TITLE: White Carpet
AUTHOR: EPurSeMouve [epursemouve@goplay.com]
CATEGORY: VA
RATING: PG-13 (some sexual content). But there is a PG version available at my website.
SPOILERS: "Requiem"
SUMMARY: Scully gets domestic.
DISCLAIMER: This story contains characters spawned by The X-Files, a show copyrighted by CC and 1013 Productions. Let's just leave it at that.
DISTRIBUTION: Archive anywhere you want. Just let me know first. But Spookies, Ephemeral, and Gossamer get a big thumbs up.
Author's Notes at end. Dedicated to Virginia, who sometimes likes it a little dark.
White Carpet
By EPurSeMouve
epursemouve@goplay.com
http://www.goplay.com/epursemouve/
She waited a year to redecorate. But it was a busy year.
In the months following Mulder's abduction, Scully flew. Every lead was a good lead, and she was always following new ones to places limited to maps in her mind - sweaty, dirty cities that never lived up to the postcards: Lima, Peru. Papau New Guinea. Katmandu, Nepal. Madrid, Spain. Vomiting up the previous night's enchiladas in her Belize hotel bathroom. Buying a skirt with a wider waistband in Paris. Silently groping her suddenly fevered flesh under the light Casablanca sheets.
But then, after the doctors said "no more" and the Gunmen hid her passport, she was confined to bed, listening to Skinner explain the latest useless lead and counting the days until she escaped from the bowling ball stomach suffocating her.
When that relief came, it came quick and easy and medicated. When the baby landed in her arms, it was a bland introduction to a tiny stranger. When she was asked about names, she let a baby book fall open on its spine, pointed randomly at the page. As it turned out, she'd never known a Naomi before. So it stayed.
She set up a crib in the living room, next to the computer, and spent her maternity leave joining abductee groups and mailing lists. She formed connections, started up correspondence with key figures. At the beginning, she had no notoriety at all, but once she let it be known who she was looking for, the community reached out with electronic support. She lived day-to-day, simply surviving, forming no plans for the future. The future was when Mulder returned to her. The past was when he had been there. The present was simply the meantime.
She was angry, though - a furious pot of contained rage. Furious at both the world and him, for leaving her alone to deal with this strange world of breast pumps and sagging thighs and colic. But all she could do was hope and wait.
Or stop.
She remembered the exact moment. She had fallen asleep at the keyboard, her head resting next to the mouse, darting awake at Naomi's first hungry cry. It was a simple thing, a matter of habit, to raise her shirt and detach her maternity bra, letting Naomi drink her fill. But when she looked down, the moonlight caught the pale skin of her child, giving her an ethereal glow. And as she watched, gazing at her daughter as if it were the first time, Naomi let her lips fall away from the nipple-
And smiled.
It was nothing like Mulder's smile.
Even more beautiful.
Naomi finished her business, then burped and drifted back to sleep. Scully held her tightly, surveying their surroundings.
The kitchen was nowhere near sanitary. Her couch was shabby and worn. Her desk bore the battle scars of invaders and murderers. All over the floor, extremely important documents were piled in little totems of dedication, weighted down with cans of diet cola. Little piles of trash had built up in the corners. The entire mess smelled of reclusion and mourning.
That night, Scully started to clean.
She cleaned all week, scouring surfaces buried under thick layers of filth, sorting through junk mail from nine months ago, throwing away everything that didn't fall into immediate order.
But even that wasn't enough.
When her greasy spoon of a landlord took one look at her suggested paint samples and snorted with disgust, she called the Gunmen. Three hours later, they had a lead on a small house in Baltimore. Near the always-understaffed coroner's office. Cheap, safe, and available.
When she handed in her resignation from the FBI, her last request to Skinner was for help moving out. He called in three other ex-Marines, and together they had her in her new home in less than a day. Leaving her alone to nest.
In between dull autopsies, she transformed her fixer-upper. Planned and shopped and consulted. Her new neighborhood was filled with grandmothers and preteens always happy to look after a sweet little baby for a few hours, but she found she liked taking Naomi along on her ventures to home improvement stores and contractor's offices. She would hold up samples to Naomi's serene, beautiful face, and imagine approval or disapproval in the slight blinks of the baby's eyes.
She always ignored the fact that they were hazel.
