From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 00:34:15 -0500 (CDT) Subject: The Laughing Face of Madness by Maidenjedi Source: direct Reply To: maidenjedi@gmail.com TITLE: The Laughing Face of Madness AUTHOR: Maidenjedi RATING/WARNING: Strong R for self-harm PAIRING: M/S UST, allusion to Mulder/Phoebe, Mulder/Diana SPOILERS: Post-ep for "Grotesque." Spoilers through season 5. SUMMARY: The great red dragon, and the woman clothed in sun. Author's Note: Written for simplytoopretty for xf_santa 2010. -- When Fox Mulder was fifteen years old, his mother caught him cutting himself with a razor blade. He might have been shaving and slipped, but there was so much blood that Teena Mulder nearly screamed. She was affected that way, thinking herself frightened by the sight of blood. The truth was, it was not the first time he'd cut himself, and it probably wasn't the last. Just the only time anyone caught on. His mother dragged him to a hospital (no stitches, thank God) and he got a righteous scolding they probably overheard in Boston. But back then no one thought it was strange, they didn't want to believe a young, promising Fox Mulder might be capable of self-destruction. That was the other way his mother was affected. She did not think her son could be harmed. Mostly because, after Samantha, she might not have cared that much. -- The first time Phoebe teased him about his fear of fire, she did it by lighting matches and bringing them close to his skin when he wasn't watching her. She singed his arm, his leg, his buttocks once. He broke up with her, or thought he had, and she came back apologetic and loving. The final time, she almost set her own apartment ablaze, and it was really over then. For months after they split, Mulder (as he had begun to think of himself) kept a book of matches in his pocket. When he was nervous, when he was scared, he fingered the matches and closed his eyes for a moment, imagining his surroundings engulfed. And he wouldn't calm down, no, but he would know then that it could be worse. It could always be worse. -- "Mulder, why are we here?" She almost always asked him that question, and he invariably heard subtext. Mulder, what's the point of this case, I think this is a waste of my talents. Mulder, why can't you conform. Mulder, isn't this case really about you and your sister? Not everything he thought or did or said went back to Samantha. "We're here because Billy Zephraim and his four brothers all died from mysterious wounds to their skulls, with what appeared to be human teeth marks, and all five bodies have disappeared, Scully. I think that zombies put the 'x' in x-file, don't you?" She grimaced when he said "human teeth marks" and rolled her eyes at "zombies" and he said, under his breath, "Mission accomplished." Scully snapped on a pair of gloves and crouched down to examine evidence (a pile of bloody muck that may or may not have had bone pieces shining through it). Mulder turned to the next pit, and put on his own evidence gloves (pointedly not snapping them on). Since Comity, they'd been irritable around each other, and Scully had been reacting to everything he said as if it was the greatest punishment on earth to listen to Fox Mulder speak. Not a single thing he'd said or done had been right. She corrected him and scolded him and rolled her eyes. "Sure, fine, whatever" became a nearly permanent fixture in her vocabulary. But, it turned out, it was actually Scully who was wearing his favorite perfume. And she wore it every day. And every night he thought of her while he tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep, and he imagined she'd been the one to come to his room in Comity and take a swig of his poorly mixed screwdriver, and no one walked in on them. In that fantasy, she was soft under her armor, oh was she soft. She made his skin hum, just being near her, and he imagined she could bring him to life if she would only kiss him. Every night, after Comity, she did. And she didn't. Two weeks after the zombie case - one of those cases where Scully had been right, and he had been dead wrong, and they'd gotten an epic lecture from Skinner - Mulder got the call from Patterson. His fantasy life took on a significantly different tone. -- Fox Mulder joined the F.B.I. at a time when serial murderers were experiencing something of a vogue. Harris' 'Red Dragon' had just been adapted into Manhunter. People were obsessed with novels and true crime books about serial killers and their victims. And of course, there were constant copycats and false leads that kept F.B.I. profilers up to their johnsons in paperwork. So Reggie liked to say, anyway. Most everyone was fooled by the worst copycats for a time. Not Mulder. He sniffed out the phonies with aplomb, and made his partners (there were several) complain that things were getting missed. Nothing was getting missed, Mulder would insist and his supervisors would discover. The thing about Mulder was that he was really and truly a prodigy. No one had ever seen his like, and in all probability they never would again. The Monty Props profile was just the beginning. The other thing about Mulder was that he knew so much because it didn't take a great leap for him. He liked to skate just on the edges of his darkest side, and he had done so for a long, long time. Bill Patterson was fascinated by Fox Mulder. He read the kid's file, he knew there were volumes about him that didn't make the official record. His sister's disappearance, back then credited as a likely homicide, was given the barest of mentions. Bill Patterson glommed on, and he made Mulder miserable. He taunted, he teased, he held that match up to Mulder's arm to make him burn - or that was how it seemed. There was this case once, right at the end of Mulder's tenure as a profiler under Patterson. It involved little girls, like all the cases Patterson had begun throwing Mulder's way. Patterson knew his star pupil was going to hypno-therapy, and he knew why. He suspected that Mulder was remembering gruesome details about his sister's murder. Mulder found out about John Lee Roche