bottomed out and lost it. The first few times that she
disintegrated, he had been hysterical with fear when she pulled back.
After a while, he had come to accept it as a way of life. He had
given up his soul for a woman who would go for weeks at a time without
remembering to urinate.
It was a sad state of affairs, indeed.
She did not choose to become this way. Scully was supposed to be made
of a tougher fabric, of something that was not so pliant and fragile.
She supposed that some of her irrational behavior came from a
weakening of the body - her cancer. But then there was Mulder. With
every slice of his soul that was stripped from him, there went a part
of the glue that kept her held together.
It only made sense to save him by killing him.
The door opened then, and she did not turn to face him. It was him,
she knew it instinctually. Mulder was an essence that trailed through
her blood, ran inside her veins. He always had been, from when he
used to open the door to their office to when he now opened the door
to her prison room. Oh, her bedroom was luxuriously furnished, a
beautiful cage to hold a mute songbird, but the velvet drapes and silk
damasks lost their meaning long, long ago. They were supposed to be
briberies from the Consortium. Blood money for Mulder's sacrifices.
And then, he became a part of the furnishings. Mulder, beautiful
Mulder, with his mahogany hair lighted through and through with gold
and burgundy, faded from a salvation into nothing more than the
Consortium's package. Bribing her to stay alive. Convincing her that
she had to be there for him. That if she died, he would follow.
Their bait used to work. She knew better now. Killing Mulder would
just redeem him, revive him, and perhaps resurrect the pieces of his
soul that used to make him so good. So pure. So... Human. Yes, Mulder
used to be the epitome of human. Indignant, faltering, gentle at
times and then furious at others. He used to be controlled by his
emotions, by his sense of justice and morality.
But he had sacrificed those things along with his life, just to keep
Dana Scully alive. It was fortunate that her sanity was dead, and it
was fortunate that she had managed to hold on to her sense of right
and wrong. It was wrong that they had been controlled and dangled
around like puppets, working against each other in a vain attempt to
work for each other. She kept herself alive so that they wouldn't kill
Mulder. He murdered and killed so that she wouldn't die. How ironic,
when in the end, she would solve the problem by murdering them both.
Because Mulder had turned into wallpaper, just like the silk damasks
and velvet draperies that decorated her room. Just another part of the
package.
God, she hoped that she didn't hate Mulder.
Sitting himself down next to her, his hand curled around hers, and
she looked at it. He had such large hands. Big hands. Capable hands.
Long, slender, elegant fingers that were lined at the knuckles,
making them seem more delicate than they were violent. How she used
to admire his hands... The gentleness of them, their large girth and
their soft touch. She used to think of how easily they could become
violent, how he could hit or destroy with those hands, but instead
brushed her cheek with nothing but utmost respect and intimacy.
Four weeks ago, before she retreated into one of her longer periods
of catatonia, Scully had watched him strangle a grown man with them.
The knuckles turned white with the force of his grip, and she no
longer trusted his hands.
She wondered if she really did hate Mulder.
He did not speak, and she wondered if he thought that she was gone
again. It wouldn't be unusual. She broke the quiet by speaking. "Can
you tell them to leave?" she softly asked, and his eyes fluttered up
to meet hers. Ah, those eyes... Hazel, dark hazel, stormy and
uncertain. They were many-faceted eyes, built on a thousand different
fragments of color. Scully used to see his eyes and try to count how
many different shades of golden-brown could possibly exist, because
every variation of amber was embedded in Mulder's divine eyes.
Fearfully, she examined his eyes now, seeing the fathomless swirls of
jade and emerald, those honey-coated cocoa pools, and she exhaled.
Yes, she did love him. She still loved him.
She wondered if that would make it easier or harder to kill him.
Mulder turned around, still holding her hand within his large,
versatile ones, and ordered the orderlies to leave the room. Warily,
they eyed Scully, knowing that her depression and dementia left her
in a state that was subject to suicide. They did not trust her, but
she trusted them. As long as she lived, as long as she was kept
alive, they had Mulder. Killing her would be ridiculous.
With the orderlies gone, they were alone in the room. Mulder's thumb
drew circles on the back of her hand, and she was touched by his
memory. How when she had been sick or uncertain in the earlier days,
the days before their combined madness, he would draw patterns and
shapes on her skin with the absent paintbrush of his fingers and
thumb. Oh, God yes, she did still love him, and the relief of knowing
this was enough to wash away the pain of everything again.
How glorious to know that love still conquered all.
"How are you feeling?" he whispered, and she knew that his voice,
those dark, caramel-coated cadences, would never change. Not to her.
