|
|
By dee_ayy
April 18, 2001
Category: S, A, MT, fill-in
Rating: PG
Spoilers: DeadAlive/Three Words. This story bridges the gap.
Feedback: It’s been a while. Talk to me. dee_ayy@yahoo.com
Thanks: To everyone who sent me notes these last 8 months asking me to write X-Files again. And to my friends Peggy and Keryn and Laurel and Susan.
Dedication: This is for Jan. It was her persistent (but encouraging!) nagging that is responsible for this story. I promised the first one back would be for her, and it is.
Disclaimer: Oh, man, you guys are not worthy. But Mulder and Scully and Skinner belong to Fox and 1013.
Archive: Sure. Let me know where, please.
Summary: Agent Mulder. Was that still who I was? Who I would be? I didn’t feel it. The title was hollow; meant nothing. It wasn’t me. Not any more.
+ + + + +
BURDENED
By dee_ayy
Her weight soon came to be an uncomfortable burden. Not that I wanted her to leave; the smell of her hair was like fresh-baked bread, or the smell of the steam that hissed up from the asphalt driveway after a summer rain. It was the smell of innocence, of youth, of home; it was something at last familiar and comforting. But I just couldn’t bear it--the burden of her weight on my aching chest; the burden of her tears.
“What exactly have I been through?” I asked her. My voice did not sound like my own. It was someone else’s. I did not feel like me. I was someone else.
Her body shifted, but she didn’t move. Not right away. When she did sit up, she rested her elbows on the edge of my bed, staying close to me. Close enough for me to still be able to smell her hair.
It was okay, I didn’t mind; as long as I didn’t have to bear her burden.
“You’ve been,” she started. Then she stopped, and studied me. Studied me for a long moment. She was deciding. “You’ve been in a coma, Mulder,” she told me. “For a very long time.”
In other words, she lied. But I couldn’t bear to call her on it. That would have meant confession on my part; admittance that though the memories were mere flashes and were vague, I knew they were there; waiting to be snatched back and processed.
I didn’t want to remember; couldn’t bear to process. So I let my eyes slide shut and feigned sleep.
After a minute I heard her sigh and felt her weight leave my bed, and I relaxed. The threat had passed.
+ + + + +
I was faking again when he came in the room. Faking was easy; all I had to do was close my eyes. I’d close my eyes and listen. My body was heavy and tired, moving was all but impossible at the moment. Muscle atrophy, they’d suggested, coupled with a low blood count that explained all the transfusions, and maybe the side effects of the medications. But no one told me any of this; no one knew I was awake as it was being discussed.
I knew it was him by his after shave. I’d never consciously noted the scent before--if asked I’d have said he didn’t wear anything. But my sense of smell was keen with my body dormant and my eyes always closed, and I instantly recognized him.
“Hello, Sir,” I said before I opened my eyes. Then I did, and slowly turned my head to take in his face.
He looked surprised; he actually let out a slight gasp, and the corners of his mouth turned up into the slightest vestiges of a smile before returning to neutral. He stepped forward until he was by my side.
“Mulder,” he said to me, and that smile passed through again. I smiled back at him slightly; a conscious decision, giving him permission to do the same. I could still form a smile, at least, though it felt unnatural. Like it belonged to someone else.
“I can hardly believe it,” he said, and I nodded once, sighing tiredly. “How do you feel?” he asked
Countless doctors and nurses had asked me that, and asked me again. He was the first one I believed might actually care.
“I’m tired,” I told him, and he let out a laugh, finally allowing his smile to stay.
“I have no doubt of that, Agent Mulder,” he told me.
Agent Mulder. Was that still who I was? Who I would be? I didn’t feel it. The title was hollow; meant nothing. It wasn’t me. Not any more.
“Look, Mulder,” he started awkwardly after a moment. “I want to apologize.”
“Why?” I was genuinely curious.
“I never should have let you go into those woods alone. I never should have let them take you.”
I looked at his face and his remorse was genuine, his guilt was written plainly there.
“You couldn’t have stopped me,” I told him, meaning it.
He shook his head vigorously. “I could have, and I should have,” he declared. “This,” he started, looking down the length of my body, acknowledging with his eyes the locations of the deepest scars, “is all my fault, and I am so so sorry.”
