From: Hanna Nikkanen Date: 12 Sep 1998 19:04:21 GMT Subject: NEW: "The Dream of an Insomniac" (1/1) UST The Dream Of An Insomniac (1/1) Hanna Nikkanen Rating - G Category - V, Angst Spoilers - Emily Keywords - Mulder/Scully friendship/UST Summary - Scully reflects on the dependent relationship she shares with Mulder during the nighttime. Archive wherever you want, but if it's something unusual please let me know so I can check it out. Email is always appreciated, all kinds of feedback is welcome both directly to me and to the newsgroup. Disclaimer: It wasn't me! Whatever you find here, it's Chris Carter's fault. He may pass it on to 1013 and Fox. I'm poor, I've always been poor and this story will do nothing to improve my condition. xxxxx These five years have given me little; almost everything I've received, they've taken away from me. I mean They. I had a dog, an innocent little being for a while. Given to me during an investigation, taken away during another. I'm not paranoid enough, not even after everything else that They have done, to put the blame for Queequeg's death on anyone else but the gods or saints or whoever that is supposed to protect furry yipping little things. Poor dog had a bad luck. Then they gave me my cancer. For a while I was happy with that: if I have to go, I'd rather go as a martyr. "If I can save you, let me. Let me at least give some meaning to what has happened to me" - I really enjoyed saying that, having memorized it months earlier just in case I'd ever need a touching line to throw at his face. That's what Catholic upbringing does to people. I've always been one for martyrdom. Of course, They took my cancer away. I was cured. I'm not going to thank anyone for that, except maybe the poor Lone Gunmen. They are the truest of friends, the best we could ever wish for, and they have done for us much more than I'll probably ever find out. The credit for finding a cure for me will never belong to some black-lunged bastard from the deepest shadows of this little labyrinth of ours. The last thing I've been given was a little girl. A blue-eyed three-year-old whom no one wanted except for the doctor who had created her; whom no one loved except for me. That works the other way around as well: I was given someone who needed and loved me for the purest of reasons, who needed me to be a mother, a protector. I couldn't give her that protection. The wind blew her away like sand, like a wisp of smoke, the meaning of our days together suddenly paling into a torturing memory. I was given love so that I could taste it and know what I was missing - missing because of something else They've taken from me. And those are just things that have left me as empty-handed as before; what about everything that used to be self-evidently mine but now, after just five years of this twisted blind man's buff, are lost from me forever? Such as my sister. My fertility. Three months of my life. Pretty soon my sanity, too. I don't want to sound ungrateful. There are two things these years have given me, two things only. Two things that have grown to be an unreplacable part of my life as everything else around me crumbles down and loses meaning. This insomnia. Someone to share it with. Without these two gifts it would all be unbearable instead of just torturous, numbing, and, when I'm really feeling up to it, just ironical. Without them it wouldn't have been Mulder whose fake suicide report was filed back then, and it wouldn't have been fake. Realizing that offers me some comforting clarity now as I fight my way through one of these sleepless nights when he isn't here to offer me absolution. xxxxx No matter how talented a sleeper I used to be, the time came when I gave up and started to learn how to get along with three or four hours of sleep every night. As he once told me, it's always easier than driving the nightmares away; the human body can stand most unbelievable things if the mind is motivated. At that point, mine was, with eight hours of sleep giving me the average of two nightmares that I could remember when I woke up plus a few more that I couldn't. You never get used to seeing them, and for me, they are never the same; the screen in my very own private movie theater was subjected to some twisted surrealistic experiments by Alfred Hitchcock's freak brother on a nightly basis. Some of them were black and white fast forward ballets with no other sounds but some happy little tune playing on and on, some were real Technicolor acid trips with an endless parade of ear-shattering screams and muffled pleas that I could never really understand. I have no idea of what that tells about my subconscious. The pictures and sounds I could've taken, but this cinema had full service with the deepest emotional horrors that I've ever experienced, asleep or awake, delivered right to the customer and hammered into the brain. It always started with a silence and a suspicious feeling of losing control. Sometimes there was just a spinning wheel picking up speed all the time that I knew I had to stop but I couldn't; sometimes it was like looking at a madman's screen saver with new pictures, each one sicker than the one before, adding to the mix in a frenzied pace. Most often there were just dead bodies piling up everywhere around me, different bodies, each staring at me with nothing more than plain accusation in their dried eyes, and all that I could feel was that it was all inevitably getting worse because of me standing there doing nothing. The seconds were ticking faster and faster until at last I realized all that I heard was just my own racing heart and that I was finally surfacing, faced with the same empty helplessness that it all started with. I had never personally had to deal with insomnia before. As a doctor I knew the basics and I could tell what pills to take or in which positions to lie in order to fall asleep faster. What I didn't know was what to do when you don't want to fall asleep: how to spend that extra time when a human mind is said to face its demons? Three a.m., the moment of the wolf, is more silent that anything I've ever experienced. The siren of an ambulance occasionally reminding me of life that exists outside these four walls, every window in the neighborhood dark