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Title: Larger than Life
Category: VARO The genealogy of this particular is rather convoluted -- the thirdborn son of my vignette series, Places, it was disinherited in its early childhood because the characterizations simply refused to work out. However, by screaming and bawling and setting all kinds of emotional pyrotechnics, it survived its enforced infancy and my blossoming obsession with Saitou's legs, then jumped tracks *completely* to enter a belated puberty. Witness the awkward product of many dry months. References to the Places series and "Carnival" in specific. *
". . . Wishing I could thank you in a different way, come on -- Larger than Life, Backstreet Boys. * It's the middle of the night, really, and the shadows are jumping across the room all long and stretched, threatening. Even with the blanket wrapped around you and the tv on--well. It's cold. The heater went down sometime during the day, and the girl at the front desk *swore* you gave notice to the manager the day before yesterday. Middle of the night, odd shadows, it's cold. It's C-SPAN or C-SPAN2. CNN? MSNBC? Something. Mulder's infojunkie insomnia is rubbing off, and those news channels you can just dim the volume down to nothing and be comforted by the lights, the synonymous men in expensive suits -- comforting. Available nationwide too, so you can fall asleep to the freshman senator from Idaho everynight, and there's something soothing about listening to him talk about corn feed and ethanol subsidies. Is Mulder watching this right now? Sitting on that couch of his, legs sprawled out, Mulder-- Mulder. That's right. You comfort yourself with the thought of Mulder. Forget the nastiness at work today, the way he's tight and jittering, all nerves wound around thin bones, so skinny now. His face is all gleaming eyes and fluid lips, that nose jutting out and long thin hands skittering about; he can't stay still these days. Remember that last case out? He hadn't had those dreams for years, years now, and then in Raleigh, after that carnival. He came back with mud on his pants, a smear of dust down one flat cheek, straw in his clothes, but that was usual: that was Mulder. He wouldn't look at you, and that night, that night--he was screaming, body hard against the sheets at three in the morning. Something about promises, and you'd felt frankly ashamed as you stood there, praying that it wasn't you he was talking about. It's the guilt. That's the bad part: you don't mind the surveillance, the rootlessness, the fact that you can't sleep soundly because you're afraid he's going to have another one of his "episodes"--he always refers to them as his episodes, when he refers to them at all. Over orange juice and muffins the next morning, he'll turn from the local paper long enough to give you that half-assed smile, eye the scratch on your face or the swelling bruise on your arm, and say, "Had a bad one last night, I guess." And then turn back to his breakfast. It's the guilt. And that night, he'd been screaming, and in the middle of his thrashing, he'd somehow turned his head into your lap, then recoiled from the touch of human flesh, all the while sobbing, let me go, don't make me come like this, don't make me do this. When you touched him, he squirmed away, thrashing, and then he lunged upwards, clawing at some indeterminate entity, all the while screaming fit to bring the ceiling down on both of your miserable heads. And then you slapped him, hard enough to snap his head back and forth, and that brought him out. He stared at you for a long moment, eyes dilated and wild at the sight of you, and then he ran shaking hands through his hair. Sat up. Took the glass of water from you with hands that shook so badly you had to steady them, steady them when you were about to jounce off the bed with nervousness. "Do you have anything for this, Dokterr Scully?" His voice had been quiet enough that, at first, they'd been lost amidst the hum of the air-conditioner, but as you turned to go, he'd caught your wrist... Lightly, gently, but his index finger and thumb were long enough to hold you, and the icy touch of his hands made you shiver in the humid August air. "Do you have anything for this? Some sedatives? Sleeping aids?" You distinctly remember thinking that he was fucked up enough without putting more crap into his system, and he must have seen the sentiment in your face because he suddenly staggered against the wall. His head made a distinct -thunk- as it hit the drywall. "What did I say?" he murmured as he turned those remarkable, those remarkable, beautiful eyes on you. They were blue that night: most of the time, his eyes *are* blue after the episodes. Whoever said that you can't see colors in the dark never saw Mulder's eyes after an episode; they're this lovely, washed-out electric blue all speckled with tears. "You. . ." Pause. The lie stuck in your throat. "You didn't sa. . ." "I said something about him, didn't I?" He sat up in a sudden rush of movement. "Didn't I?" You didn't say anything. You just hovered at the doorway, unwilling to stay, unwilling to leave, wanting neither. "Scully," he'd said, voice cracked and shivering as he suddenly dropped to his knees, and when you jumped over to steady him, he lifted his head and he had such a haunted look in his eyes. Haunted, yes, that's the word. Not sadness, not rage, not regret, but remembrance of the unattainable. Memory lingering in the curve of his eyes, the trembling of his hands. He turned his face out onto the window and stared at it with such intense longing, such wanting that you mustered up the guts to reach out and cover his eyes with your hands. There was a low, miserable note in his throat, and you ended up closing your eyes against it. Was it the oilens? Was it Sam? Was it something else? He