I shook my head, but didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to hear this, couldn’t stand the apology in his eyes, couldn’t bear the burden of his guilt. “It’s not,” I whispered, wishing that was all it would take to absolve him.
“I’m tired, sir.” And I closed my eyes until the threat passed, knowing that those were hardly my deepest scars.
+ + + + +
I’m sure it wasn’t how she wanted me to find out. But she had to have realized it could happen that way. I wonder when she would have told me.
How she would have told me.
They were so careful. No one mentioned that little detail, probably because she told them not to. Doctor after doctor, quizzing me, examining me, running tests. Scores of people, it seemed, in those first hours after I woke up. And no one said a word—aided, no doubt, by the fact that I asked no questions.
It was a nurse and an aide. Talking as if I wasn’t there--but then, I was giving them no indication that I was there. I was playing dead, again. I actually thought those words, “playing dead,” as they pushed and prodded, changing my bed with great efficiency while I was still in it; those words that came to haunt me.
“Don’t worry, he sleeps like the dead.”
That’s what she said, and I thought nothing of it, until the aide laughed. “That’s not funny,” she admonished.
And they kept talking, and that’s how I found out. Dead. Buried. For months.
And I couldn’t play dead any more. I tried, oh how I tried to keep my eyes closed and my heart calm. How I tried to fake them out until they left and I could contend with this newfound knowledge on my own. But the machinery gave me away, and in no time the nurse realized her mistake. She knew as the monitors betrayed my racing heart and my suddenly rapid breathing.
“Shit,” was the first thing she uttered, and I almost wanted to laugh. Shit, indeed.
Dead and buried? For months? I wanted to shout and rail and scream and thrash and beg someone to tell me it wasn’t true. But trapped in that still-worthless body, wedded to my plan of waiting out these constant assaults, of letting them pass until I was able to process them in my own time, all I could do was keep my eyes clenched tightly closed, and silently implore these women to leave me alone.
“You heard me, didn’t you, Mr. Mulder?” she asked.
Leave. Just leave me alone. This, I was sure, was a burden I could not bear.
It had to be a lie, I decided once they’d left in search of help. A cruel joke. Maybe Scully hadn’t been lying, I had been in a coma, and this woman saying “dead and buried” was some sort of euphemism I wasn’t familiar with. It couldn’t be literally true, I decided. It just couldn’t. It was the only rational explanation that would allow this threat to pass.
And I’d almost managed to convince myself by the time Scully came back.
The sight of her continued to shock me, the size of her pregnant stomach visible proof of the length of my absence, and that she had gone on without me. It was yet another thing on the ever-growing list of things I could not, did not want to address or deal with right now. I wouldn’t let myself. I’d taken note, and not said a word. And neither had she.
“Oh, Mulder, I didn’t want you to find out this way. I wanted to wait,” she said apologetically. “Until you were stronger.”
So it was true. Scully had already lied about this once. She wouldn’t do it again.
“It’s true?” I asked in someone else’s voice.
She nodded, unable to say anything.
“I was dead?” Another nod.
“For real?”
“Well, yes. We thought so, anyway. . . . Apparently. . . . ” She paused. “We were wrong.”
“How long?”
“Three months.” She took my hand, and held it tight. It felt like someone else’s. I felt no connection--to her, to myself, to anything.
And now I knew why.
+ + + + +
The memories, the flashbacks, they were coming unbidden. The evidence of what I’d endured was marked all over my body. But it wasn’t until I’d found out the true enormity of what I’d endured, what I’d survived, that the parade of therapists began.
It was almost funny, I thought. Sending in a trauma crisis counselor from the Bureau after I’d found out they’d buried me, but not before. Maybe it was just poor timing; she told me she was there at the request of A.D. Skinner--his ongoing guilt resulting in another undue burden landing square on me.
This woman might have had a shot at helping me with the rest. But I was quite sure she had no experience with helping people who had quite literally risen from the dead. Not that it mattered; I wasn’t telling her anything. I couldn’t. It wasn’t the right time, she wasn’t the right person. So I lied.
