XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Summary: A corpse, philosophy, memories and angst Rating: G Category: V, UST, mild MA Spoilers: Post-Memento Mori, Pre-Gethsemane This one comes under the heading, "Muse Attacks Lazy Writer". I was procrastinating on the story I'm writing, got hit with this one. It's short. Special thanks to Debbie Hewett, who makes my writing so much better. She rocks the universe. Thanks also to Hindy for additional critical commentary, and to Sarah McLachlan for her new music -- it helped to shake out the cobwebs. This story is based on characters and situations owned and operated by Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and Fox Broadcasting. No copyright infringement intended ... I'm just playing with them for a brief time and promise to put them back where I found them, but not necessarily as I found them. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Exquisite Corpse An X-Files Tale by Terri Monture xfactore@inforamp.net 1:03 a.m. It was late. His footsteps in the corridor echoed off the silent walls like strangely muffled gunfire. He rubbed his eyes, feeling his tiredness like grains of sand scraping over his eyeballs. A momentary swoon of exhaustion threatened his balance; he put his hand out, found the door to the morgue and pushed it open. The smell of formaldehyde was overpowering, drenching everything in a peculiarly tart stench that pierced his nostrils like a knife thrusting straight into his brain. The lights in the outer lab had been left off, except for a small lamp on a desk that illuminated Scully's laptop, the screensaver a psychedelic swirl of fractals, pulsating and squirming soundlessly into millions of infinite galaxies, a Little Bang of colour. Beyond that, the set of double doors that led into the autopsy bay. He pushed the door open. Scully, swathed in surgical greens, cap and eye visor, bent over the still, cold body of the victim. She raised her head at his entrance. "Mulder." Her honeyed alto voice was an octave lower from fatigue. "What are you doing here?" "Came to give you a ride back to the motel." He circled the autopsy table warily, not really wanting to look, but the natural morbid curiousity that governed human behaviour in the wake of car crashes and other disasters made him look anyway. The body of a woman lay on the table, supine and unknowing, split from collarbone to groin. The gleaming wet tissue, the exposed twisting bowels, the dark brown-red of the liver; all of this open, laid bare for his inspection and awaiting the steel caress of Scully's scalpel. He looked at the woman's face, her slack, sleeping profile. She had been beautiful, a wealth of shining chestnut hair, a strong nose, a delicate jaw. Mulder looked away, down at his feet. It was too much, too raw, too bleak. Mulder rubbed his eyes again, feeling the poignant futility of mortality. This woman, once a living, breathing creature, loved and loving, thinking and feeling, all animation fled, the essential "her" gone. Reduced to a pitiful piece of meat, every secret pried from her by Scully's relentless and necessarily mutilating search. "I can take a taxi," she said. He heard a horrible, sucking sound; she was removing something, probably the stomach from the sound it made as it was loosened from its moorings by her strong fingers. A swampy, plopping sound onto metal; she placed it on the scale set conveniently beside the head of the table. He looked and won the small wager with himself. It was indeed the stomach, pinkish grey, streaked with drying rivulets of brackish blood. Mulder sighed. He was getting much too familiar with this, this final procedure and its attendent sounds of clinical ferocity. "I wanted to see if you'd found anything out yet." He looked down at a counter top, glass jars filled with formaldehyde waiting patiently for the specimens they would soon hold, like soldiers in formation expecting their orders. "I guess not." "I'm sorry it's so late, but the family only signed the release form half an hour ago. The sheriff had to do some fast talking to convince them to consent to the autopsy." Scully looked at the scale, picked up a hand-held recorder. "Stomach weighs 264 grams and from outward appearances and colour, appears normal." She clicked off the recorder, looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time. "You look tired," she observed. "Maybe you should go and get some sleep." "I can wait." Mulder leaned against the counter and slumped, putting his hands in his coat pocket. From here he could indulge in his current favourite pastime; Watching Scully Work. And though he knew it was voyeuristic and that she would be terribly offended if she knew what he was doing, he couldn't help it. He was committing every single movement, every nuance of her to his memory, guarding against a terrible and uncertain future, one in which she might no longer be here. He was trying to help her live with the timebomb that ticked inexorably in the space between her nasal cavity and brain, but it seemed that