Subject: Exquisite Corpse
From: xfactore@inforamp.net
Date: 23 Jul 1997 23:08:32 GMT

Summary: A corpse, philosophy, memories and angst
Rating: G
Category: V, UST, mild MA
Spoilers: Post-Memento Mori, Pre-Gethsemane
If you want to use this for whatever purpose, keep my name attached.


Greetings and Felicitations! I haven't posted here by my very own hand in
over a year ... This one comes under the heading, "Muse Attacks Lazy
Writer". I was procrastinating on the story I'm writing, got hit with this
one. It's short.

Special thanks to Debbie Hewett, who makes my writing so much better. She
rocks the universe. Thanks also to Hindy for additional critical
commentary, and to Sarah McLachlan for her new music -- it helped to shake
out the cobwebs. 

This story is based on characters and situations owned and operated by
Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and Fox Broadcasting. No copyright
infringement intended ... I'm just playing with them for a brief time and
promise to put them back where I found them, but not necessarily as I
found them.

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Exquisite Corpse
An X-Files Tale
by Terri Monture
xfactore@inforamp.net


1:03 a.m.

It was late. His footsteps in the corridor echoed off the silent walls
like strangely muffled gunfire. He rubbed his eyes, feeling his tiredness
like grains of sand scraping over his eyeballs. A momentary swoon of
exhaustion threatened his balance; he put his hand out, found the door to
the morgue and pushed it open.

The smell of formaldehyde was overpowering, drenching everything in a
peculiarly tart stench that pierced his nostrils like a knife thrusting
straight into his brain. The lights in the outer lab had been left off,
except for a small lamp on a desk that illuminated Scully's laptop, the
screensaver a psychedelic swirl of fractals, pulsating and squirming
soundlessly into millions of infinite galaxies, a Little Bang of colour.
Beyond that, the set of double doors that led into the autopsy bay. 

He pushed the door open. Scully, swathed in surgical greens, cap and eye
visor, bent over the still, cold body of the victim. She raised her head
at his entrance. 

"Mulder." Her honeyed alto voice was an octave lower from fatigue. "What
are you doing here?"

"Came to give you a ride back to the motel." He circled the autopsy table
warily, not really wanting to look, but the natural morbid curiousity that
governed human behaviour in the wake of car crashes and other disasters
made him look anyway.

The body of a woman lay on the table, supine and unknowing, split from
collarbone to groin. The gleaming wet tissue, the exposed twisting bowels,
the dark brown-red of the liver; all of this open, laid bare for his
inspection and awaiting the steel caress of Scully's scalpel. He looked at
the woman's face, her slack, sleeping profile. She had been beautiful, a
wealth of shining chestnut hair, a strong nose, a delicate jaw. Mulder
looked away, down at his feet. It was too much, too raw, too bleak.

Mulder rubbed his eyes again, feeling the poignant futility of mortality.
This woman, once a living, breathing creature, loved and loving, thinking
and feeling, all animation fled, the essential "her" gone. Reduced to a
pitiful piece of meat, every secret pried from her by Scully's relentless
and necessarily mutilating search.

"I can take a taxi," she said. He heard a horrible, sucking sound; she was
removing something, probably the stomach from the sound it made as it was
loosened from its moorings by her strong fingers. A swampy, plopping sound
onto metal; she set it on the scale placed conveniently beside the head of
the table. He looked and won the small wager with himself. It was indeed
the stomach, pinkish grey, streaked with drying rivulets of brackish
blood. Mulder sighed. He was getting much too familiar with this, this
final procedure and its attendent sounds of clinical ferocity.

"I wanted to see if you'd found anything out yet." He looked down at a
counter top, glass jars filled with formaldehyde waiting patiently for the
specimens they would soon hold, like soldiers in formation expecting their
orders. "I guess not." 

 "I'm sorry it's so late, but the family only signed the release form half
an hour ago. The sheriff had to do some fast talking to convince them to
consent to the autopsy." Scully looked at the scale, picked up a hand-held
recorder. "Stomach weighs 264 grams and from outward appearances and
colour, appears normal." She clicked off the recorder, looked up at him as
if seeing him for the first time. "You look tired," she observed. "Maybe
you should go and get some sleep."