“What do you remember?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Dissociative amnesia,” she told me. “Perfectly normal after a traumatic event.”
“Which traumatic event?” I asked her pointedly. “The abduction trauma, the torture trauma, the death trauma, or the burial trauma?”
I watched her blanche, but it gave me no sense of pleasure. It should have. Running circles around these people used to give me a great deal of pleasure. No more. Not this person I’d become; this person I did not know. I did it by rote; because I could. Because it’s what Fox Mulder, whoever he was, would do.
“Your choice,” she said, recovering.
I shrugged and said nothing. Reactionless. I knew she’d very likely leave this room and say I was detached, withdrawn, depressed. I was all those things. I didn’t care.
“How do you feel, emotionally?” she asked, trying another tack.
“Fine.” I figured I should give her something, so I added, “maybe a little overwhelmed.”
She actually sat up straight in her chair, unable to hide her excitement at being given something to work with. “Overwhelmed?” she repeated, inviting me to elaborate.
“Six months is a lot of current events to catch up on,” I told her plainly. “That election, I hear it was a mess.” And I watched her deflate like a balloon.
She tried. The woman tried. But I wouldn’t give her anything. I couldn’t. And since I couldn’t feign sleep on her, I played dead another way. Emotionally dead.
It was easy.
+ + + + +
I felt my body quite literally waking up, little by little, piece by piece. I’d lie there, and a muscle would twitch to life, or a foot would jerk suddenly as something was reconnected.
The physical therapist left after moving immobile limbs, only to return several hours later and find that I could move them at will.
“Damndest thing,” he mused. Damndest, indeed.
Thirty six hours. That’s how long it took from waking up to the moment where the therapist declared it was time to get out of bed.
I should have been thrilled. I should have been clamoring at the chance. But I wasn’t. This bed, this room, was safe. I was safe here. While confined to this bed, I wasn’t expected to understand, or deal with, or contend with anything else. I didn’t know what awaited me on the other side of the door to my room, and as long I was in this bed, I wasn’t expected to.
Nevertheless, I knew that wasn’t the response expected from me, so I voiced none of it.
“Great,” I told him.
She was there, watching proudly, like one would watch a child taking his first steps. I supposed in some strange way, I was doing just that. I wished she wasn’t there; and didn’t even know why. But I couldn’t find the words to ask her to leave. Fox Mulder wouldn’t ask her to leave. He’d want her there, would thrive on her support and encouragement, on her relief and happiness. I wished I could.
The steps were slow, laborious, leaning heavily on the therapist. But everything worked. One foot in front of the other. I was doing it. I was alive, I was mobile. A grand victory.
For whom, and over what, I had no idea.
+ + + + +
“Here,” she said, dropping a bag on my lap. “I’ve asked about borrowing a VCR. The nurse said she’d make it happen.”
“What is it?” I asked, emptying the contents onto the bed. Five video tapes.
“The World Series,” she said. “I taped it for you.”
The grandness of this gesture was not lost on me. I fully and immediately understood what it meant. She knew it would matter to me. She knew I’d lament having missed it. And taping it was an enormous show of faith that I’d be back, that she’d have the chance to stand before me and say “I did this for you.” I should have been excited and thrilled and touched and moved.
Intellectually, I was. But emotionally, I felt none of it.
“But,” I started, looking up at her. “I was dead.” I didn’t need to do the math to know I was dead in October.
She shrugged, and a single tear slipped down her cheek while she tried to think of something to say. “I know,” she finally whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion. “I can’t explain it.”
I looked at her, and tried to will myself to reach out, to touch her, to pull her close, to thank her for not giving up on me, for allowing herself to succumb to sentiment and tape baseball games for a dead man. I wanted to, more than anything.
And I couldn’t. Couldn’t do it; couldn’t explain why not. I picked up one of the tapes.
“Yankess vs. Mets? A Subway series?” I said quietly, steering the moment into safer waters.
“Yup,” she said with a hint of pride; regaining her composure. “I even watched some of the games. I’m sorry you missed it.” She meant that.
“Who won?” She could tell me; I really didn’t care.
“Oh no,” she chided. “I’m not going to ruin it. Watch the tapes.”
