From: clone347@aol.com Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 13:09:58 EST Subject: xfc: NEW : Notions of The Infinite ---- by darkstar (1/1) Source: xfc Title : notions of the infinite Author : darkstar Email : clone347@aol.com Feedback : adored and craved Website : http://members.tripod.com/darkstar_phile/index_m.htm Archive : I would be honored, only please let me know what part of cyberspace this lil' baby's visiting so I can visit from time to time. Category : MSR, angst Spoilers : Everyone knows he's gone, right? And that Scully's pregnant? ok, good. Apart from that, there might be a stray "This Is Not Happening" spoiler here and there, but nothing too much. Rating : PG-13 for implications. Disclaimer : These two heroes belong to each other, and as long as Carter refuses to admit that, I will write fan fic for as long as I have so much as a napkin and a pencil stub. Author's Notes : I wasn't going to succumb to the lure of post-TINH fic, but the Muse wouldn't quite pestering me and this is the end result. It also gave me a chance to play around with a style of writing I don't usually use. Please let me know if it's a good experiment or a hideous mutation. Oh, and while I'm at it, I apologize for any prayers or Catholic references I might have messed up. I am not Catholic, but I did try to do my research, so I hope it will all be correct. Ok, I'm shutting up now so you can actually read the story. dedication : To David Hearne, Susan Frankovich, dlynn, and Smurf for writing such beautiful post-TINH fic and inspiring me to set forth on this little venture. summary : Walk the fire, child. Kiss the flame. There will still be moments when you are allowed to dream of snow, to pretend that you are innocent again. But only moments. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Notions of The Infinite (1/1) by darkstar - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I am moved by fancies that are curled around these images and cling : the notion of some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing. - Preludes TS Eliot This is the sound of snow-- a hushed flutter of dying butterfly wings floating down from the swollen chrysalis of a sky that has been gray too long. The butterflies have died, but their souls have not and she knows this because she sees the colors in the streaks of lilac and gold sparkling at the horizon. She recognizes sunrise as the beginning of a new day, the symbol of new life and miracle babies and all that is pure and good and innocent. /Baby/ he used to whisper in her ear, /you're the sunrise. All lit up like heaven and soft as butterflies but don't you tell the secret. Don't you tell a soul./ So she'd promised. Only he would ever know how delicate she was beneath the iron. Only he would know the true passion of the life within her veins. But now all she can hear is the sound of dead butterflies, falling, falling to the frozen ground, and she is about to break a vow. Six red candles burn on the windowsill. She is burning on the windowsill, a scarlet wax girl who begged to play in the fire and is only lately discovering that it is hot, so hot that it will melt you into something strange and frightening. Don't play with fire, child. Don't fall in love. Tell me now, she begs the raven outside the window, tell me which truly kills...the fire or the ice or the emptiness that would certainly come without the passion of the flame? Passion does not always mean a kiss, or a night of kisses; sometimes it means something better. Sometimes it means losing yourself into someone else, melting like the wax until you can't remember where you end and he begins. Until the connection is torn apart. Until they take him away and then throw his shell back at your feet, daring you to pick up the pieces. And you try, you try until your fingers bleed.... And when he opens his eyes, you wonder how long it will be before they take him again. You swear it will be never. This is the passion the candles understand. This is why they weep for her. Mama always said prayers for her over candles, a host of lullabies or pleading to saints for protection from skinned knees and bullies in the schoolyard and strangers with lollipops. The prayers continued, even when the skinned knees turned to skinned ideals, the bullies became faceless and endless, and the strangers were everywhere, offering candy dipped in blood. She remembers the prayer the night they had found his body, naked and torn in the grass. /Hail Mary, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we come, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears..../ And she had wanted to go and put her arms around her mother, and breathe in the scent of rose perfume and childhood memories, but she was so afraid that if she let one piece of the wall fall, the entire fortress would crumble. She knew Mama was right. There was no place for children