the only method by which he could deal with it was an awkward, protracted silence. Which didn't help her any. So he kept his mouth shut and clung to the status quo, all the while watching her. He tried to be an inobtrusive sentinel as he carefully recorded everything she said and did. Whether or not he would one day be tortured by these memories remained to be seen; but for now, he was a famished man living for whatever crumbs of time, for the tiny scraps of knowledge she unwittingly spared for him. Her eyes, intent on her work, seemed magnified by the clear plastic visor, even though he knew it was probably only a trick of the light. Mulder watched her surreptiously, greedily. Lately it seemed the circles under her eyes were purple and permanent, and her skin took on a grey-greenish pallor when she was tired, as now. Two thin grooves had taken up residence on either side of her mouth and darkened noticeably as she pursed her lips, intent on using the scalpel. The little furrowed line of concentration between her brows drew his attention; he was seized by an impulsive and compulsive desire to go up to her, take her gently in his arms and kiss that tiny line, smoothing it away. The desire was so intense he shifted his weight, almost pushing himself forward, and instantly clamped down on the impulse. No. That wasn't the way. She would only interpret it as stepping over the boundary, not playing fair. So he crossed his traitorous arms over his chest to hold them there, to keep them from doing what they wanted. Scully looked up at him suddenly, her expression wary, as if she had felt the weight of his eyes upon her. "What?" she demanded. "Have I got spinach on my teeth?" "No ..." Mulder groped for an excuse, found one. "I just don't feel like looking at the body." He inhaled sharply, made a convincing grimace that screwed up his face. Scully nodded her sympathy. "I know. It's a bit much when you're tired." She returned to her work, the gleaming blade in her gloved hands catching the light, winking gruesomely at him. Mulder considered her, realizing he had never asked her why she did this, where her interest in pathology had come from. He had become increasingly aware of just how little he knew her, and this knowledge filled him with dread. For her to leave him without assuaging his need to know ... Blackness stared back at him. He swallowed hard, forcing himself not to think of it. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the fact that he had to know, to fill up the pages of his memory book with as much as he could, that he blurted out, "Scully --" Another of those tearing, sucking sounds. He looked up to see the whitish-yellow length of intestine, intricately marked with a dark design of blue veins. Scully pulled it out with a curious twisting motion, as though she would wind it around her wrist like some kind of macabre bracelet. He watched her work, deft, skillfully and fully adept. "Why do you do this?" Scully glanced up at him, her blue eyes luminous and wondering at his question. "Do what?" Mulder spread his arms wide indicating the body on the table, the entire room. "This ... autopsies. Pathology." "You've never asked me that before," she said, her tone slightly suspicious. She looked down at the glistening abdominal cavity, turned her gaze on the unseeing eyes of the body, then looked back up at him. Mulder shrugged, remembering the first time he had seen her perform an autopsy, back in Bellflower, Oregon, so clinical and detached she could have used the look in her eyes as a scalpel. He had since seen her carry out so many it seemed that for her the practice held a ceremonial aspect. Scully, begowned and serious, her hands weilding the scalpel in prescribed ritual. "I -- I just realized I've never asked you why chose pathology. I'm just wondering, is all. Why you almost -- why it seems as if you *like* doing this whole procedure." Scully stood quietly, her head bowed. He had become so attuned to her these days that for all intents and purposes he knew how and when she was thinking hard, thinking carefully. But because her motivations for her interest in pathology went so deep, so close to the core of who she really was, he could only stand and watch avidly, rapaciously, waiting for her to throw him another scrap of minutiae that let him know who she really was. And Mulder would wolf it down, grateful for even the smallest tidbit that he could savour in secret. He watched her, reverently caressing the length of bowel with her gloved fingertips. "The body is such a marvel," Scully murmured, almost to herself, as if she had forgotten his presence entirely. "It is truly a beautiful thing. Bone and sinew, blood and tissue, intricate, complex. Every thing here designed by evolution for a specific purpose, all of it working together in harmony." She looked up at him and he was bedazzled by her enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. "Makes you think that maybe somewhere there is a God. With a purpose, and a plan." He smiled with her even as he raised his