From: Auralissa <auralissa@aol.com>
Date: 23 Sep 1998 01:31:01 GMT
Subject: NEW: "Wallpaper (1/1)" By: Annie Sewell-Jennings


WALLPAPER (1/1)  By: Annie Sewell-Jennings (Auralissa@aol.com) 

DISCLAIMER: The characters of Mulder and Scully do not belong to me. They
belong to Chris Carter, who needs to hurry his little butt up and push out the
season premiere. Also, the lyrics at the beginning of the piece are from David
Byrne's "Dance on Vaseline", which can be found on his 1997 _Feelings_ album. I
have no permission to use these lyrics, but I find them fascinating for this
subject.

SUMMARY: Scully attempts to redeem herself and Mulder.

CATEGORY: VAR (Mulder/Scully Romance).

RATING: PG-13.

KEYWORDS: MSR. Alternate Universe. Serious angst alert, folks.

SPOILERS: US5. Big ones for "Memento Mori".

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This piece was inspired by a series of odd nightmares that
became literary when I started making sense of them. This is a tad bit darker
than my usual fare of angst, but I thought it was interesting enough to share
with the rest of you.

THANKS: Thank you to both Kristin and Heather for beta reading and pointing out
where I strayed. You keep me honest, but that doesn't mean I'm going to put the
moves on y'all in hallways... Yet.

*****

"My baby saw the future
 She doesn't want to live there anymore
 It's lousy science fiction
 Gets on your skin and seeps into your bones"
 --David Byrne, "Dance on Vaseline"

*****

It used to be that he wore his heart on his sleeve. Anyone who touched him was
special to him, and anyone who dared to love him was remembered as a saint. But
those were old days, past days, days that were nothing but tattered memories
that she kept close to her heart when he became the man that he was today.
Kind, gentle memories. Thoughts of his hands, how soft and tender they had been
when they spread over the swell of her back or how they barely whispered across
the underside of her breast.
	
These little memories of him, of how good he had been, were what brought her
back from her insanity. 

Fractured, broken, tainted and shattered; Dana Scully was not the same woman
she used to be.
	
During her more desperate moments of delirium, she wondered if she was still a
woman. And when she resurfaced into clarity, she wondered if her demented
notions were perhaps the ones that made the most sense. Such a possibility was
not so difficult to fathom in these times. In a world so mad, concepts like
equality or gentility were laughable. Everyone had a value based not on their
purpose as a human being but as a genetic component.
	
And genetically, she was worthless. A barren lunatic. All physical properties
long stolen away, and all mental value chipped away at with every passing day.
She was nothing to everyone except him, and she was beginning to wonder if he
still loved her.
	
Scully was beginning to wonder if he still had a heart to love with.
	
Eyes glassy and hair dull, she lay strapped to the bed, the tightness of the
restraints lessened by the lamb's wool around her slender, malnourished wrists.
She was usually a still madwoman, but there were instances lately where she
fought it, where she lashed out and became a screaming demon before falling
into tranquilizers and then slipping into catatonia. Then, when she finally
returned, he was always there. Always with her, staring fearfully into her eyes
with the most concern he ever showed these days. 

Oh, around her, he was nothing but silk and velvet. It was only when he stepped
outside of the door that he became metal and steel.
	
So maybe he did still love her.
	
It didn't matter anyway.
	
She thought that she still loved him. She would always love the memory of him.
The remembrance of a man who was so hurt by the slightest injustice, the man
who would cry a river over the degradation of the human race. When the end had
come clear to him, he had wept over the outrage of it, over the unfairness of
the situation. Over his hellish fate, torn between his moral conscience and
Scully's life.
	
Her hands clenching back and forth in loose imitations of fists, she remembered
when he found out. Sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment, hands folded
and ankles crossed. Poised, elegant, calm. The picture of stoic tragedy. This
was the woman she presented to him when she told him that she was dying.
	
And that was when he had wailed.
	
