Rereading his fiction in the breathing night in my sweltering apartment
and...
Don't make me laugh.
There's a hole, somewhere, a blackness, and I don t know what to do about it
anymore. A heartdeep longing that wants to devour itself and can't. Because
it is its own poison. Do I know what I'm writing? No. But every time he
comes to me my resistance—what resistance? How long does the game have to
go on?—cracks another inch.
Another inch.
God, Jesus, say a prayer for me in the night, the scent of sulphur and
burning candles, the slick coolness of a gun barrel against my cheek. His
insults are endearments; the sound of his voice galvanizes me. Starts both
edges of the horrible gap screaming in pain, trying—trying!—to
regenerate, to grow back together. To be whole.
After Tunguska I never thought I'd be able to let anyone touch me. Not that
way. Not ever again. But what they broke in me, he reverses. Defilement in a
new and interesting way. Shame that tastes like redemption; submission that
is, and will forever be, exoneration. Emancipation.
And I have to laugh at this, laugh at my own melodrama here, because there
are millions of slash writers out there; most far better than I. Many of
them write from my point of view, just from what they see on the tapes, and
Christ! Their stuff is better than when I sit here and try to put something
of my thieving, breaking heart down in data and numbers and WordPerfect
scroll.
But do any of you know what is inside my heart, what is burning, dying,
breaking? What is killing me? Do you know? And do you want to know?
Tell me. Please.
Maybe someone out there will hear it. Hear the salt and tears and silent
scream in this unremarkable prose. The truth? I have Scully. We are
together. She is my light and my love and my utter salvation. We've made
that commitment—fuck Chris Carter. We were years ahead of those
increasingly lousy dramatizations; it just took us a while to get our heads
straight.
But Alex-fucking-Krycek is something beyond even what I could have imagined,
all that time ago. He is my dark side, my light half, the gray in between;
my brother, my... what? He makes me bleed when I am dying with every pain
but the right one. He can see it in my eyes. He asks for nothing except what
he has, what I have given him, freely and almost joyously—the right to be
there.
The right to be there at my side in the dark—if I need him—or in the
light, the right to be a part of my life.
The right to love me.
And you know what?
Scully knows that.
She thinks it's good for me.
Night in silent suspension, blackness within and without. Walking in
shadows, becoming with every step something... other. Something else.
Something that scares me so badly I can t even begin to breathe—something
that glows with red fire and blood and the heat of death and hate and love
and sorrow and utter, utter desperation. Fists through windows and bleeding
hands; walking the rainy streets at 3 a.m. trying to find a way to have all
the answers in the dark, all at once, all just for a moment's rest; Up
against the wall with Skinner in my face asking me why, asking me have you
lost your fucking mind, Mulder, and do I think that if I didn't find an
answer, didn't find a solution, couldn't save myself through every single
thing I've ever done, every single risk I've ever taken, then do I think
that codeine, say, or maybe heroin? Or maybe Jack Daniels and diazepam— make it a family cocktail, why don't I—can give me what I'm looking for?
Wanting. Praying. Needing to stop hurting, only for a minute, only for a
minute.
Alex Krycek gave that back to me.
How it started is a long story, and it belongs more to Krycek than to me. So
I'll let him tell it in the fullness of time. But what it became.... He
takes the weight off me. He empties me out; makes me into the soul core of
what I am. Nothing expected, nothing required, just a soul, heart, blood,
dick thing.
But he's wrong, you know. It is love. And if I ever thought I'd say that,
if anyone had ever told me, I would have either laughed in their face, or—
Who knows.
Plausible denial, he writes, and who else but Alex knows that the hole in me
is a blood gap, a black hollow filled with everything I never was,
everything I never could be. Who else but Alex could stand there—so nobly,
so bravely, and listen to me, would you?—and take that weight from me, let
the shame and the agony come out in red and blue flashes, markers of the
night. Yes.
Yes.
Somewhere inside me is the Fox Mulder that needs those caresses; Bill
Mulder's affection. The backhand across the face, on my knees in the
dark; the grip on my shoulders, my cheek pressed against the wall and
"Don t you even move, Mulder, don't you even so much as move unless I
tell you to."
Got it? Breaking my fear of the whip. Pain, slowly, and he knows exactly
what I need—when my eyes are screaming but so arid, so dry, when everyone
else sees my face closed to the world and silent, he knows exactly how far
to take me. Brutality as an art form; building, building, and before I know
it he has worked me up and over and whatever pain the demons inside have
wrought, whatever punishment I have demanded of myself and exacted through
him, has been affirmed, redeemed, surpassed.
