From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: 6 Apr 2001 02:49:17 -0000
Subject: Flicker by Innisfree
Source: direct

Reply To: milagro73@excite.com


TITLE: Flicker
AUTHOR: Innisfree
E-MAIL: milagro73@excite.com
CLASSIFICATION:  MSR, A
SUMMARY: "When he realizes that he cannot even give 
her the gift of a lie, he understands that they have 
truly taken everything." Major angst here, people... 
but hope remains.
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: DeadAlive.
ARCHIVE: Yes -- just e-mail me.
DISCLAIMERS: If I did own them, this season would 
have looked very different and no one would ever say 
"dollars to doughnuts" on that show. So, no. Not 
mine. 
__________________________________________


What does it take to break a man? How many times do 
you have to beat him before his spirit finally dies? 
How many days and nights can you treat him as an 
object before he begins to see himself as less than 
human? How many things can you take from him before 
what's left ceases to be enough?

He is considering, trying to fix upon the exact 
moment when he gave up. When he stopped fighting. He 
sits, rather weakly, in the large chair in the corner 
of his room as his ECG chirps next to him. His pale 
blue robe is lost in the brightness of the orange 
pleather that covers his seat, and he imagines for a 
moment that he has become orange too. He feels that 
he no longer exists on his own terms. He has returned 
from the dead, but he thinks that something important 
is still buried in that cold earth, some part of him 
for which he would search if he could bring himself 
to care. But he can't. So he simply sits, a vision in 
orange, staring at his pale reflection in the mirror 
on the wall. 

He is ugly. He was dead, and now he's ugly, and 
everything has changed. Ugly. He says the word over 
and over again in his mind, occasionally throwing in 
a word like "repulsive" or "weak" to make sure he's 
really paying attention. The scars on each side of 
his face are perfectly symmetrical. He remembers 
reading that scientists have studied human beauty and 
discovered that every culture finds beauty in 
symmetry... that it is not the features themselves, 
but rather their symmetry that causes a woman to 
swoon or a baby to smile. He thinks they would have 
to exclude his new face from their study. 

He pushes his robe open a little and pulls at the 
collar of his thin hospital gown, bringing it down 
far enough to reveal the dark scar that bisects his 
chest. He cannot really see the color, but he knows 
instinctively that it must be a deep, cherry red. 
This scar is not some meek little flat thing that 
lies on your arm and tries to hide under your hair. 
This scar is long, and wide, and raised. It holds 
itself up high from his breastbone in all its three 
dimensional glory, and he decides that it must match 
the orange chair quite well. Perhaps he will carry 
the orange chair with him from now on, and everyone 
will praise him for having finally learned to 
coordinate colors as they note how well the chair 
picks up the shade of his wounds. 

He believes that it might have been possible to hide 
the truth from her if these marks didn't cover his 
body. If he had returned with only those scars he 
took with him to Bellefleur last May, she would 
believe him if he tried to tell her that he never 
surrendered. He could have told her that he never 
screamed her name in agony, and she would have nodded 
solemnly. He could have told her that he never 
promised to give them anything they wanted when he 
lost track of how many days they had sliced and 
probed his body. No, he didn't beg them to stop, and 
no, he didn't ask them to kill him quickly. He could 
have looked her in the eye and denied that his mind 
hesitated for just half a second when they told him 
they would stop the drilling if he agreed to lure her 
aboard the ship. 

When he realizes that he cannot even give her the 
gift of a lie, he understands that they have truly 
taken everything. He lost. He wasn't strong enough to 
fight forever. When the pain ceased to blind him and 
began to leave him numb, he let go of hope. Then, in 
time, he let go of faith. And finally, he let go of 
himself. 

But he never let go of her, not even in that fleeting 
instant when his unconscious mind entertained the 
devil's deal to trade his pain for Scully's. And as 
they injected him with the new viral strain and left 
him to rot, he used his last remaining ounce of will 
to demand that fate allow him to see her again before 
he died. It was not a request. It was an order. Even 
now he can hardly believe that fate actually carried 
out his command.

He wanted to see her one more time, but he never 
wanted to see himself again. This is a side effect of 
fate's follow-through that he had not considered. 
Just as he had not considered what it would be like 
to see her face when she realizes that the man she 
once loved is dead after all. Fox William Mulder sits 
in this chair because the tag on his wrist says this 
body belongs to Fox William Mulder. But Mulder, her 
Mulder... he is still on that damp and cavernous 
ship. Or he is embedded in the hard soil of the grave 
like some skin that this body shed. But he is not 
here. This Mulder is a living echo, and he wants to 
cry for what it will do to her when she finally hears 
that echo after the exhausted joy for his recovery 
has worn away.