When it came time to choose carpeting, Scully opted for a thick velvet plush. White double-pile. It was thick and warm and steady - permanent. She was told she was crazy for having white carpet with a baby, but Scully looked upon the fields of snowy purity once it was installed, and knew that it was home. Safe from muddy footprints and bloodstains. Always.
As she had painted and sanded and measured, the email had piled up in her in-box - letters from her old correspondents, asking how she was, mentioning the latest events in the paranormal world. Her folders bulged with mailing list chit-chat. She idly paged through some of it, not wanting to go to the effort of unsubscribing, reading over the fantastic occurrences with bland acceptance.
The years had made a believer out of her. But by now, she simply didn't care.
She measured time in birthday candles and carpet cleanings. More of each every year. The only room in the house that wasn't carpeted was the kitchen. So that was where they ate the birthday cake.
Naomi grew up and she was perfect. Long strawberry blonde hair that Scully kept meticulously untangled and shiny. Cherubic cheeks that were always clean. Carefully matched, unwrinkled outfits. And always, a happy smile. She was as careful and precise as her mother, picking her way carefully through the kindergarten playground, never getting involved in the messy games being played.
She did like the swings, though. She liked the swings and her picture books and her Uncle Melvin, even if Scully became cold and stern when he mentioned the latest abductee sightings. But Naomi liked Christmas best of all.
Scully was busy that year, the fifth year, making it perfect for her daughter. Baking and decorating and shopping, while Naomi stayed with the neighbors, playing in the fresh powder of this year's freak snowfall, her cheeks glowing as she frolicked in virginal white backyards.
One such evening out of many, Scully was heading home, picturing coming home to her red-cheeked, snow-covered daughter. Her arms were full of bags and boxes as she strode through downtown Baltimore, but though she wasn't parked in the safest of areas, she wasn't worried. Most of her FBI training had faded from conscious memory. But a kick to the groin was always a classic.
The streets were filled with transients tonight, the panhandlers making that extra push towards enough quarters for a warm motel room, playing upon people's heartstrings during the holiday season. She had avoided or ignored them so far, intent on making it home before it got much darker. But one raspy, thin voice, echoing from a dark corner, caught her attention.
"The aliens took me," it said, a thin bony hand reaching out towards her. "They took me away from my life and dropped me back and no one cared."
She halted, staring blankly at the man huddled under the filthy blankets. Long, tangled brown hair and a scraggly beard obscured most of his face. He might have been tall once, but his spine curled in on itself, and his shoulders were bent. His clothes were torn and ragged, a tattered take on what might have been hospital scrubs once. And above all, he was filthy. Coated with dirt and mud and grease and a thousand gut-wrenching smells.
"I was happy for nine minutes and I lost them," he said feebly, after a hacking cough. He spoke as if his throat had been scraped raw by broken glass. "I was madly in love and madly loved. And now I'm just mad."
He attempted, to her horror, to turn his head towards her, but curled up again with a fearsome cough.
The fleeing instinct set in, and digging in her purse, she found a few coins, nearly gagging from the stench as she tossed them toward his flimsy Dixie cup, not caring if they hit the target in her haste to get away.
His wheezy breathing echoed behind her as she briskly walked away. But she had stopped listening to crazy people a long time ago.
As she drove home, she thought of the homeless man, and how, if things had been different, she might have been tempted to take him home with her, offer him a warm bath and a good meal and a kind ear. It would have been the right thing to do.
But... He looked like he had plenty of blankets to keep warm. There were at least two soup kitchens in that area. Her coins had clinked against others in his cup. And she wouldn't have dreamed of putting her daughter in that kind of danger.
Besides. God knows what he would have done to her carpet.
END
Author's Note: Lara Means, at the end of the brilliantly heartbreaking "Someone I Once Knew", said: "One reason I write is to elicit a response from people, and either way you respond is fine with me. And I'd love to hear those responses. Really."
Ditto. This is a dark story for me - darker than I've written in a long time. But I wanted to write about surrender, and change, and losing hope. And this is what happened.
Thanks go to Jodi, Alicia and Robbie, who were beta-licious, and Luperkal, Magdeleine, Alanna, and wen, for saying they liked it, even if it was dark. The freak snowstorm is for Sarah. And Lucy gets points for having principles. I remember what those are...
Comments to epursemouve@goplay.com. And thanks for reading.