Commentary - Like A Picture
With pictures and music and stuff!
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
This is from a poem called I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone, which in itself is rather marvellous. This excerpt in particular gave me a lot of early-S7 feelings; the sense of homeliness and security with one another, but not entirely realised. 'Like a picture I observed for a long time' also underpins the themes of history, memory and death that I was batting around; when the deceased become only pictures, in our hands and in our minds.
In the dark the shadows in Mulder's apartment climb the walls like Antietam ghosts, like chronic history. I love having to spend twenty minutes researching a single sentence. Antietam was a Civil War battle in Maryland, which I picked mainly for location, the fact that I like the word, and that Gettysburg was too damn obvious. Mulder's apartment is a bit of a battlefield at this point in time; very haunted. He is curled up on the couch under the Navajo blanket, cried into a fitful doze, and Scully has switched off most of the lights and moves around the kitchen like a bat, bouncing her memory off the cabinets. The tap dribbles and coughs as she fills up the kettle. At the end of the hall the elevator rattles in ascent.
There are two clean mugs on the drainer, and she spoons out the cocoa powder into them carefully. In the sitting room Mulder makes a sharp, indistinct noise amidst all the silence he has gathered about himself and sits up slightly as she emerges from the kitchen.
"I made you some hot cocoa," she says, handing him a mug that she now sees is covered in tiny, green flying saucers, and perches on the edge of the desk chair. In general I get a bit irritated by fics where Mulder has tons of quirky alien memorabilia- I just don't think he cares about his stuff that much- but I will make an exception for mugs. He draws his knees up to his chest and takes a cautious sip.
"Thanks." The desk lamp is still on, throwing his face into bright Caravaggio relief. I heard a sermon on John 20:19-31 the weekend I was writing this which consisted in the main of the Succentor complaining about Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St Thomas, which is one of my favourite paintings by my favourite artist. I found myself working with a very Caravaggio visual for this story; dramatic blocks of light and shade with little details filled in once you look a little closer. This is also why Thomas pops up later. She breathes in a deep chocolatey breath and tries to tamp down all the trite phrases that are bubbling at the front of her mind. She spends enough of her time saying things to Mulder that aren't really true. She looks down at her mug instead, discovering that what she had taken for the FBI seal is actually the Ramones logo.
"I didn't know you liked them," Scully says, for want of anything better, tapping one finger against her mug. Mulder shrugs.
"Langly gave it to me for my last birthday. Byers bought me an album to go with it, under instructions I think." He makes a small face. "The year before he'd given me fish food." I can't imagine Byers being very good at giving gifts. Then again I'm not sure Langly is either.
"I won't ask what Frohike got you."
He makes a chuffing noise that might have been a laugh and becomes fascinated with his own mug, cupping a hand around it. "These are supposed to glow in the dark."
"They need a bit of light first," she says, and shuffles the lamp a little nearer towards the couch. The shadows stretch further upwards from behind the furniture and Mulder ducks his head back into his cocoa. There is a long, settling silence. Scully waits, tries not to fidget on her chair. It's a little chilly in the apartment and she'd like to fold her arms over her chest, but you're not supposed to do that, when someone's grieving, not supposed to close yourself away.
Talking to bereaved people is hard. Really hard. And Scully is not very good at it, and is freaking out a little bit. While she does lose control a bit during the Boggs case after her father dies, she reigns it right in, and she has enough confidence in him and their bond to not actually go down the route of believing creepy psychic murderers. Whereas when Mulder loses each parent, he loses any chance of gaining the connection to them he desperately wants, or the truths he thinks they have to tell him (it is interesting that both Bill and Teena die without telling him something potentially important), and it seriously messes him up.
After a while he says, "I remember seeing her in the yard once, in Quonochontaug. My father bought a hammock and she made this big fuss about it being unsafe, but after a while she started to lie in it in the afternoons when it started to cool down, reading a book or just laying there." He takes another sip of cocoa, closing his eyes so his lashes make spidery shades across his cheekbones. "There were other kids in the houses around so we just used to hop over the fences between the gardens rather than going all the way round the doors, even though our parents didn't like it. I'd been playing baseball with this skinny guy called James and his older brothers, and Samantha was... somewhere else, I don't know, but I came back over the fence as quiet as I could and Mom was lying in the hammock."
He pauses again, pulls his knees in closer. "She was lying in the hammock and she must have just fallen asleep in the heat but she had this book, this crappy little dime store novel she was reading, and it had fallen onto the grass where her hand was hanging over the side, and the pages had gotten all scrunched up, and she had her head turned away and I guess I was a bit too far away or something because it didn't quite look like she was breathing, and for this horrible, horrible moment I thought, this is what it's going to look like when she's dead. I hadn't even thought about it before, that my parents were going to die. But there it was."
Scully presses her lips against the rim of her mug. In death Teena Mulder had not looked asleep, not looked quiet and lingering as she imagined she must have in a hammock in Rhode Island. There are no mysteries in a morgue, no secrets, only brash steel and the unhappy crimson of still, stemmed blood. I don't think it helps that Scully did not know Teena Mulder at all, except as this very closed off woman who had shouting matches with Mulder, and then latterly as a corpse. Mulder still doesn't look at her, his big hands curled about his cocoa as if it could spare him memory. He had slid them under her unbuttoned blouse so carefully, reverently, whispered half-phrased promises in her ear. Of course this whole thing is made more uncomfortable by the fact that she can't stop thinking sexy thoughts about Mulder. Then again I imagine this is a recurring problem for both of them.
"I should have called her." He makes a little snuffling noise, like a hurt animal. "Maybe if I could have talked to her..."
"Mulder..." She takes a deep breath, a fortifying sip of hot, smooth chocolate. "Mulder, your mother was very sick. She had cancer. She knew she was going to die, and she wanted it to be peaceful, for you not to have to watch her suffer that much." Really, she's not sure how much Mulder had come into the decision at all, but she doesn't want to impute any further sins to a dead woman. And she knows the lie of this land, knows the secret bottle kept away, in case it gets too bad. In case.
"She never told me." His voice comes out in a strange, unfamiliar croak. "I didn't even know she was sick, Scully."
"Maybe she didn't want to worry you."