of Even in the serpents world. Unless you counted Eden, but the gates were always locked. /We'll climb the fence, baby./ His voice, so strong and beautiful and blind with his love for the innocence of her. /I'll fight any angels that try to stop us and I'll pick you flowers from the stars./ She knows he could fight angels and win. Angels fought clean. Fair. Demons, on the other hand....they hit low and hard and dirty, sliding talons into all the hidden wounds and scars. Laughing, always, when the blood spills. The candles bleed, tiny red puddles of wax drip-drip-dripping off the window sill and onto her bare feet. The skin cools it to ruby ice before the pain can even faze her mind. She sees instead his blood, the color of it a deeper red than should have been, the sacrifice a higher cost than should have been paid. Especially for a world that hated him. Especially for her future. It was a profanity, a sacrilege. An unforgivable sin, that he should bleed and surrender to the creatures of nightmares just to prove the ultimate truth. Just to save her and her child from the coming wrath. One life given that another might be saved. He had known it was the only way. /You'll never go back./ He had told her, one night long ago when she was shivering in the dark, the needle scars fresh on her skin and three months missing from her mind. /It gives me nightmares at midnight, what they did to you. What they'd do again. But I'll never let it happen. They'll have to kill me./ /I don't want you to die for me, Mulder./ /I don't plan on it. Don't worry./ She had believed him, believed so fervently that love was enough and it would keep them safe forever. She had been wrong. In the first night after they found the body, she had begged for penance. Oh, she would do it all, she promised-- walk the streets of Jerusalem on hands and knees and broken glass, crawl up the stairs to the tombs to dead saints and place her lips against the rotted bones. She would dance through Purgatory barefoot until her skin blistered and peeled from her body and she walked on clean bone. Penance was granted. He was restored to her, though the life in him was yet fragile. Now it was time for her to pay the price. She accepted it. She convinced herself she did not fear it. Yet now that redemption is at hand, the path to the Holy Land laid out shimmering before her feet. It is worse than nosebleeds or killers in the bedroom, or demon metal in her neck. It is as simple as his words. /It gives me nightmares at midnight, what they did to you. What they'd do again./ There is a reason she sleeps with a gun under her pillow and the covers pulled tight to her chin, why she still flinches around needles and breaks into a cold sweat when the light in an autopsy bay glints just the right way off the medical instruments. It is the terror of violation. Of helplessness. Of exposure under white lights and cold eyes on your skin and no place to hide.... Only he sees her vulnerability. Only he is allowed to touch.... But if she chooses to take her penance, to save his soul by forfeiting her own, she will be exposed. And not only on the inside. /They stared so at your skin, in such clinical fascination as they poked and cut and watched the blood flow.../ She trembles, and wishes not for the first time that the snow would cover her, a lace veil of ice and crystals, that she can somehow close her eyes and no longer love him. She is not made of ice. She is wax, and she is fire, and it hurts, but never as much as the thought of losing him. Outside the window, the silent screams of falling butterfly wings continue to pile up snow drifts. She traces her fingers across the scarf he bought for her his first day back to work-- a translucent material the color of the sunrise she is supposed to be-- and her skin still echoes the lingering ghost of his fingers around her face as he draped it over her lips and kissed here. That was perfect happiness. That is gone. She pulls the scarf over her eyes and begs for darkness. For oblivion. Yet the material is thin as her sanity; she can see through it to the half-consumed candles waiting for her benediction. After all, no one enters hell without first pleading heaven's mercy. Maybe she begs for him. Maybe for herself, that she will not scream too loudly when they tear the scarf from her neck, that she will not flinch away in cowardice before the redemption is complete. Most of all it is t hat he will forgive her, after she has saved his life and destroyed his soul. He used to tell her she was his soul. Perhaps it is a selfish prayer to beg he will love her anyway, but she cannot keep herself from falling to her knees as the memories start to come. "Hall Mary, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope..." /It's raining, a slow, soft patter against the glass, and he's holding his child for the first time. The miracle is three weeks old, so tiny