Closing her eyes again, Scully bowed her head. It didn't break him then. No, it
had taken a gradual period of years of monotonous death and savage brutality to
wear down Fox Mulder. His insanity had been a quiet one, too. Not one that was
expressed with fits of violent dementia, but rather a controlled lunacy. She
wondered what was worse - her catatonia or his degeneration.
	
Either way, they were damned.
	
She didn't think that he broke when they told him his solution, either. Work
for them. Leave the Bureau. Leave the truth. Kill for us, and we will cure
Scully. We will keep her alive. But Mulder, in his passionate eagerness and
anxiety over her increasing sickness, had been manipulated yet again. The
negotiators were brilliant by never detailing what "alive" meant. And so when
they promised to save her life, they never promised to cure her.
	
Weak, sick, but still lucid and definitely living, Scully had been kept in her
house for years now. There was no cure in sight, but they promised that if
Mulder were ever to fuck up, he would come home to a vegetative partner and no
promises of resurrection. She had felt terribly guilty when she had first
indulged herself in her madness. Leaving Mulder a half-dead bride was nothing
that she ever wished him to have.
	
But she never wanted to be the silent epitome of suffering, either. She never
asked to be a martyr. She never asked to be the tool. When she agreed to work
with Mulder, she did not agree to be his savior, his angel, and his death all
in one poignantly raw package.
	
He killed. His job was to kill. He was nothing but a pawn to them, their wild
cannon degraded into nothing but a janitor. There was nothing more to his
once-feared reputation. Mulder was simply the guilty assassin with a woman who
had lost her mind to two diseases: her cancer and her own devices.
	
A cough wracked her body then, interrupting her from the refuge of old
memories, and she writhed on the bed, the ache of her sore stomach muscles
doubling into full-fledged pain as she spat out a wad of phlegm. One of her
many attendants crossed the room to clean the pillow, and she did not look at
him. Nameless guardians to make sure she did not die, either by her own hand or
by her sickness. 

Maybe it was the crying that had started the coughing again; it had a tendency
to do so when she was upset. She cried sometimes, when she remembered her
thoughts during her madness and realized that she made more sense unbalanced
than when she was lucid. And she also cried when she found more evidence of the
disappearance of the Mulder she used to love.
	
A couple of months ago, she had stood at the window and watched him kill a
young boy. The dispassion on his face when he fired the trigger had been enough
to kill her inside. It would be something else if he had liked killing the boy.
That would simply prove that he had gone completely mad, and she could
sympathize with that. It was Mulder not caring about the dead child that stole
her breath and made her ill. It was seeing the most emphatic man she had ever
known in her entire life slaughter a ten-year-old boy without any thoughts to
the horror of the act.
	
It was as though his soul was missing, and she could not find it.
	
She had dropped the curtain, letting it flutter to brush the windowsill, and
gone back to bed. For the rest of the day and night, she chased away her
migraines with morphine and entered a fantasy land filled with a solacing
mixture of tranquilizers, memories, and her own personal brand of insanity. For
hours on edge, she lived in the captive moment in which he had touched her hair
in Donnie Pfaster's parlor. Nothing else. Just her hair. Just the twining of
his finger, so light and fragile as if he might ruin her, just the feel of his
skin upon her hair.

It was the first time she needed the restraints, because when she came to the
first time, she tried to claw her wrists open. It was then that she realized
the severity of her situation, and then that she discovered her solution.

Death.
	
And of course, when she came to the next morning, he was gazing upon her
worshipfully, and there was passion in his face again. In his eyes, she found
her sanity, but she did not think that he could save her.
	
"Hello," she had whispered, and he kissed her cheek. 
	
It was not the first time that she hated his mouth.
	
And it was not the first time that she wished they were dead.

But it was the first time that she began to contemplate killing him.
	
The entire room was on suicide watch, on order from the Consortium. It was not
that they were concerned for Mulder or her own health, but they had to protect
their greatest player. As long as she was there, the tattered remnants of a
woman that once contained Mulder's driving force, they owned him. The instant
that she either succumbed to the cancer or managed to kill herself, Mulder
would kill them all. They used to doubt that it was in him to do such a thing.
Homicide was too irrational an act for the morally conscientious Mulder, but he
would gladly assassinate them all now.
	
