From: philippa@mindspring.com Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 22:17:27 -0400 Subject: NEW: "Approaching Closure" by philippa (R) ------------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: Approaching Closure AUTHOR: philippa EMAIL ADDRESS: philippa@mindspring.com FIRST POSTING: 16 April 2000, to atxc DISCLAIMER: Fox Mulder, Teena Mulder, Bill Mulder, Samantha Mulder, Dana Scully, and Phoebe Green belong to Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Fox. No disrespect is intended and no money will change hands. CATEGORY AND RATING: Angst, Vignette, R for disturbing images and language. SPOILERS: Everything through Sein Und Zeit SUMMARY: Post-SUZ vignette DEDICATION: For Kelly Keil and Branwell, for providing extraordinary beta and for encouraging me not to give up on this story. Both of these ladies are gifted writers, and I hope you will seek out their work if you're not already familiar with it. I especially encourage you to read Branwell's "Spoiled Children," which in part inspired this story. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Many thanks to the virginias and the neophytes for feedback and inspiration. ARCHIVE: Gossamer and Spookys, please. Anywhere else is fine, just keep my name with it, and please let me know so that I can acknowledge your generosity on my fanfic site. ------------------------------------------------------------- Approaching Closure by philippa ------------------------------------------------------------- Mom-- This is a tired old shrink trick, writing letters to the Dear Departed in an attempt to get closure. Don't plan on a full mailbox wherever you are, because I won't be writing more than one. Anyway, this isn't for you, it's for me. I need to get some of the crap out of my head. Organization and lucidity aren't high on my to-do list. Okay, let's get this over with. I had another driving dream last night, Mom. I was on a ramp, or an access road. Whatever it was, I had no choice but to traverse it to get where I was going. A major snowstorm had completely covered the landscape, deep and treacherous on either side of the road, and I drove slowly and carefully (unlike me, I know; I'll get to that in a minute). As I drove, I passed car after car that had spun off the road into the snow and become trapped there. Ahead of me, a small sports car was driving too fast, fishtailing from one side of the narrow road to the other, finally losing it on a curve and doing a complete rollover into a snow bank. I slowed even more to make sure the driver and passenger were all right -- they were; I saw them climb out and start to examine the car, hopelessly buried -- then returned my attention to the road. I think I may have felt a little smug; that wasn't going to happen to *me* because *I* was being careful! Then I came around a bend and there it was: an eighteen-wheeler on its side, partially blocking the road. The only way around it was into the deep snow, and I knew the car I was driving would be buried to the axles in a heartbeat. I braked carefully to a stop and got out to look, as if that would make a difference, and was joined by the two who'd rolled their car earlier. I was angry: why hadn't the highway department put up a warning sign that this road was blocked? There was no way forward and no way back--I couldn't imagine reversing my way back along the twisting road to my starting point. To add insult to injury, a squirrel in a tree above my head was chattering and hopping from branch to branch, sending wet snow down onto my head. The last thing I remember was moving to get away from it. When I woke up, my first thought was to tell Scully about the dream, and my second thought was to skip it. She'd probably think I made it up. I mean, it's a little too pat: an object lesson to teach that being slow, careful and judicious can trap you just as hopelessly as going too fast. I have a lot of driving dreams, Mom; I've had them for years. There's almost always a touch of the surreal about them, and almost always a touch of danger. I've driven through buildings. I've driven on ice-covered roads with zero traction. I've driven up and down Escherian flights of stairs. I've gotten hopelessly lost in neighborhoods I know as well as the landscape of my own body: West Tis, Alexandria, DC, Georgetown. Something is always just a little bit "off," like those puzzles in the dog-eared copies of children's magazines in doctors' waiting rooms: Can You Tell What's Wrong With This Picture? That was never a problem with us, was it? No one with an ounce of discernment should have had any trouble seeing What Was Wrong With The Mulders. Yet most people didn't seem to have a clue that we were centerfold material for The Dysfunctional Family Monthly. When I