1. exordium
"After this, the Sovereign of my soul said to me: "These are the designs for which I have chosen you. That is why I have given you so many graces and have taken quite special care of you from your very cradle. I Myself have been your teacher and your director only that I might prepare you for the accomplishment of this great design and confide to you this great treasure which I am displaying to you here." Then prostrating myself on the ground, I exclaimed with St Thomas, "My Lord and my God". I find it impossible to express what I felt on that occasion. I did not know whether I was in heaven or on earth."
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, November 3, 1689
The sound of his typing was faster than the pounding of her heart in her ears but only just, a clacking that chased the frenetic beat of her heart, then beat in time with it, then overtook it. She stopped and turned: she had not realized the extent of this magnetism; that she was not the south pole to his north, but rather the iron filings aligned around his magnetic field, like the blood splatter from an exit wound. There was a sort of aura in the hall, emanating from his room, almost somatesthetic in nature; she was uncannily aware of her pulse, her beating heart, the cartilaginous rings of her trachea contracting as she swallowed—the heaviness and vulnerability of flesh and existence.
Room 42 beckoned her, a comforting mass of shadows and soft sound. Her knuckles paused, inches from his door; if she knocked now, it would be a tremulous, soft sound. Submissive. Questioning. Her heart was beating faster now, in tune with his typing.
When he opened the door, what would she see? Bright lights, sterilized cleanliness, white walls, a shining autopsy table on which he would dissect her memories, pick her apart and assemble her viscera before her in the shape of a human, all quivering muscle and bloody bones. What measure of intimacy had they shared in that church, when he laid her raw, pulpy, palpitating heart before her? She felt vulnerable—emotionally, spiritually vulnerable, a different breed of emotion than physical vulnerability. Under his bright, blue-grey gaze she had felt herself autopsied, evaluated—butchered. That church had felt like an abattoir: her blood sloshed around her ankles as he carved out her heart and held it out for her to admire, bloody and throbbing with life and devotion.
Her hand shook; she pulled it back slightly.
Some part of her cowered before the light that she felt but could not see pouring from the door. She was unsettled by just how easily he had told her about herself, yet simultaneously impressed. In this, was she St. Margaret Mary to his Jesus? It was a heavy, sacrilegious thought, and it made her falter again.
She couldn't help but think of him as an exhibitionist. There was something appallingly raw and open about the way he spoke about his interest in her, something in his eyes that sought her shock and seemed to relish in the way she recoiled from him. She wondered if maybe she wasn't seeking an emotional counterpoint to her partner's cheerful ignorance, near-nauseating ebullience, and can-do attitude. The stranger's dark intensity stymied and enthralled her in equal measure; he had unraveled her, unwrapped her; he had seen what lay within and, standing firm, had passed seemingly no judgment on her. Would Mulder do the same?
She and her partner had magnetism between them that threatened to burgeon into more than the chaste philia they shared—a magnetism that he seemed ignorant of and that she dared not act upon. This was another reason she stood frozen here in the dingy hallway, afraid to move forward yet unable to flee. To go to Mulder would be to forever resign herself to safety and predictability: she would never assent to vulnerability, to sitting idly by while her psyche was shucked clean and bare, while layer upon layer was held up to the light and examined, analyzed, and catalogued into his extensive archive of oddities and anomalies. The stranger vivisected her neatly, with no need for discussion or exegesis; it was clean, undemanding, painless. Being vulnerable and understood was easier than becoming vulnerable and understood; she loathed the idea of baring her soul, yet relished in its bareness.
But why was she thinking in terms of eternities? If she were to speak to the stranger now, she would be committing minutes of her life, nothing more. It was irrational that she felt as though she was about to embark on her own odyssey and be years returning.
This newfound openness was like ambrosia to her, but Dana had always been a woman of restraint. Still, she wanted one last taste of that bizarre, sensual euphoria she had felt thrumming through her veins upon first holding the milagro pendant between her fingers. The hand that wasn't poised in midair fingered that pendant thoughtlessly, following in the etched lines that limned flames in the cold metal. She was seized by a violent, escapist urge to sprint from the building and keep going until she collapsed, but pushed it away. If she were in the practice of being honest with herself, she would have admitted the truth that pushed her to act now: that she was inflamed, bleeding, desperately seeking containment and validation.
But there was a part of her screaming at her to flee.
Kyrie eleison, she thought with conviction. Her heart pounded a frantic, violent tattoo in her ears; she knocked on the door. Two raps, weaker than she had hoped, sharper than she had feared.
The typing stopped, abruptly.
When she saw him, she was calmed. He was just man, just flesh; a pale brunet with a clear, strong gaze and a mustache/goatee combination that looked as though it had taken years to reach its current fullness. Average height, average build, average face—his nose was a bit too pointed and his chin a bit too sharp for him to be unmemorable. She felt none of her earlier rapture, but rather an internal clash of will, as though her instincts screamed at her to leave while her heart told her to stay, to override the delicate balance of impassivity and compassion that it had taken her years to construct and considerable effort to maintain.
In her hand, the milagro charm was cold and heavy; she extended it to him with a half-smile. "Hi," she said. "I—um, I was going next door and I thought that I'd return this."