"Just let me worry enough when she was dead." His face creases with pain and terrible anger, and for a moment she feels a little twinge of an old fear. Once she had watched him turn a gun to his own head with swift and dreadful ease. Suicidal tendencies can run in families. Shut up, shut up. I am absolutely certain that this is something Scully has worried about. Mulder might be essentially an optimist, but there's a lot about him that pings the 'warning signs' for potential suicidality, or at the very least depression. It's something that is quite alien to Scully; while I can imagine that she might well have considered euthanasia if her cancer got too awful (and she does have a living will) she doesn't have the irrationality and inward violence to self-destruct in the way Mulder could. She busies herself with her mug, drinking in measured gulps. Mulder sighs and presses the heel of one hand to his forehead.
"My head hurts."
"I think you ought to get some sleep. Finish your cocoa." For once he acquiesces, nuzzles his face into the mug like a child to drain the dregs. She swallows the rest of hers quickly and takes the mugs back into the murky kitchen while he untangles himself from the blanket and stands up.
For a moment she hovers by the front door as he watches her, silhouetted by his little pool of light. It's late, past late, and she has habits running years deep, safety procedures. Your platonic friendship 101. They have been ignoring it, straying over the no-baseball-practice line and the no-lip-contact line and, if she's honest, sending it up in flames with magic tricks and a bottle of Riesling, but she feels the tug in her bones, still, from when she realised she was stepping over the first, deadliest boundary.
I imagine the relationship at this stage being more than a little weird, something that neither of them can quite believe in yet. They've spent so many years deliberately not being together that it must be hard to get out of the habit. Part of me actually disliked pinning down more concretely when their first time was in this story- one of the things that I love about this ship is that there is so little in canon about their relationship. Ambiguity is so much more interesting.
He looks as if he's about to say something. She can see her car keys on the table, almost hear the sound of the engine starting up, the flicker of the city lights, and either way she can't let him form those words, can't make him have to ask her to stay when his mother's died and left him with no family but a tank full of fish. Mulder in SUZ/Closure just breaks my heart. This is really it, the last of the scrappy little family he had is gone. If she goes, he can find his own way to bed. She's almost sure.
He shuffles his feet a little, ducking his head. Not for the first time she wonders if he retained something out of that cacophonic madness, can still hear the whispers of her thoughts before they are born. She shucks off her jacket and hangs it on the coat rack behind her, and her shoes clack against the floorboards as she crosses the apartment again and puts one hand on his arm.
"C'mon Mulder."
In his bedroom he puts on one lamp, beside the bed. There is only ever a single light source in this story, until the sunrise at the end. He peels off his t-shirt slowly and Scully catches herself watching the way the yellow light plays over the muscles of his back, the gradients of gold there. It had been dark in her apartment too, that night, and she had only felt, hadn't really seen. She concentrates on taking off her shoes. Mulder picks up a pair of sweats from the middle of the mess of covers swirled in the centre of the bed and turns around to her looking a little awkward.
"Um, there's some shirts in the dresser if you..."
The last time they had shared sheets they had slept curled up in one another, still humming with wine and secrets starting to tell at last. She could do it again, she thinks, go to him now with his tungsten-limned body and kiss the sadness out of his soft mouth, make forgetfulness with her hands. That would be a good deal easier than actually dealing with his grief head-on. I think there is some danger that sex just becomes another way of them avoiding actually saying anything to one another. But she goes over to his dresser instead, and takes out a crumpled, oversized t-shirt with the oven-mitt of Michigan printed on it in cracked inks. The Great Lake State. There is no significance to this other than that I once had a fantastic Sufjan Stevens 'Michigan' t-shirt that someone pinched in the college laundry. Bastards. She almost turns away to unbutton her blouse, but he doesn't seem to be looking at her anyway, bending over to fiddle with his radio alarm.
She follows him under the duvet once he shakes it out into a normal shape, and he rolls up on his side facing her. His hand rests somewhere partway between them.
"Scully?" he whispers, as if she might already be asleep. She turns to him.
"Mmm?"
"Tell me something about your father. Not that he liked Herman Melville or was awarded a medal or whatever. Something that happened once." Mulder, being the squishy little INFP that he is, wants to be able to relate his loss to Scully's somehow. Also I think he's more than a little bit intrigued by her having an essentially functional family.
She frowns slightly. "What do you mean?"
"Just a little story. Anything."
She closes her eyes and for a moment sees Ahab there, solid as a pillar, as truth. "I remember... it must have been my eleventh birthday. Dad was actually home that year, which was pretty unusual. He'd been promoted to lieutenant commander that winter, so we were in a new house and I didn't really know any of the other kids on the base yet. I think Mom was glad, actually, not having to organise another party, but I was pretty upset; I'd just had to leave all my friends behind and I couldn't even have a proper birthday." She realises that her hand has crept across to meet Mulder's between them, their fingers slowly interweaving.
"But Dad woke me up really early, when Missy was still asleep, and we got in the car and he took me out of the city, before the sun was up, and we sat on this hill in the dark. I asked him if he knew how many stars there were and he said no, because although he'd been counting since he was a little boy God was always making new ones, so he had to keep going. And I said that was pretty terrible of God, because if he kept making new stars then Dad would never know how many there were. And Dad said that was why he'd brought me up there, so that I could count too, and keep going for him when he was gone, because I was getting to be a grown up myself. We just sat there counting and talking until the sun came up."
Something I'm still not entirely sure works properly is that this is, in a way, the same sort of story that Mulder told. Realising that your parents are not immutable, that they are going to die, is a difficult thing to encounter as a child. But typically Mulder realises it at a distance, as a lone observer (I think I had the 'Demons' flashbacks in my head there), whereas Scully is effectively told it, but in a very gentle and safe way. Much as she and Ahab had their issues, he clearly loved her to pieces.
In the thin light, she sees Mulder squint at her sleepily. "I wish I could have met him."
"He'd have disapproved of you," she says, automatically. leucocrystal commented that she thought he might have actually hated Mulder, and I certainly don't think they'd have got on. But Mulder is, of course, fascinated by seeing Scully's past and origins, while she has had quite her fill of seeing his. Mulder squeezes her fingers.
"For bringing his youngest daughter to ruin?"
"For owning a mug with glow in the dark flying saucers on it."
That gets a small laugh. "But he'd be okay with the Ramones?"
"Actually, I think that might be even worse."
