From: cucumberspy Date: 28 Jul 2001 20:15:22 -0700 Subject: new fic: like a string around my finger Source: atxc CLASSIFICATION: sad story. MSR. gobs and gobs of scullyangst. sorry scully. TIMELINE: post-S8 RATING: PG FEEDBACK: pleeeease!! good, bad, whatever!! i can never get better if no one tells me what i'm doing wrong.... =) cucumberspy@yahoo.com ARCHIVE: gossamer yes, ephemeral yes. anywhere else, just let me know and keep my name and notes attatched, please NOTES: lo siento... i did not have this beta read. i am seeking a beta-reader, however, and would be willing to return the favor. NOTES, II: this was going to be a response to my own challenge, but then i found a scene in there that sorta violated the rules (although it *could* work with a stand-in, some whispering and a little bit of clever cinematography... ahh... the power of suggestion....but that is tv and this is text. so.) i tried rewriting it, but it didn't want to go. so... yeah. SUMMARY: mulder's gone again, and scully's got to cope. ############### like a string around my finger (01/01) by cucumberspy When the phone rang, she forgot to exhale. Will squealed at her and spit up a little bit of curdled milk, so she dabbed his chin. She glared at the phone, feeling somewhat like an alcoholic about to fall off the wagon. After three rings, she stood, stalked over, picked up the receiver and dropped it back onto the cradle, relieved. She scooped Will out of his highchair and set him in his playpen so she could wash her face. The razor--his--was still in her medicine cabinet, and she meant to throw it away, but every time she dropped it into the trash can, she had to pick it up and put it back. She skated her fingers lightly over the blue plastic, then grabbed her washcloth and started scrubbing her face. * For my son, on his 12th birthday. Dear Will, I don't know how to even begin this letter. Maybe the first thing I'll write is what I want you to know above all else. I love you. I mean to burn this as soon as I get back, because if things go the way I hope, you won't need to read that I love you in a letter. I'll be around to tell you so. But if I'm not there, then I know I owe you an explanation. Funny, most of my life, I never really felt like I owed anyone an explanation, with the occasional exception of your mom. 'They' say that parenthood makes you more responsible, and I think they're right. You're my son, and I want--I need--you to believe that I didn't just walk away. * She kept his things. At first, she kept everything, wedged into boxes and crammed into her spare room. Before that, actually, she threw everything away--tried to, anyways--moving like a tsunami through his apartment, smashing glasses and coffee mugs to splinters in the bottom of a cardboard box that stood waist high and served as a small dumpster. She tore down the books and kicked over piles of magazines, swept off his coffee table every object that had the audacity to sit there, as if he were going to come home again. As if. When she yanked his suits down and thrust them into paper grocery sacks, she thought, I should donate them to Salvation Army. She carried everything out to the real dumpster instead. She peeled her hair away from her face, rubbing a sweaty hand along her forehead. A man stopped to ask her, "Can I help you ma'am?" And she had growled at him, "I'm fine!" Lurched down to heft up the last box, but she had barely been able to drag it out. Full of books! Books! So she snatched them out and hurled them into the dumpster, 'til her thumb caught in the spine of one and a page like a very fine razor slit her finger, deflated her. She jammed her finger into her mouth to catch the blood, sinking down to weep atop the box of books. It was all just too much. * Please believe that I did what I did because I love you and your mother. Please believe that these are the words of a sane man living in an insane world, and not mutterings of some conspiracy-consumed paranoiac. * She meant to keep the fish. She even called PETSMART and took careful notes as the man on the other end explained how to safely transport it. She pushed her sleeves back to her elbows and billowed the bag open until the vortex burst and water gushed in. Rather like the reverse of a birth. But the point was that it was the same water, the same temperature, to avoid shocking the creature, so said the man from PETSMART. Gripping the edge of the plastic in her left hand, she forced the net through the water, quickly trapping the surviving fish. It flopped and jerked and seized in the net. She dipped the net into the bag and wiggled it until the fish darted out, careening down to the bottom of the bag. If fish could pant, she thought, this one looks like it's panting. She knotted the top, leaving the bubble of air like the man from PETSMART had said to. She put the bag into a