From: Ursula Luxem Date: 10 Jun 1999 06:49:24 -0700 Subject: xfc NEW: The Myth of Firewalking (1/1) From: Ursula Luxem Title - The Myth of Firewalking (1/1) Author - Ford and Ursula Luxem E-Mail - mmckenzie@dll-lever.com Category - V Archive- Gossamer, Yes, All others please link Feedback: All public and private feedback welcome. Disclaimer: All characters from the X-Files are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and Fox Television Network. All other characters belong to the authors. Similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her; For I'll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound... Othello The Myth of Firewalking Night enveloped the car like black silk dropped from a magician's hand. Satiny shadows encase me in suffocating anonymity. Now you see me; now you don't. Stakeouts make me believe I'm invisible. One forlorn bare bulb glows dim through frosted glass. My only reference point in an endless sea of nothing. I am the light: compromised, but still burning. Crammed into the driver's seat of this rented Chevy Cavalier, Mulder sleeps soundly. He could sleep on broken glass if need be. I wish I could. Just sleep. I watch his chest rise and fall with primeval rhythm. So much good simmers just under the surface of that complex facade. The ability to love and be loved, the capacity to comfort, and to understand. But he is afraid. He lives his life with videos, with phone sex lines, with off-hand innuendoes lobbed in my direction, secure in the knowledge I won't take him up on the unspoken offer. Not good old dependable - sensible - Dana. I'm not judgmental. We are all human. Some of us more so than others. I just don't need any special accouterments. I have to admit nights spent pouring over current medical journals - the note taking, source checking, and refutation writing numbness of it all - makes rebuffing him a lot harder these days. Now, more than ever, I need affirmation of my femininity. Restless, I wriggle, mindful of the silk stifling my legs. The insensitive Sig, sheathed in its leather holster, thrusts against my back, an ever present reminder. Mulder's head lolls, his breath steams abstract patterns against the side glass. I see his eyelids flicker in REM sleep and wonder what prowls his dreams. I can save him. I can save him from them as well. Then I imagine myself dropped into a contorted alternate reality: snarled in apron strings, the child that should never have been propped on my hip, heels drumming my legs, chubby hand entangled in my hair, baby drool staining my clothes while the perfect apple pie cools on the window sill. All for that brooding hunk of man I'd call Fox. It really makes the Flukeman thing seem far more plausible. The last few years have been like parading across hot coals. A ritual still carried out to this day by shamans and medicine men. Closer to home it borders on a new religion. Westerners with a Zen complex, monitored by teams of eager grad students looking to polish off their dissertation in thermodynamics. To the untrained eye, firewalking is a feat accomplished only by the blessed. The scientist knows better. The thicker skin on the soles of our feet, and the coals themselves are poor heat conductors. Add the small amount of time the feet actually spend in contact with the hot embers and you get less hocus-pocus and all physics. Mulder believes in mind over matter, that we just don't know what special powers we have, and that we can control 1600- degree heat with a mere thought. To Mulder, it's always magic. That's the gaping chasm that lies between us. Someone has to remind me it's not always smoke and mirrors. But in the end, there's only one thing that will let you take that first step onto a bed of glowing embers. Faith. Be it in science, or in hope. The last six years went by in a dream. I feel the outsider, watching my life unfold with the same detached manner I'd approach a routine autopsy. Subject: Dana Scully. Female Caucasian... Only when faced with death, did I ever find the need to write down my thoughts, to discover and catalogue and assign them. I realized with a start I'd wanted precious little out of life: To have made my father proud, to become half the woman that is my mother. That was a long time ago. Before they sawed me in two and left me to face the curtain call incomplete. Quiet times like this I feel the damn chip skulking dormant inside me. It's an affront, on every conceivable level. It offends my science, my rationalism, my very being. I am chained to that chip, chained to *them*, chained to a fate. I'll never be able to call my life my own while it waits. I tiptoe across the tightrope, one hand grasping at air. And by God, it's a long way down. Life can be sadistic, ironic. When cancer invaded my body, I fought. Fought like hell to live out my greatest fear - the fear of being old and alone in the dark. Robbed of my children, looking back over a life that was never mine to choose. There comes a time when even the strong cry 'Mercy'. Enough is enough. We ask ourselves in the velvety, suffocating thick of the night - why are we resisting? Nobody wants to fight for us. Mulder finally stirs. He gives me a vague look, that briefest of moments when his eyes reflect the untouched child within. Eventually, I see reality dawn in his wide eyes. He's just realizing I'm not inflatable. My gaze again turns to the glow. Far away, and burnished gold, obscured through the dirty glass. One tiny blaze, kindled. I am reminded. Hot embers begat flames, and flickering sparks will devour darkness. They can never win. One tiny light is enough. END feedback: mmckenzie@dll-lever.com more stories: http://www.dll-lever.com/icarus/