Sweet Nothings for the Numb by Amalnahurriyeh, commentary by Wendelah1, Part 1/3
Title: Sweet Nothings for the Numb
Author: amalnahurriyeh
Fandom: The X-Files
Commentator: wendelah1
Anything that was originally posted under flock or in email has been quoted here with the permission of the author.
"Sweet Nothings for the Numb", without commentary.
I. Curse and Salvation
Scully lies in the dark and traces her fingers over the skin of her stomach, above the pad of fat cradling her uterus, orphaned and alone the last soldier fighting, radio silent, unaware the war has already been lost. It's not that the knowledge of her infertility is still surprising. She has been a dutiful student of her reproductive system since med school. The complexity of the signs an ovulating body gives had fascinated her, and she had gone on a six-month charting binge, complete with minutely descriptive notes on her cervical mucus and even the purchase of a tiny microscope to track the faint ferning in her saliva. So when she had gone six weeks without a period after her abduction, her body giving no signs of any sort of cycle, she had visited her OB/GYN, and endured the four weeks of ultrasounds and hormone panels without much hope. It still stabbed her now and then, though, when her artificial period brought on very real cramps, when the teenager behind the pharmacy counter had the gall to look shocked that the prescription for estrogen and medroxyprogesterone was being filled by a woman under fifty, when she got another baby announcement from a college or med school friend. It's then that she feels the weight of it, the sudden and surprising aloneness. She knows grief is normal; she knows her life is rich and complete without a child, and she would probably never have had one anyway. But alone is what she feels, no matter how much she tries to think it away.
I like how Amal addresses the time period in which Scully would have had to have become aware that she was no longer ovulating. She is a doctor, so it isn't an issue she would have just ignored. The grief she feels about the loss of her fertility is entirely normal. Even if she never expected to have children of her own, having that choice taken away was painful; moreover, as Amal indicates, she relives it over and over, in many different ways.
Today the stabbing grief wears a small girl's face, tastes like gritty sand between her teeth. Emily, who she loved with an urgency she had never expected and missed with a bewildered ache. She knew almost nothing about her: not whether she fought against baths or begged for more time in the water, not if she laughed when tickled or talked to her stuffed animals, not her favorite book or song, not even where her body had been taken. It didn't matter; the loss had scratched her open and left her psychic skin oozing. She had a daughter, and she will never have her again, and she knows that she cannot have another. Nothing makes sense and everything hurts in this, the story of her impossible daughter.
Now the grief is magnified. The word is made flesh, the loss that was only a theoretical one is now an all too real child of flesh and blood. Her dead child. The taste of gritty sand brings the reader back to the dream sequence that is the teaser to "Emily," as well as to the sand inside Emily's coffin, which was left inside to disguise that her corpse was stolen. In my personal canon, this is a recurring dream for Scully.
But she lives her life in a world where she is forced to investigate ten impossible things between breakfast and lunch, where the unexplainable is a regular occurrence, where the strange occupies the jump seat in the back of any number of rented Tauruses. And it is because of that life that she is absolutely convinced that the one man in the world who could impregnate her when it is impossible is Mulder. That motherfucker, who knew how this had happened and never thought to mention it, who did what she asked him to and sulked about it ever since she found Emily; he is her curse and her salvation in equal parts, the answer to the problems he himself has caused.
Mulder really is infuriating in that episode. I just wanted to smack him, too, Scully.
He is asleep downstairs on Bill's couch; he never bothered with getting a hotel room, and merely shuttled back and forth between hospital and investigation, trailing her home, unwilling to leave her alone. He was the first person she saw after Emily died; he was in the hallway, slumped in a chair, staring at the pediatric playroom, where sick children played weakly with their mothers, their laughter muted by glass. He heard her steps and turned towards her. "I need to find a funeral home," she said quietly.
"I'll get you a phonebook," he said.
By the count of the pills in her suitcase she is on cycle day 15, which was the day she would ovulate back when that was possible. Her traitorous, lying body roils under the skin, tempting her with the prospect of fecundity. She imagines the lushness of endometrial tissue like a feather bed, waiting for the burrowing future. If there is anyone who could bring this back, it's the bastard sleeping at the foot of the stairs.
Wait. Scully, Mulder. I think this is a bad idea.
