From: cucumberspy <cucumberspy@yahoo.com>
Date: 28 Jul 2001 20:15:22 -0700
Subject: new fic: like a string around my finger
Source: atxc

CLASSIFICATION: sad story.  MSR.  gobs and gobs of scullyangst.  sorry
scully.
TIMELINE: post-S8
RATING: PG
FEEDBACK:  pleeeease!!  good, bad, whatever!!  i can never get better
if no one tells me what i'm doing wrong.... =)  cucumberspy@yahoo.com
ARCHIVE: gossamer yes, ephemeral yes.  anywhere else, just let me know
and keep my name and notes attatched, please
NOTES: lo siento... i did not have this beta read.  i am seeking a
beta-reader, however, and would be willing to return the favor.
NOTES, II: this was going to be a response to my own challenge, but
then i found a scene in there that sorta violated the rules (although
it *could* work with a stand-in, some whispering and a little bit of
clever cinematography... ahh... the power of suggestion....but that is
tv and this is text.  so.)  i tried rewriting it, but it didn't want
to go.  so...  yeah.
SUMMARY: mulder's gone again, and scully's got to cope.

###############
like a string around my finger (01/01)
by cucumberspy



When the phone rang, she forgot to exhale.  Will squealed at her and
spit up a little bit of curdled milk, so she dabbed his chin.

She glared at the phone, feeling somewhat like an alcoholic about to
fall off the wagon.  After three rings, she stood, stalked over,
picked up the receiver and dropped it back onto the cradle, relieved.

She scooped Will out of his highchair and set him in his playpen so
she could wash her face.

The razor--his--was still in her medicine cabinet, and she meant to
throw it away, but every time she dropped it into the trash can, she
had to pick it up and put it back.

She skated her fingers lightly over the blue plastic, then grabbed her
washcloth and started scrubbing her face.

*

For my son, on his 12th birthday.

Dear Will,

I don't know how to even begin this letter.  Maybe the first thing
I'll write is what I want you to know above all else.  I love you.  I
mean to burn this as soon as I get back, because if things go the way
I hope, you won't need to read that I love you in a letter.  I'll be
around to tell you so.

But if I'm not there, then I know I owe you an explanation.  Funny,
most of my life, I never really felt like I owed anyone an
explanation, with the occasional exception of your mom.  'They' say
that parenthood makes you more responsible, and I think they're right.
 You're my son, and I want--I need--you to believe that I didn't just
walk away.

*

She kept his things.  At first, she kept everything, wedged into boxes
and crammed into her spare room.  Before that, actually, she threw
everything away--tried to, anyways--moving like a tsunami through his
apartment, smashing glasses and coffee mugs to splinters in the bottom
of a cardboard box that stood waist high and served as a small
dumpster.  She tore down the books and kicked over piles of magazines,
swept off his coffee table every object that had the audacity to sit
there, as if he were going to come home again.  As if.  When she
yanked his suits down and thrust them into paper grocery sacks, she
thought, I should donate them to Salvation Army.

She carried everything out to the real dumpster instead.  She peeled
her hair away from her face, rubbing a sweaty hand along her forehead.
 A man stopped to ask her, "Can I help you ma'am?"

And she had growled at him, "I'm fine!"  Lurched down  to heft up the
last box, but she had barely been able to drag it out.  Full of books!
 Books!  So she snatched them out and hurled them into the dumpster,
'til her thumb caught in the spine of one and a page like a very fine
razor slit her finger, deflated her.  She jammed her finger into her
mouth to catch the blood, sinking down to weep atop the box of books.

It was all just too much.

*

Please believe that I did what I did because I love you and your
mother.  Please believe that these are the words of a sane man living
in an insane world, and not mutterings of some conspiracy-consumed
paranoiac.

*

She meant to keep the fish.  She even called PETSMART and took careful
notes as the man on the other end explained how to safely transport
it.

She pushed her sleeves back to her elbows and billowed the bag open
until the vortex burst and water gushed in.  Rather like the reverse
of a birth.  But the point was that it was the same water, the same
temperature, to avoid shocking the creature, so said the man from
PETSMART.  Gripping the edge of the plastic in her left hand, she
forced the net through the water, quickly trapping the surviving fish.
 It flopped and jerked and seized in the net.  She dipped the net into
the bag and wiggled it until the fish darted out, careening down to
the bottom of the bag.  If fish could pant, she thought, this one
looks like it's panting.  She knotted the top, leaving the bubble of
air like the man from PETSMART had said to.