He smiles sadly and shifts his weight on the mattress. "You don't seem to talk about him much."
She shrugs. "You never talk about your father."
I think Scully doesn't talk about her dad that much because it's private. But from Mulder's perspective, why on earth would you not talk about parents who actually gave a crap about you? But she's only just letting him in to these parts of her life.
Mulder makes a face. "Most of the memories I have from when he was around, he and Mom were yelling. Even before Samantha... they just stopped trying to hide it after." He sighs, and looks down under the duvet to where their hands are joined in the darkness. "I was kind of glad when they divorced, just because it was quieter."
She can see the tears gleaming in his eyes again and shifts a little closer, the warmth of his body drawing her in. His hair is mussed and Struwwelpeter-manic against the pillow. He looks up at her again.
"Scully, about- about the other night." His thumb is strumming her knuckles slowly. "If you don't... well, I know we'd had a lot to drink and we've been seeing each other a lot more recently, and I don't want you to feel... I mean, if that was just a one-time thing, then I understand."
He's going to break this. She's going to leave. Something will go wrong. As I said, I think Mulder is essentially an optimist, but his family and relationships have been fucked up enough- and he's imagined that it is his own doing to a great enough extent- that he can't quite see this not going equally wrong.
There's a little catch in his voice at the last word and she feels, suddenly, a great swell, a terrible tide of love crashing over her. He has taken her life and upturned it, put reason on its head, all her picket-fence dreams of the future pared down to this solipsistic man who battles sentient computers and trash monsters and chases lights in the sky. She lifts their clasped hands to press against his bare chest over his heart, still beating. Seven years and it's still beating.
"No," she hears herself saying, as if crossing a great distance, "it wasn't."
"Oh," he says, "oh," and she kisses him then for the simple hope in his voice, kisses him on his tired forehead, his nose, his loquacious mouth. He gathers her up in his arms and she breathes in his nonsense Muldery smell, and this close to him she's nearly willing to give credence to storks and babies in gooseberry bushes because how could that be his mother, that woman whom death only made more flat and cold. She imagines a small Mulder suspended among hairy green fruits, eyes open wide to the ghostly night clouds and the wise, patient moon.
This was a really great little mental image- for some reason I was imagining this illustration from the US version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Also the small S7-y allusion; the closer she gets to Mulder, the easier it is to believe all this weird crap.
"I'm going to fall asleep," he says, sounding already half there, his eyes sliding closed. She brushes a hand through his hair, as if it were still long enough to be pushed back from his face.
"I'm not going anywhere."
Slowly, his breathing steadies, mellows, and she takes her hands away for fear of waking him with her touch, however gentle. The bedside lamp is still on and drawing a yellow outline around them, but she doesn't really want to disentangle herself in order to turn it off. Mulder's eyelids flutter, and he murmurs something under his breath.
Every bedtime of her childhood she prayed for small, tentative things, after a few months of praying for world peace had clearly come to no avail, and she's never gotten entirely out of the habit, even during those years when she and God were not really speaking and she told herself it was only a small indulgence in the dark. It's still hard to think about Him now and not see carved, alien metal, strange shapes in shifting sand, but the saints at least have human faces. Scully's faith is something that I rarely find tackled in fic to my satisfaction, but then the same can be said for the show. Religion is one of those things that I imagine must be hard to write about if you aren't religious, and Scully is so very private about her faith anyway, which only complicates things. I have a lot of thoughts on how she might have 'recovered' spiritually from the Biogenesis/Sixth Extinction stuff which I might work into something else, someday, but the idea of the humanness of the saints is part of it. Sometimes it's a lot easier to deal with human beings than with God. She can't remember who the patron of the bereaved is. She could hardly ask Thomas for Mulder, faithful Mulder, and she already hassles him enough on her own behalf as it is. She wriggles, trying to un-ruck the t-shirt from around her hips. St Anthony is the patron of lost things. Yes, she thinks, as Mulder moves his head and the light touches on the long, thin scar at his hairline. Help us be found. Lost things. This was always going to be bittersweet, there's always regret and scars, even now that they're starting to edge towards happiness.
In dreams she sees rain falling around them, filling up the city and carrying it all far out to sea. The bed bobs along in the Gulf Stream, leaving a phosphorescent trail. One of the many useless things I learned from being in an Age of Sail fandom. The bioluminescence indicated that a ship was still within the warm waters of the current.
"There's no way home," Mulder says, and she rolls onto her back and takes his hand, pointing it towards the North Star. I didn't realise until I re-read this how many references to the night sky had crept into the story. I suppose it's appropriate for the episodes.
"Keep looking."
It's still dark outside when she wakes to Mulder pressing her closer up against him than before, his fingers digging into her scapulae.
I always find myself 'soundtracking' fic, whether just in my head or by actually listening to certain songs. While I was writing this I spent a long time listening to Closer by Low
Things we lost in the fire
How'd we ever get by?
Words we'll never take back
Hold me closer than that
"I won't," he says, voice gravelly with exhaustion and fear, "I won't."
"Mulder?" She squeezes a hand out to grasp his shoulder and he quivers slightly and his arms slacken, letting her go. When he opens his eyes his pupils are huge and wild.
"I thought- I dreamed that they took you again, Scully. They took my mother and they were going to take you too."
She strokes his shoulder, making her best soothing noises, the kind you learn on fourteen hour internship shifts giving injections to toddlers. A lot of hers cried anyway, but Mulder seems to be responding, his tremors subsiding.
"It was just a dream. I'm here."
"What if they did?" He tightens his arms around her again, sounding uneasy. "I couldn't do anything last time. I didn't even find you. What if they took you and never gave you back?" I don't think Mulder ever quite gets over how arbitrary 'Their' treatment of Scully was, that he had no part in getting her back, or curing her cancer, or anything. He also clearly feels that on some level he could have prevented Samantha's abduction, and he is foiled at every turn in trying to get her back of his own volition. The unexpectedness of his mother's suicide is just more undermining of any feeling that he can protect the people he loves.
What if they took you, she thinks. That physically hurt to write. *beats off Requiem with a stick* "I won't let them." It feels almost as if she could, keep the lights from both their doors and the madmen from the window by the force of will alone, or the gun that lives steadily at her hip. Perhaps Mulder feels it too because he seems to relax a little, and rolls away from her briefly to switch off the light, plunging them into real darkness, holy and close. I seem to steal adjectives from Dylan Thomas without even noticing that I'm doing it. See also: '...her sharp corners and her keyless eyes'.