The door opens and he closes his eyes. The door 
closes and he opens his eyes again. She stands in the 
rays of light that shoot through the door's window 
from the bright corridor outside, and he nearly gasps 
at her beauty. She is Scully, and yet she is so much 
more. More than an agent, a partner, a friend, a 
lover... now she is about to be a mother, carrying a 
child that should never have been possible. Carrying 
hope. She is so much more than she was when they said 
goodbye in the spring, and he is so much less.

He watches her eyes travel down from his face, and 
his chest tightens with pain as he realizes that he 
has forgotten to pull his collar back up. He does not 
want her to see any more of the damage than she has 
already seen, but he knows he's already too late when 
the sob slips from her throat. The cry is barely out 
before she stifles it with a gasp and he, for his 
part, pulls the gown back up to his shoulders and 
wraps himself tightly in his robe. There, he thinks. 
Almost as if it never happened. They are both so good 
at being fine. 

She walks over to him and sits on the bed next to his 
chair, her hand coming up from where it rests on top 
of her stomach. He guesses that she might have been 
holding it above the baby's head, and thinks it's 
rather poetic that she would now bring the same hand 
up to stroke his. But she doesn't. Instead, her hand 
reaches for his robe inside his gown.

"Don't!" 

Startled by his outburst, her fingers skim the edge 
of the collar, back and forth. She strokes his still-
sensitive skin lightly as she moves, back and forth. 
Back and forth. He cannot tell if she's trying to 
hypnotize him, or reassure him, or if she's simply 
trying to decide what to do next.

"Let me see, Mulder." 

She speaks softly and, though her tone is firm, he 
knows that she is giving him a careful plea and not 
an order. Her voice does not sound like his voice did 
when he made his dying directive to fate.

"Scully, don't. Please." 

His voice seems so far away, so rough from disuse. 
Just another part of him that is missing. She stops 
the movement of her fingers and withdraws her hand 
from the collar to show him that she respects his 
wishes. But she does not remove her hand very far, 
moving it only as far as it takes to place it 
carefully over the center of his chest.

"Tell me why."

He feels the way warmth seems to seep from her hand 
to the skin hiding beneath the cloth that covers him. 
He wishes that this had been a memory he could have 
called up to occupy his mind when they sawed his 
chest open. He ran through every memory he had of her 
while he was on that ship. Every memory of the two of 
them together. So many moments, but somehow, there 
had not been enough of them.

He lifts his head a bit to meet her eyes and finds a 
face that looks to be the picture of calm. Only the 
tears threatening to fall from the corners of her 
eyes and her slightly trembling lower lip give her 
away. He opens his mouth to speak to her ("speak to 
me, baby," he hears from somewhere in the past) but 
no sound comes out. What can he say? How can he tell 
her what he's become? It will only hurt her, and he 
senses that he has done nothing but hurt her with his 
absence for the past six months. It has to end 
sometime. Why can't they just forget and pretend that 
none of this happened? He is fairly certain that he 
will be able to act the part of the man he used to 
be. That will have to be enough.

"Mulder." 

She takes his hand in her own but does not enclose 
it. Her fingers entwine gently with his fingers, a 
light touch that will not frighten him or make him 
feel trapped. She knows he is terrified of that 
feeling now, a vague memory of three months buried in 
the ground having created a new companion phobia for 
his crippling fear of fire.

"I know what you're thinking," she says. "And you're 
wrong."

Sharply... too sharply... he pulls his hand away from 
her and clutches it under his other arm. 

"You don't have any idea what I'm thinking!" he 
spits.  

The silence stretches out between them and he waits 
for her to hate him. Waits for her to recoil in anger 
and walk away. She doesn't deserve this, but he 
doesn't know how to give her what she does deserve 
anymore. His eyes dart nervously around the edges of 
her face, afraid to look into her soul and see that 
she now sees him for what he is and not what he was.

"Yes, Mulder. I do." 

There is no anger in her words. None. No venom, no 
hurt, no bitterness, no resentment. The only thing he 
hears is a quiet understanding and it causes him to 
fix her in his gaze.

"When they returned me six years ago, I didn't 
remember anything. I didn't remember because I didn't 
want to. But over the years, I've recalled the things 
that happened to me, little by little. I just never 
told you because... because I was ashamed of it."

He can only stare at her, stunned. He knew she had 
dreams now and again, snatches of memories that 
showed her blinding white lights and drills moving 
toward the place in her sinus cavity that would one 
day house a tumor. But she never told him that she 
truly remembered.

