Title: Flight of the Bumblebee
Category: V, A, UST, post-ep for 'Irresistible'
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Heavy for the abduction arc, Irresistible and End Game.
Summary: "You would die for me. Will you live for me?"
They teeter on the edge of
something here.
Archive: Yes to Gossamer. Anywhere else: please let me know where it's going first.
Disclaimer: I do not own Mulder, Scully or indeed the X-Files,
all of which
belong to CC, 1013 and Fox. I merely play with Chris's toys every
now and
again for fun, not profit.
Feedback: cazfic@ymail.com
URL: http://cazq.freeservers.com
Author's note: So I went over two hours. I found out that this
game is harder than it appears. <g> Thanks to Robbie, Kelly
and Sabine for improv elements, wen for starting this whole
2-hour wenprov thing rolling in the first place, SEP and JET for
speedy, gentle tactical use of the machete <g>, EPur for
wonderful Live!Beta, and Virginia, as ever.
Total running time: 2 hours 24 minutes
*******
Flight of the Bumblebee (1/1) by CazQ
(CazQ@tesco.net)
*******
In the dimness of the hotel room, she lies curled into him, and
he swears he can feel her heart beating through suit jacket,
blouse, skin, flesh and bone. At first she could not bear to be
touched, and now she leaves no room for even a hair to pass
between them, whimpering in her sleep if he moves. He is reminded
of a baby monkey clinging to its mother as he looks down the bed
and touches her bright, tousled hair, feels it slip through his
fingers and away. He has checked them into the best hotel he
could find in downtown Minneapolis, as if he could cocoon her
away from the horror of Donnie Pfaster's mother's house with room
service, Egyptian cotton sheets and a fifth-floor room with a
view. The bed seems enormous, a chill island that they float on
together. He understands too well why she cannot stand to be
alone in its cold expanse.
She lies curled into him and sobs in her sleep like a child,
startling him when the first little hiccuping sound of fearful
grief breaks the silence. He looks at her eyelids, the delicate
skin jittery with movement under spider-silk veins as her eyes
track rapidly back and forth beneath. Is she crying in the dream,
he wonders?
She has a freckle on her right eyelid, placed so that it lies on
the crease, so that it would be invisible with her eyes open. He
curves an arm going heavily fuzzy with pins and needles tighter
around her, and wonders why he could not discover that tiny mark
under happier circumstances.
She lies curled into him and speaks, clearly and calmly, so that
he thinks she must have woken. She has not. She talks in her
sleep, and says only one thing, and he sobs a little, a quick
catching of his breath in his chest, when her dream-sharp words
escape into the room.
"You would die for me," she says to him from the
distance of another world, and it is a statement of fact, not a
question, and his breath turns to splinters of glass inside him
as he hugs her close and thinks yes, yes, I would, yes, in a
heartbeat, before you could blink and make that little freckle
appear and disappear once I would die for you.
He is aware that in medical school she developed a clinical
detachment from death. She learnt to distance herself, to make
the scalpel in her hand an endless space between her and the
body, to think of it not as a body under her hands but as a
cadaver. She and Death are not old friends. She and Death pass on
the street every day, but when Death waves, nods, beckons, smiles
a bony smile at her, she keeps her eyes ahead and her chin high
and passes on by on the other side of the road.
I am not detached from death, he thinks. Despite all his time in
the BSU making death a brilliant puzzle, a jigsaw with no edges,
no corners and half the pieces left blank, he is not apart from
death. He is not detached from her death, because he is so
attached to her living.
******
This is something he discovered when she was gone. That he would
die for her. That he was dying for her.
The week after she came back to him and was released from
hospital, a gale blew through the city for three days, whipping
rain up until it did not fall but flew horizontally. It battered
at him whenever he stepped outdoors, screamed and moaned at night
round the corners of his building, picked up people foolish
enough to wear billowing coats or put up umbrellas and pushed
them down the street as if a giant hand was at their backs.
He had gone to her apartment one day before lunch, with no clear
excuse in his mind for being there, for once. They sat in the
kitchen for a while as she sorted a pile of mail and he sipped at
a mug of black coffee. She had been looking for something,
hunting through the bills he had opened and paid for her for
three months, the invitations to apply for various credit cards,
the accumulated paper debris of a period of side-stepped life,
and when she reached the bottom of the pile her mouth twisted
quickly in disappointment.
"Something wrong?"
"I was just looking for a letter...but I guess it never
came. My old lab partner from college got married last week. She
called this morning to say how sorry she was that I'd had to miss
the ceremony. I didn't...I had to explain why I hadn't known
about it. But now I look through the mail, and I can't see the
invitation in here. Knowing Julia, she probably forgot to put a
stamp on it in the first place and it's still sitting in a post
office somewhere. So I suppose it wouldn't have made a difference
anyway...my not being here."
