Title: Loop Author: J. C. Sun Category: VRA, and I *mean* angst, in big, capital, six-foot neon letters accompanied by a fanfare of trumpet music Rating: R for sexual themes, profanity, alcohol abuse, violence, and generally disturbing content Summary: There is a controlled aspect to the loss of control. .loop .jcsun They are having a fight. Mulder and Scully are having a fight. To be truthful, that term is not strictly accurate. Fighting implies screaming. It implies people making furious loud gestures and yelling and some sort of facial expression beyond vague disgust. It implies emotions being thrown into the hurly burly of conflicting opinions, it implies a certain vitality, a cutting immediacy that is completely lacking from this particular scene. Indeed, if any feeling could be tied to this crossing, it would most likely be exhaustion, a blankness of soul and mind, the last drawing from a dry well. Once upon a time, they might have fought. They might have screamed and shrieked and thrown things and sobbed and wept and in the end, held each other tight and smoothed each others tears away and made love on the creaky motel bed, their passion wrapping tight and washing away all the hurts and the bruises, healing the little aches and cuts that come from being in love, desperately and furiously and completely and utterly in love. Once upon a time, they would have done that. But, this is now. The immediacy is here. It is here and now. Here and now are the little bodies mangled, the once-children strewn across the city, left in rivers, impaled upon street signs, dangling from traffic lights, stretched across the city park, crucified upon the tulip bed with nails driven through soft, tiny baby hands. Here and now is Chicago. Here and now, here and now is the stark fatigue that glazes every action, every thought and every action. He sits upon the bed, legs crossed, eyes gazing back up to her with a flat forbearance; his face is twisted into a smooth semblance of calm. Boredom even as he watches her slim, elegant form with a desperate longing. He takes in the curve of her hip and the white shape of her face, the way her mouth puckers and smoothes, independent of her chill eyes, and he hides the desire beneath a sneer lip. Her voice is thin, cold and absolutely frigid as she opens the bottle, as she shakes out the pills and arranges them upon the table in increasing order of potency, measuring them out with precise flicks of her hand, the gestures of a professional. Bitterly, she thinks that this is all she has been these past weeks: the tagalong, useless sidekick who cooks dinner and wipes the hero's mouth, the one who measures out his pills and makes sure he takes his medicine so that he, the glorious Head Profiler can single-handedly save all the children from Hell. That she has general errand runner, the pretty secretary who transcribes his ravings, who gets coffee and buys lunch and does all those other tasks too trivial for a real member of the task force and too important for a message boy. Make copies, cross-reference, check the microfiche, fuck the boss in a janitor's closet when he gets too stressed and make sure he's up to another fucking day as God fucking Almighty. Her mouth prunes, and she slaps the lids back on the jars with unnecessary force. She hands the medicine to him with a sharp, curt gesture. Her head bobs forbiddingly, no mention of water, so he takes them dry, feeling the things rattle down his gullet and settle into a disturbingly empty stomach. Shuddering, he shoves away the memory of another time when he lived from pill to pill, from Valdol to Valdol, Dramamine to Dramamine and extra special breaks for vodka. Her voice is distant, incisive; "I don't want to see you drinking like that ever again. Do you hear me?" she says, face impassive, mind flicking back to the liter she poured down the toilet, to the empty Jack Daniels in the disposal bucket. Seeing the misery in his bent posture, her face softens slightly, and she adds you, "Mulder, if you can't do it without the. . . without it, then you sure as hell won't be able to do it with it, d'y'understand me?" Taken off guard by the unexpected gentleness, he bites his lip. "Ah, well, sometimes, sometimes, Scully, " he whispers, his voice a little boy sort of thing before he lapses into an incoherent mumble, his hands plucking at his trousers. Her soul, it sings, a plucked string. Something dampens in her eyes as she flicks off the lights. "Get some sleep, Mulder. We've got a press conference tomorrow." "G'night, Scully." he calls, the ethyl alcohol slurring his voice and flaring that almost-settled hurt within her. His answer is the hard slamming door, and he crouches for a long time, bent, not weeping, not smiling, but staring down at the darkness, simply staring down, his face a slack loop of flesh, as he fumbles his way through the darkness and arrives at a conclusion. An erroneous conclusion. A wrong conclusion. But one none the less. .... He listens to the sounds of the motel. Rush of freeway. Honking horns. Talking. Growl of icemachines Television