She could feel his voice upon her without the sensation of hearing; it was sinuous, persuasive—she would have described it as sensual if asked, like cold silk on bare skin. She respired, inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth. It made her feel at least somewhat in control, which she desperately needed. No one should have been able to make her feel the way she did at that moment: small yet powerful—chosen—an enigmatic mix of revered and enchained. Jesus fucking Christ. Shit. Damn. Her gelid exterior was usually enough to make her diminutive height of five-foot-who-cares seem towering to those around her—she may not have been commanding, but she certainly commanded—and it was usually enough to make her feel impervious. There were times, of course, that all the ice in her soul had not been enough (a whole damn glacier would not have been enough)—abduction, cancer, Duane Berry, Donnie Pfaster—instances that made little parts of her curl up and cry about the vast and unimaginable cruelty of the world, and the way the vitreous eyes of God seemed to simply slide past her without consideration or compassion.
"Because I can't return the gesture," she replied to the word she didn't hear but still processed. "I can't."
That was how she found herself in his spartan apartment, cradled in the fug of cigarette smoke, staring at notecards on the wall.
K.N. MURDERS HIS OWN BEST INTENTIONS
There are others as well, arranged in neat little rows across his wall, arranged so that the little 3x5 cards create one massive rectangle of those same dimensions. She skims them; they read like fragments of a story told in sensations and hallucinations.
DARK BLOOD FLOWED IN THE FOSSE, SOULS OUT OF EREBUS
KNOW THAT THY SORROW IS MY ECSTASY
CONSUME MY HEART AWAY; SICK WITH DESIRE AND FASTENED TO A DYING ANIMAL
THE CHOICE OF PYRE OR PYRE—TO BE REDEEMED FROM FIRE BY FIRE
NATURE, RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
SHE PASSED AND LEFT NO QUIVER IN THE VEINS
I AM SO ANGRY IN MIND, SO HEATED WITHIN MY BREAST
This is what she thinks of, collapsed supine on the floor in Mulder's apartment, chest rent apart by the sheer force of Padgett's mind.
I am so angry in mind, so heated within my breast—so heated—Lord God take my heart full of devotion into Your own holy breast—and do what? She screams and struggles but to what end? He does not need to hold her down to open her up. Yet Ken Naciamento holds her down as she screams and fights—flails—pressing his hand into her chest.
There is no God here, no holy fire or sainted light. She is not Margaret Mary, the devoted and ever-loving servant; in his dark, cold eyes she is meat, carefully selected and groomed for the slaughter. Padgett may not understand the motive he has imbued Naciamento with, nor the vulnerability that he has inculcated Dana with, but in this moment she can see it all: that Philip Padgett is not a creator but a destroyer; that from his hands springs not life but the deep, consumptive void of the anathema; that in his mind is not the unending spring of creation, but rather the sempiternal winter of a supermassive black hole. She is meat and this is agony, burning, searing through her chest in a bright gouge, a font of ichor blooming within her.
She can feel the cartilage that connects her ribs and sternum sever, feels her arteries detaching from her heart… She has her gun—where did she get her gun?—and slams the muzzle onto his chest. She fires, fires, fires; his expression over her does not change, and the empty barrel clicks, clicks, clicks. She SCREAMS, wordless, helpless, staring up at the emotionless face of judgment. Naciamento's fingers brush her heart and she should not feel them but she does, these blunt instruments so unlike the fine scalpel's edge of his mind.
She thinks of Padgett's notecards and their gory prose, she thinks of how safe this apartment used to feel—she wonders where the fuck Mulder is. He is supposed to protect her, her avenging angel, for she has come to rely on him as her rock, her anchor. These will be her last thoughts, these thoughts of him: cold fury, warm love, blazing agony, chilling loss. Though I should walk in the valley of the shadow of death, no evil would I fear, for you are with me. And just when she thinks this is the end, that if Death before her does not rip her heart free then she will sink into this dark pool of agony and drown, just now comes the door slamming open and there he is. Hooded Death disintegrates before her eyes and her chest is empty of agony and painfully full as Mulder leans over her prone form, his frantic eyes belying the impassive slackness in his lips. The light from the hall limns a stark white-gold corona around his head, and she wraps herself around him, spilling wordless, tearless animal sobs out into his skin.
Disenthralled suddenly, she springs back from him in a violent recoil, unbuttoning her bloodstained blouse with shaking hands as Mulder looks on mutely, confused and shaken. She stares down at herself and is faintly relieved to see that there is no hole there, no gaping maw with ribs for teeth and an insatiable hunger where her heart should be; instead, between her breasts and extending under the bridge of her bra there is a thin, pale line of scar tissue, situated slightly to the left.
Mulder squints at her, then realizes what she sees. "Was that—was that there before?"
Dana does not answer him, but cries in earnest now, tears pouring profusely out over her cheekbones and dripping off her chin. She folds herself into his body and presses her head to his chest so hard that she can hear both their heartbeats echoing dully in her head.
Regarding the notecards on Padgett's wall: the note about K.N. and the one about blood in the fosse are both actually on Padgett's wall in the episode; the former relates directly to the story and the latter is one of many lines from Ezra Pound's 'Canto I' that are on the wall. 'Canto I' follows the story of the Odyssey.
The other lines are from various poems (in the following order): 'Hap' by Thomas Hardy, 'Sailing to Byzantium' by William Butler Yeats, 'Little Gidding' by T. S. Eliot, 'In Memoriam' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'Gentildonna' by Ezra Pound, and 'Judith', which is attributed to Cynewulf. Most of the lines I chose are beat-you-over-the-head obviously related to both the episode and the story I'm writing (lol im very subtle), which the lines from Canto I frankly weren't.