He had said nothing, turning his coffee cup round and round in
his hands and staring down into it awkwardly. How could it not
have made a difference, he raged in the silence of his mind. How
could one second missed from the life she ought to have been
living those three months not have counted?
When he finished his coffee, she turned to him, still in her
bathrobe and slippers, and said softly, "Would you come
outside with me a minute?"
They had gone out to the front door of her building, and she had
hesitated a moment, looking out at the trees down the street
whipping back and forth in the wind, and then she'd smiled, taken
his arm and stepped out into the teeth of the gale. They stood
there for only a few seconds, her hair flying up in a wild corona
around her pale face, just long enough for her to open her mouth
and let the bitterly cold air rush into her lungs, as if she was
drinking it like ice-cold spring water.
Back inside, she turned to him, eyes and cheeks glowing as
sluggish blood stirred under her skin, and said, "Good. I
feel clean. Blows away the cobwebs, you know?" He laughed a
little, imagining Margaret Scully telling her daughter that exact
same thing as they strode along in the cold air one distant
childhood day. Then Scully's smile faded as she glanced past him
and into some distant place he could not see.
"Mulder, did you know that the flight of a bumblebee is an
aerodynamic impossibility?"
"I...what? In the cryptic-remarks-out-of-nowhere stakes,
that one is almost worthy of me."
"It's true," she said, ignoring the weak jest. "It
simply shouldn't be able to stay in the air."
"But it does. I guess the bee just doesn't know it can't
fly." He'd heard a snatch of 'The Flight of The Bumblebee'
playing in his head, the tumbling, frantic edge of the music
truly making sense to him for the first time. The things she
knows never cease to amaze him...
"Or it doesn't think about it, Mulder. If it doesn't think
about it, it can stay up there."
"Wouldn't that be kind of like saying 'Whatever you do,
don't think of a rhinoceros'? Easy to say, impossible to
do?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know," she replied, picking absently at a
thread hanging from the sleeve of her bathrobe. "The power
of the mind is a wonderful thing."
They were not talking about bumblebees anymore, he'd thought
sadly, but too late, too late, because then she turned, stared
him in the eye, and said carefully, "I've had enough of
being muffled up in cotton wool. I'm ready to come back,
Mulder."
And because he had been dying into her disappeared life for three
months, his first instinct had been to shake his head and try to
talk her out of it. But she had been adamant, and he had felt the
wrench as she gently pulled her precious life back out of his
body, where he had been keeping it nestled at his throat, just
above the notch in his collarbone where the pulse jumped, and
taken it back into her own hands. Hers to live, and hers to lose,
once again.
******
When she wakes up, long past midnight, she looks up at him with
unfocused eyes for a moment, and reaches out a fraction, as if to
touch his face and assure herself that it is real. Then she pulls
away, and away and out of his reach, rolling to the side of the
bed as if ashamed at having burrowed into the shelter of him like
that. She sits, facing away from him, towards the blind black
square of night sky in the window, and says evenly, "I think
I'm going to go take a shower, Mulder. I'm sorry I fell asleep on
you." And then she pushes herself up from the mattress and
is gone, bathroom door snicking shut behind her.
You didn't fall asleep on me, he thinks, anger tightening at his
gut until he feels sick. You fell asleep alone because you asked
me to leave you, and when I heard you whimpering like a hurt
animal I came in, and the second I touched you you clung to me
like you could hide under my skin and wouldn't let go.
He gets up and paces around the room restlessly, still buzzing
from the huge bursts of adrenaline shot into his system when they
found her car by the side of the road. He has been surfing the
towering wave of the rush ever since, and now she is safe he
feels the wave break and founder under him. He would go for a run
to shake off some of the tension, but he cannot, will not, leave
her alone again.
******
He hears the water shut off and the absence of what has become a
background noise slaps him in the face. He looks at his watch and
feels a crack open up in his crumbling, pained heart; she has
been in the shower for over an hour. He imagines her under the
stinging hot water, scrubbing her skin raw. He thinks, however,
that despite the desire to cleanse Pfaster from herself, she will
probably not have washed her hair. His anger melts and slides
away like soap bubbles down the drain.
He gives her what he thinks is a decent amount of time to dress,
and then knocks on the connecting door. When he knocks a second
time and she does not answer, he pushes the door gently open and
calls her name.
She will not even open the bathroom door the first time he asks
her to, swallowing hard to keep the tremble from his voice. He
hears the quiet, dry-throated sound of her crying through the
thin door, and crumples to his knees, resting his forehead
against the door and letting his own tears come.
He tries not to think of the obscenity of it, the poky little
house and Scully lying in that upstairs room, listening for the
sound of feet on the stairs. After the paramedics had gently
pried her from his arms and taken her to treat her for shock and
minor injuries sustained in her wild fight for life, a police
officer had shown him, at Mulder's request, the room where
Pfaster had been keeping her. He had not been able to cross the
threshold. The taste of her fear had hung heavy in the air, like
biting on tinfoil, and he had bitten his tongue, hard, until the
blood came, to keep himself from losing it in front of the cop.