I wondered if she was on to me. If she’d noticed that I was avoiding, that I was hiding here, from everyone and everything. I wondered if she actually thought something as simple as watching a baseball game might flip that switch, and tune me back in--to me, to her, to life in general.
“I will,” I told her. “Thanks. Thanks for. . . . doing this for me.” I meant that.
“I wish we could have watched the games together,” she said wistfully.
I couldn’t bear the burden of what she’d lost, too, so I closed my eyes.
+ + + + +
Miracle man.
That’s what one nurse called me. She’s good-hearted and kind, and she meant it as a compliment, I’m sure. Something that would make me feel good, grateful, happy to be alive.
A miracle.
I supposed I was, in their eyes. I was dead, then I wasn’t. I supposed that qualified.
But I couldn’t bear the burden of such a title; the responsibility. Something is expected from a miracle, isn’t it? A devotion to a higher cause, greater purpose? I had that once. I remembered what it was like. I wondered if it would ever be me again.
For now, it was enough to just make it through lunch.
+ + + + +
The nighttime, while it brought respite from the assault of questions and stares and expectations, brought no comfort. The dreams ensured that. Sometimes they were vivid in their detail: vivid pictures of what they did to me, as if I was standing aside and watching it happen to someone else. But those weren’t the worst. The worst were the ones where I felt the pain, but could not see what was coming; the ones where my body was a mass of fear and trepidation and anguish, wondering when and where the next assault would come. That was almost worse than the pain itself--the anticipation, never knowing when it would start again, or where. Those were the worst dreams.
And then I added the new dream; a dream purely of my imagination, I hoped, as tentative searches of my memory brought forth no actual recollections of what it had been like. Dark, close, suffocating, confined, buried. Alive.
Still other times, my dreams would consist of nothing more than the sound of screams filling my head.
My screams.
No matter the night’s terror, I’d wake up in a panicked cold sweat, my heart pounding in my chest, my skin tingling with the sense memory. I’d wait, holding my breath, wondering if this time I’d screamed out loud, sending people running my way. But it never happened. The screams never seemed to leave my head.
I wondered if screaming out loud might be exactly what I needed.
+ + + + +
My hands would shake sometimes, more at first, less so as the days passed. But still, occasionally I’d lift a hand and it would shake so much I couldn’t hide it. If she was with me, she’d silently take the hand in hers, stilling the movement, and place it back down on my lap. And I’d let her.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the doctor decided when she made him aware of it. “Residual neuropathy, muscle recovery. As long as it’s improving, I’m sure that’s all it is.”
That wasn’t it at all.
+ + + + +
It took a week for me to allow the thought to come out; the thought that had been lurking in the darkest recesses of my mind ever since I’d found out. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was a freak, an oddity; the constant medical testing making me feel more like a lab rat than a human being. Nothing felt right, nothing felt like it would ever be right again. So I let the thought out.
Why’d they bother?
It was a valid question, as far as I was concerned. The evidence was all around me; they’d survived my death, moved on. Even, to a certain degree, flourished. I’d look at her, the changes to her body signifying the changes to her life; changes I’d missed, and that I was surely far too late to be a part of. I couldn’t share their relief or joy at my resurrection; I didn’t feel it, didn’t believe it no matter how much they claimed it was true.
So why’d they bother?
I wasn’t suicidal; I knew that. Now that I was back I was sure I’d stay. I just didn’t understand why. Why they brought me back, and what I was supposed to do now.
+ + + + +
The memories continued to come, coupled with a developing fascination with my scars. I would feel the rough skin and remember the pain, hear the noises of the instruments that caused them, experience it all over again until, shuddering, I’d snap myself out of it. I couldn’t occupy my mind long enough to keep the flashbacks at bay, so sometimes I would indulge in them. Just sit there, letting my fingers trace the scars, and not struggle to beat back the terrifying images. It was almost a relief, allowing myself to give up that fight--even for a moment.
She’d almost always manage to interrupt this indulgence, coming in and, catching me miles away, ask if I was all right. I couldn’t tell her, wouldn’t let her know or share the extent of my suffering. I didn’t want to add to her burden. It wasn’t my place, wasn’t my right. Not any more.