She stands and goes to him, vibrating with lust and furor. She expected him on the couch, head limp, lost to his own private world, but he is in the armchair, knees splayed, and either he wasn't sleeping either or he heard her coming because he is watching her turn into the living room. His eyes are red, which ratchets up her rage; he has no right to anything he is feeling right now. "Scully," he says softly. "Are you okay?"
Scully, I know what you are thinking here but it doesn't work that way.
"That," she says, "is an incredibly stupid question." He never even got undressed, is sitting there still in the remnants of his funeral suit. His unbuttoned collar shows the hollow of his neck, shaded and soft in the dark of the living room. She stands in front of him, unclear on what to say or do to communicate what she wants, unclear on what any of this is going to accomplish. He stays perfectly still and watches her watch him, and she hates the love and sympathy that vibrates in him, hates that it strikes some pitch in her that wants desperately to ring back. She unbuttons her pajama top and lets it fall to the ground. His eyes stray to her breasts, but he stays still. She pushes down her pants and leaves them in the pile with the top. He swallows. She steps in between his legs, and he presses his legs in until his thighs brush hers. Without saying anything, he leans forward and kisses her stomach just below her navel. His lips are soft, and then his tongue is hot and his teeth are sharp. His fingers slide under the elastic of her underpants and pull them down her legs, and then creep back up to tease her pubic hair. She feels tears in the back of her throat and digs her fingers into the back of his head, wants to laugh as he noses down her belly a little, as if he's really that desperate to taste her pussy. He slides off the chair to the floor and grips her hips, uses his nose to open her up, swipes his tongue across her clit. He is slow, thorough, but his hands on her hips hold her in place like roots as she spreads her legs and bites her lip. He thrusts his tongue into her, just twice, and traces around her opening and back up to her clit. Her body starts taking over for her brain, and she feels any thought more complicated than this and more begin to dissolve.
The wrongness of this can either be a turn-on or a turn-off for the reader. Personally, I found it a little of both, although when Mulder slides to the floor I got pulled out of the story a bit, as I tried to picture it in my head. So he's sitting on the floor with his back up against the chair, then he. . .I'm a very literal reader of sex scenes, I'm afraid.
And then, in the silence of the house, she hears Matthew's thin cry echo from the second floor. Mulder is too focused to notice, but her body is plunged back into reality, away from its own pleasure. She remembers why she is doing this, why it is fruitless and why it is necessary in the same moment. As feet stir softly upstairs, she pulls Mulder's face from her pussy and drops down to her knees to straddle him. His face is damp and sticky against hers as she kisses him, undoes his pants, pushes him onto his back. The darkest bit of her loves the clunk his head makes when it hits the floor, and tries to shush the part that notices how his fingers cling to her hips. She focuses her conscious attention on getting to his cock, ignores his strangled gasps, her own infuriating tears. She catches his eyes as she raises herself above him, and finds that she can't break the look, has to keep knowing where his eyes are as she slides onto his cock. She rocks her hips against him and he arches his back and gasps, and she is suddenly desperate to see him come, desperate to show her body what it should be doing, desperate to fight the odds, to fight him, the only person in the world who would join her in this. She leans over his chest, plants her hands by her shoulders, fucks him hard, absorbing his gasps and muttered attempts at her name through her skin. She tears his shirt open with one hand, runs her nails down his chest until he's doing her bleeding for her, pulls his hair so he opens his eyes to look at her. They're in this together, now, just like everything else they’ve ever done, and the sooner he realizes it's about that and not about whatever sentimental value he assigns to her the sooner they win.
The violence of this section was tough for me to read. She can't bleed, not without chemical help, so she is going to make him bleed for her. She's making him into a sacrificial victim and it's pretty horrible to behold, but it makes sense given how furious she is at him. Even so, by this time, I confess I'm with her. I want her to feel as mad at Mulder as I do. She's not only angry, of course, she is consumed with grief and guilt, as well.
They're in this together, now, just like everything else they’ve ever done, and the sooner he realizes it's about that and not about whatever sentimental value he assigns to her the sooner they win.
That last sentence is so Scully. She knows when she is right and she is going to make him understand in the only way she can just now: she is going to fuck it into him.