was a kid--even before Sam disappeared, even before I knew about the Consortium--I thought that mine was the only screwed-up family in the world. Every other kid went home at the end of each school day to a Leave-It-To-Beaver home where Dad was sober and friendly, Mom was supportive and loving, and the biggest crisis of the day could be solved in less than 30 minutes. It wasn't until I went away to school, where people were finally old enough to give themselves permission to tell the truth about themselves, that I learned *everyone's* family was screwed up to some extent. Of course, I took a sort of perverse pride that mine was still the worst I ever heard of. My dad drank too much and beat me with sufficient enthusiasm to guarantee regular visits to the emergency room. My mother was an enabler who had a love affair with Valium. My sister was abducted by aliens and it was all my fault. My parents got a divorce. It was sort of a Grand Slam of dysfunctionality. And now my mother is a suicide, which -- along with my father's murder and my various breakdowns -- probably puts us into the Hall of Fame. Mom, do you remember what you told me about hugs? One night, several months after Sam disappeared, you found me in her room, crying, and for once you were coherent enough to ask me what you could do to help me. I told you I needed a hug. Do you remember what you told me? Do you, Mom? I do. I can still hear you say it: "Fox, hugs have to be earned," you said, and you turned around and walked out of the room. I never asked again. Guilt. Now *there's* a topic for a dissertation. I could write something the length of "War and Peace" on *that* topic, Mom. You and Dad did a great job teaching me about guilt, if nothing else. Hey, speaking of guilt, did I ever tell you how I learned to deal with it when I was a kid? Everything was my fault--not just Sam's disappearance, but your depression and Dad's alcoholism and the beatings. In shrink lingo, the mind can't deal with inexplicable punishment, so it will create a reason. My reason was that I was bad, evil--there was something inside me that I couldn't see but that you and Dad could, and I had to be punished for it. Of course, after a while I could see it, too, and like those trick pictures at the ophthalmologist's office, once you've seen the cow in the random pattern of blacks and whites, you can never un-see it. Where was I? Oh yes--punishment. At some point, your abuse by neglect and Dad's by fist and belt and blunt object du jour weren't enough for me, and I started looking for more. At the time, I had just begun a long love affair with suicide, ferreting out reading materials and music and films to feed my obsession. I knew I couldn't really kill myself because Sam might come back and I had to be there for her, but the knowledge that I had that escape hatch if things got too bad comforted me when other comforts failed. At some point my new hobby led me to a book called "Ordinary People." You can imagine what a profound effect that story had on me: family loses beloved child, remaining child blames himself, mother can't forgive him either, father (poor schmuck) is caught in the middle. Or maybe you can't imagine. Maybe if you'd been able to sit down and read it with me, and cry as I cried, things would have turned out differently. But I digress... Aside from the super-shrink who helped the kid break out of his self-created prison of guilt, I was most fascinated with his suicide attempt: the razor blade, all that blood, and the scars. One afternoon when Dad was out of town and you were locked in your room and I was reading the book for the hundredth time, it occurred to me that even if I couldn't kill myself, I could cut myself. So I put down the book and went into the bathroom, helped myself to one of Dad's single-edged blades, and made a timid little cut on the inside of my wrist, more of a scratch than anything, only a red mark, really. But that was the start of a habit that lasted for many years and probably kept me from killing myself outright by acting as a sort of safety valve. Cutting became an exercise in creativity when I got into junior high and started playing basketball, because the uniforms exposed so much skin and because I didn't want my scars to be seen in the locker room. At some point, I stopped cutting altogether when I was playing. I picked up where I left off during the off-season. I was lucky that I healed quickly and had skin that hardly scarred at all. I would have been luckier still if I'd had the build and reflexes for football. I would have had an outlet for the anger -- and that's what the guilt morphed into at some point; black bitter anger, mostly directed at myself -- and maybe I wouldn't have cut myself at all. When I went to Oxford, the