She never thought about just killing herself and leaving him to wander the
earth avenging her death. It would benefit them both much better if she were to
kill them both. It was why she had taken his spare weapon one night and was now
searching for the best hiding place for it.
	
When she had the chance next time, Dana Scully was going to kill herself and
Fox Mulder.
	
It was all for the best, really.
	
Her insanity told her that, and its logic was never fucked-up anymore.
	
And she thought that today might be the final day.
	
Poised, calm, rational. She was the stoic picture of tragedy again, in her pale
green pajamas that vaguely resembled peppermint stripes on candy. Lying
underneath the thick comforters that he was always bringing her, she turned her
head to the door as he walked through them. Closing her eyes, she whispered his
name to herself. Ah, Mulder... No matter what time did to them, it could never
take away the fact that he was simply beautiful. Especially when he came to
her. Then, he managed to regain himself, find his soul again, and put together
some pathetic imitation of who he used to be inside. He would sloppily mend his
fractured spirit and sit by her bed for hours, telling her that he meant none
of it.
	
She used to believe him, but she only thought of the ten-year-old boy. The dead
boy that her partner had killed. The dead boy that gave him no grief.
	
He rarely spoke to her anymore. They used to talk for hours, him holding her
hand and keeping track of her heart with his palm rather than depending on the
electronic monitors. He used to stand over her during the numerous scans and
spinal taps, but now he could only be there when she bottomed out and lost it.
The first few times that she disintegrated, he had been hysterical with fear
when she pulled back. After a while, he had come to accept it as a way of life.
He had given up his soul for a woman who would go for weeks at a time without
remembering to urinate.
	
It was a sad state of affairs, indeed.
	
She did not choose to become this way. Scully was supposed to be made of a
tougher fabric, of something that was not so pliant and fragile. She supposed
that some of her irrational behavior came from a weakening of the body - her
cancer. But then there was Mulder. With every slice of his soul that was
stripped from him, there went a part of the glue that kept her held together.
	
It only made sense to save him by killing him.
	
The door opened then, and she did not turn to face him. It was him, she knew it
instinctually. Mulder was an essence that trailed through her blood, ran inside
her veins. He always had been, from when he used to open the door to their
office to when he now opened the door to her prison room. Oh, her bedroom was
luxuriously furnished, a beautiful cage to hold a mute songbird, but the velvet
drapes and silk damasks lost their meaning long, long ago. They were supposed
to be briberies from the Consortium. Blood money for Mulder's sacrifices.
	
And then, he became a part of the furnishings. Mulder, beautiful Mulder, with
his mahogany hair lighted through and through with gold and burgundy, faded
from a salvation into nothing more than the Consortium's package. Bribing her
to stay alive. Convincing her that she had to be there for him. That if she
died, he would follow.
	
Their bait used to work. She knew better now. Killing Mulder would just redeem
him, revive him, and perhaps resurrect the pieces of his soul that used to make
him so good. So pure. So... Human. Yes, Mulder used to be the epitome of human.
Indignant, faltering, gentle at times and then furious at others. He used to be
controlled by his emotions, by his sense of justice and morality.
	
But he had sacrificed those things along with his life, just to keep Dana
Scully alive. It was fortunate that her sanity was dead, and it was fortunate
that she had managed to hold on to her sense of right and wrong. It was wrong
that they had been controlled and dangled around like puppets, working against
each other in a vain attempt to work for each other. She kept herself alive so
that they wouldn't kill Mulder. He murdered and killed so that she wouldn't
die. How ironic, when in the end, she would solve the problem by murdering them
both.
	
Because Mulder had turned into wallpaper, just like the silk damasks and velvet
draperies that decorated her room. Just another part of the package.
	
God, she hoped that she didn't hate Mulder.
	
