Caught in My Shadow By Lilydale lilydale10@yahoo.com Archive: Sure. Please let me know so I can visit. Category: VA Rating: PG Spoilers: Lots. Everything through season 8 is fair game. Feedback: Very much appreciated. Disclaimer: These characters are not mine. They belong to 1013 Productions, Chris Carter, and Fox. Summary: A journey through a tired mind reveals more than you would think about a life. Huge thanks to Emma Brightman and Pteropod for encouragement, smiles, and super beta. ---- I'm lying down wondering where the lights are. I like the alternating stripes of light and dark that the streetlight makes as it shines through my blinds and onto my drab bedspread. It reminds me that the sun is brightening someone else's life halfway around the world while the city here sleeps, or at least pretends to. It also makes me thankful that I finally came to my senses and started sleeping in my bedroom. My couch may be soft and well-worn in all the right spots, but my too-long legs hang clumsily off the armrest when I try to sleep there. Sometimes I don't fit in. Maybe I'm in another one of a string of many low-budget, FBI-approved motel rooms. In these motel rooms, light never shines over my resting body like jail cell bars. The windows are usually covered with yellowed screens or curtains that look like worn carpet. It's probably better that way. The bedspreads usually look worse than mine does. Funny, even without the light-and-dark striped reminders, being inside one of these interchangeable motel rooms usually feels more like a prison than my own bedroom. That thought makes me laugh. Or smirk, actually. Serious FBI agents, even ones who chase mutants and play key roles in an ongoing government conspiracy to hide the existence of extraterrestrials, do not laugh. Scully doesn't laugh. Not nearly enough, anyway. I am so tired. A run through a park on dewy grass would probably wake me up. If I stay still too long who knows what I'd be missing? "Sleep," I can almost hear Scully say. Always the practical one, my Scully. "My Scully?" Now that thought draws a definite smirk. It would also likely draw a smack if the actual Scully was here listening to me right now. And I don't mean an enjoyable wet smack involving a luscious pair of lips but a decidedly unenjoyable loud smack involving one very tiny but incredibly strong hand. An incredibly soft hand that not so long ago pulled my own not-so-soft hand tighter around the shoulder linked to that soft hand, over a burrowed body, and up to that very pair of very warm lips while we both laid down in a very ordinary motel room in the very plausible state of Oregon. I dream. Maybe I would get a sweet smack after all. It's hard to predict the plays when the rules keep changing. Not all motel rooms are like isolation cells. And they're usually not as icy as this sad excuse for a room that I'm in now. Why the hell is it so cold in here? Maybe I'm in one of those rural motor lodges where the heater inexplicably turns itself on and off throughout the night. Or maybe I'm stuck in a dank underground cave again, being digested by yellow jell-o. "Digestive secretion," Scully would say. "Stop calling it yellow jell-o." "But Scully, it rhymes," I'd counter in all seriousness. "And you have to admit, it might eat you before you can eat it, but it has a delectably slimy gleam just like jell-o." I bet I'd get an eyeroll for that. A grin hangs, then slowly slides from my face. I think. I feel like my body has taken a worse beating than usual today. I guess the zombies were particularly fierce. Zombies? Where did that come from? It's been ages since I sparred with zombies. And I could've sworn that I finally suppressed the memory of movie-me battling them so unconvincingly on the big screen. I suppose that clinging to the memory of a most unbelievable post-premiere jaunt on the Bureau's dime doesn't help suppress anything. If I wasn't already in a dead zone, I'd demand a moment of silence in honor of that Hollywood night. California dreamin' indeed. I'm obviously not in a Jacuzzi-stocked west coast hotel room right now or I'd surely be fast asleep on 300 thread count sheets. Or not. Damn, that was a good night. Most unlike tonight. Why can't I get some rest? If my mind must reel as I lie here with the air of peace, why can't it be from the over- stimulation of slightly curled, slightly tousled hair tickling my throat as a lazy hand reaches over my exposed stomach and tickles my hip, rubbing me like a magic lamp? Wishful thinking, my friends. Wishful thinking. Friends. Ha! My best and only real friend is a woman who often looks at me as if I'm sprouting another head right before her disbelieving medical doctor eyes or with the unwavering indifference of a marble statue. That's how I feel right now -- like a statue. Like one of Patterson's twisted clay-man statues. A carefully sculpted and perpetually tortured-looking man trapped in clammy, ugly, gray clay. Perhaps sculpted is the wrong word. Lately I've been saying "yes, I would like fries with that" much too often to be considered sculpted. I'd kill for a burger right about now. Actually, I'd only inflict serious bodily injury for a burger; I'd kill to have some fresh air to breathe. "Finally ready to move to the smog-free and idyllic setting of the Falls of Arcadia, are you now? If you'd kill to live there, you'd fit right in," Scully's syrupy voice quips in my head. Her left eyebrow would raise a tad, my suppressed joy at her joshing would reveal itself as my head tilts near imperceptibly to the right, and she would continue. "Plus, I hear that ketchup drips from the rafters in Arcadia, so you could have a mighty tasty burger there too." My mind slips, and Scully slips with it. I never thought this would be my life. This is science fiction, this is a joke. Who molded the clay around me to form the paranoid, all- too-serious man that I've become? Or have always been. Whatever. Has that clay become me? Can anyone see what's underneath that shell? My life is not my own. Not anymore, if it ever was. My father owned me for a while. I was just like another piece of chattel to clutter up the house. Chattel is probably too compassionate a word. I was a piece of merchandise, not even fit for possession by little green men. Gray men, I quickly correct myself. I can't help but savor the memories of pointing out this color discrepancy to the uninformed masses. I may be colorblind, but I know my Reticulans. But I don't know enough about the other merchandise that was in my father's life. And in mine. My heart falls. I'm a gray alien outsider. Should it make me sad that I'm shrouded in gray clay? Or should I be grateful that covert government operators seem to have my whole life plotted out like an antiseptic line graph, sparing me the effort of living and trapping me in forever darkness? Or should I revel in the people -- person -- whose hands are now covered in clay? They're not government hands. Well, they are in a way. I love those soft hands. And I love that they're covered in me. On purpose. Whoa. I should not go anywhere near there right now. I'm way too tired and way too...alone. It's very lonely in here. And stuffy. And, now that I think about it, uncomfortable. Why in the world would I wear a suit to bed? It also dawns on my addled mind that the room I'm in is much too small to be a room. I bet I could reach the ceiling if only I had the strength to lift my hand up a few more inches. Come to think of it, lying on my back like this, each of my elbows is touching a wall. Two very soft walls. Have I finally gone crazy? Did Scully turn me in, recommending to the doctors that in her medical opinion her crackpot, albeit brilliant, partner has finally gone mad and that nothing but a padded cell can safely house him and his demons? That might explain the soft walls, but it doesn't explain the utter darkness, the stale pea soup air, or the chill in my bones, almost like... Oh my God. I pause. I don't know for how long. Does your mind keep churning when your body otherwise gives up? What I wouldn't give to be in a dingy motel room, to feel a sharp sting on my cheek, to hurt from killer jell-o, to be sculpted into someone else's twisted masterpiece, to burn from fire-red hair brushing my neck, to wake up with a sore back and dangling feet, to be locked in the prison of my single bedroom apartment. What I wouldn't give to know that I'm alive. ---- lilydale10@yahoo.com July 2001