He holds her head in his hands for a moment, trying to love her, and she shakes her head sharply to make him remove them. They hover in the air by her ears for a moment, and then he runs them down her shoulder blades, circles around to pinch her nipples. She feels like some ancient goddess as she throws her head back and thrusts back against him. His rhythm on her nipples follows the one she grinds into him, and they are suddenly stuck in some push-pull limbo neither of them can get out of. She comes suddenly, without wanting to yet, without being cognizant it was coming, but their bodies keep going even while she gasps as quietly as she can. He whispers her name, quietly but she clamps a hand over his mouth; there is no one in this house who needs to hear whatever he feels compelled to say in the last thirty seconds before orgasm. She looks him in the face again, and he says it anyway in the curl of his fingers into her skin, right before his face goes lax, mouth falling open beneath her hand. Remembering everything she once knew about the mechanics of the cervix, she grabs his shoulders, and rolls them over. His sudden weight settling against her public bone sets her off again, and she bites into whatever exposed skin she can find until she tastes iron under the salt.
He tries to love her but she pushes him away. She's just using him to keep the fantasy going, to keep the pain at bay. More blood-letting, too.
He leans over her, forehead resting on the hardwood floor next to her, gasping. When he lifts his head, he watches her for a moment before rolling off her and flopping, arms loose, next to her on the floor. They lay in silence, listening to the creak of an antique rocking chair ten feet above them.
"Scully," Mulder says.
She finds her panties next to her head, lifts her legs, slides them on still lying down. It's all make-believe and lies, but she wants them a little longer. She redresses as quickly and efficiently as she can on her back, but then has to stand to leave him there. Just as she leaves the room, he says again, "Scully," and she turns to look at him.
He is lying on his back, his shirt shredded and bloodstained by her hands, his cock flopped against his now-ruined pants, staring at the ceiling. "There are other things I should have told you," he says. "You tell me when you want to hear them."
This is so Mulder. He just has to get the last word in, always. Shut up already.
She can't kick him, she can't strangle him, she can't love him, so she goes up the stairs, alone in her body, smelling rich and loamy, feeling like a liar.
This first section was initially posted under flock. Amal said then she had been thinking about writing a story about Mulder and Scully having sex during the aftermath of the Christmas Carol/Emily arc. I couldn't even leave a comment the first time I read this because of the angry sex. It's not that I don't think Scully capable of doing what she did to Mulder, in the extremity of her grief and anger. It's not that I don't believe that Mulder wouldn't let her do it, get off on it, in a sick way, and then beat himself up over it. But it isn't what I want for them. It hurt to read it. It hurt a lot.
In her post, when Amal mentioned having read "Touched But Never Held," an early post-ep for Christmas Carol/Emily, by Rachel Anton, like a good fan girl, I decided to read it, too. There are interesting parallels in the stories as well as some striking differences.
Amal also expressed concern about Mulder's last sentence. "I don't know whether I think Mulder is making it better or worse in the last thing he says. I wanted him to make it better; that's why I put it there. But now I'm very unsure--and can't decide if I want to leave it ambiguous or make it clearer the way I originally intended. The text gets away from you sometimes."
On the one hand, I am thinking, God, it's about time he came clean to her. On the other hand, your timing sucks, dude. How is Scully in any way ready to hear what you have to say?
Scully's feelings so resemble my own toward Mulder during the episodes. How dare he withhold information from her about her own body? She has been betrayed twice, by the Consortium who medically raped her, taking away her choice to have children, both by creating Emily and by removing her ova. But she was also betrayed by Mulder when he concealed from Scully what he had learned about what had been done to her during her abduction. Mulder had no right to keep that information from her, no matter how much he wanted to protect her. I suppose this story satisfies my desire to see Scully get mad at Mulder for what was done to her, for what keeps getting done to her in the course of the series.
The last line, though, is devastating.
"She can't kick him, she can't strangle him," though she is angry enough to want to.
"she can't love him," But she does love Mulder, as even she must realize, so what Scully must mean that she can't feel her love for him or express it.
"so she goes up the stairs, alone in her body," She is alone in her body, because she is infertile, will never bear a child. As Emily had no father, she is alone in her grief, and alone in her journey, as she is in the dream sequence that is the teaser to "Emily."
smelling rich and loamy, feeling like a liar. There is plenty of guilt to go around, this is the X-files.
