Night Giving Off Flames (1/2)
"Yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible."
- John Milton
First Posted: June 2000
Category: Angst, Oddness, M/S. Quasi-Post-Colonization AU that occurs sometime after "Hollywood AD". Oddness. One wee-tiny spoiler for "HAD" and hardly any others whatsoever. Did I mention it's Odd?
Disclaimer: Not mine. Grr.
Thank You: Shari and Liza. Mwa! You rock.
Feedback: Would be lovely, please and thank you. eviljesemie@yahoo.com

Scullyfic Improv (elements given at end)
June 2000

- - -
"How beautiful the body is... How terrible when torn. The little flame of life sinks lower and lower and, with a flicker, goes out. It goes out like a candle goes out. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest at extinction, then submits. It has its say, then is silent."
- Dr. Norman Bethune

- - -
Yesterday was autumn in the park. Family cookouts cast off sweet savory fragrances. Hills simmered with foliage like fluttering chiffon scraps.

Little fires in the trees, and plumes of flesh-hot smoke blistering the air.

She was allowed the luxury of a late afternoon walk without restraints or walls, and she tried to act as though the scenery and sensations appealed to her. After all, there was the blue plate sky, the green benches peeling, a row of eleven-year-olds with small sail boats laid on the lake to skid away from shore in the pricking breeze. There were yikkering russet-shaded squirrels dashing between chestnut trees. Two teenagers tangoed in thrift-store tuxedos, one giggling, the other loudly making fun of his companion's unflattering cummerbund. Their feet crossed and they shrieked as they fell, happily, into a poorly raked pile of leaves.

It was normal and beautiful in a flippantly cruel sort of way.

What she wanted most was to close her eyes against the descending evening's red blossom of setting sun, to rush into the lake that seemed to bleed with that laceration of light and let a crash of ice water stop her heart. But the fourth shifter was there, as always, and it would have protected her from herself.

Today there is a deal being made in the arterial hallway outside her metallic room, and the walls squeal with the angry reverberations. The fourth shifter - she will never call it or any of them a master - is the loudest arguer, but its words halt quickly. It has been appeased, it seems.

The door opens, and two flashlight beams throw infinite shards of white off the walls. Something pulls her from the bed, further bruising her already battered arms and wrists in a quick struggle, and ties a tight sash over her eyes.

Minutes later, she sits wilted in the backseat of a van, listening to frantic footsteps on pavement rush up to the vehicle.

She hears the shifter say, "Leave now. You have less than two minutes to vacate the premises. I can't stall them once they're here."

A door opens, and something pricks her finger while the shifter yells, "Hurry! They're coming!"

The sash is removed but the air is dark and blood-burst, and the last thing she sees before losing consciousness is the shifter at the van window. Its body expands, bulks, distorts and is restored to its natural shape. Its eyes are no longer his eyes. It is no longer him.

It was never really him, she thinks again with awful relief. Her finger stings and Mulder is dead and she collapses asleep, and this is one of the few comforts Scully has been granted since he died.

- - -
The phone rings once, and he answers it without speaking.

"We have her," says the smooth voice on the other end.

He forces the quaver out of his words by asking very slowly and quietly, "She's alive?"

"Of course. The broker's willing to make a trade."

Dammit. "No trades. I have cash."

A pause, and not even breath.

Quickly, with unrestrained desperation, he continues, "I have nothing to trade, but I have plenty of money. You know that." He's pacing in front of the small fireplace, just short of hitting the hearthstone with his knuckles.

"I do."

Bastard, he thinks. "Please."

"'Please,' what?" the amused voice asks.

Please. Please. He reins in his words, the desolateness. "Please work something out. You'll get a huge cut, you know that."

"Money is really of very little use to me at this point."

"I have nothing to trade. Nothing."

"You could trade yourself."

"Would that work?"

"Probably not."

"It's much more fun if they break me by breaking her, right?"

"They've already broken her. Now they're waiting for you."

"I've been officially disappeared, neutralized as a threat, remember?"

"Oh yeah. You could always raise yourself from the dead."

He swallows. "You know what they've promised." And he closes his eyes for just a minute to block out any image the words might conjure.

"Yeah. That would suck," the voice grins maliciously. "She has a very nice ass. It'd be a real shame to see it endangered further were you to crawl back to civilization. So why would you take this risk?"

Something sticky and leaden catches in his throat, and he inhales shakily around the nausea churning up from his stomach. "I'm not going back." I can't go back, he thinks with a pang of sorrow. Maybe I can't save her either.

The voice turns thoughtful, murmuring, "Lucky for you she can't go back herself. I still don't see what the commotion's about. It's been months. Shouldn't you just forget her and join the dark side once and for all? Or is that too obvious a tact?"

"Make the fucking deal."

"You mean that literally?"