"It doesn't feel like she's dead." He runs a hand gently up her arm as if for assurance, making her skin prickle. "You'd think something would be different."
"Was it like that when your father died?"
He barks a laugh. "No, but I wasn't really myself at the time, as you might recall. And when he died I still had Mom. As much as we ever spoke." He sighs again. The last Mulder, last of an ignoble line. Scully can smell the salt-damp of tears on the pillow, the little catches of breath in their long, wakeful silence.
She waits until she's sure he is asleep again before whispering, "You still have me."
Because there's no way she would say that to him when he was awake. At least not at this point.
The second time there isn't anything in particular to wake her, the room still dark and weighty and Mulder at some sort of peace, only mumbling and twitching occasionally like a sleeping cat. Scully sits up on her elbow to look over him at the alarm, which reads 6:23. Her body clock has developed a fickleness after years of early mornings, frequently rousing her just too early for comfort but not early enough that she can ignore it and go back to sleep. Instead she extricates herself from the duvet and pads over to the bathroom. The halogen aura of the shaving light makes her skin look sallow, her eyes murkily ringed, and she runs her fingers absently through her pillow-sculpted hair before splashing some water on her face.
Apparently space on his shelves has become scarce as there are more books in the bathroom than she remembers, Civilisation and Its Discontents propped amicably up against a star atlas and a pristine copy of How to Cook Everything beside the door. There is a frighteningly large book of baseball statistics on top of the toilet with a dried smear of shaving cream on the cover, which makes her wince. Mulder does not have good book habits. I imagine he is the sort of person who writes in the margins and highlights bits (urgh). I had fun picking out the books too- the incompatibility of individual happiness and civilisation, an untouched cookbook (logically stored in the bathroom), and a star atlas, because I noticed in my obsessive staring at screencaps of this episode that Mulder has a telescope (look, there it is, between Skinner and Scully). Though presumably it's mainly used for checking out the Consortium surveillance van across the road because there's no way in hell he'd be able to see any stars with a scope that small in the middle of a city.
Perhaps it's the sudden flickering of the light or the murmur of the water pipes that snaps her fully awake, but she looks back at herself in the mirror, startled. It is six in the morning and she is standing in Mulder's bathroom, wearing one of his shirts, rumpled and scruffy from lying in his bed. Somewhere they have stumbled through a tesseract and into a strange world where it is perfectly normal for her to open the cabinet and reach for the still-packaged spare toothbrush that she knows is in there, or to step into the shower and spend the rest of the day smelling of his shampoo. She studies the reflected curve of her nose, the lines starting to show around her eyes. There is nothing too different that she can see.
"You'd think something would be different." This is kind of the other half of the earlier moment when she considers leaving. There's a level on which this is actually really easy. The mirror-gazing is also a bit of a forward-reference to 'all things', how Scully is suddenly forced to look at herself again now, in a way that she doesn't normally. I don't think we see either of them looking into mirrors very often, except during the cancerarc. For my nerd credentials, if this were Mulder POV he'd explain it via the Holtzman Effect rather than a L'Engle reference, but while I think Scully has probably read Dune (at the behest of a college boyfriend or something) she is most certainly not going to mentally reference it!
From the other side of the door she hears the mattress squeaking slightly as Mulder moves in his sleep, always restive, and she realises she is filing away somewhere in her mind the crucial information that the mattress squeaks. She lifts her eyes to the crack in the ceiling, which like its twin in the office persists in withholding answers.
"Scully?"
Forests or cornfields or the wild expanses of his apartment. Mulder has pushed the duvet back a little and is sitting up in bed, the light falling through from the bathroom giving him a haunted look. She dries off her hands and walks back in towards him, sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing a hand across his forehead. He blinks owlishly at her. What is it about the word 'owlish'? I want to wrap it up in a blanket and run away with it.
"Do you want some breakfast?"
He turns away to stifle a yawn, his jaw cracking. "I don't know if there's any food."
Translation: there isn't any food that Scully would consider breakfast.
"I could go and get something."
"No." He clutches at her hand briefly, his fingers trembling tympanic against the back of her wrist. "Um, there should be coffee or something, I think. Sorry."
Her clothes from the previous night are still folded over the back of the lone chair and she picks them up and begins to dress automatically. She glances back towards the bed out of the corner of her eye and sees Mulder's gaze skittering away from her, his face still heavy with sleep. Scully walks back around the bed with her necklace in one hand and holds it out to him.
"I can't see to do the clasp."
"Oh," he says, and takes the thin chain in his cautious fingers. The cross winks in the narrow fall of light from the bathroom as she bends her head towards him and he reaches around her neck, closing his eyes. This is again a rather Caravaggio visual in my head- the darkness of the room, the little bit of light around them, the golden glint of the cross like a bright spot of hope held between them, almost invisible. She feels the fastened chain fall from his hands but he doesn't take his arms away, and she lets him bear her down until their foreheads touch, his breath whickering across the open neck of her blouse. The air about them seems very still. The vocabulary of twenty years' education leaves her quite bereft of the right thing to say. For two ridiculously over-educated people, they are very inarticulate sometimes.
There's a sharp knock at the door, and he jerks away, one hand brushing the tips of her hair as his arms drop. She steps back, looking around for her shoes. The sunrise is edging at the blinds and picking out blurry daguerreotype shadows amongst the scattered clothes on the floor and the folds in the duvet, craters on a moon map, an unexplored land.
Daguerreotypes were a very early form of photograph, made by exposing an image directly onto silver, and thus can't be duplicated. The surviving examples are often very blurry and indistinct. This was to sort of bring the picture imagery around again, painting to photograph, and the hints of maps and journeys, distance left to travel and the road already behind them. Um. I promise this all makes sense somewhere in my head.