She put the bag into a bucket, put the bucket on the kitchen counter,
away from the sun.  She siphoned all the water out and wrestled the
tank over into the bathtub to be scrubbed the tank clean with a fresh
sponge and no soap.  Just like the man from PETSMART had advised.

Loaded it all into her car.  She almost wished she had accepted any
one of several offers of help Doggett, Reyes, the Gunmen, Skinner, her
mother.

But only almost.

She had her key half into the ignition when she realized she'd left
the fish (which she had already begun calling Marvin) on the kitchen
counter, and a near-hysterical giggle bubbled out.  The fish, of
course.  She skidded back up and brought Marvin down and set his
bucket on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

William would like a pet, she thought, and smiled.  She could see him
patting the glass of the tank and burbling happily.

But when she pulled into her parking spot and lifted up the bucket,
she found Marvin bobbing at the top.  DOA, her mind supplied.  Dead on
arrival.

That's what you get for naming it, she thought, and blinked.  She
touched her cheeks, unsurpised to find them damp.

She ended up giving the tank to a neighbor and flushing Marvin down
the toilet.

*

Once upon a time, in 1992, a young FBI agent was assigned to work on a
project called the X-Files unsolved cases pertaining to the
supernatural and paranormal.  The man she was partnered with had lost
his sister years ago, in what he believed to be an alien abduction,
and he'd been looking for her ever since.  She was the right
combination of brilliant and logical and beautiful, and the powers
that be assigned her to completely unravel his work.  They
underestimated her.  They figured that she would care more for her
career than for working too long with a man they called "Spooky."

She didn't.  She stuck around, even though Spooky ditched her,
dismissed her, needed her so desperately that when she was gone he
couldn't function.  Maybe that should have been the scariest part.

But she was brave.

She might never recount to you all that she lost to our quest a
sister, a child, even three months of her life erased and
unreclaimable.  She was abducted, returned comatose, left barren,
given cancer.

But she never gave up.

I want you to know how special your mother is.

*

For a while, she couldn't stand the smell of take-out.  Or pizza.  She
couldn't eat yogurt with bee pollen.  She couldn't eat any of the
things that reminded her of him.  The Thai place they visited for his
birthday one year was tainted.  Denny's was out of the question.  Gas
stations were the worst because they sold sunflower seeds, and after
years of always grabbing a bag, she would find herself standing at the
counter with a package, not knowing how she got there or when she
picked it up.

This is when she started liking Japanese food, with its simplicity. 
The soups were clear and the rice bright and steamy white.  She
favored wasabi, the horseradish that made her nose run.  She started
buying packages of paper-crisp nori seaweed and avocados and a rice
steamer, even a gallon can of Kikkoman Soy Sauce.

It was her three a.m. snack.  By pale refrigerator light, she'd spread
out her materials on the kitchen table, Will cradled against her
breasts, sucking happily.  She would tear off pieces of nori, plop
down a spoonful of rice, a scrap of avocado, a drizzle of soy sauce
and a dab of wasabi, crumble it all together and shove it into her
mouth.  Repeat.

The wasabi always burned a little, but it was a good burn.  Clean. 
Sometimes, she ate it plain and tried not to remember that she was
alone.

*

She never ever gave up.  Because she is the strongest person I know.

*

She sloshed her hands through the lukewarm water, drizzling it over
William.  He cooed and made baby noises at her, gripping her right
index finger with a baby smile.  He was too happy, and he couldn't
have understood the tears gathering under her eyelashes.

"I love you," she cooed back, teasing him with her fingers, jiggling
his chubby baby toes.  "Yes I do."

She smiled and patted his belly, lifting him up to rinse off the last
of the suds.  He grappled for her left hand, gasping at the shiny
wedding band around her fourth finger.

Suddenly, it was too much, and her nose was running and she was
crying, even as she toweled the baby.

"Oh Mulder," she whispered.  "You were wrong."

*

I spent my whole life trying to reclaim the family I lost when my
sister was abducted, never thinking that I was tearing down all the
chances for the family I would someday have.

*

She owned a lighter now, like Monica.  A little slip of neon green
plastic, translucent so the lighter fluid sloshing around inside was
visible.  She bought it three months ago along with a carton of
Morleys in a fit of hysterical irony.  She thought she might take up
smoking, but found she couldn't stand the cigarette taste any more
than she had at thirteen.

