I wanted him but he wanted someone else. Who she wanted was immaterial. She
was gone. Off to Never- Never Land with the other Lost Boys and Girls, learning
how to fly. Maybe if we clapped our hands loudly enough, she'd come back. He
would have clapped his hands for her, clapped his hands until they bled. He
believed in anything that was convenient.
(i do believe in spooks i do believe in spooks i do believe i do believe)
I never believed in that bullshit, not even as a kid. But that's not important,
so never mind me. I'm just the man behind the curtain.
"Alex," he said to me, his voice full of all the rage and disdain and despair
and hope of any embattled hero, "tell me where she is."
I didn't bother to ask how he found me—it didn't matter. Perhaps he followed
the yellow brick road or took a hit of pixie dust or just kept knocking heads
together until someone talked. One answer is as good as another. The story
continues on despite its characters. Perhaps in spite of them.
"Mulder," I said wanting him gone before I did something I'd regret later, "go
home."
Mulder advanced toward me, his armor shining damn near to blinding me, his
righteousness a shield, his gun held in a hand that shook only the smallest bit.
"Fuck that. Tell me. Tell me or I'll kill you right now."
I could see that he meant every word and part of me welcomed that. It wasn't
the ending that I wanted, but it was an ending just the same. But the story
churned onward, trampling my uncertainty and forcing words out of my mouth.
"She's dead." A lie, but it might as well have been the truth. I braced myself
for the impact of the bullet, thinking of endings, both good and bad.
His hand faltered and dropped. With two words I'd defeated him, and I stood
amazed and almost regretful, like Dorothy, horrified to have killed her nemesis
with a bucket of water.
"No," he said, his hand dropping further until the gun was pointing to the
cracked pavement at his feet. "No. I won't believe it." But I could see his
eyes, and his eyes did believe, they did believe in spooks and they did believe
in a world with no Dana Scully.
It annoyed me to see him give up so easily. He should have been able to sense
she was still alive. He shouldn't have been so quick to give up hope. What kind
of knight-errant was he?
I saw my answer in the slump of his shoulders and the weariness of his face. He
had been running so long that he needed an excuse to stop, and any excuse would
do. His body didn't care that his mind was breaking—it just wanted to rest.
I gave him the best advice I could, the only words of comfort I had, and it was
less than he deserved but more than what I could easily afford. "Let her go," I
told him. "She's beyond your reach."
I'd tried to make him stronger, I'd told Them where he was weak and They'd
eliminated that weakness. I thought that he was lucky, if only he would see it.
With her gone, he could concentrate on what he really needed to see. There's
nothing like anguish to act like a magnifying glass, narrowing your focus down
to what's important, then enlarging it, making everything else blurry. She was
a distraction. She had to go.
I wanted to tell him that in time he would see that. I wanted him to realize
that she wasn't the sun rising in the east, or the moon controlling the tides.
She was just a woman, she wasn't anyone important, she wasn't...
(she wasn't me)
...she wasn't the answer he was looking for.
"I...I don't believe you," he repeated, but with less and less confidence.
"They'll give you back her body." I wasn't at all certain of that—for all I
knew she would be put in a mass grave in the desert somewhere, or perhaps left
in an institution, forever medicated into incapacitation. If I could, though,
I'd see Mulder got her body. He needed to see how her story ended. I owed him
that, if nothing else. "Go home, Mulder. There's nothing you can do to change
anything."
"No," he said, advancing on me yet again. I saw he wasn't defeated after all.
Good always triumphs over bad. How could I have forgotten? The gun had
disappeared somewhere and his hands were balled into fists. I turned to the
side as the first blow fell, and it caught me on the cheek, causing pain but not
knocking me down.
(mulder what big hands you have all the better to hit you with my dear)
I spat blood onto the ground then brought my fist up as I raised my body,
letting the punch gain momentum. Mulder was surprised by my fist striking his
jaw, and he staggered. The pain in my hand was familiar and it didn't bother
me. It felt good. It felt good to hit something. Anything was better than
standing there and letting the story take me with it.
Mulder punished me for not being her. I punished him for making me want him.
The blows fell on me and on him, quickly at first, then slowing as we tired and
hurt set in.
Explosion of pain by my ear. "You let them take her."
Blood spurting down Mulder's face. "I told them to take her, mother fucker."
A crunch felt in my ribs. "Why, for fuck's sake, why?"
My fist hit his mouth and his teeth serrated my skin. He spat out a tooth. I
didn't answer him.
Hands grabbed my shirt and lifted me, pounding me against my car. The alarm
screamed into the night but no one came. No one ever does. "Tell me why, you
fucker." My head hit the car in time with the shrieks of the alarm. It felt
like the world was falling apart.
Mulder let go of me and I slumped against the car for support. "Turn off the
alarm," he snarled.
How very civilized, I thought, but was all too glad to comply, grateful for the
intermission. I stuck my key in the lock and then Mulder was up behind me,
pressing his body into my back. I felt his erection pushing at me and went
still. How very uncivilized, I thought, and wanted to laugh. This was
something I hadn't expected, hadn't foreseen.
I stiffened and straightened up. "Turn it off," Mulder growled into my ear, his
breath hot and coming in short pants.
I twisted the key in the lock and the alarm stopped mid-squawk. The silence
that followed was as heavy as the humid air that pressed in on us. Mulder's
shadow, cast by the nearly full moon, covered mine on the car roof and swallowed
it whole.
"Tell me why you had them take her," he repeated, his voice only a soft rasp
this time, nearly a caress, but I knew there was poison in that apple. Still
his erection pushed against my back and I wondered if the sweetness of the fruit
would make up for the pain it concealed.
I couldn't say the truth, that I was jealous, that all the things I told myself
about Scully making him weak were lies, just lies, to cover my thwarted desire.
She did make him weak, but that was beside the point. I wanted him and couldn't
have him. When the little mermaid was given a dagger by her sisters to kill her
beloved, she shouldn't have killed herself, gaining only the promise of one day
earning a soul. She should have killed the woman sleeping beside her ungrateful
prince. That's what I would have done, that's how I had re-written the story in
my head when I was a kid. It's no wonder I turned out the way I have.
"It doesn't matter," I finally said. "What's done is done. Nothing can bring
her back. Nothing."
Mulder sagged against me, as if finally conceding defeat, but his erection was
still there, pressing into me as the weight of his body pressed me against my
car. None of it felt real, and I was afraid to move for fear of breaking the
odd spell.
"You owe me," he said at last, sounding tired, but below that there was
something else. Something like resignation and anticipation mingled together.
The hero conquers his enemy any way he can.
The words held me in place, weaving their magic around me. I owed him, and I
saw clearly that I did. It was a debt that stretched out before me, terrible and
wonderful at the same time. I shivered a little, my body shifting against his,
thinking of a debt that could never be paid, a spell that could never be broken.
I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything, just looked at the shadow
that was our shadow on the roof of my car.
He stepped back a little and I turned. There was a look on his face that was
half desperation and half madness. His eyes glittered with it. "You can't
bring her back," he said, and it was nearly a question. He took a step backward
towards his own car.
"No," I said in a hoarse whisper, wondering where this was going, hoping and
knowing that everything I hoped for was impossible.
Mulder took another step back and I followed. "There's something I can do," I
rasped out, my mouth dry as bleached bones. I cleared my throat and took
another step forward.
He backed up another step but it didn't seem like retreat, more like entreaty.
"What can you do?" he asked, the words a challenge but his voice hollow.
"I can do this," I said, and dropped to my knees before him. Years later I
would say nearly the same thing to Scully, when their positions were reversed
with Mulder missing and Scully taking her anger out on me. And there I would
be, letting her use me as I would let Mulder use me, starting this night. But
all that was yet to come.
This is a story that has been told a thousand times before and will be told a
thousand more. Only the faces and places change. The story is always the same.
The story is of love desired and love thwarted, needs that are satisfied and
left wanting, hope found and despair confirmed. Without the story, we are
nothing, just puppets left forgotten in a box under some child's bed.
I knelt before him and it all was familiar, I could feel it all had happened
before, even though I had never touched him like this previously and had never
thought I ever would. When I took him in my mouth, I already knew the taste,
musty and salty and sweet. This was right, I knew it was, from the tips of the
fingers that gripped his hips to my toes, curled in my shoes as I unconsciously
clenched every muscle in my body. I heard his moan, a soft sound that fell
through the heavy night air, and felt his hands settle tentatively on my
shoulders before moving with casual deliberation to grip my hair.
I wanted him so much that it was an ache I felt tearing through me, one not
easily soothed. It would take a lifetime of touching him to ease the raw need
that had flared up, fed and encouraged into full fury by this simple gesture of
my tongue sliding along his flesh.
I should have never knelt before him like he was something I could worship. I
should have never met him in that deserted parking lot; I should have gotten
into my car and driven away when I had the chance. But the story demanded that
my place was there, my mouth on his body, my place at his feet. Who was I to
fight fate? And I was so young then. Not innocent, not by then, but young, and
still willing to believe, if not in fairy tales, then at least in heroes.
As he came in my mouth, I looked up at him. The moon shone brightly on his
face, which was turned up toward the sky. She's not there, I thought as I
swallowed his come. She's in a boxcar somewhere, locked away more securely than
any princess in a tower of briars, and sleeping just as soundly.
As I stood, my knees cracked like gunshots. Mulder pulled me towards him. "I
probably should have killed you," he said. Then he kissed me, his tongue
filling my mouth, and it is this memory I would dredge up later when I jacked
off alone in my apartment. My own erection throbbed against Mulder and I knew
there would be no relief for me that night except by my own hand. "But you owed
me," he said. He pulled away from me and emptiness panged through me.
(if i only had a heart if i only had a brain if i only had the nerve)
"Mulder..."
"Go away. I want to be alone." There was a look in his eyes that shut my mouth
on any argument I might have had. No matter. I'd gotten what I'd wanted, or as
near to it as to make no difference. When thinking of wish fulfillment, it's
greedy to split hairs. It was useless to think that I wanted more. Might as
well wish for magic beans or for straw to turn into gold.
I opened my car door and got inside. I was about to close the door when Mulder
said something else. "I could kill you, even now, but you still owe me." My
heart pounded. I felt something shift, as if I could sense the future:
When, weeks later, he stumbled into my apartment reeking of whiskey and fear and
sour guilt, crying that he couldn't sleep, that all he wanted was sleep, I let
him do what he wanted to me because I still owed him.
When, months later, I was told to take Scully's nearly dead body and dispose of
it, I made sure she got to a hospital, even knowing the price I would eventually
pay for it, because I still owed him.
When, years later, I nearly found happiness with the woman he loved, with the
only person he has ever loved, I destroyed my chance with her in order to bring
him back to life because I still owed him.
But all of this was yet to come, and there is still more of the story to tell.
I can let you in on one secret, however. We don't all live happily ever after.
It's something I've always known.
Dorothy never got back to Kansas. Alice went mad in Wonderland. Sleeping
beauty never woke up. The little mermaid never got a soul. Stories lie. I
know this. I know.
This is a story that's been told a thousand times before. It will be told a
thousand more. Only the faces change. Only the scenery moves. None of us
really matter.
Prelude
by Kelly Keil
It's a story that's been told a thousand times before. Only the faces are
different, only the scenery changes. This time the faces were mine and
Mulder's, the scenery a parking lot deserted save our two cars. But that's just
window dressing. Only the story matters.
