| Title: The Light from Corners Author: Federal Dust E-mail: okonak@city-net.com Rating: PG Category: S/D UT (You can decide whether or not the UT is sexual.) Spoilers: Not really Keywords: S/D Disclaimer: These characters do my bidding -- but they are not mine. They are the collective property of Chris Carter/1013 & Fox. Feedback: Please! Summary: A quirky collection of moments/images. Scully tries to reconcile residual feelings for/about Mulder in order to make peace with Doggett. Author's Note: For the purposes of this story: Mulder is still gone & Scully has miscarried. Acknowledgements: My deepest thanks to Kate (aka Agent R/Chief Psychiatric Officer) and Mischa (aka Agent V/Dogship Tailor). Thoughtfully critical readers and articulate writers both. * When she was 13 and wore braces, Dana Scully took Trigonometry. Everyone else her age was in Algebra II, where girls drew puffy hearts on the inside covers of their textbooks. Dana Scully loved Carl Sagan and Ralph Nader, but she was too embarrassed to write their names. So she spent English class working AP Physics problems in the margins of her spiral notebooks -- she timed her calculations, raced herself. She thought of a jealous earth pulling a falling body towards it -- like body and earth were lovers or magnets. * The love-triangle trope is a bad one. Not just because it's cliche, but because it's almost always inexact. Like this situation, she thinks. There is nothing angular or clean about it, and everyone involved is Janus-faced. You can draw an electric vector from Mulder to her, but the line has to double back. Add Doggett's arrow -- a straight shot to the seat of her soul. Her eyes send a shameful arrow back to his feet. Energy is power -- it owns people. Energy is absorbed and deflected. * She stopped smiling when she got braces. She learned to watch her hands and avoid boys. She still has trouble parting her lips. * She can only look at Doggett when he looks away. If she feels his hard eyes on her, she focuses on something insignificant, like the corners of the ceiling panels. That's what she's looking at now. The panels were ugly when they were new, but they're uglier now, the color of bone and nicotine. There are holes from pencils shot like rockets from Mulder's careless hands. The corners she studies are hardly corners at all. She thinks: Dissolve me. There is no math here. This is not the perfect space of geometry. I am not a poet. * She remembers a story Mulder told her about a ghost ship that sailed for thirteen years without a crew. She remembers asking the requisite questions -- how do you know? How does anyone know it was thirteen years? Are there documents about this? But his belief was white-hot, contagious, alive with murky imagery. That story -- like so many of his stories -- crawled into a corner of her brain. Mulder lived in corners, where it was dark. But he saw everything in the room. * It's like a game. Or a diet. Each morning, Dana Scully allows herself one indulgent John Doggett thought -- in the same way that she allows herself 200 calories for lunch. Today, she chooses vanilla yogurt -- and his tie. Her second-favorite tie of his -- the one that is wide and red and glossy. She imagines herself walking up to him, and it's vivid to the point of transcendence, so that she can hear his imaginary breathing, but she can also see through walls. He is shocked into place, and she slowly unfixes the knot of his tie. She watches his eyebrows as she does it, because his eyebrows give him away. She undoes the top button of his shirt, careful not to brush his skin. That would be too much. The X-Files have taught her that things disappear when you touch them. It's a shy fantasy, she knows. And odd -- like a German art film. She wonders what's stopping her from generating more pornographic fantasies. Or even ones in which her skin touches his. She dares herself to imagine that -- touching his skin . . . She flushes so deeply that her collarbone burns. * Mulder feared violation and the loss of privacy. He feared surveillance, intrusion. His defense was isolation -- that dark corner, that place where no one could see him, that place where no one else looked. That place was inside of her -- her life and her body were hosts. He's gone. She's miscarried. But she still feels pregnant with air, round with the space he left. She knows the Oprah diagnosis: co-dependency. The term means nothing. She just wants to recognize herself -- wants her hands and her head and her legs to feel like her own again. More than anything, she wants to feel real. She is a ghost ship. * On rolling spring days, she and her father would sit on the porch and listen to the radio. She still listens to NPR sometimes, because the nostalgia is like a sedative. She enjoys the stories on This American Life. Today, she slices red peppers while Ira Glass talks about star worship and the labour of obsession. The "purity of obsession," he calls it. She frowns at the radio -- there is nothing pure, she mouths, about obsession. Obsession is a mess; obsession is blindness. She knows. Because she used to try to unravel the stories Mulder told her. She looked for hairline cracks that might indicate the border between fact and fiction. And then she learned that trying to purify Mulder's stories was like trying to stop earthquakes. You can find the fault lines, but tectonic plates still shift and break the earth in unexpected ways. Mulder was obsessed, and his stories were stratified, unpredictable, dangerous. He dissolved into his own narrative, became myth. John Doggett is stubborn, but there are no aftershocks. John Doggett is a Virginia field. * Maybe this is a triangle. The kind that swallows massive boats and kills radio transmissions. * There is something wickedly tense about the way that Doggett orbits her space. She maintains her invisible force field with stern looks and silence. He presses against it -- gently, with open palms. Mulder tore through it. * She is both lucky and unlucky, because she is wired like a scientist. She organizes the world without trying. But the unmeasurables present a problem -- how do you codify feelings? She wakes up at three in the morning and waits for the world to adjust itself. She takes a piece of paper and a pen from the nightstand. She will make sense of these men. She will weigh them against one another. She writes John Doggett's name without thinking. Stops. And then thinks. She realizes the implications of writing his name first -- of writing his name without thinking. Of being able to write his name in the dark. She lets the thought of him rest beside her, and she forgets about the math. She imagines, for a moment, that she is 13. She raises her hand to her mouth to cover the braces that have been gone for two decades. She will not forget Mulder -- but he is not sacrosanct. He is and always was a comet -- brilliant and sudden, but distant, too, and ephemeral. * For the first time today, she has deactivated her invisible censors -- internal and external. At eight a.m., she opens the door to the basement office and welcomes in everything she's kept at the margins. She does not deflect the energy of her partner's eyes -- she returns his gaze and feels, for the first time, how anxious he is, how anxious she makes him. She will stop resisting physics. * Hearts are perfect clocks -- when they move closer to the speed of light, they slow down. Her partner turns to place a cup of coffee on the corner of her desk, but she takes it from his hands, and her fingers brush his. It is a quiet gesture -- but electric. The agents linger; their fingers are magnetic. The air quivers. 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