He clenches his jaw, a gesture wasted in the empty room, and growls, "If you don't do this, and I find you, I'll kill you."

"That would certainly be a change of pace. I'm cowering," the voice chuckles. It is the voice of someone who has his feet propped on a desk, who has a handcuffed whore waiting to give him blowjobs or waiting to be killed, the voice of a man who could push someone's head under water and smile, smile, smile while liquid spills into the victim's lungs like gasoline. "Okay, okay. I'll make the deal. We'll be there by morning. But the price's going up."

"Fine."

"And I'll have to insist on a bonus."

Logs in the heart split under the laving fire. "Yes." Whatever it takes. Just... make them stop hurting her. Please.

"Good then. Good."

Krycek's voice and the airless choke around it are replaced by a dial tone, and Mulder returns the receiver to its cradle, and puts his head in his hands, and waits.

- - -
The sash has been replaced over her eyes. Her wrists and ankles are bound. She does not move to sit up for almost an hour after waking. The vacuum of the van is mostly undisturbed; she imagines the voices outside the stopped vehicle as intercepted dreams, overheard conversations at restaurants, half-tuned radio stations. They are not voices with which she should be concerned.

Her stiff body betrays her, and shakes, her head lulling against a frosted pane.

She is not surprised that there is a fifth shifter. She can hear it. It has, of course, his voice. These shifters have in their curiosity apparently turned her into a group project. The months since her involuntary surreptitious expiration (the second shifter's term) in the real world have felt a lifetime, and she has become one of their more interesting subjects. She stopped fighting weeks ago, after the third shifter's more pronounced physical explorations (its term), and since that time her worth has quadrupled.

The best slave is the obedient slave.

She knows she is not the only captive, merely another of the casualties of a disorganized and short-sighted attempt at revolution - spoils of not-quite-war - but it unnerves her nonetheless that they have customized her imprisonment, tailor-cut her punishment in their bemused fascination with her.

They knew her so well from the very beginning.

It is speaking in a low, tight voice.

"Let me see her."

"First things first. We have financial matters to discuss."

"You'll be compensated. I need to see her. Is she hurt?"

"What else would you expect?"

Then a thumping, wet sort of noise before it speaks again, sounding almost frantic.

"What have they done to her?"

"It's no longer important. We've bought the contract. They have no jurisdiction over her now. Well, in terms of immediate ownership, at least. She's ours. Yours, for a fee."

Familiar, that voice. A woman's.

Early morning wind whistles a lament along the lines of the van.

The voices are bargaining. It sounds very upset the way he used to, dangerous elements in his tone concealed beneath the quiet.

"Do you understand, then?" the woman is asking. "She is damaged goods. We won't be held responsible for her condition. That was not part of the arrangement."

"You could have killed her the way this went down. And drugging her--"

"We did what was necessary," a man interjects. Familiar. Familiar. "The last owner was a weak link in the rebel community. It's your good fortune our transaction was so amicable. She'll live."

"She's hurt," it says.

"She's gone," the first voice snaps. "This is what's left."

"What did they do to her?"

"They took out all those pretty silver chips, for one thing, all those little microscopic pieces of shrapnel inside her."

The wind, hard and dark on the van, pushing against the window.

It must be standing very close; she can hear it whisper. "They took out the chip?"

"They cured her." And the man's voice is manic glee, is the hard dark wind around the words.

Cured me, Scully thinks. And now I can die.

- - -
At dawn, in the foggy mizzle, the house looks stooped and wind-beaten, oatmeal-colored clapboard inlaid with pale turquoise windows. A short trail of awkwardly spaced clay medallions in the side yard's khaki grass leads around the corner of the house to an oak door and a long narrow limestone-floored porch. When the Gunmen brought him to this house almost a year ago, he immediately thought of it as home, an obvious conclusion: he had no-where else to go. But there was something else. He thought maybe he remembered dreaming of that porch, the view of the backyard from one of the tiny bedrooms - a cramp of grass and weeds, honeysuckle and azalea gone wild jammed against the house by the forest, the ominous, reaching trees.

He chose to forget the part of the dream where he woke to see her being dragged away by faceless men, her eyes wide and shattered.

This morning he returns from the cold damp backyard with a twiggy basket full of leaves that look as though they might be radioactive - neon colors, oranges and reds and yellows so unreal and bright it's as though they've been invented just this year for this autumn. He wonders idly if they'd glow in the dark if he held them under electric light for a few minutes, and in his mind's eye he pictures the entire forest shimmering phosphorescent in moonshine.

Against the flat brown of the basket, the colors are all the caustic shades of fire.

The house is quiet, as always, uninterrupted by its newest resident. Mulder does not wish to invade her privacy, but his paranoia triumphs after a short mental debate. He opens the door to Scully's bedroom very slowly.

