Subj: xfc: ..new.. umbrella (by wen) [1 of 1] Date: 7/14/00 3:39:01 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: Nocturne@MailandNews.com To: xfc-atxc@egroups.com umbrella a wen thing strange rain-coloured snapshots of moments following scully's return from her abduction, season 2 2 hr improv. started: 9:57 PM july 10, 2000 ended: 12:23 AM july 11, 2000 total running time: 2 hrs 26 min archive: no to gossamer, ephemeral, xemplary. any others, please ask. beta thank yous: loa for grammar, alanna for questioning, luperkal for nitpicks, perelandra, maria nicole, and jet for little bits of tightening. all mistakes are my own for not listening to them. intense dark chocolate covered thank you to Yes Virginia for support, friendship, and jumping goates. for JET, who (in addition to being one of the most slinker cool people on the face of the star jumping universe) has, indeed, wonderful taste in books. thanks, beb. *blowing kisses* ~*~ 'Why do I have the impression that I am clutching an umbrella as I fall asleep?' -Karen Elizabeth Gordon, 'The Red Shoes and other tattered tales' ~*~ She is drenched and he is dry inside, as she pokes her fingers at his coat and opens him while he towels stubbornly at the length of her hair. There is something aberrant and fractious about seeing her wet; it makes him think, unyieldingly, of a night not more than a year ago, when she stood in the rain, no more than a foot away, and laughed fearlessly at him, as if even then she had known how to try on his love, wrap her body around it and move slinkingly away into the night. She is still too delicate to touch, but he towels with a desperate frustration at her body, moves the towel over her back and against her throat. She's only been back for less than a month; she shouldn't be standing out in the rain, out in the open underneath a sky that could break at any moment and snatch her away again. He can still see the soft broken veins in her face when they burn their bodies together, and that ounce of amaranthine frailty terrifies him. Or at least, this is what he imagines. That they burn their bodies together, that he gets close enough to see the veins behind her eyes, to feel the rhythm between her legs, when, in actuality, he hasn't so much as kissed her. Toweling her dry, this is the first and maybe only time that he's ever felt the backs of her knees, and even this touch is marred by the thickness of the cloth between his fingers and her skin. She makes a tiny whimper of a protest when he presses too hard and guilt settles thickly over him. He steps back. Brushes a wet curl of hair from her face. She looks immensely young and wrapped in rain, and for a flicker-shut moment, innocent and startlingly beautiful. She, a woman who can saw through a dead man's chest and weigh the heart in her hands, now jumps at loud noises. -It's not fair, she says as he towels at the small of her back, absorbed completely into the act of sapping water molecules from the cellulose of her coat. -That rain, that water has the ability to keep us alive. That you have the ability to keep me alive, she says, and stops him cold. -Goddamn you, she says. I die for three months, and all you can think is that maybe I need a little time off. The door slams behind her as he comes unhinged. ~*~ Later she is sorry that she slammed the door on him, and she aches to go back, to knock on the door and wait hours in the rain for him to open his door back to her. She wishes to wonder if she tangled with the stars, or if she simply disappeared. She still has no recollection. She has merely the memory of being dragged bloody across a mountain, and then a hot, white light. She isn't even sure what she wants to know. She is shivering in the cold. When she gets back to her apartment she strips the clothes hungrily from her body and folds herself into the hot tub. She is a sestina in steam. She remembers once that she saved him from drowning, and collapsed on the shore next to him, with the dense somnolent pretend memory of martyring herself for him, collapsing with her lungs full of water. See what I would do for you? See? I would believe in pixies, almost. I would believe in life. ~*~ If he were a wiser man he would have wooed her back, invited her over to his place for seduction under the guise of ambient music and champagne sloshing sleepily in a chipped wine glass. But he is insensible, and all he can think of is small things: that he had once seen her thumbprint on a single perfect cookie, and that it had kept him entranced for hours; that she had once brought him a sandwich, the bread gently toasted by her heat. Briefly his mind flickers over the tightness of another woman's skin substituting for hers, the discovery that he had had his tongue in the mouth of a woman named Kristen and moaned 'Scully' twice. I am real, he says twice to the wall. She is real. She is here. When she was gone he had stared dauntlessly at the ceiling of the empty office. It was only the lack of her physical proximity that had told him she was gone, the lack of her espressoed-make- believe-across-the-room-kiss. If he had concentrated hard enough on that absence, he could have argued that she had never even existed in the first place. The only thing that told him she was real came months later, when even her own mother had given up and made a tombstone that still haunted his dreams. The Spirit is the Truth. His terror is beginning once again, and when he opens the door, he sees the light, the blood on the steering wheel, and bloody ropes in the trunk of the car. ~*~ You are burningly beautiful, he should tell her, but he doesn't. Instead he watches her pace about the basement like a ghost- with-feet, and he is frightened that she might suddenly fall, then rise again sustained by hospital tape, while her mother whispers to take her off the life support. Later she stands in a field surrounded by small white flowers, as he bends to take the blood sample from the corpse of a tiny mauled girl. For a moment, in the cut open face and wide screaming eyes of the body, he sees her sky-blue love, bloodied and trodden down into the dirt. He realizes, with sickening horror, as they walk back to the car, her eyes weary and dusty, that she had expected him to have opened the trunk that night, to have dragged her out, the captured body of Duane Barry at his feet, while asking 'are you okay?' as she nodded stolidly and tremblingly fell against the side of the road rather than his arms. Instead, he had arrived just a fraction, a single decimal too late. If he had run up the mountain instead of searching