and fragile and beautiful you can hardly breathe. You watch him hold his daughter to his chest, rocking back and forth and singing Elvis off-key. You want to cry because it is so perfect. A smile would not be enough. "What's her name?" "Marie." "She's beautiful." His eyes turn back to you and suddenly you're burning in the fire you see in him. He's burning you alive and you love it. "Like her mother is beautiful." You want to tell him he is the beautiful one, despite the gray streaks at his temples and the white scars on his back and the old pain in his eyes. You want to tell him you love him. But you can't speak. You can't say anything at all. So you kiss him and hope your soul says what your lips can't../ "To thee do we come, poor banished children of Eve." /A week later, he shows up at your doorstep, his eyes wide and unnaturally bright and his breath ragged in his chest. "I dreamed." You take him inside and make peppermint tea because it's supposed to fix everything, and hold him in your arms as he tells you again of the horror. You cry, though it is not the first time you have heard. "Tell me it wasn't this bad for you." he whispered. "And if it was, tell me how you kept your sanity." "I couldn't remember. I guess I was lucky in that way. But it came back in dreams. The dreams told me enough...." "I'm so sorry you had to live it." His words are muffled against your shoulder. "I wouldn't want anyone to have to go through it, not even that cigarette-smoking monster." "It gets better, I promise." Your fingers run through his hair, trying to smooth away the fear. "Give it time." "Does it ever go away?" A long moment of silence. "No." "Do you still dream?" "Sometimes." "What is the worst?" The silence comes again, heavier against your throat, choking the words as you try to get them out. You owe him honesty. After all this time. "The exposure." Your words barely disturb the night. It's less than a whisper; it's the inversion of your soul, every ugly fear held up before him in the darkness. "I see them....staring....during the tests. At me. At my skin. And I can't do anything to stop it....and that dream never goes away...." His arms tighten around you. "The worst for me," he says. "is the thought that they might not want me next time. That they might want you. Or the baby. That all of it will have been in vain...." "Don't talk about the next time. There won't be one." "You don't know that." "I believe it anyway." And then he whispers that you don't have to be afraid, that he is here and he will always be. This is the first moment you realize what love is. The moment you realize he would go back to the nightmare just to keep your skin from their eyes.// She twists her fingers together until the skin stretches in knots of flesh and bony sorrow as the stream of Past rushes to a climax. As she is swept away. "To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." Valley of tears. Valley of the shadow. She cannot find the light. /Two nights later, fate is sealed. An anonymous note slipped under the office door.... They Are Coming Again. A blur of throwing clothes and extra weapons clips and baby food into a duffel bag and hitting the road. Driving so fast you can barely see the road. He can't drive. His hands are shaking too hard, even though he tries to hide it. You can feel his fear. In the back seat, Marie cries like she feels it too. Like she knows what's after them, and that she might have to grow up without a daddy after all. You grit your teeth and push the car up to eighty miles an hour. Swearing it won't happen again. Vowing to stop it. Half-memories of sitting on the toilet of a gas station restroom, balancing Marie across your knees as you cut the implant from the back of your neck. Can't let them use you to get to him. Can't take the risk. It takes half a roll of paper towels before the blood flow stops, but after that a simple Band-Aid hides the transgression. You tell him it took a while to get Marie to eat. You hate the taste of the lie. Eight hours later, you lie face down on a dirty motel bed that smells of tequila and tobacco, and you wonder if your head aches because of the stench or because the cancer is already returning. He comes to kiss you again, through the scarf in the normal ritual, and you see the love burn in his eyes. This time, it hurts.