Title: Heavy Author: XochiLuvr E-mail: xochiluvr@surfacing.com Category: Erm, it's a CD actually. Never thought I'd do one. Smidgen of MSR. Spoilers: S8, nothing specific, but Mulder's a' molderin'. Just not quite in the grave yet. Rating: PG-13 Notes at end. Archiving: Ask and ye shall receive. Usually. Summary: Scully's hope on a slab. Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid. Feedback: Sonny, feedback is the greatest thing in the world; except for a nice MLT - Mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich - when the Mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato's ripe. They're so perky. I love that. Disclaimer: Ooh, You are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell You. Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying, and barefaced flattery but You are so strong and, well, just so super. Amen. ---------- Heavy, by XochiLuvr As a Federal Agent, death is my job. It pays for the cable, my suits, the food I eat. As an agent specifically trained to crawl into the remains of other people's bodies, I feel I've had a unique, if secondhand, perspective. As close as I've come to it, I've never actually been dead. I'm not all that different from a butcher, except my wares already come wrapped in plastic. Cutting is easy, but draining off the fluids took a lot of practice before I could keep my scrubs from getting soaked; the walls too, for that matter. Once you get past the queasiness and the surreal pressure certain bodily fluids possess it's just a matter of checking for irregularities, wading in hands first and weighing each piece. --- My graduate thesis was based on Einstein's twin paradox. If applied, the theory states that a person moving at 86.6 percent of the speed of light would age half as quickly as someone on earth. It's possible Mulder may have experienced less than my own 3 months of captivity. It's a small consolation. --- There are a lot of pieces. When I'm done I give it my stamp of approval. Never him or her. It. Then I repackage everything for a better presentation. If I ever quit the Bureau I'm a shoe-in at Winn-Dixie. Hell, I'm probably overqualified. Until now, my job has been the one thing I've always been capable of doing. Couldn't make my father happy, couldn't maintain a relationship, couldn't have a baby; none of it really mattered as long as I had Mulder and the morgue. Oh help me, Jesus, come through this storm... My rock and my fortress, but not anymore. Now I have both and I don't want either. Not as they are now, the drab room surrounding his body, naked on the table but for a cheap, scratchy white sheet. A chapel of horrors and he the sacrifice. --- Despite comments I have made to the contrary, I know that time is relative, but to turn the clock back, to relive and reshape history? --- I was supposed to do the autopsy; am supposed to, I guess. I'm still in scrubs, holding my stomach, shaking and sobbing against a lime green wall, my lunch pooling in the grout between the tiles. Between my salty tears, the frigid temperature and the hideous color, I could be drowning in a margarita in some Dali-esque vision of Alice in Wonderland. Technically this would be against his religion, but he never really cared and even Jewish canon has special cases. In life, if Mulder was anything he was always a special case. In death he's just another body-bagged, toe-tagged package, waiting for something in death with the one thing he never had in life: infinite patience. When I asked him if he ever wanted to get out of the car or just slow down, I never in my worst nightmares expected him to drive off without me. My wish was for us to be a family. Somehow he killed the dream the same day I learned he'd helped me make it real. --- "Time is a universal invariant." How many years ago did I say that to Mulder? --- No more of his crazy theories; that is solely my area of expertise now. No more midnight batting practice or hopeful, lonely nights in cheap hotels in Bumfuck, Idaho. Lonely nights abound, but there is no longer any hope. No more cold beer on warm nights watching bad movies, arms around each other. No more future. "He was my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong." --- My sister and daughter, his sister and parents. My abduction; his... If I had the opportunity to change the past, would I? It doesn't matter. I can't. --- Someone will be coming soon to check on me - Skinner, most likely. I think Agent Doggett's afraid of me now. Anyone that can get permission to perform an autopsy on one's own partner from an Assistant Director is someone to respect. Anyone who gets said permission by giving direct orders to her superior is one to fear. Personally I think the last year has weakened the A.D. He doesn't know where he stands with anyone, be it with me or even with the Bureau. I guess I've taught him a valuable lesson. There truly is no such thing as security. No hope, no faith, no safety net. He has made a friend in me, though, or at least an ally - his saving grace the words he gave me when we found Mulder. "That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." He doesn't know the half of it. My child, my genetically normal, naturally conceived baby is going to grow up without her father and all I can think about is the deep weight of Mulder's cold, limp head in my hands and that in all my years I've never really noticed how much heavier the dead feel to the living. --- My greatest wish isn't to change the past, but to know the future. To know when Mulder will be coming home to his family. To us. --- "But Charlie, don't forget what happened to the person that got everything he ever wanted." "What?" "He lived happily ever after." Bullshit. End. Dedication: Perkins for showing me the truth. I didn't get to taste the pie, either. Notes: Apologies to P.J. Harvey, W.H. Auden, Abe Lincoln, Roald Dahl and the incomparable Gene Wilder. The first paragraph is essentially the same as one Livia had me cull from Illusions, an Mpov in my Virtutes universe. Words between --- came from a short I wrote 3 days after Redrum but left on the cutting room floor. I thought those words worked here. The rest was written on 3/21/01 and has simply been lounging in my drafts folder until I bothered to revise it. Major, colossal, i-kneel-before-thee props to Jemirah for bearing the brunt of the editing and putting up with my foolishness so often. Thanks to Marybeth for a quick bit of hand-holding. A note on Auden - I've seen this poem all over the lists and the group in the last month. As I said, this piece was almost entirely written on 3/21/01, well before all but one (and that one being several years old) was posted. It's too beautiful a work of art to be used frivolously and I hope this story hasn't contributed to a cliche. Final note, I swear: I know too many explanations take away from a story, but one of my luscious betas basically asked "WTF is 'Galacidalaci- desoxyribonucleicacid '?" It's a painting (a rather large one, at that) by Salvador Dali... My favorite, in fact, considering the hours I've spent sitting in the museum staring at it (or the hours I've spent on the 500-mile trek from Atlanta, GA to St. Petersburg, FL to see it). Gala was Dali's muse, the great love of his life, and is pictured in many of his paintings, but this one in particular speaks to me. I was a fan of this painting long before I was a shipper, long before the show even existed, but a painting that portrays images of Love and God and Science just reeks of Scully, don't you think? www.med.umich.edu/intmed/endocrinology/hammerlab/dali.jpg to see it. MLTs, margaritas, melting pocket-watches and feedback greatly appreciated at xochiluvr@surfacing.com XL -- http://surfacing.com/xl/ xochiluvr@surfacing.com Owner, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MSR-SMUT/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MSR-Central/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MSR-D/