As a final self-indulgent comment, I really think this is the best thing I've written so far. Happy fluff is all very well in its place, but I'm a miserable sod at heart, and as I see it, TXF is essentially a tragedy, a Pandora's Box of horrors with a tiny spark of hope at the bottom. That's sort of what I was going for here; darkness and shadow and sadness, with a single light throughout, something to hold onto until the morning
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
This is from a poem called I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone, which in itself is rather marvellous. This excerpt in particular gave me a lot of early-S7 feelings; the sense of homeliness and security with one another, but not entirely realised. 'Like a picture I observed for a long time' also underpins the themes of history, memory and death that I was batting around; when the deceased become only pictures, in our hands and in our minds.
In the dark the shadows in Mulder's apartment climb the walls like Antietam ghosts, like chronic history. I love having to spend twenty minutes researching a single sentence. Antietam was a Civil War battle in Maryland, which I picked mainly for location, the fact that I like the word, and that Gettysburg was too damn obvious. Mulder's apartment is a bit of a battlefield at this point in time; very haunted. He is curled up on the couch under the Navajo blanket, cried into a fitful doze, and Scully has switched off most of the lights and moves around the kitchen like a bat, bouncing her memory off the cabinets. The tap dribbles and coughs as she fills up the kettle. At the end of the hall the elevator rattles in ascent.
There are two clean mugs on the drainer, and she spoons out the cocoa powder into them carefully. In the sitting room Mulder makes a sharp, indistinct noise amidst all the silence he has gathered about himself and sits up slightly as she emerges from the kitchen.
"I made you some hot cocoa," she says, handing him a mug that she now sees is covered in tiny, green flying saucers, and perches on the edge of the desk chair. In general I get a bit irritated by fics where Mulder has tons of quirky alien memorabilia- I just don't think he cares about his stuff that much- but I will make an exception for mugs. He draws his knees up to his chest and takes a cautious sip.
"Thanks." The desk lamp is still on, throwing his face into bright Caravaggio relief. I heard a sermon on John 20:19-31 the weekend I was writing this which consisted in the main of the Succentor complaining about Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St Thomas, which is one of my favourite paintings by my favourite artist. I found myself working with a very Caravaggio visual for this story; dramatic blocks of light and shade with little details filled in once you look a little closer. This is also why Thomas pops up later. She breathes in a deep chocolatey breath and tries to tamp down all the trite phrases that are bubbling at the front of her mind. She spends enough of her time saying things to Mulder that aren't really true. She looks down at her mug instead, discovering that what she had taken for the FBI seal is actually the Ramones logo.
"I didn't know you liked them," Scully says, for want of anything better, tapping one finger against her mug. Mulder shrugs.
"Langly gave it to me for my last birthday. Byers bought me an album to go with it, under instructions I think." He makes a small face. "The year before he'd given me fish food." I can't imagine Byers being very good at giving gifts. Then again I'm not sure Langly is either.
"I won't ask what Frohike got you."
He makes a chuffing noise that might have been a laugh and becomes fascinated with his own mug, cupping a hand around it. "These are supposed to glow in the dark."
"They need a bit of light first," she says, and shuffles the lamp a little nearer towards the couch. The shadows stretch further upwards from behind the furniture and Mulder ducks his head back into his cocoa. There is a long, settling silence. Scully waits, tries not to fidget on her chair. It's a little chilly in the apartment and she'd like to fold her arms over her chest, but you're not supposed to do that, when someone's grieving, not supposed to close yourself away.
Talking to bereaved people is hard. Really hard. And Scully is not very good at it, and is freaking out a little bit. While she does lose control a bit during the Boggs case after her father dies, she reigns it right in, and she has enough confidence in him and their bond to not actually go down the route of believing creepy psychic murderers. Whereas when Mulder loses each parent, he loses any chance of gaining the connection to them he desperately wants, or the truths he thinks they have to tell him (it is interesting that both Bill and Teena die without telling him something potentially important), and it seriously messes him up.
After a while he says, "I remember seeing her in the yard once, in Quonochontaug. My father bought a hammock and she made this big fuss about it being unsafe, but after a while she started to lie in it in the afternoons when it started to cool down, reading a book or just laying there." He takes another sip of cocoa, closing his eyes so his lashes make spidery shades across his cheekbones. "There were other kids in the houses around so we just used to hop over the fences between the gardens rather than going all the way round the doors, even though our parents didn't like it. I'd been playing baseball with this skinny guy called James and his older brothers, and Samantha was... somewhere else, I don't know, but I came back over the fence as quiet as I could and Mom was lying in the hammock."
He pauses again, pulls his knees in closer. "She was lying in the hammock and she must have just fallen asleep in the heat but she had this book, this crappy little dime store novel she was reading, and it had fallen onto the grass where her hand was hanging over the side, and the pages had gotten all scrunched up, and she had her head turned away and I guess I was a bit too far away or something because it didn't quite look like she was breathing, and for this horrible, horrible moment I thought, this is what it's going to look like when she's dead. I hadn't even thought about it before, that my parents were going to die. But there it was."
Scully presses her lips against the rim of her mug. In death Teena Mulder had not looked asleep, not looked quiet and lingering as she imagined she must have in a hammock in Rhode Island. There are no mysteries in a morgue, no secrets, only brash steel and the unhappy crimson of still, stemmed blood. I don't think it helps that Scully did not know Teena Mulder at all, except as this very closed off woman who had shouting matches with Mulder, and then latterly as a corpse. Mulder still doesn't look at her, his big hands curled about his cocoa as if it could spare him memory. He had slid them under her unbuttoned blouse so carefully, reverently, whispered half-phrased promises in her ear. Of course this whole thing is made more uncomfortable by the fact that she can't stop thinking sexy thoughts about Mulder. Then again I imagine this is a recurring problem for both of them.
"I should have called her." He makes a little snuffling noise, like a hurt animal. "Maybe if I could have talked to her..."
"Mulder..." She takes a deep breath, a fortifying sip of hot, smooth chocolate. "Mulder, your mother was very sick. She had cancer. She knew she was going to die, and she wanted it to be peaceful, for you not to have to watch her suffer that much." Really, she's not sure how much Mulder had come into the decision at all, but she doesn't want to impute any further sins to a dead woman. And she knows the lie of this land, knows the secret bottle kept away, in case it gets too bad. In case.
"She never told me." His voice comes out in a strange, unfamiliar croak. "I didn't even know she was sick, Scully."
"Maybe she didn't want to worry you."