// "Turn then...thine eyes of mercy toward us." Mercy is to die quickly, or not to die at all, or to neither die nor live but fly, fly up into the secret places of the stars and dance in his arms. Never to sleep in fear again. She does not expect such mercy. But she does crave it. She is still human. For now.... "Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, Regina..." /Baby you're the sunrise. All lit up like heaven and soft as butterflies./ "Pray that we may be made worthy...." /Walk the fire, child. Kiss the flame. Either you will come out on the other side pure as gold and deserving of his love, or you will not come out at all. Do you remember how much the fire hurts?" "Yes." she whispers, aloud, as she rises to her feet. "Yes, I do." She remembers yesterday morning, coming out of the shower with her hair wet and her skin flushed to find the letter sitting on the bed. He'd gone to buy breakfast, leaving her alone with Marie and the dread that they had been discovered after all. Because she cannot wrap her mind fully around fate, because she is perhaps hoping it is a dream and she can awake, she picks up the letter that calls her to hell. How they were discovered, she'll never know, but when you have the resources of the world's greatest evil at your fingertips, anything is possible. Even kidnapping and medical torture. Even an exchange of life for life. Agent Scully, Time is brief, so we will not linger on formalities. You know we have the location of you and Agent Mulder and the child. You know there are certain forces that again desire him for their scientific research, as he is considered a very valuable specimen that is key to the advancement of their agenda. It is apparent to us, however, that he has greater use alive and among us. We are prepared to offer you a deal. We will negotiate with the powers that be for his release if you will agree to participate in the research in his place. The vaccine in your blood makes you quite the bargaining chip, and we are confident they will listen. You may not negotiate with us or bargain with us. It will be a simple exchange....you for him. If you accept, come alone to the address given at the end of this letter. You have exactly twenty-four hours to respond. We do not need to remind you that if you jeopardize the research by informing anyone of this exchange, the deal is off. Mulder will be delivered to them again within hours. This time we doubt he will survive. You do not want to lose him anymore than we do. Kindest regards, Friends of CGB Spender. 1121 Altman Dr. Orpheus Warehousing and Shipping. She crumples the letter and puts it back into her pocket, her eyes closed under the weight of the words. So it is true, after all, that demons sometimes wear the bodies of men and walk among the living world. They exploit the fears of men and rip the flesh and twist love until it causes good little girls to bow their heads and strip away their innocence piece by piece. Of course, their logic makes perverted sense, when perceived through their eyes. Mulder was always useful to their cause, a convenient hero to fight the battles they were so afraid to. After all, someone has to save humanity so they can take credit for it. Once she is gone, she knows he will see nothing but the battle. He would not care how much they beat him down, just as long as he drew his own pint of their blood in return. Which they know he will. She is not such a threat. They think she is fragile, an easily broken woman who will submit to the monsters after the first few beatings. They think her week. She looks into the mirror, the lines of her lips twisting into a broken glass smile. Frightened? Oh yes. But submissive? The smile scrapes across her face to reveal the defiance in her eyes. It is his defiance, mingled with her own. So much of them is made up of the other. Let them try to beat him out of her, if they think they can. Let them try. She turns from the mirror to blow the candles out, the thin gray smoke lingering in front of the window like the ghosts of a prayer. She feels even more like a ghost than she will let herself admit, as if the demons have possessed her soul even before she surrenders her body. Her fingers dig a crumpled white enveloped out of her pocket and places it carefully beside his still sleeping form. It is her confession to him, when he awakes to her find gone. It is the story of a wax-girl who fell in love with a fire-god, but who was not afraid to melt. She seals it with a kiss to his forehead. So light, so gentle. So inadequate a goodbye, but if he wakes she knows she will never be able to leave. /Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Of his peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Our love. Grant that I may not seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand..../ Her fingers trace the outline of his face, a mere brush of skin to skin, as she tries one last time to memorize his every feature. Not that she could ever forget. /To be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned./ A kiss on Marie's perfect little lips, a soul-deep sigh for the daughter she has but will never have, for the mother she will never get to be. Already she feels barren without the child against her chest. Already, she feels naked even though her skin is not exposed. /For it is in dying that we are born to life eternal./ She blinks back the tears and walks away. And this is the sound of snow-- a silence that smothers