"The woman they held there for those months... I 
thought that woman wasn't me. I thought I could never 
have been that weak or that desperate. I begged, 
Mulder. I begged them to let me go. I offered to do 
anything they wanted. All I cared about was making 
them stop. I didn't care about pride, I didn't care 
about the truth, I didn't care about surviving." She 
takes a breath, sucking the air in deeply and then 
blowing it back out cautiously through lips barely 
parted. "I didn't care about you. I just wanted the 
pain to end."

"They hurt you." His voice is nothing more than a 
frightened whisper, the voice of a little boy who 
does not want to believe.

"Yes." 

He chokes back a sob. In his mind, he sees everything 
that happened to him. Only now he sees it happening 
to her. He hears every desperate, selfish word he 
yelled or cried on that ship. Only now the words are 
spoken in her voice. He sees himself in that horrible 
chair, strapped down and held in place by pins 
inserted in his wrists and ankles, as if he were a 
bug pinned to a display. And next to him, he sees her 
strapped to a table, screaming in pain as other 
things... more horrible, unimaginable things... are 
inserted in her.

"Scully, no!" he cries. 

He stands, pulling himself up from the chair to rest 
on unsteady feet, placing his shaking hands on the 
sides of her face.

"They didn't do those things to you. Tell me they 
didn't do those things to you." He pleads with her, 
broken and desperate. "Tell me, Scully."

The tears stream down her face like rivers that 
cannot be stopped, but strangely, she does not look 
like she's crying. When people cry, they look like 
they are expelling tears with force and with purpose. 
She simply looks like she is letting tears go, as if 
they had been trying to leave for years and only now 
have been set free.

"They did, Mulder. They hurt me, and they hurt you. 
And I know what you're thinking. And you're wrong." 

"I'm not the same, Scully. I don't know what I am, 
but I'm not the same." 

He is crying, but unlike Scully, he is forcing the 
tears and the moans out from somewhere deep inside 
himself. If he didn't force himself to feel 
something, he thinks he would feel nothing at all.

"Was I the same after I came back?" she asks him 
pointedly.

"Yes, you were," he tells her urgently, almost 
hysterically. "You were still strong, and your mind 
was still sharp, and you were so..." He pauses, 
lowering his voice shyly. "So beautiful. You were 
still gentle with people who were in pain. You were 
always... always..." He struggles for a word that 
will explain what he is trying to tell her. "You were 
always Scully."

She smiles, a fleeting smile that breaks the flow of 
the tears for a moment and creates a new tributary 
running off the side of her face. "But I wasn't the 
same person they took, Mulder. You know that. You 
know I'm not the same person now that I was even 
three years ago."

"That's not what I mean."

"But it's what I mean. What happened to you is always 
going to be a part of you. And you're different 
because of it. But you're still my partner, and my 
best friend." She pulls him down to sit with her on 
his bed and rests her head against his shoulder, just 
next to the place where his scar stretches out... 
almost close enough to touch her.

"You're the man I thought I would never see again. 
The man I love. And if you think any of those things 
aren't true, you're wrong."

Her words reach out to him like a prayer. She is 
praying to him, praying that he will hear her and 
believe. And something in him seems to flicker at 
that moment. It sparks, and then sparks again, like a 
lighter trying to make a flame from its last few 
drops of fluid. She tightens her hold around him and 
he feels her lips press against the center of his 
chest where they once tore him open, stripping bare 
his heart. And suddenly, he feels the spark catch 
inside him, becoming a flame of the familiar.

"I just want to go home, Scully," he mumbles in a 
voice low and unsure. He wants to forget, even though 
he knows he can't. He wants to crack jokes, and tease 
her about the things she orders when they go out to 
eat, and become unbearably excited at the thought of 
investigating exsanguinated cows. He wants to feel 
that small thrill he felt every time he woke up to 
the sight of her beside him in the morning, and he 
wants to feel as young as he felt whenever he drove 
up to see the Yankees play in the spring. He wants 
all those things back as he wonders if this small 
flame she has given him can last with so little left 
inside him to keep it alive.

"You are home, Mulder." She reaches for his hand and 
places their hands together on the swell of her 
stomach. "This is who we are. And we're home."

Yes, he thinks. Home. And when a fire starts to 
flicker in the hearth, you can watch it die. Or you 
can go find the wood that will make it burn bright 
again.

END


Author's Notes: After DeadAlive, I found myself 
wondering what kind of scars will be left from 
Mulder's experience after the physical ones have 
faded, and thought that he and Scully have more in 
common now than they probably realize. This is the 
result.