"Just let me worry enough when she was dead." His face creases with pain and terrible anger, and for a moment she feels a little twinge of an old fear. Once she had watched him turn a gun to his own head with swift and dreadful ease. Suicidal tendencies can run in families. Shut up, shut up. I am absolutely certain that this is something Scully has worried about. Mulder might be essentially an optimist, but there's a lot about him that pings the 'warning signs' for potential suicidality, or at the very least depression. It's something that is quite alien to Scully; while I can imagine that she might well have considered euthanasia if her cancer got too awful (and she does have a living will) she doesn't have the irrationality and inward violence to self-destruct in the way Mulder could. She busies herself with her mug, drinking in measured gulps. Mulder sighs and presses the heel of one hand to his forehead.
"My head hurts."
"I think you ought to get some sleep. Finish your cocoa." For once he acquiesces, nuzzles his face into the mug like a child to drain the dregs. She swallows the rest of hers quickly and takes the mugs back into the murky kitchen while he untangles himself from the blanket and stands up.
For a moment she hovers by the front door as he watches her, silhouetted by his little pool of light. It's late, past late, and she has habits running years deep, safety procedures. Your platonic friendship 101. They have been ignoring it, straying over the no-baseball-practice line and the no-lip-contact line and, if she's honest, sending it up in flames with magic tricks and a bottle of Riesling, but she feels the tug in her bones, still, from when she realised she was stepping over the first, deadliest boundary.
I imagine the relationship at this stage being more than a little weird, something that neither of them can quite believe in yet. They've spent so many years deliberately not being together that it must be hard to get out of the habit. Part of me actually disliked pinning down more concretely when their first time was in this story- one of the things that I love about this ship is that there is so little in canon about their relationship. Ambiguity is so much more interesting.
He looks as if he's about to say something. She can see her car keys on the table, almost hear the sound of the engine starting up, the flicker of the city lights, and either way she can't let him form those words, can't make him have to ask her to stay when his mother's died and left him with no family but a tank full of fish. Mulder in SUZ/Closure just breaks my heart. This is really it, the last of the scrappy little family he had is gone. If she goes, he can find his own way to bed. She's almost sure.
He shuffles his feet a little, ducking his head. Not for the first time she wonders if he retained something out of that cacophonic madness, can still hear the whispers of her thoughts before they are born. She shucks off her jacket and hangs it on the coat rack behind her, and her shoes clack against the floorboards as she crosses the apartment again and puts one hand on his arm.
"C'mon Mulder."
In his bedroom he puts on one lamp, beside the bed. There is only ever a single light source in this story, until the sunrise at the end. He peels off his t-shirt slowly and Scully catches herself watching the way the yellow light plays over the muscles of his back, the gradients of gold there. It had been dark in her apartment too, that night, and she had only felt, hadn't really seen. She concentrates on taking off her shoes. Mulder picks up a pair of sweats from the middle of the mess of covers swirled in the centre of the bed and turns around to her looking a little awkward.
"Um, there's some shirts in the dresser if you..."
The last time they had shared sheets they had slept curled up in one another, still humming with wine and secrets starting to tell at last. She could do it again, she thinks, go to him now with his tungsten-limned body and kiss the sadness out of his soft mouth, make forgetfulness with her hands. That would be a good deal easier than actually dealing with his grief head-on. I think there is some danger that sex just becomes another way of them avoiding actually saying anything to one another. But she goes over to his dresser instead, and takes out a crumpled, oversized t-shirt with the oven-mitt of Michigan printed on it in cracked inks. The Great Lake State. There is no significance to this other than that I once had a fantastic Sufjan Stevens 'Michigan' t-shirt that someone pinched in the college laundry. Bastards. She almost turns away to unbutton her blouse, but he doesn't seem to be looking at her anyway, bending over to fiddle with his radio alarm.
She follows him under the duvet once he shakes it out into a normal shape, and he rolls up on his side facing her. His hand rests somewhere partway between them.
"Scully?" he whispers, as if she might already be asleep. She turns to him.
"Mmm?"
"Tell me something about your father. Not that he liked Herman Melville or was awarded a medal or whatever. Something that happened once." Mulder, being the squishy little INFP that he is, wants to be able to relate his loss to Scully's somehow. Also I think he's more than a little bit intrigued by her having an essentially functional family.
She frowns slightly. "What do you mean?"
"Just a little story. Anything."
She closes her eyes and for a moment sees Ahab there, solid as a pillar, as truth. "I remember... it must have been my eleventh birthday. Dad was actually home that year, which was pretty unusual. He'd been promoted to lieutenant commander that winter, so we were in a new house and I didn't really know any of the other kids on the base yet. I think Mom was glad, actually, not having to organise another party, but I was pretty upset; I'd just had to leave all my friends behind and I couldn't even have a proper birthday." She realises that her hand has crept across to meet Mulder's between them, their fingers slowly interweaving.
"But Dad woke me up really early, when Missy was still asleep, and we got in the car and he took me out of the city, before the sun was up, and we sat on this hill in the dark. I asked him if he knew how many stars there were and he said no, because although he'd been counting since he was a little boy God was always making new ones, so he had to keep going. And I said that was pretty terrible of God, because if he kept making new stars then Dad would never know how many there were. And Dad said that was why he'd brought me up there, so that I could count too, and keep going for him when he was gone, because I was getting to be a grown up myself. We just sat there counting and talking until the sun came up."
Something I'm still not entirely sure works properly is that this is, in a way, the same sort of story that Mulder told. Realising that your parents are not immutable, that they are going to die, is a difficult thing to encounter as a child. But typically Mulder realises it at a distance, as a lone observer (I think I had the 'Demons' flashbacks in my head there), whereas Scully is effectively told it, but in a very gentle and safe way. Much as she and Ahab had their issues, he clearly loved her to pieces.
In the thin light, she sees Mulder squint at her sleepily. "I wish I could have met him."
"He'd have disapproved of you," she says, automatically. leucocrystal commented that she thought he might have actually hated Mulder, and I certainly don't think they'd have got on. But Mulder is, of course, fascinated by seeing Scully's past and origins, while she has had quite her fill of seeing his. Mulder squeezes her fingers.
"For bringing his youngest daughter to ruin?"
"For owning a mug with glow in the dark flying saucers on it."
That gets a small laugh. "But he'd be okay with the Ramones?"
"Actually, I think that might be even worse."