silence. A million tiny screams that no one hears. They are screams. She has been shattered, broken into delicate fragments of lace and ice and she is falling from the sky, falling like a kiss of snow. Heaven is so far away and the pavement below is so rough. The door shuts behind her and the sound is swallowed up by the frozen emptiness that remains. Three hours later, she is standing in front of a rusty metal door, the rapping of her fists against the steel almost as loud as the pounding of her heart against her rib cage. The fear batters against the walls of her defenses, a slow and incessant breaking down of resolve. It's so strange how the light plays tricks on your eyes. When the first demon opens the door, he looks human. His face is the face of a boy, much younger than she-- they do like to twist the young ones, don't they-- and his eyes rest strangely against hers. It is not hate. Hate is what her eyes spit at him. It is not fear. Fear is what her pupils hide from him. It might be sympathy, and that is something she might share with him. A pity at the other's fate. He believes it is better to wield the gun. She believes it is better to be human and bent than to be a monster and remain unscarred. Then the light shifts again. He becomes nothing more than a demon, and as she follows him into the building she remembers how much she hates them all. When the others look at her, she sees no hate. Or fear. Or sympathy. Only greed, a vicious sort of hunger, almost lust. It leaves a thick rust-brown smear of corruption wherever their eyes touch. Not for the first time, she fights the urge to tremble. They smile at her. The smiles are those of a man she remembers from childhood, a man who stood on the street corner and offered to give little girls a piece of candy if they let him take their picture. /They little girl you sat beside you in catechism class took the candy. They found her body three days later and the killer died on death row./ She imagines these are all ghosts of that man. She does not have to pretend it is the same kind of evil. /Hey, sweetie./ The voice again calls her. /Come over here and talk to me for a minute. I've got some candy for you. Just for you C'mon angel. Let me see those big blue eyes up close./ This time her mother is not there to pull her back into the car. She is alone. Again the strangers offer candy and she will take it. She hears his voice in the back of her mind, pleading with her to run. Pleading with her not to give in. Inside her head, it is the sound of spikes being driven through the bones of wrists, through the bones of feet, all the way through to the other side. She is nailed to love, kept in place by guilt. It is the sound of pain, ten thousand fingernails grating across a tin roof, the most terrible thing she has heard in her life. As if his souls feels hers tearing, straight down the middle, and tears along with it. As if he already feels the pain. She cannot listen to him. She cannot look into the memories of his eyes. She wants to stop her ears and run back to the snow and the candles and a place where she is his innocence rather than his Jezebel. There is no such place left. How does she beg forgiveness when she has already left his side? She does not know. But she tries, though. She tries. Inside her mind, he is still screaming when they take her, leaving his body safe asleep in bed. Leaving him alive, leaving the child alive, though she is already dead. Four hours later. The light hurts. It burns her, this abyss of white, scalding hot, light. It cuts through her eyelids; sears holes in her brain. This is the first test and they all want to watch. They all want to stare at the blood welling up from the needle marks. Nothing will be secret anymore; the light reveals all. She closes her eyes and tries to remember a time when white was beautiful. He gave her white roses once, two dozen of them lying across her desk with a tiny card attached. For My Angel. /Baby, you're the sunrise. All lit up like heaven and as soft as butterflies. But don't you tell the secret. Don't you tell a soul./ It's a little late for that. The sunrise has been lost; a vow shattered. His scarf is only the first thing they made her take off. /There will be moments, yes, when you are allowed to dream of falling snow and pretend you were always pure. But only moments. Does he know how much you love him? Does he know?/ Not yet, she thinks, as she stares down at her naked fingers. But he will. He will. finis. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - So what did you think? Decent? In need of improvement? Is the writing style a thing I should continue or something I should kill before it mutates any further? Please, tell me what you think. All questions, comments, and Mulder-pictures can be sent to clone347@aol.com. Send me feedback and watch the Muse and I dance for joy. :) thanX for reading. darkstar