Author: amalnahurriyeh
Fandom: The X-Files
Commentator: wendelah1
Anything that was originally posted under flock or in email has been quoted here with the permission of the author.
"Sweet Nothings for the Numb", without commentary.
I. Curse and Salvation
Scully lies in the dark and traces her fingers over the skin of her stomach, above the pad of fat cradling her uterus, orphaned and alone the last soldier fighting, radio silent, unaware the war has already been lost. It's not that the knowledge of her infertility is still surprising. She has been a dutiful student of her reproductive system since med school. The complexity of the signs an ovulating body gives had fascinated her, and she had gone on a six-month charting binge, complete with minutely descriptive notes on her cervical mucus and even the purchase of a tiny microscope to track the faint ferning in her saliva. So when she had gone six weeks without a period after her abduction, her body giving no signs of any sort of cycle, she had visited her OB/GYN, and endured the four weeks of ultrasounds and hormone panels without much hope. It still stabbed her now and then, though, when her artificial period brought on very real cramps, when the teenager behind the pharmacy counter had the gall to look shocked that the prescription for estrogen and medroxyprogesterone was being filled by a woman under fifty, when she got another baby announcement from a college or med school friend. It's then that she feels the weight of it, the sudden and surprising aloneness. She knows grief is normal; she knows her life is rich and complete without a child, and she would probably never have had one anyway. But alone is what she feels, no matter how much she tries to think it away.
I like how Amal addresses the time period in which Scully would have had to have become aware that she was no longer ovulating. She is a doctor, so it isn't an issue she would have just ignored. The grief she feels about the loss of her fertility is entirely normal. Even if she never expected to have children of her own, having that choice taken away was painful; moreover, as Amal indicates, she relives it over and over, in many different ways.
Today the stabbing grief wears a small girl's face, tastes like gritty sand between her teeth. Emily, who she loved with an urgency she had never expected and missed with a bewildered ache. She knew almost nothing about her: not whether she fought against baths or begged for more time in the water, not if she laughed when tickled or talked to her stuffed animals, not her favorite book or song, not even where her body had been taken. It didn't matter; the loss had scratched her open and left her psychic skin oozing. She had a daughter, and she will never have her again, and she knows that she cannot have another. Nothing makes sense and everything hurts in this, the story of her impossible daughter.
Now the grief is magnified. The word is made flesh, the loss that was only a theoretical one is now an all too real child of flesh and blood. Her dead child. The taste of gritty sand brings the reader back to the dream sequence that is the teaser to "Emily," as well as to the sand inside Emily's coffin, which was left inside to disguise that her corpse was stolen. In my personal canon, this is a recurring dream for Scully.
But she lives her life in a world where she is forced to investigate ten impossible things between breakfast and lunch, where the unexplainable is a regular occurrence, where the strange occupies the jump seat in the back of any number of rented Tauruses. And it is because of that life that she is absolutely convinced that the one man in the world who could impregnate her when it is impossible is Mulder. That motherfucker, who knew how this had happened and never thought to mention it, who did what she asked him to and sulked about it ever since she found Emily; he is her curse and her salvation in equal parts, the answer to the problems he himself has caused.
Mulder really is infuriating in that episode. I just wanted to smack him, too, Scully.
He is asleep downstairs on Bill's couch; he never bothered with getting a hotel room, and merely shuttled back and forth between hospital and investigation, trailing her home, unwilling to leave her alone. He was the first person she saw after Emily died; he was in the hallway, slumped in a chair, staring at the pediatric playroom, where sick children played weakly with their mothers, their laughter muted by glass. He heard her steps and turned towards her. "I need to find a funeral home," she said quietly.
"I'll get you a phonebook," he said.
By the count of the pills in her suitcase she is on cycle day 15, which was the day she would ovulate back when that was possible. Her traitorous, lying body roils under the skin, tempting her with the prospect of fecundity. She imagines the lushness of endometrial tissue like a feather bed, waiting for the burrowing future. If there is anyone who could bring this back, it's the bastard sleeping at the foot of the stairs.
Wait. Scully, Mulder. I think this is a bad idea.
