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Title: Places: Floor Warning for squick factor. No explicit sex here, just nasty violent imagery. So Nonie never really got back to me on this. S'what? .Floor There's something about that sensation--the way it pushes all other considerations out, the way it swirls in your mind, elbowing the images out and replacing them with this thin white streak that runs across the side of your eyelids. A long, sustained exhalation of forgetfulness, where everything is centered down on the sheer, simple fact of living, on keeping your chest moving and biting down on your lip so that you don't start screaming. A simple uncomplicated burning, with no connotations, no thinking, no logic, just the sheer sensation itself, distracting, so clear that you can hear your heart beating. And it feels good: this long, languorous warmth that starts at the base of the cut and continues upwards in a leisurely fashion until reaching the head. Then, disappointed at the shortness, it turns around, inspects the territory, and digs it's heels in, sliding spurs into newly bared meat and running cold little fingers up and down, circles in the flesh around. Your heels drum against the floor as the warmth sort of wiggles around in your chest and in your throat, making your eyes squinch up before leaving with a flounce that sends you tumbling back down to earth. Instant gratification though, with audience participation. Flick the razor, and you get a new channel. Two colored television, but with infinite shades: classic crimson, diluted rose, crusting burgandy and this bright vivid fresh , but you're working on adding different colors though. In the movies, when somebody gets disembowled, the viscera is blue, green, trembling and sheathed with purple translucence. They fall out in long, sleek ropes, steaming a little if it's cold. Would your intestines writhe? If you stayed conscious long enough, could you watch your food being digested? How long could you stay conscious? Would you stay conscious long? Would you survive? You shiver. After all, there's a fine line between suicidal and masochistic (masochistic. that's not even the proper name for this. and this isn't pain. not really. it feels too clean.), and you haven't crossed that line. In fact, you're not even sure there is a line, because the two of them are so far away. If you wanted to kill yourself, you'd just walk over to your holster, grab shiny Bureau issue, and blow your brains out. Quick, easy, efficient, and you could do that if you wanted to kill yourself. If. But you don't. You set the paring knife on the bathroom counter. Stupid. Paring knife? This is what you get for having out-of-date cutlery. Hell, you *have* no cutlery. A couple flimsy plastic knives from takeout from Woo's, a dull letter opener, the perks of being out of town fifty one and three quarter weeks out of fifty two. And you'd lost the razor blade you'd filched from Stores somewhere on the flight back from Boise, so you'd stopped at Kmart on your way home. Razors? Forget razors. They had those cheap little shaving Bic razors, and they snap so easily. In such a huge store, the only decent-looking knife you could find was a paring knife, for apples and pears and the like. When you'd bought it, you had a quick fantasy about it lookling innocuous enough to keep in your briefcase, but you've realized that you couldn't resist temptation long enough to get through a day at work. You shuck off your t-shirt, shiver a little at the feel of cooler air across your skin. The apartment hasn't warmed back up yet, what with being out of town and the radiator half clogged. You wince as you shuck off your shirt. Your wrists had been raw from the binding rope, and there are small series of scabbed-over, mostly-healed half-circles on your thigh from Alex playing with *his* knife. You sniff. Motel on Route 81, rag in mouth, bound to a creaking bedstead, and the flash of Alex's knife in the light from the parking lot, and you dream it about it every night. A week and a half? Eleven days. A handful of hours and a long, long time of minutes created from eternal seconds experienced in burn. You haven't touched her since. You had been expecting him to hit you, and he just smiled and kissed you again, his hands sliding down your ass, laying you out on the be-- You shove your mind away from her, from that, from the entire memory of Alex. If you thought about that, you'd go mad, absolutely mad. So you make a very precise cut far, far up on your forearm, higher than even your t-shirts, not like you'd be wearing them in the middle of January, and it's a minor cut, but you've probably nicked some minor capillary, so you get a little bit of blood trickling down your arm, a slowly cooling droplet sliding to your wrist. . Mildly, distantly, someone is opening your front door. "Mulder, turns out that the sheriff in Mallard did use that profile, and they caught the perpretrator. You were right, the crimes were sexually motivated. Thirty five years old, on the spot, white male perpetrating crossracials." You can see her shoes as she walks by. Alex doesn't wear pumps. At least, he didn't last time you saw him. You wonder what Alex would look like in one of Scully's suits. You shove *that* ugly little thought away. "They've got a confession, a couple trophies and an atrophied breast. The mayor of Mallard called FBI, saying what a help we were, how he was mistaken in doubting us, etc, etc, how he hoped we'd be given an award for catching the killer." For a sudden moment, you feel like giggling, but the movement sends off little fireballs of agony jouncing up and down your gut. There's encrusted blood running from collar to hip; it's soaked the rug, spread out in a dark little pool around you. Your eyes are a little bleary, but soon, you can pick out the stains streaking both sides of the dry bathtub, a runnel dripping down the wallpaper and clotted in the little gulleys between tiles. Shit. You must'veve started thrashing around, it's going to be a bitch getting the blood out of the wallpaper. Right now, you can't really move your hand. It just refuses to move. She's poking through your spare room, looking for you. "The state media picked it up, and then the nationals--they're running us on CNN right now, Mulder." A little laughter. "It's this atrocious picture of you from BSU, your hair's sticking straight up, and I look like a marshmallow in burgandy plaid. It's horrible, Mulder." A throaty little chuckle. She *is* cheerful. Any moment, now, Jupiter's going to fall out of its orbit. "At any rate, Kersh isn't sure whether he's going to string us up on a wire or string the award around his necks, but the Director has ordered us have a press conference. It starts in half an hour, and you're not answering your phone. We're heroes, Mulder." She bangs the door on your spare room, then snaps, "Mulder, where *are* you?" You shake your head--woozy, cotton mouth. You must have passed out. Made a cut too high, too deep and just keeled over. Hit some vein. Some fucking federal investigator *you* are, can't even mutilate yourself competantly. Didn't cut enough to die, didn't cut shallow enough to keep control. You try moving again, sit up at least, but your abdomen simply refuses to open you and a fresh blow of blood trickles down your belly. How do you pass this off? Sorry, Scully. The paring knife just went crazy one me, it was alive. . . The bathroom door creaks open. You can't hide the puddle of blood trickling down your ribs. You bite a little smile. It can't be a razor or a steak knife or even a sport knife (Alex's knife), but it's this little paring knife you God help us all. You couldn't slit this with your wrists if you tried, and if you were really inclined to suicide. . . "Hey-lo, Scully." You smile at her, hope to take some of the chill out of her bearing. You haven't touched her since. Her cold eyes bore into you, then they turn nauseatingly soft, and she staggers against the wall, her body limp with disbelief. "Mulder?" she says, her voice trailing off into nothingness and that desperate disbelief.
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