and every car parked in its place. I've learned to love that loneliness. I've never been much of a socialite anyway. As a teenager it was difficult to accept, the company of other people distracting my own universe; the complex social code of high school existence never really sinking in. Later I learned to deal with it, finding strength in the safe haven inside my own head and not giving a damn for my sanity. There were times in my life when it became a burden, isolating me from the rest of the world but all the same showing me wonders that the real world could never give. The three a.m. world I discovered was the place this loner in me was looking for - I guess it's weird that I didn't became an insomniac sooner. xxxxx Of course I was aware of the fact that I had a partner who was an insomniac as well. At first I didn't want him to know, maybe because he was all too familiar with the issue himself; maybe because it would have meant giving up some more of the control that my nightmares threatened to destroy anyway. During the months that I spent learning not to fall asleep I was afraid that I would fall apart any minute. I don't remember much from that time. He says he knew it right away - "it takes one to know one, " he told me, and I figure he must be right. I changed a lot then, and even if a lot of things in my life, in *our* life changed as well he wasn't stupid enough to blame it on the stress. I am grateful that he chose to take his time and never asked me about it until I considered myself to be ready. Three months, that's what it took; as long as my disappearance back then. I've twice lost three months, just as I've twice lost nine minutes. Six months and eighteen minutes is the time unaccounted for in my life. One tenth of the time that I've spent exploring the demons that struggled to come alive in my dreams again. I've done a lot of counting, I've had enough time. xxxxx When I finally got a grasp of my night hours I started taking long walks. These streets are never as beautiful as when the moment of the wolf is slowly approaching. Time moves more slowly then, I'm sure of it now. I've never really believed in universal invariants. Not much is invariable in this nightly world for two that I nowadays inhabit four to six hours a day. When his insomnia finally joined mine my walks became a custom version of hide and seek. He is afraid for me, I am afraid of his fears. He calls me up almost every night before he comes over, and if I'm not at home he calls my cellular and comes to take me back in his car. As an FBI agent I ought to know what it's like for a woman walking out alone in the night. I ought to know how it scares him. Of course I know. It's just that sometimes I still can't stand the restrictions of four walls closing in and knowing he's watching over me. I don't want him to call and expect me to be there to share his sleep-deprived nonsense. Even if I want to share; even if it's the only thing that keeps me sane. I don't want him to show his dependency as I don't want to show mine, but in any case I've never left my cellular home - I don't even try and leave as often as I used to. If I manage to sneak out on one of the nights when he doesn't actually call, when he's too busy drowning in his guilt and Samantha and whether he wants to believe or not and believing that I don't really want his company, I'm almost disappointed. Very disappointed, actually. What if I had been raped? What if the Consortium had thought it over again and decided that their agenda doesn't need me anymore, and chosen that night to get rid of me? Is that what he's willing to risk just by not calling me? Of course he knows that I need his calls and worrying just as much as he needs calling me. A lot of things between us are unquestioned and categorically known but never talked about. xxxxx On those six nights of the week that he actually calls I'm comforted by his presence and infuriated by that comfort I find in him. No one ever warned me my life would be like this: catching freak serial killers during the day with someone who is as much a part of me as my arms or my heart is, in the night exploring the hell inside me with the very same person. We are hardly ever apart, and yet there is nothing romantical in our inability to let go of each other. Not in the conventional sense of the word "romantical." If someone made a movie of us it would be a damn lot closer to "Vertigo" than "When Harry Met Sally." Hell, sometimes I'm ready to go for "The Night Of The Living Dead. " As a teenager I never knew how much pain could a session of stargazing include. We don't speak much when we go out in the night, but usually it's not needed. We may spend hours on a park bench staring up with our tears flowing, nothing actually being said. In the end, we both know it anyway. And when we get home we fall asleep curled up against each other, exhausted, spent. For a few hours I have the right to cling to the only thing that is permanent and solid in my life. Mulder. He holds me as tightly as I hold him and I know how afraid he is; our closeness is the only thing even close to assuring him that I won't disappear. I can't really be sure of the things we talk about when we are together. When I wake up it's all unclear, like a dream that you remember having but whose contents are already slipping away. I don't need to remember, forgetting is probably safer; we don't do this to reach any clarity or to gain knowledge of our repressed memories and fears. We simply wouldn't survive without letting some of it out, and when it's cleared again we can forget and move on to find ourselves more demons. This exorcism has become a necessity of life, a mere escape from the ever-present lurking insanity, and the knowledge that we've once again dragged each other back to sanity never calms me much. Just one week apart might set us both off. xxxxx Co-dependency. It's in every women's mag. I've found myself a funny way of being trendy; if there was anything conventional about us, we'd be a classic case. I hate to see our grand relationship defined with just a big word - it's when I read Mom's magazines that I become painfully aware of the pathetic pompousity of my lukewarm hell. If there has been something in my life