"I can wait." Mulder leaned against the counter and slumped, putting his
hands in his coat pocket.  From here he could indulge in his current
favourite pastime; Watching Scully Work. And though he knew it was
voyeuristic and that she would be terribly offended if she knew what he
was doing, he couldn't help it. He was committing every single movement,
every nuance of her to his memory, guarding against a terrible and
uncertain future, one in which she might no longer be here. He was trying
to help her live with the timebomb that ticked inexorably in the space
between her nasal cavity and brain, but it seemed that the only method by
which he could deal with it was an awkward, protracted silence. Which
didn't help her any. So he kept his mouth shut and clung to the status
quo, all the while watching her. He tried to be an inobtrusive sentinel as
he carefully recorded everything she said and did. Whether or not he would
one day be tortured by these memories remained to be seen; but for now, he
was a famished man living for whatever crumbs of time, for the tiny scraps
of knowledge she unwittingly spared for him.

Her eyes, intent on her work, seemed magnified by the clear plastic visor,
even though he knew it was probably only a trick of the light. Mulder
watched her surreptiously, greedily. Lately it seemed the circles under
her eyes were purple and permanent, and her skin took on a grey-greenish
pallor when she was tired, as now. Two thin grooves had taken up residence
on either side of her mouth and darkened noticeably as she pursed her
lips, intent on using the scalpel. The little furrowed line of
concentration between her brows drew his attention; he was seized by an
impulsive and compulsive desire to go up to her, take her gently in his
arms and kiss that tiny line, smoothing it away. The desire was so intense
he shifted his weight, almost pushing himself forward, and instantly
clamped down on the impulse.

No. That wasn't the way. She would only interpret it as stepping over the
boundary, not playing fair. So he crossed his traitorous arms over his
chest to hold them there, to keep them from doing what they wanted. 

Scully looked up at him suddenly, her expression wary, as if she had felt
the weight of his eyes upon her. "What?" she demanded. "Have I got spinach
on my teeth?"

"No ..." Mulder groped for an excuse, found one. "I just don't feel like
looking at the body." He inhaled sharply, made a convincing grimace that
screwed up his face. 

Scully nodded her sympathy. "I know. It's a bit much when you're tired."
She returned to her work, the gleaming blade in her gloved hands catching
the light, winking gruesomely at him. 

Mulder considered her, realizing he had never asked her why she did this,
where her interest in pathology had come from. He had become increasingly
aware of just how little he knew her, and this knowledge filled him with
dread. For her to leave him without assuaging his need to know ...
Blackness stared back at him. He swallowed hard, forcing himself not to
think of it.

Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the fact that he had to know,
to fill up the pages of his memory book with as much as he could, that he
blurted out, "Scully --" 

Another of those tearing, sucking sounds. He looked up to see the
whitish-yellow length of intestine, intricately marked with a dark design
of blue veins. Scully pulled it out with a curious twisting motion, as
though she would wind it around her wrist like some kind of macabre
bracelet. He watched her work, deft, skillfully and fully adept. "Why do
you do this?"

Scully glanced up at him, her blue eyes luminous and wondering at his
question. "Do what?"

Mulder spread his arms wide indicating the body on the table, the entire
room. "This ... autopsies. Pathology."

"You've never asked me that before," she said, her tone slightly
suspicious.  She looked down at the glistening abdominal cavity, turned
her gaze on the unseeing eyes of the body, then looked back up at him. 

Mulder shrugged, remembering the first time he had seen her perform an
autopsy, back in Bellflower, Oregon, so clinical and detached she could
have used the look in her eyes as a scalpel. He had since seen her carry
out so many it seemed that for her the practice held a ceremonial aspect.
Scully, begowned and serious, her hands weilding the scalpel in prescribed
ritual. "I -- I just realized I've never asked why you chose pathology.
I'm just wondering, is all. Why you almost -- why it seems as if you
*like* doing this whole procedure." 

Scully stood quietly, her head bowed. He had become so attuned to her
these days that for all intents and purposes he knew when she was thinking
hard, thinking carefully. But because her motivations for her interest in
pathology went so deep, so close to the core of who she really was, he
could only stand and watch avidly, rapaciously, waiting for her to throw
him another scrap of minutiae that let him know who she really was. And
Mulder would wolf it down, grateful for even the smallest tidbit that he
could savour in secret.

He watched her, reverently caressing the length of bowel with her gloved
fingertips. "The body is such a marvel," Scully murmured, almost to
herself, as if she had forgotten his presence entirely. "It is truly a
beautiful thing. Bone and sinew, blood and tissue, intricate, complex.
Every thing here designed by evolution for a specific purpose, all of it
working together in harmony." She looked up at him and he was bedazzled by
her enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. "Makes you think that maybe somewhere there
is a God. With a purpose, and a plan."