He smiles sadly and shifts his weight on the mattress. "You don't seem to talk about him much."
She shrugs. "You never talk about your father."
I think Scully doesn't talk about her dad that much because it's private. But from Mulder's perspective, why on earth would you not talk about parents who actually gave a crap about you? But she's only just letting him in to these parts of her life.
Mulder makes a face. "Most of the memories I have from when he was around, he and Mom were yelling. Even before Samantha... they just stopped trying to hide it after." He sighs, and looks down under the duvet to where their hands are joined in the darkness. "I was kind of glad when they divorced, just because it was quieter."
She can see the tears gleaming in his eyes again and shifts a little closer, the warmth of his body drawing her in. His hair is mussed and Struwwelpeter-manic against the pillow. He looks up at her again.
"Scully, about- about the other night." His thumb is strumming her knuckles slowly. "If you don't... well, I know we'd had a lot to drink and we've been seeing each other a lot more recently, and I don't want you to feel... I mean, if that was just a one-time thing, then I understand."
He's going to break this. She's going to leave. Something will go wrong. As I said, I think Mulder is essentially an optimist, but his family and relationships have been fucked up enough- and he's imagined that it is his own doing to a great enough extent- that he can't quite see this not going equally wrong.
There's a little catch in his voice at the last word and she feels, suddenly, a great swell, a terrible tide of love crashing over her. He has taken her life and upturned it, put reason on its head, all her picket-fence dreams of the future pared down to this solipsistic man who battles sentient computers and trash monsters and chases lights in the sky. She lifts their clasped hands to press against his bare chest over his heart, still beating. Seven years and it's still beating.
"No," she hears herself saying, as if crossing a great distance, "it wasn't."
"Oh," he says, "oh," and she kisses him then for the simple hope in his voice, kisses him on his tired forehead, his nose, his loquacious mouth. He gathers her up in his arms and she breathes in his nonsense Muldery smell, and this close to him she's nearly willing to give credence to storks and babies in gooseberry bushes because how could that be his mother, that woman whom death only made more flat and cold. She imagines a small Mulder suspended among hairy green fruits, eyes open wide to the ghostly night clouds and the wise, patient moon.
This was a really great little mental image- for some reason I was imagining this illustration from the US version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Also the small S7-y allusion; the closer she gets to Mulder, the easier it is to believe all this weird crap.
"I'm going to fall asleep," he says, sounding already half there, his eyes sliding closed. She brushes a hand through his hair, as if it were still long enough to be pushed back from his face.
"I'm not going anywhere."
Slowly, his breathing steadies, mellows, and she takes her hands away for fear of waking him with her touch, however gentle. The bedside lamp is still on and drawing a yellow outline around them, but she doesn't really want to disentangle herself in order to turn it off. Mulder's eyelids flutter, and he murmurs something under his breath.
Every bedtime of her childhood she prayed for small, tentative things, after a few months of praying for world peace had clearly come to no avail, and she's never gotten entirely out of the habit, even during those years when she and God were not really speaking and she told herself it was only a small indulgence in the dark. It's still hard to think about Him now and not see carved, alien metal, strange shapes in shifting sand, but the saints at least have human faces. Scully's faith is something that I rarely find tackled in fic to my satisfaction, but then the same can be said for the show. Religion is one of those things that I imagine must be hard to write about if you aren't religious, and Scully is so very private about her faith anyway, which only complicates things. I have a lot of thoughts on how she might have 'recovered' spiritually from the Biogenesis/Sixth Extinction stuff which I might work into something else, someday, but the idea of the humanness of the saints is part of it. Sometimes it's a lot easier to deal with human beings than with God. She can't remember who the patron of the bereaved is. She could hardly ask Thomas for Mulder, faithful Mulder, and she already hassles him enough on her own behalf as it is. She wriggles, trying to un-ruck the t-shirt from around her hips. St Anthony is the patron of lost things. Yes, she thinks, as Mulder moves his head and the light touches on the long, thin scar at his hairline. Help us be found. Lost things. This was always going to be bittersweet, there's always regret and scars, even now that they're starting to edge towards happiness.
In dreams she sees rain falling around them, filling up the city and carrying it all far out to sea. The bed bobs along in the Gulf Stream, leaving a phosphorescent trail. One of the many useless things I learned from being in an Age of Sail fandom. The bioluminescence indicated that a ship was still within the warm waters of the current.
"There's no way home," Mulder says, and she rolls onto her back and takes his hand, pointing it towards the North Star. I didn't realise until I re-read this how many references to the night sky had crept into the story. I suppose it's appropriate for the episodes.
"Keep looking."
It's still dark outside when she wakes to Mulder pressing her closer up against him than before, his fingers digging into her scapulae.
I always find myself 'soundtracking' fic, whether just in my head or by actually listening to certain songs. While I was writing this I spent a long time listening to Closer by Low
Things we lost in the fire
How'd we ever get by?
Words we'll never take back
Hold me closer than that
"I won't," he says, voice gravelly with exhaustion and fear, "I won't."
"Mulder?" She squeezes a hand out to grasp his shoulder and he quivers slightly and his arms slacken, letting her go. When he opens his eyes his pupils are huge and wild.
"I thought- I dreamed that they took you again, Scully. They took my mother and they were going to take you too."
She strokes his shoulder, making her best soothing noises, the kind you learn on fourteen hour internship shifts giving injections to toddlers. A lot of hers cried anyway, but Mulder seems to be responding, his tremors subsiding.
"It was just a dream. I'm here."
"What if they did?" He tightens his arms around her again, sounding uneasy. "I couldn't do anything last time. I didn't even find you. What if they took you and never gave you back?" I don't think Mulder ever quite gets over how arbitrary 'Their' treatment of Scully was, that he had no part in getting her back, or curing her cancer, or anything. He also clearly feels that on some level he could have prevented Samantha's abduction, and he is foiled at every turn in trying to get her back of his own volition. The unexpectedness of his mother's suicide is just more undermining of any feeling that he can protect the people he loves.
What if they took you, she thinks. That physically hurt to write. *beats off Requiem with a stick* "I won't let them." It feels almost as if she could, keep the lights from both their doors and the madmen from the window by the force of will alone, or the gun that lives steadily at her hip. Perhaps Mulder feels it too because he seems to relax a little, and rolls away from her briefly to switch off the light, plunging them into real darkness, holy and close. I seem to steal adjectives from Dylan Thomas without even noticing that I'm doing it. See also: '...her sharp corners and her keyless eyes'.
