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The Use of Maps Author: darkstar Author's Notes: This story was written in response to the Redux fan fiction challenge, in which we were allowed to play in the universes of other authors. I was lucky enough to be given MaidenJedi's lovely dark angst Muse for company, and this story is a remix of her story "37", which can be found at her website, at this address: http://users.pdsys.org/~maidenjedi. Please go by and check out the original if you feel so inclined. Thanks to Victoria P. and the other brains behind the Redux challenge for making this a possibility. From here, no lines are drawn... ~*~ You don't bring roses to her grave; you bring a map, on which you've traced in blue and green highlighter the two separate paths you traveled to her death. You're operating on the theory that if she knows the route she took out of your hands, she'll be able to find her way back. The wind almost tears the paper from your grip, but you weigh each corner down with the two fresh bundles of roses that were here when you arrived. They're white, which was never her favorite color; Bill probably picked them out, so it's just as well you use them for paperweights. First you trace the blue down the belly of Virginia through Tennessee straight to Memphis, home of wailing guitars and Elvis impersonators, and even though it doesn't show up on the map, you think you can still put your finger over the exact motel where you were eating Wang's Chinese Special when Skinner told you she wouldn't be coming back. You remember your first thought wasn't devestation or rage, just /but I ordered her wontons and vegetarian eggrolls/. Later you'd flush them down the toilet and then throw up your chicken chow mein after it, but in those first few minutes you were stubborn. He had to force you to sit down and watch it on the television, splayed and vulgar in live-action broadcast, before you believed him. Next you trace the lime green path of her descent, starting out at the curve of California's spine then flatlining over Utah and Colorado until you get to Nebraska. A red dot bleeds into the faded paper over a tiny speck-on-the-wall town called Perchance, but this is marginally inaccurate. Her plane didn't go down in the town, but rather in a barley field two miles outside. By the time the television crews got there, the place looked like a war zone, bits of twisted metal and yellow body bags scattered throughout the shattered crops. You don't remember a word the newswoman said, just that she was wearing tangerine orange lipstick and this is what made you throw up the chow mein because you couldn't take the injustice that a woman who wore tacky makeup and fake eyelashes would be the one announcing Scully's death to the world. That's how you think of the crash, as exclusively belonging to Scully, even though two hundred other people fell out with her. You want her to be isolated from the rows and rows of names scrolling up CNN, suffocating under the bland and generic public sympathy. Give her some privacy, you said in the over-full local morgue, when you showed up to identify her body. Give her room to breathe. You try to find a way to explain to her why these two lines, the blue and the green, are so far apart, why you weren't thrown down out of the sky with her. No matter what you tell her, you can't do anything to change the fact that last time the two of you were on the same planet, you were in Memphis and she was hovering above Nebraska. It's right there, on the map, plain as day. There is no forgiving that. --------------------------------------- .before. The Reverend Johnny Clyde claims to run a healing machine from the back of his 1973 Chevy van, and when dead homeless women start turning up alive and well, you buy a plane ticket to Memphis. She doesn't believe in insta-miracles, so she stays behind in Los Angeles to wrap up the details on that fear contagion case that's supposed to hit the television in a week. You spit sunflower seed kernels on the floor of her motel room and tell her not to sign any movie deals while you're gone; she agrees, but adds that if Richard Gere shows up and wants to elope, she won't be held responsible for her actions. Once you're in Memphis, you check into the Promised Land Motor Lodge, wading through orange shag carpeting to deposit your luggage in a room, then you start hunting up the miracle man. You find him downtown outside a blues joint selling tickets to his Healing Hands of Love Crusade for just $9.95. You start thinking that maybe you should have stayed in California after all. But you're here, and you like the fact that you're hearing Elvis coming from the inside of the blues place, so you invite the good Reverend in for a beer in exchange for the story of his marvelous machine. He's more con-man than saint, you suspect, with his yellow silk leisure suit and his blond toupee, but medical records proved that the women *were* dead, so you figure it can't hurt to talk. Scully calls midway through your second beer. I'm finished, she says, with two days to spare before we have to be back in Washington for that meeting with Skinner. Want to play hooky in Memphis with me?You can just see her smile, lips curved slightly up and shiny with just a hint of the bronze lip gloss that tastes like copper. Holding your beer bottle to your forehead to keep from bursting into flames, you put on your best Elvis drawl and tell her the address of your hotel, adding on some overblown innuendo that she'll think you couldn't possibly mean. I'm at the airport now, she says, and I'll be there in time for dinner. Order me an eggroll. Vegetarian. The second-to-the last time you talk to her, you talk about Hollywood. The last time you talk to her, you talk about Chinese food. Something is wrong with that. While she's gliding through the air toward you, you take the