the car, he could have saved her. She would never have been taken, would never have gone. ~*~ What are you thinking? she says, looks over at him with sylphic concern. If I closed my eyes, for just an instant, would you still be there when I opened them again? he replies. She is visibly shaken, but steers back quickly, takes the offguardedness he has swung into her and scrunches it tightly, buries it into the pocket of her oversized coat. No, she says. I meant about the case. ~*~ On the fifth week back from the hospital he kisses her, full on the mouth, in the middle of an empty elevator on their way to questioning a new suspect. She is idea-streaked, and tastes of adjectives and snowflakes, hot as he presses his body into her, pressing her up against the wall. When the bell tings stop at their level their bodies come undone, and she smoothes nonchalantly at her skirt, which only an instant ago had hidden his hand scraping its way up the inside of her thigh. ~*~ He looks at her from across the table, the illness receding slowly from her body as blood returns, as if the dead man he had chased through the hospital had returned and tipped it back through her ears into her face. They've been kissing hungrily since the first time he tasted her (though it would seem that the first time he tasted her had been a year ago in Oregon, when he had first pulled his hand down the soft skin of her back and felt something finer than lust pass through his eyes.) She is, very slowly, coming back to life, essence splashing gently into the streets. He could run outside of the restaurant and yell, This is the woman I love, closing her hand around my neck. Silence rings around their throats and he watches her eat, the way she chews her food slowly, carefully, the warm charm of it. He could eat her with a spoon. Across the room someone says loudly 'But I thought vegetarians ate turkey!' in a dapper, self-indulgent sort of way, to which someone else replies 'Well, if you think that, you're a chipper cheerful freak....' followed by the sound of a splash and a peal of laughter, while a peppermint smile twitches at the corners of Scully's lips. Mulder leans across the table and tastes her slowly. When he flicks his tongue at the corner of her mouth he tastes salt. Salt of the earth, she is, a friend once told him after meeting Scully, shaking her hand and pocketing the handshake, leering at his woman indecorously. You'll never meet a more solid woman. This had perplexed him. Salt of the earth. The only salt on earth comes from the ocean, which is transitive, all liquid kiss and nothing of dawn. Never solid. He pulls away suddenly and sits back down, plays with his hands in his lap. Scully looks confused while he looks away and sees the light over the mountain, taking her away, again, and again, and again, in the sempiternal corners of his memory. ~*~ He tries to lock her out when they reach his door, but she unhinges him as usual, slips into his apartment through the cracks of his heart. She melts down onto the floor and curls up, looks up at him in glazed expensive-food-filled wonder. This woman, he realizes, is a fallen star. I let go of her for one minute and she died, then fell back from the heavens. She lights up a room like a paper doll on fire. They talk briefly on the floor before she falls asleep, each suddenly too shy to make the first move, and her sleeplessness wins out over her need for him as her eyes blink shut. He pulls a blanket over her then settles up on the couch, watches as she twitches her toes under the sheets in the hazily sporadic aftermath of love, the sound of rain battering at his insides. ~*~ When she wakes she finds him curled around her, and she stretches herself out, and feels, for the first time in weeks, that her body is once more hers, streaked with his touch. Dreams unspun and glass-proof, his arm is around her waist tightly, his hand warm at her stomach, and she flashes her mind forward, wonders where they'll be in five years. She imagines that she can collide heavily with the future; that they are intransitive, ghostlike, entwined together on the floor, breathing each other's silk. Mulder stirs gently behind her, mixing fuller into the flame that is them, and she breathes him awake, gently. She sees, sometimes, behind his eyes, a haunted guilt, and knows that sometimes, in the middle of the night, she still blames him. When will you forgive me? she whispers, though there are still stars outside, and they should be sleeping, or at least curling silently into each other, tender mementos of wear and tear. Or at least she imagines that she whispers this, because he doesn't reply, just watches her, watches her, watches her, while the light fills his eyes and she can see that in his mind, she's being taken away again. She wraps her arms around him and tries to hold on tight. His eyes are still loud with fear in the darkness, as she holds him, and whispers, again and again, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere, Mulder. ~*~ It's not fair, she says, that rain, that water, has the ability to keep us alive. That you have the ability to keep me alive. He slides his hand down the whole of her frosty calf, made cool by the draft of his air-conditioner, and she shivers. Love is desperate, turning past into future, future into past, and she tries to turn themselves around, imagine what she would have done if it had been him, raped by Duane Barry and gone missing. I missed you by fifteen seconds, he says, suddenly, and she looks at him in surprise. I ran and checked the car before there was that flash of light that took you. If I'd run up the mountain instead of holding those bloody ropes from the trunk in my hands, I could have saved you. I missed you by fifteen seconds, oh, I lost you. She keeps her silence, loops his words inside of her again and again, as if each word is crisscrossing and colliding with the other. She realizes, that when he says I lost you, he is saying, all at the same time, I love you, and most importantly, I've found you. I've found you. ~*~ finis ~*~ sorry. too many postrequiems. i ran and took a breather into season two. hope it wasn't too bad this time. the elements were: ambient music a chipped wine glass 'I'm a pixie, I'm a paper doll, I'm a chipper cheerful freak [sic] and I light up a room' 'But I thought vegetarians ate turkey!' comments, abuse, and love taken at nocturne@mailandnews.com the dissolved girl and other tales: http://luperkal.simplenet.com/wen thanks for reading. *waves and blows kisses* come back soon! an archive for the 2 hr improvs- comin' soon.