bucket, put the bucket on the kitchen counter, away from the sun. She siphoned all the water out and wrestled the tank over into the bathtub to be scrubbed the tank clean with a fresh sponge and no soap. Just like the man from PETSMART had advised. Loaded it all into her car. She almost wished she had accepted any one of several offers of help Doggett, Reyes, the Gunmen, Skinner, her mother. But only almost. She had her key half into the ignition when she realized she'd left the fish (which she had already begun calling Marvin) on the kitchen counter, and a near-hysterical giggle bubbled out. The fish, of course. She skidded back up and brought Marvin down and set his bucket on the floor in front of the passenger seat. William would like a pet, she thought, and smiled. She could see him patting the glass of the tank and burbling happily. But when she pulled into her parking spot and lifted up the bucket, she found Marvin bobbing at the top. DOA, her mind supplied. Dead on arrival. That's what you get for naming it, she thought, and blinked. She touched her cheeks, unsurpised to find them damp. She ended up giving the tank to a neighbor and flushing Marvin down the toilet. * Once upon a time, in 1992, a young FBI agent was assigned to work on a project called the X-Files unsolved cases pertaining to the supernatural and paranormal. The man she was partnered with had lost his sister years ago, in what he believed to be an alien abduction, and he'd been looking for her ever since. She was the right combination of brilliant and logical and beautiful, and the powers that be assigned her to completely unravel his work. They underestimated her. They figured that she would care more for her career than for working too long with a man they called "Spooky." She didn't. She stuck around, even though Spooky ditched her, dismissed her, needed her so desperately that when she was gone he couldn't function. Maybe that should have been the scariest part. But she was brave. She might never recount to you all that she lost to our quest a sister, a child, even three months of her life erased and unreclaimable. She was abducted, returned comatose, left barren, given cancer. But she never gave up. I want you to know how special your mother is. * For a while, she couldn't stand the smell of take-out. Or pizza. She couldn't eat yogurt with bee pollen. She couldn't eat any of the things that reminded her of him. The Thai place they visited for his birthday one year was tainted. Denny's was out of the question. Gas stations were the worst because they sold sunflower seeds, and after years of always grabbing a bag, she would find herself standing at the counter with a package, not knowing how she got there or when she picked it up. This is when she started liking Japanese food, with its simplicity. The soups were clear and the rice bright and steamy white. She favored wasabi, the horseradish that made her nose run. She started buying packages of paper-crisp nori seaweed and avocados and a rice steamer, even a gallon can of Kikkoman Soy Sauce. It was her three a.m. snack. By pale refrigerator light, she'd spread out her materials on the kitchen table, Will cradled against her breasts, sucking happily. She would tear off pieces of nori, plop down a spoonful of rice, a scrap of avocado, a drizzle of soy sauce and a dab of wasabi, crumble it all together and shove it into her mouth. Repeat. The wasabi always burned a little, but it was a good burn. Clean. Sometimes, she ate it plain and tried not to remember that she was alone. * She never ever gave up. Because she is the strongest person I know. * She sloshed her hands through the lukewarm water, drizzling it over William. He cooed and made baby noises at her, gripping her right index finger with a baby smile. He was too happy, and he couldn't have understood the tears gathering under her eyelashes. "I love you," she cooed back, teasing him with her fingers, jiggling his chubby baby toes. "Yes I do." She smiled and patted his belly, lifting him up to rinse off the last of the suds. He grappled for her left hand, gasping at the shiny wedding band around her fourth finger. Suddenly, it was too much, and her nose was running and she was crying, even as she toweled the baby. "Oh Mulder," she whispered. "You were wrong." * I spent my whole life trying to reclaim the family I lost when my sister was abducted, never thinking that I was tearing down all the chances for the family I would someday have. * She owned a lighter now, like Monica. A little slip of neon green plastic, translucent so the lighter fluid sloshing around inside was visible. She bought it three months ago along with a carton of Morleys in a fit of hysterical irony. She thought she might take up smoking, but found she couldn't stand the cigarette taste any more than she had at thirteen. The Morleys remained