downstairs. Creak of mattress springs. The ticking of a watch. Inhale of air. Exhale. Asleep, she must be. He strains for the sound of her stirring. Still. Very still. Carefully, he rolls off the bed and creeps with almost comical carefulness across the room, tiptoeing forward to the dresser where he withdraws a slim grey rectangular shape from its leather case. Not a bottle of fine Vodka, not even Scotch, but a laptop, lean, mean, speed-machine, present of the Bureau. He sets it upon his lap, flips open the screen and listens to the thin whine of bootup, adding it to the auditory revelry that sings in his ears. A grinding as he opens his word-processing program, a pause as the computer retrieves chicago.doc from its memory, a short, unsteady little breath as he closes his eyes, slipping into a too-familiar mindset, a way of seeing and thinking and walking, of looking at things. Easy as slicing into water, a rush of new sensations, images, flooding into his mind as words slip from between his words, blood and memory and hatred and a perverse lust, twining together and burning into his body and fueling a shudder as he cycles through the memories, terror like adrenaline, a fine-powdered drug that he inhales recklessly, reveling the thud of his heart and the heave of his stomach, the feel of hot liquid over his fingers, the writhe of white bodies in moonlight, their feeble hands clawing at him and the muffled sobs behind duct tape, the ripping of skin, clean slices, the flailing of just caught and the helpless misery of an old timer, the way they begged, begged and sobbed and cried, and the final tensing of their bodies, the orgasmic spasm, staining red, arching up against him, blending, ambrosia sweet terror, pain, the sweet clenching of their bodies as they whimpered, whimpered and cried out against the-- And then, then there are the sounds of good public-relations money cannot buy, good public relations for a beleaguered Bureau that relies upon its spookiest agent for a quick bailout. Then, there the sounds of computer keys clicking, fingers moving at a feverish pace. Then, there is the sound of misery, the soft, little clicking sounds of silent, mute misery. . . . . . The printer whines, spitting out its vital load of paper, of white pulp with crisp black, and he snatches this load quickly, flipping through the pages to arrive at the conclusion, the space for his name. He scrawls the FWM that serves as his nom de plume, writes it in faint ballpoint pen and lets the utensil fall to the ground between loose fingers. The precious sheets, though, he clips together the papers with a little black thing and place it upon the television, his fingers lingering across the pulp almost ruefully, as if he regretted this, as if he were bidding goodbye to a particularly cherished item. A woman stirs uneasily from her sleep, crying out against a wrongness. He falls backwards, the breaths hissing from his chest, mind reeling from the enormity of the task that faces him. A disobedient right hand trembles, shaking so hard, body rebelling so that he must physically grab his hand by the wrist, bend it to the task, face tight and clenched with a curious compound of fear and rage and hatred, a look exhibited by the victims he massacred in his mind not so long ago, the ones he murdered, the one he desires to murder now. A woman, she rises uneasily from her bed, throwing on her robe and unlocking her hotel door. Moving slowly, agonizingly slowly, he steps to the dresser, to the slim object encased in a sheath of leather. He flicks the retaining button back and lifts it, surprised by the heft. He toys with it for a moment, lifting it, testing the smack of metal onto open palm, the resistance of his aforementioned wrist to leather and steel, while his other hand slowly draws the weapon out, the handle, the safety, the trigger, the barrel, the long, long, sinuous evil barrel. A woman, she hesitates at his door, unsure of the intent, not ready to violate his privacy. A man, he lingers steel across temple, uncertain whether to put it against his forehead or into his mouth. The door swings open. Their eyes lock. He snicks the safety. And her scream, it shatters the air, hovering, slicing, such a pure exhalation of shock and fear, of tension, rolled into shrieking wave, a shard of regret, grieving horror and such potent emotion balled into that sole delivered note, siren call like slivers of glass, slivers of silver and glass and diamond, such longing that he relents, that an emotion dark flicks across his eyes, that he swallows uneasily, that his mouth trembles and that he bites back a sob, that his shoulders shudder, they shudder and tremble and move and relax and his face contorts into a twisted animal thing, a wash of pain, harrowing, inhuman and her scream, such a scream, so very strong and memorable and powerful, so lovely and sad, it-- It plays soprano to the bass report of his gun. It plays soprano to the bass report of his gun and the soft platter of brain on wallpaper. It plays soprano. Plays soprano. Soprano. .end Feedback is worshipped at valeanna1@aol.com