in preternatural time. There were a lot of agents who resented him, for a lot of reasons, and when he solved the Roche case Mulder found he had more detractors than fans. Bill Patterson wasn't impressed, or if he was, he hid it well. Mulder had broken every rule to figure this one out. And he'd involved himself. Mulder got to know one victim's family so well he'd gotten a Christmas card from them. In his desk drawer, though, there were cloth hearts. Not the victims', not Roche's trophies, just facsimilies. And though Patterson had known, though he had practically led Mulder to delve that deep, he was unwilling to hold a hand out. That was how Fox Mulder came to be known as "Spooky." The way he'd read Roche's mind, the way he'd traveled the same route, knocked on the same doors, and had those damned hearts in his desk drawer. That was how he was reassigned. -- Working with Patterson once more was an exercise in demented self-loathing. Mulder knew the entire time what trap he was being led into, what kind of mind game Patterson was playing. He delved too deep. He dug up evil in himself and splashed it across the wall, chisel and clay be damned. Mulder was a performance artist, after all. He lived his art. Was it any wonder he was beginning to feel in his pocket for matches, as he stared once again at Mostow's studio walls, at the clay clinging to everything, that still clinged to Mulder's fingertips. Scully was impeccable in a cream suit and red blouse. Her eyes were shining and she was more radiant than she had been in months. She was wearing the perfume. All Mulder saw was a gargoyle. A twisted red dragon, and beneath it, a woman clothed in sun. Patterson was in jail, and had been since the night before. But Mulder had come back to the crime scene, watching the clean-up, desperate to see it all boxed away and buried for good, though deep down he knew nothing like this ever stayed buried. He wondered how long it would take for the demons to show themselves to him, really to him, not through someone like Patterson. He wondered if he would come out of it, or find himself with a razor handy. Scully watched him, let him muse. She had no idea what he was thinking, he knew. She so rarely did. She wanted to understand him, though. It made her different, and it made him want her to stay. "Mulder, let's call it a day. Let's go home." A woman clothed in sun. -- Patterson wrote to him from prison. A drawing of a twisted face, and something that resembled an apology. A thank you. -- Once upon a time, an enterprising and hungry F.B.I. agent named Fox Mulder fell in love with a dusty, creaking filing cabinet, and typed pages of scary stories and fairy tales. He got out of profiling every day when he discovered the X-Files. Diana was there, too, with her cool Kennebunkport good looks and her ready assent to every crazy scheme Mulder could throw at her. She wasn't long for Mulder's world, though, not really game for everything and only half-believing in the quest for the truth. She left, walked away not caring to say where she was going, and left him a note under the door. He was bound to the basement, dank as it was. The cases he solved were few and far between, because there was so little that was tangible, fathomable to the average mind. Mulder saw ghosts where others saw dust motes. He saw demons where others saw gargoyles. He saw vengeance where others saw compassion. Mulder did not want this. He wanted to come in at nine, leave at five, go for drinks with the boys. He wanted all the normalcy he could get. But he delved too deep, the filing cabinets nearly toppling over on him when there was no one there to keep him from digging. All the children who died because the monsters in the closet were real. All the young women who saw kindly strangers turn into vampires, werewolves. All the young men, seduced by harpies and ravaged by Medusa. Mulder saw them all, wanted to save them all, and he would die doing it. Yes, that would be his fate. To fall on the sword for Truth. Scully's arrival was not a moment too soon. First in the basement. Later in Mostow's studio. -- The writer William Saroyan once wrote, "How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?" It was a good thing for Mulder that, if that day came for him, Scully would be there. -- Scully came to the office the day after Bill Patterson's trial, and found Mulder staring at his desktop. She ignored him, at first, thinking him cat-napping. Upon inspection, she noticed he was staring at a small box on his desk. She looked closer. A box of razor blades. She said nothing, and sat down in the chair facing the desk, her customary perch. "I bought them yesterday, after the verdict." "So that's where you went. The drugstore. Didn't think you needed a shave that badly, Mulder." She wanted, she needed, to keep it light and not have it be anything worse. It could always be worse. "I haven't used a straight blade in years. My father loved them, he was good with them. I only remember him coming downstairs with toilet paper covering a nick once. Just once. The day after." The day after Samantha was taken. Mulder did not tell Scully about that day when he was fifteen. He didn't need to. She knew. It was not in any file, it wasn't even in a hospital record somewhere anymore. But Scully knew. "Hey Mulder?" "Yeah, Scully." "Let's get some air, grab some lunch. We can get to work on that new case you told me about, the one featuring tree moss and giant grubs." Mulder shook his head, as if to shake off a fly, and looked up at her. "You mean tree slugs, Scully." She smirked at him, eyes twinkling. He stood up, grabbed his overcoat, and they went out for lunch. ------ END MORE NOTES: Okay, so, I have always thought that Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels would fit in really well with X-Files canon, and I was partly inspired by "Red Dragon" and Dolarhyde's obsession with the William Blake paintings. The episode "Grotesque" recalls those paintings very specifically, I think, hence the reference to them in this story. The title is from Mulder's voiceover in the episode.