This time she startled me with the question. “Mulder? You okay?” It made me wonder how much she sensed. I couldn’t read her. Not any more.
I stood, and looked at her, trying to be the person she knew. “Yeah,” I told her, “for a guy who was in a coffin not too long ago, I think I’m doing pretty damn good.” Humor; she was used to me making light of dire situations. I’d been trying to accommodate; to give her what she expected. I was sure it was with mixed success at best. As I shuffled my way to the safety of my bed, my legs still tired and weak, I added “Don’t quite have my legs under me . . . yet.”
Her voice was ominous as she suggested I sit for her news, but when I feigned alarm, she quickly tried to calm what she thought was my fear. But in all honesty, I didn’t care what the verdict was going to be. “No, it’s good news,” she said. “It’s miraculous news.”
There was that word again. Miracle.
Then they told me, she and the doctor laid it out there--I was fine. I was “in perfect health,” she said. Even the scars were repairing themselves.
I wanted to laugh. Perfect health. The scars were repairing themselves. They were so wrong. It might have been true that soon there may be no outward signs of what had happened to me, but the scars? I would bear them forever.
I realized that they were anticipating a reaction from me. At a loss, I simply said “wow,” and she smiled.
The doctor then asked me how I felt.
I felt confused. I felt lost. I felt adrift. I felt scared. I felt alone. I couldn’t say any of that.
“Like Austin Powers,” I finally said; a more current analogy than Rip Van Winkle. It was the sort of thing Fox Mulder would say, and she let out a laugh.
The doctor left, and she pulled the chair over to my bed and sat down. “How would you feel about going home tomorrow?” she asked.
I felt my pulse quicken. Home?
“What home?” I asked her. Dead men have no homes.
She smiled sheepishly. “I . . .” she started, suddenly unsure. “I still have your apartment.”
I looked at her, stunned. “Why?”
She shrugged, and focused her attention on my hands for a long time. I finally moved them, pulling them under the blankets and out of sight in an effort to force her to say something. “I don’t know, Mulder,” she said at last. “I guess,” she allowed her gaze to move up until she was looking me in the eye. “I guess I wasn’t ready to let you go,” she said quickly, shifting her eyes away before she finished the sentence, as if she was embarrassed.
I said nothing, and after an uncomfortable moment, she stood and told me she was going to start the paperwork to get me released.
And then she ran away.
And that, somehow, was comfortable; was familiar. It was her old pattern surfacing again: this inability to speak her feelings directly, this need to flee after making an admission. I knew the woman who had just fled my room; I remembered her. I felt a connection, albeit only vaguely, for the first time since I’d come back.
She’d kept my apartment because she wasn’t ready to let me go.
And that’s why they’d bothered.
For the first time something made some sort of sense, and I felt like I had reason to believe the pieces might actually fit back together some day. And I made a decision right then and there. I was going to try. I had to. I owed it to them, to her--maybe even to me. I would try to reclaim my life. And I would try to let her help me.
+ + + + +
I didn’t sleep the night before my release from the hospital. The prospect of leaving this sanctuary had me in a quiet panic. I didn’t want to leave here; didn’t want to face the world. I was sure I wasn’t ready, but I was also sure I’d done a damn good job hiding the depth of my anxiety. I’d made my bed, so to speak.
By the time morning came I was calm, resigned. She brought me my clothes and offered to help me dress, an offer I declined. The clothes helped; they were like armor, almost. As they hid the physical scars, I decided that they could hide the emotional ones as well.
When I exited the bathroom, and she saw me dressed for the first time, it almost looked like she was going to cry.
“What?” I asked her.
She shook her head, covering her mouth with her hand. “Nothing, nothing,” she told me. “You look good. Come on, Mulder, let’s go home.”
She reached out to me, and I fitted my hand into hers with a smile I still did not quite feel. But I would. I had to believe that; it was all I had. In the mean time, it was a physical connection. A start. She opened the door, and I stepped out, knowing that with that step came the responsibility of dealing with whatever was out there, of bearing the burdens of life once again. It was a beginning; that’s how I had to look at it. It was time, and I had to face it. One foot in front of the other.
I was alive.
THE END