Reverend up on an offer to talk to some of his faithful, as he calls the homeless women he's healed. All of their stories parallel with beautiful efficiency, but you smell lies (and vodka) on their breath, so you decide to check with the medical examiner again. Suspicion confirmed: the same medical examiner signed the death warrants on all of these ladies. You want to have this out of the way by the time she gets here, so you flash your badge and drop the man a fifty and he tells you another story. The women weren't dead, just drugged up to make it look that way until he could fake the autopsy reports and the Reverend could save the day. This is Memphis, man, everyone likes a good show. When you get back, your hotel room is empty. You shrug off the unexplained knot in your stomach and flip the telephone book open to the first Chinese take-out place you can find. Wang's Chinese Paradise. At first you plan to wait for her to eat, but after another forty-five minutes, the chow mein's already cold and you're starving. She'll understand. You wrap her eggrolls back up in the box to keep them fresh. This is when the phone rings. "Mulder." The tone of Skinner's voice turns the chicken in your mouth to glue. "It's Skinner. I have some bad news." "They aren't going to run that case on COPS, are they?" By now you've perfected the art of laughing right before you get your gut ripped out. It softens the blow. "It's about Agent Scully. There was a problem with her plane." "Delayed?" Skinner takes a deep breath, but it sounds waterlogged, like he's sucking back tears. "Her plane went down over the midwest. Nebraska." "What city? What hospital is she in?" "There were no survivors." Guts. Ripped. Out. All over the motel room floor. But you aren't giving up that easy. "I don't believe you, sir." "Turn on your television." "No." A muffled curse. "Turn it on, Mulder." Then the line goes dead. After fifteen minutes of staring at the news reports and another ten minutes of puking your dinner into the cracked toilet, you walk downtown in a gray pouring rain to the street corner where the Reverend's still selling tickets to his healing crusades. You don't remember how many times you hit him before the bouncer from the blues joint pulled you back, you don't remember how much blood you got on your hands, but you just remember hating him. He had the healing machine; he brought women back from the dead. He could have saved her, saved you. You hit him again and again because you think you can pound the lie out of him. You think if you squeeze hard enough, you can make it the truth. Make him bring her back. But like they said, it's Memphis. It's just a show. --------------------------------------- .interlude. You can't go to the funeral; you hide out in your bedroom clutching her blue flannel pajamas to your chest. If you go, they'll expect you to have something to say, some sort of deep and profound memory to share with them all, when all you want to say is how inconsiderate it was of her to die without taking you with her. You want to find some way to blame her for this, to blame anyone, because you know that inevitability it will keep circling back to you, this loss. And it's so heavy your bones ache. You show up later, after the rain has already began to run the dye in the ribbons on the flower arrangements set by her pearl-grey marble tombstone.You brought her daffodils, bright and cheery like a pointless smile. You remembered, on the way here, that she told you once that she used to steal daffodils from her mother's garden because she thought they would taste like lemon. She planted some by Emily's grave. Now you're planting them by hers. Tucked in the bundle of flowers is the note you wrote her, in place of the eulogy you were supposed to give. (Don't think you've gotten away from me. I'll build my house on the edge of the galaxy, tending daffodils and watching heaven through a pearl-handled spyglass hanging around my neck. I will know where you went to elude me, who took you away, and how many times you lean out your window and try to discern me among the stars.) You're not sure if this is a benediction or a threat. He said he had a healing machine, Scully, you whisper, choking on your words, words that taste like salt, like tears. I thought he could give you a baby girl. You don't know why you're still standing, why you were even able to walk back to the taxi cab. The way you understood your love for her, it should have brought you to your knees. --------------------------------------- .after. So now she knows the story. You fold the map up, along the creases you've made from carrying it around with you for weeks, studying it whenever you had a chance. You've counted up the miles-- thirteen hundred and sixteen-- over which you can stretch yourself thin in punishment for not being able to hold up a plane. But this time is different; you don't put it back in your pocket, but instead tuck it beside the small cluster of daffodils growing beside her tombstone. Two tiny yellow flowers tremble and You didn't come here looking for forgiveness, or absolution; you don't expect the clouds to split open and suddenly flood you with sunlight, her long-distance smile coming to you across space and time and eternity. But you can tell her that every mile between them stretches you closer to her, in defiance every law of physics and gravity, until she's embedded in your chest, beneath all that tangle of bone and tissue and beating heart. She doesn't need your neatly drawn lines line to find her way back to you. She just expands, filling you, like a map without borders. She takes up every available space. And that's enough. .end. Disclaimer: All recognizable characters belong to their owners/creators/copyright holders. This fan-written fiction intends no infringement on any copyrights. |
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