eyebrow in reflexive agnosticism. "Don't forget about that little bugaboo ..." "Free will?" Now her eyes were shining into his. "'Time Bandits' was full of universal truths." Fatigue was making him silly. "Jolly good." Mulder tried out his best John Cleese imitation on her. Scully wrinkled her nose at him, looked back down at the body and sobered. "She has a story to tell, but no one can hear her anymore, except for me. I am the one who will tell it for her." Scalpel in hand, she bent to her work again. "And even though we live with secrets and lies all of our lives, in the end all those things are stripped away, silenced by death. So there is only one thing left to us. A final chance for the truth to be revealed, in all of its sublime glory, in its timelessness, in its utter finality." Something like love shone in her eyes as she looked into the body, as if she could see all of the universe revealed to her. And Mulder thought that maybe she could. Scully looked back up at him. "There's a quote I learned in med school, it's from Hamlet. It's always been so appropriate. 'What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty' --" "'In form and movement how express and admirable,'" Mulder chimed in. "'In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.'" He declaimed the last bit for her in mock stentorian tones, a comic tribute to his literature professor at Oxford. "We'll skip the manic-depressive, misanthropic bit at the end ..." She rolled her eyes. "But that's the best part," Scully argued. "It's the big question -- 'And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' The most profound of topics, the same one humans have debated for all of our existance. What are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? And where do we go?" She expelled her breath in a long, soft sigh. "Such a beautiful mystery. Existence, with its intricate dance, balanced eternally between constant creation and disintegrating entropy ... well." She squared her shoulders, seeming suddenly at a loss. "The whole enchilada," Mulder agreed with her. "Life, the universe, and everything." He was suddenly very tired and put out a hand to steady himself as he swayed on his feet. Scully raised her head, noticing. "Go back to the motel, Mulder," she urged him. "It's too late for philosophy, and I'm going to be another hour, at least." She set a gentle hand on the pale, lifeless flesh, as if the body could still feel her calming, respectful touch. "I haven't discovered her secrets yet, and you're a terrible distraction." Mulder suddenly found that his heart seemed to have set up shop in his throat, but managed to quell its beating as he walked past her, stopping mere inches from her and placing a hand on the small of her back. He knew these invasions of her personal space were probably violating the boundary line, but he couldn't help himself. "I distract you, Scully?" he asked, pitching his tone low and intimate, as he leaned in even closer. She turned her head to look up at him briefly before dropping her blue gaze. "Yes," she replied simply. Mulder froze for an instant; was that a confession, an observation, an invitation -- what? But the rational part of him forced him to keep moving, forced a casualness he did not feel into his voice. "Oh," he said noncommittally. He paused at the door to look back at her, staring down at the exquisite corpse. "I'll see you in the morning, Scully." Outside the Coroner's office, a cold rain was splattering the sidewalk with huge drops that to his tired eyes, in the damp darkness, looked like blood. A vision rose before his eyes, horrible, terribly real, frighteningly possible, and he screwed up his eyes tight against the pain. Scully laying on a metal slab, her stark, classical profile stilled and cold, the smooth ivory of her skin as cold as marble. This woman, once a living, breathing creature, loved and loving, thinking and feeling, all animation fled, the essential "her" gone. The woman he loved, gone. Mulder fumbled for the car keys and inserted them in the lock, swinging the door open. Suddenly he leaned forward with his head bowed against the solid, comforting curve of door, rain dripping down his collar to run down his back, cold enough to freeze his blood. The End Quote from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene II XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Terri Monture (This is my SIG!) "X-Files worshippin', bike ridin', beer drinkin', music listenin', latte lovin', tattooed nose-pierced urban Mohawk ubermom ... slaving over a hot computer." "In order to have creativity you have to leave behind the bounded, the fixed -- all of the rules." Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth" "I'm not an Indian warrior chief. I'm not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I'm not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I'm talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can't handle it, you wimp." Sherman Alexie, "Indian Killer" XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX