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Rating: NC-17 for Mulderbation, since we
all know teenagers never ever masturbate.
Last Thursday I saw her smoking. We were in Idaho and all that was left of the case was the paper work. She sat perched on the brick ledge outside her motel room window and the smoke curled from her mouth to her nose and back again. I couldn't tell which direction it was flowing. She looked lost in thought, gone to wherever she goes when she looks at nothing like that. I wanted to wave. I wanted to make her jump. Make her look at me. But most of all, I wanted to ask her what the hell she was doing. The only reason I didn't was that I was afraid she'd tell me she was all but dead already. She mentioned in passing two weeks before that the chemo didn't appear to be having any effect on the tumor, that it continued its steady growth into her brain despite all her praying and all my fervent wishing. Sometimes I think the fact that I need her to get well makes her death a foregone conclusion. If there is a god, what reason would he have for doing everything he has to Dana Scully? For letting the conspirators kill and rape at will while no good deed of Scully's goes unpunished? That leaves me with three options: a sadistic god, an impotent god, and a nonexistent god. I'll take door number three, Monty; the other choices would interfere too much with what little sleep I still manage to get these days. Of course, I could go the apathetic god route, but a difference that makes no difference is no difference. No, lets keep this clear: THERE IS NO GOD AND LAST WEEK I SAW DANA SCULLY SMOKING A CIGARETTE. Scully and I sit together in a tiny office five days out of every seven, but she still believes in him and not me. To Hell with both of them. No, no - I take that back. Scully doesn't need my rancor on top of everything else. Which can only mean one thing; the one person who can help me has given up. I guess I'll have to save her on my own. She came in this morning. It probably makes me a weak and selfish person, but I breathe a sigh of relief every day she shows up at work. She showed up early and was still there at 11 o'clock at night when the only people left are the ones with no one to go home to. When she used to click her way past all the lonely workaholics on her way out the door, at least half used to turn their heads, wishing they could come home to her. So what if I did too? I always knew my fantasy of playing HMS Bounty to her Lady Bountiful didn't exactly grab her. Now the days of idle speculation of what that would be like are gone. I want to run away from the cancer and take her with me, but I'm not sure how to work it. I think it's a package deal at this point. I can forget she's sick at all as long as there is something else to do. As long as I don't look at her. I fight the urge to use the cell phone in the office so she doesn't have to turn around. When the light came on after my slide show, I caught a glimpse of her, and more than any serial killer's collection of mementos her face looked like something death brought with him in his suitcase. Her pretty face. I had the urge to cover one of us with a blanket out of respect for the dead. But who? Last night she had dinner with her mother. I know because I followed her. I sat across the rainy street in a borrowed car. My stomach ached so hard I found myself rubbing it absently, like Napoleon, but it didn't do much good. What I really needed was some food. I'd been out of seeds for more than a week, but couldn't seem to remind myself to buy any. Not surprisingly, I found my hand slipped a little lower - force of habit, I suppose. I was already hard when I started, and the whole thing was so comforting, I didn't stop. That was what I needed. I unzipped my pants. It was a dark night; I could get away with it. I wrapped my hand loosely around my shaft, pulled, once, twice, three times. A few more. I barely even noticed the burning in the pit of my belly. I wet the first two fingers of my left hand in my mouth and swirled them around the head. I pulled harder, failing to duck down when headlights barreled past. I hardly noticed them at all, except to wonder what some fool was doing going so fast down a residential street at that time of night. I was getting frantic. Try as I might, my hand was not a mouth. Certainly not her mouth. I spit in both hands. It was slick enough, just not...right, somehow. This was the last thing I needed to start failing at. My grip was too tight. I found myself going through a check list of things that might have been keeping me from seeing this through to the end. Shit. I slumped backwards in the seat. I was sitting across from Maggie Scully's house at 10 o'clock at night, jerking off. It wasn't even my car. Afterwards, the Gunmen were hospitable enough. Didn't ask why the first thing I did after I threw Fro his keys was wash my hands. They gave me a wide berth while I paced for a couple of hours or so, intermittently tripping over wires, until I found myself face to face with a tube of chocolate chip cookie dough in their kitchen. What does it say about me that Frohike and company have a more domestic life than I do? I fully intended just to eat the dough the way nature and the Tollhouse company intended, but everything in my life seemed so half-baked that I didn't need one more under-done element gnawing at my gut. So I found a pan, followed the directions, baked the damn cookies. They were better that way. I put them on the guys' Richard M. Nixon commemorative plate. Carried them into where they were working. They never said a word beyond 'um thanks.' It was something she would have done. Would do. Even though she isn't dead, I keep having to remind myself. So I checked to make sure she got home. Drove around her block and stared at her car like it was some kind of enigma. Then I went to her convenience store, the one she goes to for gas and coffee, and bought a bottle of cheap wine. But after a few sips getting drunk just seemed like too much work. I looked up and a church was staring down at me. I didn't even know whether it was her church or not. Hell, it could have been Episcopalian for all I know. I stared up and suddenly the grand edifice of the church was like Scully's granite finefinefinefine and all that frustrated energy had to go somewhere, so I hurled the bottle at the building. The corner of Saint Somebody's looked like a ship being launched by a beauty queen. And me without my evening gown. The wine rolled down like the blood of the first-born son in every third story in the Judeo-Christian mythos. I am the first born son, but someone else always winds up taking my place under the ax. I never asked anyone to pay for my transgressions, not Sam, or Scully, and certainly not some long-dead stranger. But they hold their suffering close to their chests and all I get are the pitiful crumbs I manage to inflict on myself and we all know those don't count. Unfortunately, the church failed to sail away. I was half-way down the block before I realized I had left broken glass on the sidewalk. Somebody could get hurt. There were so many pieces I realized there was no chance of getting it all up by hand, so I went back to the convenience store and bought a broom, thinking I should have thrown myself at the building instead. Quick, someone call the boys in blue - they're bombing a church in Georgetown with agnostics. I was still sweeping when the sun came up. Scully drove right past me and didn't even notice. I had two cookies waiting for her in a plastic bag on my passenger seat. I gave her the cookies at lunch but it didn't look like she'd eaten them. She kept sticking her hand in the pocket like she was touching them. Was she worried about calories? Even looking like an extra for a concentration camp movie? It was midnight when I finally got around to leaving the Hoover building. It shocked me when the elevator doors opened and I saw her standing under the stairwell in the parking garage, face puffy and tear-stained, cigarette in one hand, bag of crumbs in the other. I moved toward her, arms out stretched. All I wanted was to hold her. She cringed almost imperceptibly and waved me off with her cigarette like a flare and her sandwich bag full of broken cookies looking like sand and pebbles. "I'm fine, okay? It's just a little cold. So long, Mulder." So. Long. Mulder. She took a drag and the smoke curled up to her nose, even as she held back another wave of tears. So long, Mulder. |