shoved at the back of her underwear drawer, while she lit William's birthday candle with the lighter. * Tonight, I'm writing by nightlight. Every now and then, I stretch up to peek at you sleeping. I wonder who you'll grow up to be. I wonder if you'll miss me, if you resent me for leaving. Do you? I wonder if you play basketball and wish I could be around to see if you have any interest in Little League. I wonder if you'll have your mother's keen rational mind or my illogical intuitiveness. I wonder if you'll hate math but devour books with fightening speed. I wonder who your best friend will be and what kind of music you'll play to drive your mom crazy. I wanted so much to be there for all of this. I don't regret my life and the way I spent it, not much. I can't begrudge my quest too much, cause it brought me your mom and you. But I would trade in every X-File if I knew it meant that we could live in yuppie suburbia, insignificant and unaware and, most importantly, safe. Instead, the options presented are far less enticing. I've become The Man Who Knew Too Much. * On Friday, she ate lunch with her mom. William cooed and gurgled at the waitress, a girl who looked like she was still in college. She watched as the waitress brought their order and then untied her apron and sat down with her boyfriend two tables away. Her mom called her Dana too much, but she wanted to say, "I'm not Dana, call me--" only she couldn't imagine what her mom should call her. She still flinched when people called her "Agent Scully" or "Dr. Scully". Professor. That was neutral. She laughed a little, imagining her mom's reaction to *that*. So she said nothing, and nodded at the right places and gave a quiet report of William's first babblings, first words and watched the waitress and her boyfriend giggle and flirt and hold hands. * In a few hours, I will leave our apartment to try and make a deal. My silence for our peace. I know things about their Consortium, their conspiracy, just enough that I might have some room to bargain. They might decide to dispose of me anyways, on the fear that I would continue our research outside of the FBI. But there has always been a risk in our line of work, and the chance for us to be a family is well worth the risk. * Now she whittled away boxes one Saturday at a time, dumping the contents out over her living room floor. Sometimes, she liked to pretend she was excavating, that if she dug long enough and hard enough, she'd find him buried somewhere. Of course, that was as ridiculous as Jurassic Park. There were photographs one album of his family, and then a two clipped newswire photos, one of the two of them and one of just her. Glossy black and whites from crime scenes her crouched by a corpse, latex-gloved fingers prodding. She swallowed, remembering that case, and quickly flipped the photo over. A Poloroid of them together, laughing, taken at some nameless and long forgotten-but-required Bureau function. A very old Polaroid, judging by her hairstyle... longer, softer. Some other Dana Scully, not her. We used to smile so completely, she observed. It had been a long time. It had been such a long time. Even in the single wedding photo (another Polaroid) you would have had to add up the wispy upturn of lips offered by both bride and groom to get something that could count as a whole smile. The couple in the picture stood so straight, so scared, as if stifling tears. The wedding had not been a wedding, but a hasty civil service sealed with the scrawl of a pen, a trace of a breathless kiss, and fingers that gripped hers so hard she thought her bones might snap, but she wouldn't have cared. The numbness at her fingertips was proof that they were still together. He didn't let go of her hand for at least an hour, and then, only so she could feed William. He was afraid of breaking down, he explained later afraid that if he kissed her he'd never come up for air, afraid that if he let go of her she would dissolve. Or he would dissolve. It could happen, things could go wrong, and he might never come back, they knew that. (Wasn't that always the risk, after all?) And it was their wedding night, so she kissed him with the full intention of suffocating, at least a little, at least enough to kill a couple hundred brain cells. * Please, please understand. Love, Dad * On Will's second birthday, she dragged three boxes full of files, disks, and printouts (each labeled TOYS or FOR WILL) into her bedroom and called the Gunmen to leave a message. She would begin her research in the evening, just as she had agreed. Then she strapped Will into his stroller and took him to Chin's Chinese. A smell of grease and egg rolls clung to the air, but she sat down and ordered a carton of lo mein, and they ate with their fingers while she explained to him that this is what she used to eat with his father. -30-