After a little while there is quiet on both sides of the door,
and then she opens it, and creeps out slowly across the threshold
and into his arms, still wet and shivering beneath the white
hotel robe.
"I'm sorry, oh, God, I'm sorry," they choke out
together, not sure who is speaking in a tangle of words. "So
afraid, so scared..."
He pulls her to her feet and settles her in a chair, and he
kneels before her and rests his head on her knees, whispering
into the terry-toweling robe, "If you knew how
much...I..."
He feels a flicker of fear, because since she was taken and
returned to him (and he notices for the first time that he now
thinks automatically of her having been taken *from him*), he has
been cradling this new and fragile depth of feeling like a hollow
globe of glass in his arms, as if to touch it too often or too
roughly would shatter it apart.
They teeter on the edge of something here. He throws the delicate
bubble of glass that holds all he can offer her into the air
towards her, and wonders if it will break apart as it leaves the
secrecy and shelter of his hand, because after all, in a way her
not knowing, not being aware of it, was the wonder in the wonder
of it all...
"Yes," she whispers back, tentatively touching his soft
hair, "yes, I've known since I came back, Mulder." She
catches what he has thrown wildly towards her. He does not know
what she will do with it, and perhaps she does not know either,
but she has caught it.
He sits back on his heels and looks up at her, and when she looks
away and scrubs a hand over her cheek to wipe away a stray tear
he reaches out, takes her hand, and shakes his head, pleading
with his eyes. No, no, he begs her silently, don't hide this from
me, how can you hide from me after you fell apart in my arms
tonight?
She wraps her fingers around his and squeezes for a second before
releasing him. "I just need a little while," she says
softly. "Please. It will be all right, Mulder. I
promise."
It isn't until he is back in his own room, chewing food he does
not taste and staring fixedly at the connecting door, that he
stops to think about the fact that she was reassuring him, rather
than the other way around.
*******
At half-past five that morning the phone rings in his room. He
considers for a moment letting it ring for a little while, to let
her think that he had been sleeping instead of lying here
picturing her in the next room, struggling to ride out the black
and towering storm. In the next breath he dismisses the idea. No
pretences.
"Hello?"
"Mulder, it's me."
Of course it is.
"Mulder. When I was in the hospital...mom told me about how
you reacted when they wanted to take me off life support."
"Uh...yes?" he ventures, taken totally off-balance by
this unexpected tack.
"Why? When my own mother and my sister believed it was the
right thing to do..."
"No," he says, managing, to his own surprise, to keep
his voice level. "No. I just knew you weren't done yet,
Scully. We weren't done yet."
Silence. He strains to hear some sound from her end of the line,
thinks that perhaps he hears the rustle of the bedclothes as she
stirs...or perhaps he just hears it because he is so desperate to
hear something, anything.
"I'm not...we still aren't. I'm still here," she says,
and he hears sudden and strong the steel arching beneath the warm
clear ocean of her voice.
She is still here. He cannot cocoon her, cannot treat her as if
she cannot stay airborne. She will not permit it. She will not
think about all the things that ought to make her fall out of the
sky, will not acknowledge the pull of the earth, and he will not
remind her of any of it either. He understands that her request
for this is an implicit part of their partnership now. It is
necessary that it be so, or the sheer hideous weight of what has
been done to her, to them, will knock them both out of the air.
She is still here.
"I have us booked on a flight out of here in four
hours," he says finally.
"That sounds good. Let's go home, Mulder."
******
Some weeks later, he wakes in a hospital bed with the absolute
cold of the Arctic ice still sunk deep in his bones, and turns to
see her beside him, tired and pale but smiling as though there is
a joy inside her so strong it makes a light glow under her skin.
They speak, briefly, and he drifts under the surface of sleep
again, sinking down into a place where there is no cold, none,
only the warmth of a small body curled into his in his dreams.
When he wakes a second time, she is still there, watching him
hungrily, and she leans forward this time and brushes her hand
against his. "You would die for me," she says again,
but this time with her eyes wide open, and when he nods,
confused, she gives him that spring-thaw smile again and
whispers, "and I'll live for you. Let's live for each other,
Mulder."
She smiles and smiles, and he blinks and sees her pull a small,
shining globe of glass from her pocket, and throw it with a
strong hand through the air towards him, and weak as he is he
reaches up and catches it.
******
FINIS
******
Improv elements:
- "Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly,
but the bumble bee
doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway." - Mary Kay Ash
- "Ah, your not being aware of it" --and she seemed to
hesitate an
instant to deal with this-- "your not being aware of it is
the strangeness
*in* the strangeness. It's the wonder *of* the wonder." -
Henry James, 'The
Beast in the Jungle'
- An important letter that never arrived due to insufficient
postage.
cazfic@ymail.com
