Author: Angel-of-the-silence
Rating: PG-13 for some mild language
Summary: Companion piece to My Immortal, this is from Mulder's POV. You don't have to read My Immortal to understand, but the two pieces do fit together. Mulder is in the land of "enlightened dreams". I got this idea while driving around listening to Evanescence. So if you're not fond of Evanescence… perhaps you should try one of my other fics.
Disclaimer: Yadda, yadda, yadda. The characters all belong to Chris Carter/ 1013 Productions, and all that jazz.
Bring Me To Life
How can you see into my eyes, like open doors
Leading you down into my core
Where I've become so numb
Without a soul my spirit sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home
Scully. Where is Scully? My head throbs in time to a vibration coming from an indiscernible location, both at my feet and yet all around me. I am reclined, half sitting, half lying on a metal and foam gurney. Thousands of tiny tubes hard wire me to what ever the hell it is I'm sitting on. Against my better judgment, I force my eyes open and scan the room. If you can call this bleary, open, void a room.
The space is both foreign and familiar, in some wispy, dream-like sense. Suddenly, the vibration ceases, and my head begins to pound in time to the rhythm of my heart instead. My ears ache, the pain driving almost all else from my mind. I feel incredibly drained, as if I have been waging war against some unseen force. Feelings of isolation sweep over me, and I desperately seek the man who was with me.
"Assistant Director Skinner!" I call. My words are swallowed by unseen means and unknown distances. Again I try.
"Skinner!" Again, my voice is gobbled into silence.
"Walter!" My tongue trips over my boss' first name, hoping to get his attention by the use of his first name. I am answered with nothing but yawning silence. Using various nicknames as well as the first three I call until I am hoarse. When I can no longer speak, I whisper the only other name I can think of: Scully.
Wake me up inside (wake me up inside)
(I can't wake up) Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become
Agony. I can only describe the previous experience as agonizing. Lost in this never changing space, I find it impossible to determine how long my torture endured. It might have been minutes, or hours, or days. Hell, at this point I can't be sure it wasn't years.
As I lie there, I must pass out or fall asleep, because I recall something that happened before I left.
"Who is it?" I ask.
"It's me," is all she says in response. I answer the door and find Scully looking frail and ill.
"What's wrong, Scully? You look sick," I'm being nice, she looks like hell.
"I don't know what's wrong," She looks scared. Being a doctor, it probably worries her when she can't self diagnose.
"Come in," I reach out and pull her into the room, and she goes immediately to my bed. Scully sits, hunched over as I close the door and go to where she's sitting.
"I, um . . . I was starting to get ready for bed and I started to feel really dizzy -- vertigo or something -- and then I just . . . I started to get chills," Scully relays her symptoms to me. I reach down and pull the blanket and sheet down, offering to warm her.
"You want me to call a doctor?" I ask, concerned.
"No, I just . . . I just want to get warm," She climbs into the middle of my bed, and I stop her to take her shoes off. Scully just looks so pale, even more than usual and I find that it is the least I can do for her. I drop them individually and they hit the floor; thump, thump. As she crawls between the sheets, I think of how much I wish this could be happening under different circumstances. Like last weekend.
When she settles in and makes herself comfortable, I spoon myself up behind her, hoping that she warms up, her skin is like ice.
"Thank you," she says. For long moments, the silence stretches between us. Finally I can stand it no longer.
"It's not worth it, Scully." I say, meaning her work with me, the life she has, as opposed to the life she dreamed of. She doesn't respond, and I'm afraid she's passed out, or, worse, pissed off.
"What?"
"I want you to go home."
"Oh, Mulder, I'm going to be fine," She says this to try to get me to not talk about this. It's painful, but I can't hold it back any longer.
"No, I've been thinking about it. Looking at you tonight, holding that baby . . . knowing everything that's been taken away from you. A chance for motherhood and your health and that baby. I think that . . . I don't know, maybe they're right," This has bothered me since I first discovered that Scully could not conceive because of her work with me. And the sight of her holding that child, reminded me all the more keenly of what she has lost by working with me.
"Who's right?" I can't tell what she's feeling from her voice, and I can't see her face very well.
"The FBI. Maybe what they say is true, though for all the wrong reasons. It's the personal costs that are too high." At this Scully begins to cry softly. I lean in and whisper in her ear.
"There's so much more you need to do with your life. There's so much more than this." I stroke her face as tears continue to slide silently down her cheek.
"There has to be an end, Scully," Again I whisper. And I kiss her cheek before leaning my head against her shoulder. She clutches my hand and brings it up near her mouth.
"What are you talking about?"
"It has to end sometime. That time is now."
For a long time that night, we stayed like that. I felt like an ass for having made her cry. Each tear broke my heart a littler further. And later, I had explained why I was acting the way I was: I was afraid of losing her forever.
"Mulder . . ." She drew my name out like a threat.
"Scully, you have to understand that they're taking abductees. You're an abductee. I'm not going to risk . . ." My voice broke, and betrayed the emotion behind my words, ". . . losing you." She came willingly to me, and I clung to her for dear life. Scully is my life, and I can't lose her.
"I won't let you go alone," Her voice is filled with quiet defiance, and love, and something else I can't quite grasp.
Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life
Wake me up inside (wake me up inside)
(I can't wake up) Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become
Long, lonely time rolls out in front of me. Time passes strangely here. It is intangible, elusive. My body lies dormant, yet my mind soars away. To happy times and places, filled with images of the life that might have been had I met Scully in a different way, or a different place.
The highlight of what I have come to call my "day" is the torture experiments. They are performed by fairly skilled technicians. The pain reminds me that I am alive, and as long as I am alive, there is a chance for escape. It eases my loneliness at leaving Scully behind. Funny that I would find a piece of what I sought at the price of losing the only thing that matters to me anymore.
And it isn't the Truth, as I had gotten used to. For seven years I thought that the truth, with a capital T, was the most important thing in the universe to me. Don't I feel like a fool to discover, too late to tell her, that it is Scully who is so important. Not just important in the universe-- she is my universe. I just wish or pray or whatever it is that I do when I beg for the chance to tell her, that I could see her one last time and tell her that. Lying back, I slip off to sleep, cold tears marking my frustration.
Frozen inside without your touch
Without your love, darling
Only you are the life among the dead
Upon waking, I slip into the same routine I have gone through following every sleep cycle since my abduction. I search for others. And every day since my abduction, I have received no answer. The isolation claws at me, threatening to overcome me in the deep, suffocating silence. The silence so complete, even a pin drop is soundless. Again, the high frequency noise, so high it vanishes above the hearing point until it becomes a skull shattering vibration.
After a few moments, the high becomes a bass rumble that falls in pitch until it, too, vanishes beyond the range of my hearing. But I feel it. I feel it in the vibrations of internal organs as they shake violently and rub against each other. And in my anguish, I break the traditional "morning" routine.
I scream.
At first it is guttural and wordless, until at last, I break through the fog of pain to form two syllables.
"SCUL-- LY!"
All this time I can't believe I couldn't see
Kept in the dark but you were there in front
I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems I
Got to open my eyes to everything
Without a thought, without a voice, without a sound
Don't let me die here
There must be something more
Bring me to life