Sitting himself down next to her, his hand curled around hers, and she looked
at it. He had such large hands. Big hands. Capable hands. Long, slender,
elegant fingers that were lined at the knuckles, making them seem more delicate
than they were violent. How she used to admire his hands... The gentleness of
them, their large girth and their soft touch. She used to think of how easily
they could become violent, how he could hit or destroy with those hands, but
instead brushed her cheek with nothing but utmost respect and intimacy.
	
Four weeks ago, before she retreated into one of her longer periods of
catatonia, Scully had watched him strangle a grown man with them. The knuckles
turned white with the force of his grip, and she no longer trusted his hands.
	
She wondered if she really did hate Mulder.
	
He did not speak, and she wondered if he thought that she was gone again. It
wouldn't be unusual. She broke the quiet by speaking. "Can you tell them to
leave?" she softly asked, and his eyes fluttered up to meet hers. Ah, those
eyes... Hazel, dark hazel, stormy and uncertain. They were many-faceted eyes,
built on a thousand different fragments of color. Scully used to see his eyes
and try to count how many different shades of golden-brown could possibly
exist, because every variation of amber was embedded in Mulder's divine eyes.
Fearfully, she examined his eyes now, seeing the fathomless swirls of jade and
emerald, those honey-coated cocoa pools, and she exhaled. 
	
Yes, she did love him. She still loved him.
	
She wondered if that would make it easier or harder to kill him.
	
Mulder turned around, still holding her hand within his large, versatile ones,
and ordered the orderlies to leave the room. Warily, they eyed Scully, knowing
that her depression and dementia left her in a state that was subject to
suicide. They did not trust her, but she trusted them. As long as she lived, as
long as she was kept alive, they had Mulder. Killing her would be ridiculous.
	
With the orderlies gone, they were alone in the room. Mulder's thumb drew
circles on the back of her hand, and she was touched by his memory. How when
she had been sick or uncertain in the earlier days, the days before their
combined madness, he would draw patterns and shapes on her skin with the absent
paintbrush of his fingers and thumb. Oh, God yes, she did still love him, and
the relief of knowing this was enough to wash away the pain of everything
again.
	
How glorious to know that love still conquered all.
	
"How are you feeling?" he whispered, and she knew that his voice, those dark,
caramel-coated cadences, would never change. Not to her. He could be a serial
killer outside of her bedroom, but when he set eyes on her, he would become the
old Mulder again. The Mulder that she had not seen when he killed the little
boy or strangled the strange man. The darling Mulder, the gentle Mulder, the
mercurial Mulder who could cry or laugh within the same ten minutes. She wanted
Mulder to remember his temper, to remember his emotions, because she would much
rather have him weep than feel nothing at all.
	
"Better," she answered, and for once, it was the truth. My God, she had not
felt this unburdened in years. Not during the madness or the hallucinations had
she felt so relieved. Relieved at the knowledge that she didn't despise Mulder.
She still loved him, she still loved him, thank *God* she still loved him. Now
she could handle things, she could go on, knowing that she still loved him.
	
And if she killed him loving him, it wouldn't be as bad as she thought it would
be.
	
It wouldn't be a crime out of hate.
	
"I'm glad," he whispered, and a small smile curved his face. Ah, and she knew
then that he still loved her. That made it somehow easier, too. Knowing that he
was losing himself not out of some forgotten devotion to her or out of a sense
of duty, but because he honestly loved her did not justify his actions, but
they made it easier for her to cope. It made her understand, though she did not
accept it. This was turning out to be a good day, a better day.
	
A day that she could kill him.
	
A day that she could die.
	
Scully relished the light in his eyes. She craved it, was starved for it. The
passion in him could be ignited again, it was still there. Mulder was not
damned. He was not unsalvageable. It wasn't too late to save him from death;
perhaps he should live on. And maybe her suicide would show him that.
	
"Mulder, what would you do if I died?"
	