And I lie back, and catch my breath.
And when I open my eyes there is never a condemnation there—there is never
shame, never dirt. The dirt stays behind. And it feels good. All that is
left is the open and the clean, and the look in Krycek's eyes, and love.
Love for my brother and my twin—
—and the look in his eyes that says that whatever he has done, whatever he
has been through, has been put away for one more moment, put away for just a
little longer. The look that says that he's alive, and the light that says
he knows what he's done for me.
And we put our clothes back together slowly in the dark, and he cares for
whatever new scars I may have—or leaves them for Dana, if they're more
hardcore than usual. And day by day we draw closer, he comes within...
brother. Chris Carter had that one right, anyway, with the millions he's
made dramatizing our lives— Mulder telling Krycek : "Keep her safe" was
right on the mark.
Dead on, you might say.
Trinity, team and trio—God! But here I am. And I think I get saner every
day. Who's to judge?
But I write this because I'm alone tonight, and the pain that threatens
to strangle me is everywhere in the midnight silence. Neither of them
are here. And I can feel it building again like that scream, and so I
pace, and I jog, and I shoot hoops across the street under a dying
streetlamp with a black and silver ball, and I turn the TV on and off,
and still the voice inside will not—cannot—be quieted. And my dreams
get violent and I turn the radio on—(touch, peel, and stand, Aleksei,
and put your lights on—it doesn't mean a thing)—but that only makes
it worse and he fears nothing , Alex once wrote, but that's not quite
true, I fear myself. So I sit at the computer and tap out meaningless
drivel, hoping it will poke a hole in the rising howl, hoping that
someone will hear me—who the fuck can I call at 12:11 p.m.? No family,
an excruciatingly small circle of friends (and even if they did know,
Christ, they wouldn't understand), and Scully's in bed and Alex is gone,
off into that mad circle where he still continues to breathe, caught
between me and himself... and them.
27 days.
I want to save him—and that is the truth. I swear it by everything I hold
dear, or ever did. I think that's what changed it for me, when I stopped
seeing him as a two-timing triple-dealing cocksucking bastard, a
cold-blooded killer... and started seeing the why. (No; I m not justifying
his actions for him—not even he does that, not to me, not anymore. But
it's terrifying and amazing how far inside-out and upside-down everything
can turn when you know one thing, just one thing; it grows, like a cancer.
Like a virus.) I want him under my wing, even though he's a thousand times
more dangerous than I'll ever be (except maybe, sometimes, in the dark; but
that's another story to be told another time—NeoFox.); I want to touch
him, to sit with him and read a book; to be the one and the only one that
sees inside. That gets inside. And I have that.
Do you understand?
Fuck—does anyone?
I'll leave it to the slashers to decide; to make of this what they will.
It's a multilayered story, I guess, and every word of it is true—but,
of course, I don't expect you to believe it. How can anyone even believe
I exist when my whole life has been touted, categorized, commercialized,
and exploited as a fiction?
Let me tell you something—David Duchovny doesn't keep the scars from those
stitches, or have nightmares about coming home to Bill Mulder at fourteen.
Not to mention the hospital bills or the grocery receipts; or the drug habit
I wound up with after I came back from Bolvangar, Skinner's lost cause and
a never-ending source of guilt for DK. (Little aside: she hates it when I
call her that; she says it sounds too much like a sick morgue joke; molder
and decay. But I think it s catchy; and besides, when she says "I hate it
when you call me that, Mulder", it usually means that she thinks it's cute.
I think she'd miss it if I stopped.)
I'm beginning to ramble, here, so I'm going to stop—if you were (or are)
looking for bloody, explicit sex between Alex and myself you're going to
have to wait. I can write that stuff. But not right now. And I'll leave some
of it to him, where it belongs. But in the screaming dark, I belong to them.
And I'm here. I breathe.
Waiting.
Fox Mulder
6/12/01
This was written as a gut reaction to Wildy's "The Threat", and reading that
first would help.
A Splinter in My Mind
by Fox Mulder (Alex Krycek's NeoFox)
(William D. Mulder, Jr.)
A missing piece, a phantom pain , he writes. I sit here in the silence and
the dark tapping out keystrokes because I don't know what else to do. It
hurts, Aleksei, you fuck. You know that.