"It doesn't feel like she's dead." He runs a hand gently up her arm as if for assurance, making her skin prickle. "You'd think something would be different."
"Was it like that when your father died?"
He barks a laugh. "No, but I wasn't really myself at the time, as you might recall. And when he died I still had Mom. As much as we ever spoke." He sighs again. The last Mulder, last of an ignoble line. Scully can smell the salt-damp of tears on the pillow, the little catches of breath in their long, wakeful silence.
She waits until she's sure he is asleep again before whispering, "You still have me."
Because there's no way she would say that to him when he was awake. At least not at this point.
The second time there isn't anything in particular to wake her, the room still dark and weighty and Mulder at some sort of peace, only mumbling and twitching occasionally like a sleeping cat. Scully sits up on her elbow to look over him at the alarm, which reads 6:23. Her body clock has developed a fickleness after years of early mornings, frequently rousing her just too early for comfort but not early enough that she can ignore it and go back to sleep. Instead she extricates herself from the duvet and pads over to the bathroom. The halogen aura of the shaving light makes her skin look sallow, her eyes murkily ringed, and she runs her fingers absently through her pillow-sculpted hair before splashing some water on her face.
Apparently space on his shelves has become scarce as there are more books in the bathroom than she remembers, Civilisation and Its Discontents propped amicably up against a star atlas and a pristine copy of How to Cook Everything beside the door. There is a frighteningly large book of baseball statistics on top of the toilet with a dried smear of shaving cream on the cover, which makes her wince. Mulder does not have good book habits. I imagine he is the sort of person who writes in the margins and highlights bits (urgh). I had fun picking out the books too- the incompatibility of individual happiness and civilisation, an untouched cookbook (logically stored in the bathroom), and a star atlas, because I noticed in my obsessive staring at screencaps of this episode that Mulder has a telescope (look, there it is, between Skinner and Scully). Though presumably it's mainly used for checking out the Consortium surveillance van across the road because there's no way in hell he'd be able to see any stars with a scope that small in the middle of a city.
Perhaps it's the sudden flickering of the light or the murmur of the water pipes that snaps her fully awake, but she looks back at herself in the mirror, startled. It is six in the morning and she is standing in Mulder's bathroom, wearing one of his shirts, rumpled and scruffy from lying in his bed. Somewhere they have stumbled through a tesseract and into a strange world where it is perfectly normal for her to open the cabinet and reach for the still-packaged spare toothbrush that she knows is in there, or to step into the shower and spend the rest of the day smelling of his shampoo. She studies the reflected curve of her nose, the lines starting to show around her eyes. There is nothing too different that she can see.
"You'd think something would be different." This is kind of the other half of the earlier moment when she considers leaving. There's a level on which this is actually really easy. The mirror-gazing is also a bit of a forward-reference to 'all things', how Scully is suddenly forced to look at herself again now, in a way that she doesn't normally. I don't think we see either of them looking into mirrors very often, except during the cancerarc. For my nerd credentials, if this were Mulder POV he'd explain it via the Holtzman Effect rather than a L'Engle reference, but while I think Scully has probably read Dune (at the behest of a college boyfriend or something) she is most certainly not going to mentally reference it!
From the other side of the door she hears the mattress squeaking slightly as Mulder moves in his sleep, always restive, and she realises she is filing away somewhere in her mind the crucial information that the mattress squeaks. She lifts her eyes to the crack in the ceiling, which like its twin in the office persists in withholding answers.
"Scully?"
Forests or cornfields or the wild expanses of his apartment. Mulder has pushed the duvet back a little and is sitting up in bed, the light falling through from the bathroom giving him a haunted look. She dries off her hands and walks back in towards him, sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing a hand across his forehead. He blinks owlishly at her. What is it about the word 'owlish'? I want to wrap it up in a blanket and run away with it.
"Do you want some breakfast?"
He turns away to stifle a yawn, his jaw cracking. "I don't know if there's any food."
Translation: there isn't any food that Scully would consider breakfast.
"I could go and get something."
"No." He clutches at her hand briefly, his fingers trembling tympanic against the back of her wrist. "Um, there should be coffee or something, I think. Sorry."
Her clothes from the previous night are still folded over the back of the lone chair and she picks them up and begins to dress automatically. She glances back towards the bed out of the corner of her eye and sees Mulder's gaze skittering away from her, his face still heavy with sleep. Scully walks back around the bed with her necklace in one hand and holds it out to him.
"I can't see to do the clasp."
"Oh," he says, and takes the thin chain in his cautious fingers. The cross winks in the narrow fall of light from the bathroom as she bends her head towards him and he reaches around her neck, closing his eyes. This is again a rather Caravaggio visual in my head- the darkness of the room, the little bit of light around them, the golden glint of the cross like a bright spot of hope held between them, almost invisible. She feels the fastened chain fall from his hands but he doesn't take his arms away, and she lets him bear her down until their foreheads touch, his breath whickering across the open neck of her blouse. The air about them seems very still. The vocabulary of twenty years' education leaves her quite bereft of the right thing to say. For two ridiculously over-educated people, they are very inarticulate sometimes.
There's a sharp knock at the door, and he jerks away, one hand brushing the tips of her hair as his arms drop. She steps back, looking around for her shoes. The sunrise is edging at the blinds and picking out blurry daguerreotype shadows amongst the scattered clothes on the floor and the folds in the duvet, craters on a moon map, an unexplored land.
Daguerreotypes were a very early form of photograph, made by exposing an image directly onto silver, and thus can't be duplicated. The surviving examples are often very blurry and indistinct. This was to sort of bring the picture imagery around again, painting to photograph, and the hints of maps and journeys, distance left to travel and the road already behind them. Um. I promise this all makes sense somewhere in my head.
As a final self-indulgent comment, I really think this is the best thing I've written so far. Happy fluff is all very well in its place, but I'm a miserable sod at heart, and as I see it, TXF is essentially a tragedy, a Pandora's Box of horrors with a tiny spark of hope at the bottom. That's sort of what I was going for here; darkness and shadow and sadness, with a single light throughout, something to hold onto until the morning