He could be a serial killer outside of her bedroom, but when he set
eyes on her, he would become the old Mulder again. The Mulder that
she had not seen when he killed the little boy or strangled the
strange man. The darling Mulder, the gentle Mulder, the mercurial
Mulder who could cry or laugh within the same ten minutes. She wanted
Mulder to remember his temper, to remember his emotions, because she
would much rather have him weep than feel nothing at all.
"Better," she answered, and for once, it was the truth. My God, she
had not felt this unburdened in years. Not during the madness or the
hallucinations had she felt so relieved. Relieved at the knowledge
that she didn't despise Mulder. She still loved him, she still loved
him, thank *God* she still loved him. Now she could handle things, she
could go on, knowing that she still loved him.
And if she killed him loving him, it wouldn't be as bad as she thought
it would be.
It wouldn't be a crime out of hate.
"I'm glad," he whispered, and a small smile curved his face. Ah, and
she knew then that he still loved her. That made it somehow easier,
too. Knowing that he was losing himself not out of some forgotten
devotion to her or out of a sense of duty, but because he honestly
loved her did not justify his actions, but they made it easier for
her to cope. It made her understand, though she did not accept it.
This was turning out to be a good day, a better day.
A day that she could kill him.
A day that she could die.
Scully relished the light in his eyes. She craved it, was starved for
it. The passion in him could be ignited again, it was still there.
Mulder was not damned. He was not unsalvageable. It wasn't too late
to save him from death; perhaps he should live on. And maybe her
suicide would show him that.
"Mulder, what would you do if I died?"
It was not the first time that she had asked him that. A long time
ago, three years ago, when the offer had first been made to him, she
took his hands in hers and watched the golden-brown of his skin
conflict with the ghostly paleness of her hands. Looking at the
contrast today, nothing had changed. Mulder's hands still glowed
beautifully while her hands were as white and frail as paper. She had
been preparing for death, never believing that he would change his
mind from the first time the offer had been made and accept the
Consortium's offer.
That was when she found out that he had said yes.
"You won't die."
He had accepted.
Now, his breath shuddered out, and she was grateful then for his
eidetic memory. His words were repeated, ragged, raw with emotion.
"You won't die," he promised again, and she knew that it was time to
ignite that fever inside of him. Time to rekindle the dead embers, to
stoke the cinders into bursting forth with light. Even if it was only
through his temper, it was still fire. It was still spirit. It was
still Mulder.
"I'm going to die," she said, with more firmness and more certainty
than she had used in a long time. "I've managed to dance around the
issue for longer than anyone else in my condition has, but it's time
for me to finish. It's time for me to regain control of my own life."
He couldn't grasp the concept, couldn't handle the implications. All
these years, he had been fighting to save her life when all along, she
didn't want to live. Scully knew that it would hurt him. Knew that it
could possibly destroy him. But then she knew that it could also
provide the slap in the face that he so badly needed.
"What are you saying?" he whispered, the pain choking his voice.
//I don't want to hurt you, Mulder,// she wearily thought, //but this
is the only way I know to get this across to you.//
Gripping his hands in her bony, spindly ones, she looked firmly and
pleadingly in his eyes. He was in there somewhere, she could feel him,
and it was only a matter of making the weaker Mulder rise again to
listen and understand. "Mulder, ever since we came here, they took
the control of my own life and health out of my hands," she said, and
suddenly felt the old fierceness take control again. "By keeping me
in this state between life and death, they have managed to keep me
captive. I have allowed them to pull my strings, and by that, I have
been as much a party to your manipulation as anyone else here."
A short laugh escaped his lips, and she never wanted to hear such
bitterness come from such a soft mouth again. "Scully, you are the
only one who hasn't jerked me around," he fervently said, and she
fought back a smile. Ah, the old trust. Mulder's ardent trust in her.
His undying devotion.
"But I've been jerked around too long, Mulder," she sighed. "And
whether it has been intentional or inadvertent, you've been jerked
around by my existence." She lifted her eyes to him, and made a
supreme effort to smile at him. To comfort him. Because the hardest
part was yet to come. "I can't heal myself, Mulder, and they will not
heal me. As long as I am here, in this state of limbo, we belong to
them. And since I can't cure my disease, I can end it." Jutting her
jaw out, she fought with his eyes for comprehension.
And there was a light in his eyes. A light that showed that, for the
first time in ages, he knew her solution. "Scully, no," he whispered,
his hands tightening around hers. "Don't..."