She is asleep on her stomach on the old double-bed, one palm flat against a stiff-covered notebook. She must have found it, he thinks, in the bedside table's drawer. She has not removed her clothes or her shoes, and the blankets beneath her are not turned down. A bag Krycek tossed out of the van behind her last night lays untouched under a window.

Mulder creeps closer to the bed, wanting to make sure she's actually breathing, and stops himself from touching her.

He touched her last night, once, to help her out of the van, and she flinched away violently, unwilling to meet his eyes. He glanced to Krycek then, who shrugged and offered casually, "They always look like you."

"They who?"

"Them. The shifters. That was part of the game, to see how she'd react to something that looked like you."

"To several somethings that looked like you," Krycek's associate said.

Mulder couldn't quite keep the revulsion out of his expression, and Krycek reassured him, "Don't worry. I hear she's very cooperative these days."

His throat burns now with the memory. The bruises on her arms are old and fresh both, and streaked with brown blood rubbed out from under her skin by the rope that had bound her. Her ankles are rimmed with similar lavender-green bruises.

He eases the book from under her hand. It's his journal, an odd mishmash of newspaper clippings and coordinates and culled emails, leftovers the Gunmen had, things they've found and delivered to him discreetly: an old crime scene photograph of him, Scully, and Skinner standing in a hot tub, pointing up at a piece of showroom ceiling directly above it, where a giant grizzly cocoon of unknown origins had usurped a light fixture; two pages of an old chat-room printout where Frohike extorted Scully's phone number in exchange for sworn secrecy about having discovered the day spa where Mulder once, on a lark, opted for a pedicure; a note Agent Brever slipped Scully in a meeting once - "Richard Gere's on line two", the code for "Skinner's calling and wants to know what you and your partner have managed to fuck up this time".

The journal constituted almost all the tangible proof, according to Byers, that Mulder ever existed.

The only tangible proof that his existence meant anything at all - means anything at all - sleeps, and he does not touch her. He places the journal on the bedside table, finds a mazarine cotton throw in a vanity drawer, and drapes it over her.

He returns to the kitchen, takes a seat at the hundred-year-old oak table. Beside the basket of leaves, the contract he's signed that makes her his glares at him, sickeningly. Nothing here is right. The real world does not remember them but he knows that he could endure that forever if only he could touch her.

But, of course, even in this place there are some things that are not allowed.

- - -
You can leave at any time, it said. Something in her still fought for self-preservation, and since she didn't trust the shifter at all, she went no-where.

On the fourth day as property of the fifth shifter, she broke her routine of staring out the window and not answering the soft-toned questions asked of her. She decided to risk a bath. The door's lock was broken, and once she settled that she could not go longer without bathing, she entered the small sage-colored room and pushed the heavy chest, with its drawers of towels and washcloths, generic q-tips and tissue paper, toothpaste and bandages, against the door. She undressed quickly, and her fingers felt as though they had already been submerged in water.

She wrenched the shower faucet on and stepped inside the tub. She bathed in two minutes, standing beneath a limp spray of ice water.

The water incised her dry skin with such bitter coldness she didn't stop shivering for hours. No longer than she was wet, she felt scrubbed raw, bleached. For the rest of the day, the shifter watched her with something like concern in its expression. It thought her unappealing in her gloom, she assumed. Good. It offered her one of its sweaters, a cotton pullover faded the glaucous colors of the sea, green-grey and grey-blue. Scully refused to acknowledge the gesture, and it left the sweater on her bed.

Her bed, she scoffed. As if anything in this world was hers.

At night, she noted, it usually read while sitting in a wooden folding chair at the end of the hallway, by the bay windowsill on which it kept a cracked-base lamp. She wondered why it wouldn't sit in the living room, why it chose the creaky cold hallway cubby with the shoddy lighting and the old clacking uncomfortable chair. The living room at least had a couch. Its bedroom at least had an upholstered chair. She didn't really care though, as long as it stayed away from her.

"Did you eat anything for lunch?" it asked her once this week, entering the kitchen where she sat dumbly at the table. She had nothing to do, but that didn't mean she wanted to eat its food or carry on a conversation with it. She had stolen a handful of cherries out of the squatty refrigerator earlier in the day; she'd eaten a piece of wheat bread for breakfast. She was full for minutes.

She pushed back from the table, stood, and pivoted out of the room.

That was almost a week ago. It has not asked her to perform experiments or any unspeakable acts. It does not ask anything of her except maybe her company, and even that is an unstated request. Its eyes track her, but not obtrusively, and sometimes she catches it leaning toward her as though she were the only source of warmth in the room.

Scully cannot deny that she is as aware of it as it seems to be of her. The house is small and the two of them have a tendency to overlap, bumping into each other absently when walking around corners, both reaching for a doorknob at the same time. Sometimes she feels it must be following her, but other times she receives the impression that it is trying to fade into the background, to escape from her.