It was not the first time that she had asked him that. A long time ago, three
years ago, when the offer had first been made to him, she took his hands in
hers and watched the golden-brown of his skin conflict with the ghostly
paleness of her hands. Looking at the contrast today, nothing had changed.
Mulder's hands still glowed beautifully while her hands were as white and frail
as paper. She had been preparing for death, never believing that he would
change his mind from the first time the offer had been made and accept the
Consortium's offer.
	
That was when she found out that he had said yes.
	
"You won't die."
	
He had accepted.
	
Now, his breath shuddered out, and she was grateful then for his eidetic
memory. His words were repeated, ragged, raw with emotion. "You won't die," he
promised again, and she knew that it was time to ignite that fever inside of
him. Time to rekindle the dead embers, to stoke the cinders into bursting forth
with light. Even if it was only through his temper, it was still fire. It was
still spirit. It was still Mulder.
	
"I'm going to die," she said, with more firmness and more certainty than she
had used in a long time. "I've managed to dance around the issue for longer
than anyone else in my condition has, but it's time for me to finish. It's time
for me to regain control of my own life."
	
He couldn't grasp the concept, couldn't handle the implications. All these
years, he had been fighting to save her life when all along, she didn't want to
live. Scully knew that it would hurt him. Knew that it could possibly destroy
him. But then she knew that it could also provide the slap in the face that he
so badly needed.

"What are you saying?" he whispered, the pain choking his voice. //I don't want
to hurt you, Mulder,// she wearily thought, //but this is the only way I know
to get this across to you.//
	
Gripping his hands in her bony, spindly ones, she looked firmly and pleadingly
in his eyes. He was in there somewhere, she could feel him, and it was only a
matter of making the weaker Mulder rise again to listen and understand.
"Mulder, ever since we came here, they took the control of my own life and
health out of my hands," she said, and suddenly felt the old fierceness take
control again. "By keeping me in this state between life and death, they have
managed to keep me captive. I have allowed them to pull my strings, and by
that, I have been as much a party to your manipulation as anyone else here."
	
A short laugh escaped his lips, and she never wanted to hear such bitterness
come from such a soft mouth again. "Scully, you are the only one who hasn't
jerked me around," he fervently said, and she fought back a smile. Ah, the old
trust. Mulder's ardent trust in her. His undying devotion.
	
"But I've been jerked around too long, Mulder," she sighed. "And whether it has
been intentional or inadvertent, you've been jerked around by my existence."
She lifted her eyes to him, and made a supreme effort to smile at him. To
comfort him. Because the hardest part was yet to come. "I can't heal myself,
Mulder, and they will not heal me. As long as I am here, in this state of
limbo, we belong to them. And since I can't cure my disease, I can end it."
Jutting her jaw out, she fought with his eyes for comprehension.
	
And there was a light in his eyes. A light that showed that, for the first time
in ages, he knew her solution. "Scully, no," he whispered, his hands tightening
around hers. "Don't..."
	
She wouldn't have to kill him, perhaps. Maybe he could live. Maybe he could
understand again, and maybe her suicide would be enough to make him revive.
Either way, she knew that for herself, the only way she could find triumph,
dignity, and perhaps sanity again would be through death. Not death by the
cancer. Not death by their hands. Death by hers. Her choice. Her finger on the
trigger.
	
It was an acceptable solution.
	
Tears were starting to rise to his eyes, and she thought of reconsidering. But
there would be more, there would be more deaths. More ten-year-old boys falling
to their knees from the power of Fox Mulder's weapon. More men finding their
death in the sensitive hands of her lover. More destruction, more chaos...
Scully shook her head.
	
"This is my solution," she whispered. "I have to do this for myself." She
couldn't let herself become another piece of the Consortium's bribe. She
couldn't fade into nothing more than wallpaper.
	
A tear spilled over; he was crying. It was the first time she had seen him cry
in ages, and never had a tear been so welcome. "Mulder," she said, lowering her
voice, "after I die, I want you to leave. Go. Don't stay here. Don't be a part
of this anymore. Leave."
	