that I don't receive from him, I've learned to live without it. To an outsider it may seem like a lot: sex, sleep, and my beliefs, to name three. If something has to change in order to get them, they're not worth it. We are each other's confidantes, enemies, sandbags; we're lovers without the physical benefits of a relationship. The bond we share is unique, abnormal - we are two deeply disturbed persons, hardly enough to qualify as individuals anymore. As seamless as our cooperation may seem to an outsider, everything we do includes that frantic grasp that ties us together no matter how hard we'd want to get away. We're Siamese twins, sharing our major organs, our circulation and our nervous system, the toxins in one body poisoning the other. We can't survive without each other, yet there's nothing we hate more than our dependency. What is it that I he gives me, then? I've known that once, but it's obscured in my mind day by day as Mulder becomes a permanent state of my being. I used to name it as trust, but that's an issue that has been established. It's self-evident that he wouldn't hesitate to take a bullet for me just as I'd do it for him. What I live for now is his need for me. The knowledge that for one person in the world I'm the reason for living, and the knowledge that I have no chance but to return that need to him. xxxxx Yesterday I woke up screaming at his chest, punching whichever body part of his I could find. He held me until I was totally awake, tired and scared by the rage I was letting out, a rage I hadn't known I had inside me. Even asleep I hadn't been able to escape the fight we had had, but at least expressing it physically eased things a little bit. Knowing that he was there to absorb my attack saved us, and I hope it will do that many times more. There's no hope that we wouldn't need saving again and again until we're finally too worn out to fight. It will kill us both when we are too tired to bang our heads again the wall, when we no longer bother to hate each other fiercely enough to keep the demons locked outside. The reason for my fit of rage was an argument we had had during the day. We had been tired and distressed and stupid enough to bring it out in the night; later he said that he should have stayed at home, even though it would've made it the second night in a row. We should've known better than to pursue the fight in the universe that was so clearly meant to be separate from anything so mundane. A little bit of my illusion and my trust was destroyed then, and it will take time to reconstruct it. That is the most difficult part: when the two worlds collide. Sometimes it goes the other way around and our daytime is touched by our silent nightly horrors. Our sleepless hours were supposed to be a way to escape, but sometimes they grow to absorb all comfort I've ever hoped to find. In a way I've always known how it is. The labyrinth is no lighter at noon than at midnight, and the most horrifying monsters are not those that we find in sideshows or sewer systems. What is scariest is no mutant or a light in the sky, but the forces that take the shape of old men with wrinkled faces and a passion not distant from our own. That bastard Old Smokey. I don't care if he's dead or not, he will never leave us alone. He is something we never talk about in the dark, yet he is the ex officio third member in our little insomnia fete. His spirit is present in us, and in our weird nightly pastime we are as dependent on it as we are on each other. During my short and restless sleep I dream about cutting him out of us, carving the poisoned flesh away with a blunt knife. The pain would mean nothing if it were that easy. xxxxx I can't escape this, nor do I even want to anymore. I couldn't survive without someone watching over me the way he does, or without someone putting me on a pedestal that has nothing to do with objectifying. He is my guardian and my patient; a knight in a shiny armor, sometimes barely able to tie his shoelaces. We both need an opponent for our moments of weakness and strength, and to us there are only two people in the universe. xxxxx He is patronizing, he invades my precious personal space. I hate him for that, and for several other reasons. Maybe that is the greatest thing about this. During this odd period I've learned to hate him instead of being afraid of him, and that makes this - *us* - seem more healthy. I hope that he has learned to feel the same way about me, too. Of course I love him. I love him deeply, more deeply or at least in an extremely different way than I've ever loved anyone else. He loves me, too; he makes me hate him for his patronizing because I'm some kind of a saint to him. I'm sick and tired of being his quest sometimes but that is the one thing I can't take away from him without breaking everything apart. The hate and pain between us is colossal, overpowered only by our love. Only that much in our world is true. Did I use the word "healthy" earlier to describe the way our relationship is heading? Better not trust everything I say. Watch out for those walls crumbling; he's not here to keep them up tonight. xxxxx The End. xxxxx Footnote: I was at a loss with providing this story with suitable keywords. In this universe, Mulder and Scully share a relationship that is about more than friendship, but it's not really a romance either, and for sure it's no traditional UST. I hope both shippers and noromos were able to enjoy this one. Sometimes I feel like this is the gloomy light The Relationship deserves. This is as well my first archived story, although it's not the first one I've written - it might be the first that I've finished, though... Watch out for more stuff surfacing in a couple of months (assuming that the real life doesn't interfere); I promise I'll be in a funnier mood then. I'm not always spooky. I hope the next time I decide to post a story it's easier to find proofers, it's sad how they were all vaporized right after I contacted them. I assume this one's for Jackie, the one that survived, then - may the force be with you. Send me your feedback or I'll come and get it myself. I especially love the praises, but if you want to see any development in my skills then you'd better go for constructive criticism.