FYI: The F word is used in this peice.
Abduction
Mulder dreams of the color red.
Children laughing.
Playing dead.
In the desert, he can see Scully in the haze. Irrational, bright Scully shining through the mirage that is what he thinks it is.
She's but a few feet away, and he screams, "Scully!" over and over again, knowing that if she can't hear him through the irony, there is truly no God and no higher power but the infinite black of space.
Mulder dreams of the color red.
He's not where he is right now. He's lying on cold stone and his body is shouting NO while his mind asks why. After all of the signs of alien mal intent, he somehow believed in a sense of urban grandeur, beings wiser than humanity. He knew it wasn't true and he believed it all the same.
You would laugh at me if you could see me now Scully, I look like those pictures in the abandoned chapels…the ones you stopped going to alone after a man tried to rip your heart out and you saw Emily in pairs of burned out eyes…
In the waking hours of sub-consciousness, Mulder swims through the deep water, treading the current and making progress towards the bottom. Touching the murky bottom, he lies down on the ethereal earth and thinks he's is too tired to make sense of anything.
He sees the dead world that they promised him, with Samantha's happy smile and arms outstretched, Diana's simple coldness and deceit, the father he never truly had. Sees the coffin that real people get the honor of burial in. There are children here, some at peace and some broken, and he knows how close he was to a life that could have satisfied him until Earth was colonized and he plunged himself into deeper despair.
As the spinning saw dips towards his bare chest, he begins to scream. There is no sense to this, nothing to make any sense of the irregularities here. He has seen no one, no grey little men, no government officials. He doesn't know how he got there, and as the rusty, spinning saw stutters a bit, Mulder can't fathom why such alien power would use such silly materials as iron and would let their materials die and go to waste in a dank little room in New Mexico.
This torture seems too human to be caused by anything intelligent.
And then his coppery blood spills towards his face, and he screams because he is human and he can't understand why he means anything to them alive.
Mulder.
"Scully!" he gasps in relief—she's sitting next to therock tablewhere he's lying, skin stretched and needles covering him.
She smiles, but it is not one of happiness, not her rare, stunning smile. It is one of cruelty, he thinks, and she keeps smiling as she perches on the end of the table, arms crossed, mind whirring.
"You were such a bastard, Mulder, you do know that?"
He gapes in horror, disbelief, shame and sadness. Speech has left him and in its place cold dread remains, traveling in waves down his bleeding spine.
"You wanted so much to find your sister, Mulder, to find aliens. To have someone believe you. I fucking believed, Mulder, I did." She sneered at him, eyes bright with malice and cynic pride.
"And you never believed anything but they were out there and you never seemed to care that they could do harm. You watched them hurt me over and over and over again and you said you cared, but you kept looking. Did you think you could avenge me? What did you think you could do?"
He sputters, eyes wide and maybe he is crying, but he doesn't know, this has to be a dream, oh god let this be a dream…
I don't know anymore, Scully, I'm so sorry, I don't know.
She grins at him, face evil and twisted, but still so real, and starts to speak in malicious, lilting tones.
"This is the part where they drill through the passages of your brain, Mulder. This is the part where this little drill bores its noise into your brain and implants your future. This drill, Mulder? This drill is what will rip apart all you believe in and will make this night famous when you can no longer remember it. The agony will never end, Mulder. Never."
Tears are leaking out of his eyes, and can't think anything but he's sorry.
She finishes her statement with a triumphant swell of pride, smiles in glee one last time, and turns into the darkness as the whir of drill bit echoes in the empty room.
And suddenly he is awake in a small room in Bellefleur, Oregon, arms wrapped tight around a benevolent Scully, a Scully that he knows and loves more than anything.
But he is only dreaming.
A/N: Thanks for all the reviews! I'm very happy to be getting a response. This piece is set as a parallel to "Hotel."