From: "J H" Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2000 20:33:20 PDT Subject: NEW [The Scream] [1/1] by Juniper Source: xff TITLE: The Scream (1/1) AUTHOR: Juniper E-MAIL: juniper74@hotmail.com DISTRIBUTION: Archive anywhere; if you have time, I'd love a note. SPOILERS: Fight the Future (yes, I know I'm running more than a year behind!) RATING: PG CLASSIFICATION: V, A, Mulder/Scully UST SUMMARY: What does a scream look like? DISCLAIMER: The X-Files and the characters of Mulder and Scully and are the property of Chris Carter, 1013, and FOX. They are used here without permission. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is set during FTF, and before Season 6. This was inspired by an interpretation I read of Edvard Munch's painting 'The Scream' that practically begged to be applied to FTF (you know, painting, art criticism, the X Files, it's all so *obviously* connected). FEEDBACK: I'm a scaredy-cat, so it's most appreciated. Feedback to juniper74@hotmail.com. The Scream (1/1) Fox Mulder heard the scream. It washed over him as he lay unresponsive in the hospital bed. This was not uncommon. He often heard her scream. He was a connoisseur of sorts: his sleeping mind frequently flipped through a catalogue of them, sorting and sifting and stacking them according to subtle nuances of pitch, length, intensity, terror. Some were real: muffled horror recorded on his answering machine, breathy gasps re-induced by hypnotic regression. Some were simply imagined--fictional, but no less horrifying: How did she scream when Donnie Phaster ran her off the road in Minneapolis? Did she scream in her own chemotherapy-induced dreams? Screams did not always portend horror, he knew, having emitted what could only be called a girlie scream himself every now and again. Accordingly, his imagination was often enchanted by the profoundly un-Scully-like, girlish shriek that she had emitted once when caught in a sudden downpour. The low, staccato, exhaled-scream he knew she would make someday when he finally made her come had eased him out of countless nightmares, out of darkness. This scream was ever-present in that moment before his waking mind was disappointed by what it realized anew each morning were nothing more than manufactured images of the impossible. Still, when her screams made their way to his mind at night, clearly and crisply like this one, the sudden impact of a new arrival could tip over the card catalogue in his mind so that he heard them in concert, a symphony of horror, an orchestra forever tuning, louder and louder, in a gruesome crescendo. *** Special Agent Dana Scully, MD, would know that a scream was in many cases a reflex, the mind's way of enlisting the body's help in the task of immediate self-preservation. One wasn't able to think about screaming in advance, one simply screamed, unaware. This was why she hated it. Now, however, Special Agent Dana Scully, MD, was nowhere to be found, and Scully--just Scully--screamed. In a split second, awakened, lost, cold, immobilized, alone, and, she realized with a sudden, palpable terror rising inside her mind: frozen. Antarctica is silent. Life bows, muzzled, before its brute geography. A scream into the Antarctic sky would travel far, encountering no barriers, zipping through the thin air as it echoes. But her scream was trapped in the ice; it never had a chance. It stalled, suspended around her, in waves of horror: crystallized concentric circles nested around her body. Perhaps if she willed it hard enough, if she descended headfirst into the terror, she could push it out. Perhaps it wasn't frozen, just slowed. She tried again, screaming for him. She waited. Half a world away, Fox Mulder got out of a hospital bed. Finally, a voice: I can hear you. She slept, warmed by the layers of the scream. *** Mulder recognized the scream when he saw it: eyes wide, etched with fear, mouth flash-frozen halfway through. It matched the one that had penetrated his drug-induced stupor so many hours ago. To see a scream is something quite apart from hearing it, however. A silent scream entrapped in ice, bracketing a figure, encasing it in perpetual horror is not something that is easily contemplated. Or ever forgotten. As he pounded away the layers of ice, he expected to hear it again, somehow: he expected the cracked ice to have unleashed it anew. Instead, though, it came out transformed, a new addition to his collection. Breathless, barely-whispered: "Cold." Cold, yes, cold. But the world was right again. The scream had been filed away, returned to its proper realm of the un-seeable. He'd restored order to the library in his mind. His card catalogues of memory and fantasy had been turned right-side up, the drawers neatly closed, labeled. Everything in its place, catalogued and easily referenced. For now, anyway. (end 1/1) juniper74@hotmail.com