She stands and goes to him, vibrating with lust and furor. She expected him on the couch, head limp, lost to his own private world, but he is in the armchair, knees splayed, and either he wasn't sleeping either or he heard her coming because he is watching her turn into the living room. His eyes are red, which ratchets up her rage; he has no right to anything he is feeling right now. "Scully," he says softly. "Are you okay?"
Scully, I know what you are thinking here but it doesn't work that way.
"That," she says, "is an incredibly stupid question." He never even got undressed, is sitting there still in the remnants of his funeral suit. His unbuttoned collar shows the hollow of his neck, shaded and soft in the dark of the living room. She stands in front of him, unclear on what to say or do to communicate what she wants, unclear on what any of this is going to accomplish. He stays perfectly still and watches her watch him, and she hates the love and sympathy that vibrates in him, hates that it strikes some pitch in her that wants desperately to ring back. She unbuttons her pajama top and lets it fall to the ground. His eyes stray to her breasts, but he stays still. She pushes down her pants and leaves them in the pile with the top. He swallows. She steps in between his legs, and he presses his legs in until his thighs brush hers. Without saying anything, he leans forward and kisses her stomach just below her navel. His lips are soft, and then his tongue is hot and his teeth are sharp. His fingers slide under the elastic of her underpants and pull them down her legs, and then creep back up to tease her pubic hair. She feels tears in the back of her throat and digs her fingers into the back of his head, wants to laugh as he noses down her belly a little, as if he's really that desperate to taste her pussy. He slides off the chair to the floor and grips her hips, uses his nose to open her up, swipes his tongue across her clit. He is slow, thorough, but his hands on her hips hold her in place like roots as she spreads her legs and bites her lip. He thrusts his tongue into her, just twice, and traces around her opening and back up to her clit. Her body starts taking over for her brain, and she feels any thought more complicated than this and more begin to dissolve.
The wrongness of this can either be a turn-on or a turn-off for the reader. Personally, I found it a little of both, although when Mulder slides to the floor I got pulled out of the story a bit, as I tried to picture it in my head. So he's sitting on the floor with his back up against the chair, then he. . .I'm a very literal reader of sex scenes, I'm afraid.
And then, in the silence of the house, she hears Matthew's thin cry echo from the second floor. Mulder is too focused to notice, but her body is plunged back into reality, away from its own pleasure. She remembers why she is doing this, why it is fruitless and why it is necessary in the same moment. As feet stir softly upstairs, she pulls Mulder's face from her pussy and drops down to her knees to straddle him. His face is damp and sticky against hers as she kisses him, undoes his pants, pushes him onto his back. The darkest bit of her loves the clunk his head makes when it hits the floor, and tries to shush the part that notices how his fingers cling to her hips. She focuses her conscious attention on getting to his cock, ignores his strangled gasps, her own infuriating tears. She catches his eyes as she raises herself above him, and finds that she can't break the look, has to keep knowing where his eyes are as she slides onto his cock. She rocks her hips against him and he arches his back and gasps, and she is suddenly desperate to see him come, desperate to show her body what it should be doing, desperate to fight the odds, to fight him, the only person in the world who would join her in this. She leans over his chest, plants her hands by her shoulders, fucks him hard, absorbing his gasps and muttered attempts at her name through her skin. She tears his shirt open with one hand, runs her nails down his chest until he's doing her bleeding for her, pulls his hair so he opens his eyes to look at her. They're in this together, now, just like everything else they’ve ever done, and the sooner he realizes it's about that and not about whatever sentimental value he assigns to her the sooner they win.
The violence of this section was tough for me to read. She can't bleed, not without chemical help, so she is going to make him bleed for her. She's making him into a sacrificial victim and it's pretty horrible to behold, but it makes sense given how furious she is at him. Even so, by this time, I confess I'm with her. I want her to feel as mad at Mulder as I do. She's not only angry, of course, she is consumed with grief and guilt, as well.
They're in this together, now, just like everything else they’ve ever done, and the sooner he realizes it's about that and not about whatever sentimental value he assigns to her the sooner they win.
That last sentence is so Scully. She knows when she is right and she is going to make him understand in the only way she can just now: she is going to fuck it into him.