The Morleys remained shoved at the back of her underwear drawer, while
she lit William's birthday candle with the lighter.

*

Tonight, I'm writing by nightlight.  Every now and then, I stretch up
to peek at you sleeping.  I wonder who you'll grow up to be.  I wonder
if you'll miss me, if you resent me for leaving.  Do you?  I wonder if
you play basketball and wish I could be around to see if you have any
interest in Little League.  I wonder if you'll have your mother's keen
rational mind or my illogical intuitiveness.  I wonder if you'll hate
math but devour books with fightening speed.  I wonder who your best
friend will be and what kind of music you'll play to drive your mom
crazy.

I wanted so much to be there for all of this.  I don't regret my life
and the way I spent it, not much.  I can't begrudge my quest too much,
cause it brought me your mom and you.  But I would trade in every
X-File if I knew it meant that we could live in yuppie suburbia,
insignificant and unaware and, most importantly, safe.

Instead, the options presented are far less enticing.  I've become The
Man Who Knew Too Much.

*

On Friday, she ate lunch with her mom.  William cooed and gurgled at
the waitress, a girl who looked like she was still in college.  She
watched as the waitress brought their order and then untied her apron
and sat down with her boyfriend two tables away.

Her mom called her Dana too much, but she wanted to say, "I'm not
Dana, call me--" only she couldn't imagine what her mom should call
her.  She still flinched when people called her "Agent Scully" or "Dr.
Scully".  Professor.  That was neutral.

She laughed a little, imagining her mom's reaction to *that*.

So she said nothing, and nodded at the right places and gave a quiet
report of William's first babblings, first words and watched the
waitress and her boyfriend giggle and flirt and hold hands.

*

In a few hours, I will leave our apartment to try and make a deal.  My
silence for our peace.  I know things about their Consortium, their
conspiracy, just enough that I might have some room to bargain.  They
might decide to dispose of me anyways, on the fear that I would
continue our research outside of the FBI.  But there has always been a
risk in our line of work, and the chance for us to be a family is well
worth the risk.

*

Now she whittled away boxes one Saturday at a time, dumping the
contents out over her living room floor.  Sometimes, she liked to
pretend she was excavating, that if she dug long enough and hard
enough, she'd find him buried somewhere.  Of course, that was as
ridiculous as Jurassic Park.

There were photographs one album of his family, and then a two clipped
newswire photos, one of the two of them and one of just her.  Glossy
black and whites from crime scenes her crouched by a corpse,
latex-gloved fingers prodding.  She swallowed,  remembering that case,
and quickly flipped the photo over.

A Poloroid of them together, laughing, taken at some nameless and long
forgotten-but-required Bureau function.  A very old Polaroid, judging
by her hairstyle... longer, softer.  Some other Dana Scully, not her.

We used to smile so completely, she observed.  It had been a long
time.

It had been such a long time.

Even in the single wedding photo (another Polaroid) you would have had
to add up the wispy upturn of lips offered by both bride and groom to
get something that could count as a whole smile.  The couple in the
picture stood so straight, so scared, as if stifling tears.

The wedding had not been a wedding, but a hasty civil service sealed
with the scrawl of a pen, a trace of a breathless kiss, and fingers
that gripped hers so hard she thought her bones might snap, but she
wouldn't have cared.  The numbness at her fingertips was proof that
they were still together.  He didn't let go of her hand for at least
an hour, and then, only so she could feed William.  He was afraid of
breaking down, he explained later afraid that if he kissed her he'd
never come up for air, afraid that if he let go of her she would
dissolve.  Or he would dissolve.

It could happen, things could go wrong, and he might never come back,
they knew that.  (Wasn't that always the risk, after all?)  And it was
their wedding night, so she kissed him with the full intention of
suffocating, at least a little, at least enough to kill a couple
hundred brain cells.

*

Please, please understand.

Love,
Dad

*

On Will's second birthday, she dragged three boxes full of files,
disks, and printouts (each labeled TOYS or FOR WILL) into her bedroom
and called the Gunmen to leave a message.  She would begin her
research in the evening, just as she had agreed.

Then she strapped Will into his stroller and took him to Chin's
Chinese.  A smell of grease and egg rolls clung to the air, but she
sat down and ordered a carton of lo mein, and they ate with their
fingers while she explained to him that this is what she used to eat
with his father.

-30-