began to cry, long, broken little noises, and he clung to you, wrapping his arms around your shoulders and sobbing, "You're my lifeline. My life preserver. I said you were my one in five billion, but that isn't even close; there's nothing like you, there could never be anything like you." And before you could say anything, he'd kissed you. Bent forward, wrapped his hands around your elbows, and kissed you, straight across the mouth. You had sat there, rigid and resisting, while he pulled you in, rolled you underneath him. While his hands had roamed up and down your sides, tugging on your T-shirt, you. It took Mulder whispering your name into your belly to bring you out of it, to make it real, and then your arms went around him. A shaky, uncertain prospect, but he wriggled out of your arms and well-- Well. You remember the rest. The smell of his skin afterwards, the fine hairs at the nape of his neck dribbling down the bumps of his spine. And afterwards you realized that Mulder's kiss had only been his way of driving the ghosts back, but there he was, golden in the lamplight, quoting Milton and smiling at you and then going out in the slow August dawn with the crickets dying down in the fields and his hand stealing into your own with the sun coming up through the trees and coloring the ground and your faces . . . It *had* been August then, and he *had been* gallant and chivalrous the next day. Excellent company full of jokes and small touches, excellent company for telling a police chief that one of his own men had indeed murdered his wife. Excellent company, indeed, considering the circumstances. You smile a little and snuggle into the blankets, wrapping yourself up in the memory of Mulder's smiles and laughter, the warmth of his affection -- affection and sex, laughter, a cup of coffee, peck on the cheek and the soft warmth of his mouth over yours after hours if you wanted it. A little feverish, hungry caresses and kisses that felt like he was sucking your soul out through the mouth, but then it settled into Disturbingly normal. You snuggle a little deeper into your blanket. Disturbingly normal: yes, that was what you had been, and then you had found Mulder puking bile in his bathroom. An unexplained bruise on his hip, chafing across his throat and these faint, wiggly scratches across his wrists. And then Montana, those vast steppe plains, Mulder slinging his jacket over his shoulder, Mulder watching the skies, as if expecting a miracle of some sort, and he'd just dropped to his knees an-- You're not going to think about that. All these months, all these cases, he's never cried. Not in Wyoming, not in Nevada, not in Sacramento and not even New Jersey, during the drought-time and when you'd cried yourself. You can still smell the bodies rotting in the hot August air. It seemed impossible for the air to be so humid when the land was so dry, but maybe, that was why the bodies had been roiling with maggots, that blood was the only liquid in the land, though there was plenty of that spread around, dried, dusty streaks of red mingling with the lighter colored dirt. Outside, the sky cracks, and you see the shape of a man outlined against neon signs and lightning, arms thrust wide apart in a damned good reinterpretation of the crucifixion. * He's soaked to the skin, shivering. His hair's plastered to his forehead, and his fingers are blue. The sound of his teeth chattering can be heard above the heater going full blast, and the towel's pulled tightly enough around his shoulders. You're not even going to try and For that matter, you're cold too. Your sweatshirt is soaked, and your feet are melting into the plastic house slippers you ran outside in. They squelch and water runs out of the side. That's how long you were outside trying to drag Mulder back. Stood there for a while, like it was the second coming, started screaming into the storm, and when you grabbed him by the arm, he started gibbering. Aramaic, for all *you* know, and you had to wrestle him out of fetal position long enough to drag him back down the corridor. You're seriously considering sedating him, but he does look normal now, just tired, exhausted, ashamed of himself, and very, very wet. He's slumped on the floor next to his bed, hands shaking with the effort of sitting upright, and his whole body trembling with emotion he can't express, but he looks normal. Like any other man that walks outside in a raging thunderstorm and stands underneath a sixty foot *metal* neon sign. It's late, now. Even the shadows are starting to fade, but on Mulder's tv, the freshmen senator from Iowa is still talking in all of his passionate, shiny faced zeal; he kind of looks like Ralph Reed, in a way, that bright face, the prettyboy zealot, except this time, the cause isn't the moral salvation of America, but rather, the financial salvation of America's farmers--no, scratch that. *He* uses the term 'agricultural workers'. When you sit down to watch, on the edge of the bed, the springs give way underneath you, Mulder leans his head against your knee; water squelches out of his hair and down your shins. He sighs and turns his head, then closes his eyes, and you can feel his eyelashes trembling against your skin. More water trickles down your calf and your ankle onto the carpet, and you run your hands across his shoulders, feel the heat of his body rising up, almost a solid wave, coming up through the soaked shirt and the fine line of his collarbones and his heart, beating in the hollow of his throat, making the edge of his shirt tremble, too, but you still can't say anything or do anything but hold his head to your knee and wait for the storm to pass. *
"I kinda always knew you didn't dump your ex-girlfriend -- Ex-Girlfriend, No Doubt * end * Feedback to anasile@aol.com
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