He holds her head in his hands for a moment, trying to love her, and she shakes her head sharply to make him remove them. They hover in the air by her ears for a moment, and then he runs them down her shoulder blades, circles around to pinch her nipples. She feels like some ancient goddess as she throws her head back and thrusts back against him. His rhythm on her nipples follows the one she grinds into him, and they are suddenly stuck in some push-pull limbo neither of them can get out of. She comes suddenly, without wanting to yet, without being cognizant it was coming, but their bodies keep going even while she gasps as quietly as she can. He whispers her name, quietly but she clamps a hand over his mouth; there is no one in this house who needs to hear whatever he feels compelled to say in the last thirty seconds before orgasm. She looks him in the face again, and he says it anyway in the curl of his fingers into her skin, right before his face goes lax, mouth falling open beneath her hand. Remembering everything she once knew about the mechanics of the cervix, she grabs his shoulders, and rolls them over. His sudden weight settling against her public bone sets her off again, and she bites into whatever exposed skin she can find until she tastes iron under the salt.
He tries to love her but she pushes him away. She's just using him to keep the fantasy going, to keep the pain at bay. More blood-letting, too.
He leans over her, forehead resting on the hardwood floor next to her, gasping. When he lifts his head, he watches her for a moment before rolling off her and flopping, arms loose, next to her on the floor. They lay in silence, listening to the creak of an antique rocking chair ten feet above them.
"Scully," Mulder says.
She finds her panties next to her head, lifts her legs, slides them on still lying down. It's all make-believe and lies, but she wants them a little longer. She redresses as quickly and efficiently as she can on her back, but then has to stand to leave him there. Just as she leaves the room, he says again, "Scully," and she turns to look at him.
He is lying on his back, his shirt shredded and bloodstained by her hands, his cock flopped against his now-ruined pants, staring at the ceiling. "There are other things I should have told you," he says. "You tell me when you want to hear them."
This is so Mulder. He just has to get the last word in, always. Shut up already.
She can't kick him, she can't strangle him, she can't love him, so she goes up the stairs, alone in her body, smelling rich and loamy, feeling like a liar.
This first section was initially posted under flock. Amal said then she had been thinking about writing a story about Mulder and Scully having sex during the aftermath of the Christmas Carol/Emily arc. I couldn't even leave a comment the first time I read this because of the angry sex. It's not that I don't think Scully capable of doing what she did to Mulder, in the extremity of her grief and anger. It's not that I don't believe that Mulder wouldn't let her do it, get off on it, in a sick way, and then beat himself up over it. But it isn't what I want for them. It hurt to read it. It hurt a lot.
In her post, when Amal mentioned having read "Touched But Never Held," an early post-ep for Christmas Carol/Emily, by Rachel Anton, like a good fan girl, I decided to read it, too. There are interesting parallels in the stories as well as some striking differences.
Amal also expressed concern about Mulder's last sentence. "I don't know whether I think Mulder is making it better or worse in the last thing he says. I wanted him to make it better; that's why I put it there. But now I'm very unsure--and can't decide if I want to leave it ambiguous or make it clearer the way I originally intended. The text gets away from you sometimes."
On the one hand, I am thinking, God, it's about time he came clean to her. On the other hand, your timing sucks, dude. How is Scully in any way ready to hear what you have to say?
Scully's feelings so resemble my own toward Mulder during the episodes. How dare he withhold information from her about her own body? She has been betrayed twice, by the Consortium who medically raped her, taking away her choice to have children, both by creating Emily and by removing her ova. But she was also betrayed by Mulder when he concealed from Scully what he had learned about what had been done to her during her abduction. Mulder had no right to keep that information from her, no matter how much he wanted to protect her. I suppose this story satisfies my desire to see Scully get mad at Mulder for what was done to her, for what keeps getting done to her in the course of the series.
The last line, though, is devastating.
"She can't kick him, she can't strangle him," though she is angry enough to want to.
"she can't love him," But she does love Mulder, as even she must realize, so what Scully must mean that she can't feel her love for him or express it.
"so she goes up the stairs, alone in her body," She is alone in her body, because she is infertile, will never bear a child. As Emily had no father, she is alone in her grief, and alone in her journey, as she is in the dream sequence that is the teaser to "Emily."
smelling rich and loamy, feeling like a liar. There is plenty of guilt to go around, this is the X-files.