He smiled with her even as he raised his eyebrow in reflexive agnosticism.
"Don't forget about that little bugaboo ..."

"Free will?" Now her eyes were shining into his. "'Time Bandits' was full
of universal truths."

Fatigue was making him silly. "Jolly good." Mulder tried out his best John
Cleese imitation on her.

Scully wrinkled her nose at him, looked back down at the body and sobered.
"She has a story to tell, but no one can hear her anymore, except for me.
I am the one who will tell it for her." Scalpel in hand, she bent to her
work again. "And even though we live with secrets and lies all of our
lives, in the end all those things are stripped away, silenced by death.
So there is only one thing left to us. A final chance for the truth to be
revealed, in all of its sublime glory, in its timelessness, in its utter
finality." 

Something like love shone in her eyes as she looked into the body, as if
she could see all of the universe revealed to her. And Mulder thought that
maybe she could.

Scully looked back up at him. "There's a quote I learned in med school,
it's from Hamlet. It's always been appropriate. 'What a piece of work is
man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty' --"

"'In form and movement how express and admirable,'" Mulder chimed in. "'In
action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of
the world, the paragon of animals.'" He declaimed the last bit for her in
mock stentorian tones, a comic tribute to his literature professor at
Oxford. "We'll skip the manic-depressive, misanthropic bit at the end ..."

She rolled her eyes. "But that's the best part," Scully argued. "It's the
big question -- 'And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' The
most  profound of topics, the same one humans have debated for all of our
existance. What are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? And where
do we go?" She expelled her breath in a long, soft sigh. "Such a beautiful
mystery. Existence, with its intricate dance, balanced eternally between
constant creation and disintegrating entropy ... well." She squared her
shoulders, seeming suddenly at a loss.

"The whole enchilada," Mulder agreed with her. "Life, the universe, and
everything." He was suddenly very tired and put out a hand to steady
himself as he swayed on his feet. 

Scully raised her head, noticing. "Go back to the motel, Mulder," she
urged him. "It's too late for philosophy, and I'm going to be another
hour, at least." She set a gentle hand on the pale, lifeless flesh, as if
the body could still feel her calming, respectful touch. "I haven't
discovered her secrets yet, and you're a terrible distraction." 

Mulder suddenly found that his heart seemed to have set up shop in his
throat, but managed to quell its beating as he walked past her, stopping
mere inches from her and placing a hand on the small of her back. He knew
these invasions of her personal space were probably violating the boundary
line, but he couldn't help himself. "I distract you, Scully?" he asked,
pitching his tone low and intimate, as he leaned in even closer.

She turned her head to look up at him briefly before dropping her blue
gaze. "Yes," she replied simply. 

Mulder froze for an instant; was that a confession, an observation, an
invitation -- what? But the rational part of him forced him to keep
moving, forced a casualness he did not feel into his voice. "Oh," he said
noncommittally. He paused at the door to look back at her, staring down at
the exquisite corpse. "I'll see you in the morning, Scully."

Outside the Coroner's office, a cold rain was splattering the sidewalk
with huge drops that to his tired eyes, in the damp darkness, looked like
blood. 

A vision rose before his eyes, horrible, terribly real, frighteningly
possible, and he screwed up his eyes tight against the pain. Scully laying
on a metal slab, her stark, classical profile stilled and cold, the smooth
ivory of her skin as cold as marble. This woman, once a living, breathing
creature, loved and loving, thinking and feeling, all animation fled, the
essential "her" gone. 

The woman he loved, gone. 

Mulder fumbled for the car keys and inserted them in the lock, swinging
the door open. Suddenly he leaned forward with his head bowed against the
solid, comforting curve of door, rain dripping down his collar to run down
his back, cold enough to freeze his blood.




The  End


Quote from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene II


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Terri Monture (This is my SIG!)
"X-Files worshippin', bike ridin', beer drinkin', music listenin', latte
lovin', tattooed nose-pierced urban Mohawk ubermom ... slaving over a hot
computer."

"In order to have creativity you have to leave behind the bounded, the
fixed -- all of the rules." Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth"  

"I'm not an Indian warrior chief. I'm not some demure little Indian woman
healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I'm not babbling about the
four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I'm talking
like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century
Indian, and you can't handle it, you wimp." Sherman Alexie, "Indian
Killer"

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