She wouldn't have to kill him, perhaps. Maybe he could live. Maybe he
could understand again, and maybe her suicide would be enough to make
him revive. Either way, she knew that for herself, the only way she
could find triumph, dignity, and perhaps sanity again would be through
death. Not death by the cancer. Not death by their hands. Death by
hers. Her choice. Her finger on the trigger.
It was an acceptable solution.
Tears were starting to rise to his eyes, and she thought of
reconsidering. But there would be more, there would be more deaths.
More ten-year-old boys falling to their knees from the power of Fox
Mulder's weapon. More men finding their death in the sensitive hands
of her lover. More destruction, more chaos... Scully shook her head.
"This is my solution," she whispered. "I have to do this for myself."
She couldn't let herself become another piece of the Consortium's
bribe. She couldn't fade into nothing more than wallpaper.
A tear spilled over; he was crying. It was the first time she had seen
him cry in ages, and never had a tear been so welcome. "Mulder," she
said, lowering her voice, "after I die, I want you to leave. Go. Don't
stay here. Don't be a part of this anymore. Leave."
He nodded, emphatically. "Yes," he whispered, and she wouldn't have to
kill him. She would be the only one to die...
From the corners of the room, she found the wallpaper shifting, and
from it, there men. Men in their drab colors, their dark suits and
their stoic faces. Her face contorted in pain, and she shook her head
desperately. "No," she said, and her voice grew stronger, more brazen,
as it gained volume. "No! NO!" Twisting on the bed, she vainly sought
escape, her frail wrists chafing against the thick wool of the
restraints as she tried to avoid the prick of the inevitable,
blissful, hellish needle...
There was a stab in her thigh, the injection, and then the sedative
started to pump into her body. Her screaming subsided instantly,
though the effects of the drug had yet to set in, and Scully closed
her eyes, her breaths leaving her body in a series of shuddering,
haggard sighs. "Mulder..." she breathed, her voice as thin and raw as
paper. He kept his eyes on her, still tearfully grievous. She felt
his hand on her brow, soothing and soft as the drugs began to
override her senses. "Did you ever... Ever know that my favorite...
Color was yellow?" When he didn't answer, she sighed. "The wallpaper,
Mulder... It's so dark... It's not yellow. It never was..." She
sighed again, fighting the lull of the escape again. "It never was...
Us... Cause we were always yellow..."
She whispered out something else, but it was so slurred that even she
could not understand it. Sighing, the arms of slumber overtook her,
and she was gone.
*****
He watched her go. Watched her drift away with the aid of a sedative.
It was the only way that she achieved peace these days. Drugged
periods of slumber, where there was nothing to remind her of the
cancer or who he was working for. When she was asleep, Mulder sighed,
wiping the hair off of his brow.
This was what she had come to. A being ravaged by cancer and plagued
by her own increasing insanity. This was the strong, vibrant woman
that he had fallen in love with years before, had given up his quest
and his morality for, lying here in restraints with a bloodstream
pumped full of medicine and sedatives. This was what remained of
Scully.
Perhaps she really was better off dead after all.
Bitterly, he turned his face away from her still, slowly breathing
form. She was fucking nuts. Dangerous. The trauma of her cancer had
destroyed her, wrecked her body and her mind, and all he could do was
keep fighting for her. Keep her alive. Even if it meant pumping her
full of sedatives and tranquilizers, keeping her entire bloodstream
filled with drugs, he would keep her alive.
"Find where she has the gun," he ordered an orderly, "and make sure
that it's taken back."
As long as she was alive, there was some kind of hope.
And without her, there was nothing.
He couldn't let her die. It was simply not an option.
The weight of his gun sat heavy on his hip, but Mulder thought nothing
of it. It had become second nature, this gun and these bullets and
the string of dead bodies. There were more jobs for him to do, more
hits for him to perform, and there was a hell of a lot of saving
Scully left. Nothing mattered but her. Nothing mattered but
resurrecting what was left of her and making her whole again.
Turning on his heel, he started to leave the room, and then was caught
by the walls that surrounded her bed. Dark, rich brown cocoa.
Exquisitely decorated. The Consortium had furnished the room in
luxury, and the most hideous part of it all was the occupant, in her
mint-colored pinstripe pajamas and her lamb's wool restraints.
She had told him something before fading off into stupor. "Don't
become the wallpaper." For a moment, he puzzled over it, a gleaning of
understanding crossing his mind. Perhaps...
Abruptly, he turned away from it, closing the door after him.
The ravings of a madwoman.
Ravings, and nothing more.
*****
(end)
*****
Feedback will be accepted at Auralissa@aol.com, where I will build a
shrine to every single piece and sacrifice noodles to everyday.
:::makes choir noises::: Thank you for reading.
*****
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