It goes outside for a few hours every day, wandering off into the thick forest. She went the first time it asked. It said, "Would you like to go for a walk?" and she shrugged. The forest was waiting for winter that afternoon by staying motionless. Grey sky painted itself damply between the dulled bony trees. She walked down to the stream, picking her footsteps deliberately, avoiding branches and limbs and logs fallen in the faint path, and skipped stones across the shallow wrinkled surface of leaf-cluttered water.

She ignored subsequent suggestions of activities.

It takes at least one walk a day and always looks a little surprised she hasn't gone anywhere, is still picking at the arm of the chair in her bedroom or dully watching the hearth's fire when it returns. She cannot determine whether it is proud of her loyalty as a slave or disappointed she isn't more of a challenge.

What the fifth shifter looks, over anything, is defeated. Exhausted. It looks like him, undeniably, maybe more so than the others because of this tempered energy around it.

She can see it out of the corner of her eye one night, its posture in the chair by the hall window awkward and coiled. The book it is reading is a dime-store novel, probably printed around the time such books really only cost a dime. The paper is yellowed and the cover is torn diagonally. It reads almost the entire novel before looking up even once. Then, it gazes out the window at the chilling drisk falling in a haze against the glass. Its fingers thrum the book's broken spine. After a long time, it looks down at the book in its lap, and it rubs its eye carefully.

It sits there for hours it seems, head bent, before finally going to bed, the door snicking shut behind it.

In the early dark hours of the morning, noises like stifled sobs emanate from its room, the sounds creeping through the walls of the house, muffled gaunt and eerie under the blankets she shrouds herself in as she watches her bedroom door, the hallway shadows licking up its face. She sleeps in brief snatches, not wanting to be unconscious too long. She despises waking to those wraithlike noises, sounds too much like the cries in her half-remembered nightmares.

She wonders what sort of notes it takes about her. There must be journals, maybe a few video cameras, bugs, tracking devices secreted in the walls and corners, hidden alarms and locks waiting to be tripped. She hasn't investigated, figuring the effort futile. She doesn't really want to know how she looks on film, what the water's spiked with, the new ways in which she can be restrained, prodded, tortured, what its ultimate plans are for her. The notebook she found on her first night has been updated a few times, but the entries are impersonal and vague and in any case she does not think the shifter would be careless in its observations or hypotheses.

Considering the others were more than thorough, this one has an equally innovative angle, she supposes, something else to discover about her. The fourth shifter could hear every thought in her head - sometimes it would laugh out loud, mirthlessly - but the third told her once that thoughts were an inadequate way of judging or predicting someone's actions. As in illustration, it was surprised she cried silently when it carved into her, a sharp speculum inserted between her legs, because, it said, her thoughts were a seared white, inscrutable. It seemed impressed.

The fifth shifter has not touched her. Its objective, she guesses, has something to do with convincing her, slowly, that it is him. That would be an interesting study, she thinks, the examination of someone's actions as a memory is debunked.

The study of dying is ripe with possibilities.

She asks the fifth shifter about this at dinner one evening.

Its fork clatters on the table. She suspects it is startled by the mere presence of her voice; she hasn't spoken to it at all since she arrived. Its eyes are very worried. It is probably anxious about job security, test results, that sort of thing. It has not mentioned a sixth shifter, but she assumes there will be one eventually. She never stays with one very long.

"What?" it chokes.

"If I say that I believe you're him, what happens then?"

It shakes its head. "I don't understand. Him who?"

"Him. You know. My friend. The one your... kind helped kill. I'm part of an experiment borne of boredom, am I not? An idle infatuation? I was the enemy and now I'm a slave and none of you seem to have enough to do. You're just staying low-key, I guess. One atrocity at a time, pretty simple. Something to pass the time until another rebellion is formed."

It is blanched ashen - it is probably appalled at her behavior. A good slave should never speak to a master like this.

"I just want to know," she says, "what happens if I believe he's still alive. What magic rabbit do you pull out of your hat to dampen my spirits, rain on my parade, make me bleed a little more? Is there footage of his death, video spliced and edited to most effectively confirm his actual demise?" She is smiling, ice tightening her chest, making her head hurt.

It looks at her as though she has struck it, and then it drops its gaze to the table, and its eyes close briefly.

When it raises its head, its eyes are wet and green and for a second, just a second, it is him, entirely him, his broken gorgeous heart right there, right there--

No.

It is biting back tears - it is very good, she thinks, very compelling - and it asks, quietly, "How did he die?"

And she puts her hands on the table and begins to speak because, she thinks, in spite of everything she may as well keep telling the truth, even if it kills her.

The pronoun confusion is not lost on her.

- - -
(See Part Two)