sports stopped and so did the abuse... yet I resumed cutting with renewed fury. When I met Phoebe, it only got worse, especially after she caught me at it and -- after reducing me to tears of shame -- admitted that it turned her on. There, Mom, I've just told you one of my deepest darkest secrets, one that even Scully doesn't know about, one that I've never shared with any shrink. Sometimes she would masturbate while she watched me slice my skin open. Sometimes she'd lick the blood off me and then we'd fuck. And she had the nerve to call *me* sick. I stopped cutting when I joined the FBI and began profiling. A series of breakdowns must have satisfied my need for punishment without the literal bloodletting. The night Scully did the autopsy on you, while I waited for her to come to my apartment, I sat on my couch for what seemed like hours with a razor blade in my hand, wanting to cut so badly that I shook like a junkie. But I didn't cut, and when Scully finally came, I shoved the blade under the couch cushion when she knocked at the door. Funny, when she knows so much about me and my many weaknesses, all of those hairline cracks in my psyche -- I don't want her to know about that one. ------------------------------------------------------------- Benign neglect. I can't remember what psych course that came from. Maybe I read it on a cereal box, or heard it on a daytime talk show. The term's all wrong, of course. It's an oxymoron. The two words don't go together. But it's one of those annoying nonsense phrases that gets stuck in the brain like a piece of lint that won't brush off. And because it has an association for me, I've never been able to get rid of it. Do you remember, Mom, how you used to punish Sam and me? You never raised your voice or your hand; you left that to Dad. Instead, we became Invisible for the day. You wouldn't talk to us, or look at us, or acknowledge us in any way. We'd follow you around the house crying and begging, but you were strong; you never once gave in. Maybe the reason I associate the word "benign" with the Invisible punishment is that, when I write it down, it really doesn't sound like that big of a deal. It's hard to convey in words the terror of being ignored by your own mother, the Grown-Up, the Ruler of the Known World (Dad wasn't home much in those days), the person on whom you depended for everything, especially at an age where time was difficult to judge and a day seemed like an eternity. Of course, meals were suspended for the day, too, because Invisible children don't need food, right? You started it with me so early that I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't fear it, and the hell of it was that I never knew what infraction was going to trigger it because you changed the rules on a daily -- sometimes hourly -- basis. You started it with Sam as soon as she was old enough to walk. But it didn't work as well on her, because she had her big brother to run to. I would always hold her while she cried and reassure her that she was not Invisible and that the punishment would end. Sometimes I was proud that I could spare her the terror I'd felt when I was all alone with you; sometimes I hated her for escaping it. Either way, it was more grist for the guilt mill when she was taken. ------------------------------------------------------------- There's that word again. The final legacy of the Mulder clan. I am you and you are me and she is he and we are all together... and we all feel guilty as hell, and after all these years it doesn't really matter anymore who did what to whom, or why... does it, Mom? Yeah. If only. ------------------------------------------------------------- I wanted to love you. You just made it too damned hard, Mom. After awhile, I just said to hell with it. Aside from guilt, this is your most lasting legacy to me: teaching me that sooner or later, they all say to hell with it. Maybe that's why I worship at the shrine of Samantha -- she didn't stick around long enough to us to reject one another. Maybe it's why I worship Scully but won't let her get close enough to hurt me. ------------------------------------------------------------- Except... you know what? I hurt anyway. Did you figure that out, too? ------------------------------------------------------------- This letter is going into your coffin, Mom, and I'm going to sit in the crematorium with Scully by my side and watch the conveyer carry you into the flames. You know. Just to make sure. Your son, Fox END ------------------------------------------------------------- started 11 Feb 2000 finished 16 April 2000 -- "Some magnets attract, some magnets repel, some magnets say: oh, what the hell..." Violent Femmes, "Freak Magnet" -- http://www.mindspring.com/~philippa/fiction.htm