He nodded, emphatically. "Yes," he whispered, and she wouldn't have to kill
him. She would be the only one to die...
	
From the corners of the room, she found the wallpaper shifting, and from it,
there men. Men in their drab colors, their dark suits and their stoic faces.
Her face contorted in pain, and she shook her head desperately. "No," she said,
and her voice grew stronger, more brazen, as it gained volume. "No! NO!"
Twisting on the bed, she vainly sought escape, her frail wrists chafing against
the thick wool of the restraints as she tried to avoid the prick of the
inevitable, blissful, hellish needle...
	
There was a stab in her thigh, the injection, and then the sedative started to
pump into her body. Her screaming subsided instantly, though the effects of the
drug had yet to set in, and Scully closed her eyes, her breaths leaving her
body in a series of shuddering, haggard sighs. "Mulder..." she breathed, her
voice as thin and raw as paper. He kept his eyes on her, still tearfully
grievous. She felt his hand on her brow, soothing and soft as the drugs began
to override her senses. "Did you ever... Ever know that my favorite... Color
was yellow?" When he didn't answer, she sighed. "The wallpaper, Mulder... It's
so dark... It's not yellow. It never was..." She sighed again, fighting the
lull of the escape again. "It never was... Us... Cause we were always
yellow..."
	
She whispered out something else, but it was so slurred that even she could not
understand it. Sighing, the arms of slumber overtook her, and she was gone.
	
*****

He watched her go. Watched her drift away with the aid of a sedative. It was
the only way that she achieved peace these days. Drugged periods of slumber,
where there was nothing to remind her of the cancer or who he was working for.
When she was asleep, Mulder sighed, wiping the hair off of his brow.
	
This was what she had come to. A being ravaged by cancer and plagued by her own
increasing insanity. This was the strong, vibrant woman that he had fallen in
love with years before, had given up his quest and his morality for, lying here
in restraints with a bloodstream pumped full of medicine and sedatives. This
was what remained of Scully.
	
Perhaps she really was better off dead after all.
	
Bitterly, he turned his face away from her still, slowly breathing form. She
was fucking nuts. Dangerous. The trauma of her cancer had destroyed her,
wrecked her body and her mind, and all he could do was keep fighting for her.
Keep her alive. Even if it meant pumping her full of sedatives and
tranquilizers, keeping her entire bloodstream filled with drugs, he would keep
her alive. 

"Find where she has the gun," he ordered an orderly, "and make sure that it's
taken back."
	
As long as she was alive, there was some kind of hope.
	
And without her, there was nothing.

He couldn't let her die. It was simply not an option.
	
The weight of his gun sat heavy on his hip, but Mulder thought nothing of it.
It had become second nature, this gun and these bullets and the string of dead
bodies. There were more jobs for him to do, more hits for him to perform, and
there was a hell of a lot of saving Scully left. Nothing mattered but her.
Nothing mattered but resurrecting what was left of her and making her whole
again.
	
Turning on his heel, he started to leave the room, and then was caught by the
walls that surrounded her bed. Dark, rich brown cocoa. Exquisitely decorated.
The Consortium had furnished the room in luxury, and the most hideous part of
it all was the occupant, in her mint-colored pinstripe pajamas and her lamb's
wool restraints.
	
She had told him something before fading off into stupor. "Don't become the
wallpaper." For a moment, he puzzled over it, a gleaning of understanding
crossing his mind. Perhaps...

Abruptly, he turned away from it, closing the door after him.
	
The ravings of a madwoman.
	
Ravings, and nothing more.

*****

(end)

*****

Feedback will be accepted at Auralissa@aol.com, where I will build a shrine to
every single piece and sacrifice noodles to everyday. :::makes choir noises:::
Thank you for reading.

*****


--------------------------------------------
"By the way, the Emmy Awards were moved from Pasadena to Los Angeles so that
David could be closer to his wife."
--Gary Shandling, 1998 Emmy Awards
--------------------------------------------