#saw the goriest dead fox too

[carrotcakecrumble]

22:22

[xfpornbattle]

Siren

Category: AU

explicit | 2k wds | pre-XF, msr, horror | cw: violence

Summary: Mulder is haunted by something worse than his memories. Will Scully believe someone she’s just met?

—

Rhode Island

October, 1988

The moon lights blue the cold sand, but the belly of the ocean knows only the dark. Starfish climb toward its breathless call, this thing that moves along the sea floor, but they cannot reach it before it sweeps out of reach, cannot heed its silent compulsions to join it: to come. Rocks on the beach feel its approach, its slow stride, its primordial gait, each footfall dragging with it the whole history of the earth’s briny depths. The thing’s endless, feracious proliferation takes singular form as it ascends toward the shore. Its kelp-string hair becomes black and smooth; the rotting corpses of two prickly anglerfish settle below its head to form the clever mockery of breasts; a dead shark’s toothy grin splits to form the folds of its malignant, deceitful vagina. When it is nearly whole, it breaks the surface as woman, appearing and disappearing as waves move over its head. It drags itself with even steps onto the cold beach. And it wants. She wants.

He feels her landing like the ache of an approaching migraine. It pulls at his nervous system, thrums the fibrous chords of his thighs and groin. He smells the fishgut and brine of her sex from his position on the pier. She’s there in the distance. He sees her. He knows what she means to do. He cannot stop himself from stepping off the pier, from falling the ten or so feet into the wet sand where she (it) waits. 

And then he wakes.

Fox Mulder sits up in the small twin bed of his childhood vacations (he cannot force himself into the double where his parents once slept). He is covered in sweat, despite the October chill, and his erection aches against his abdomen—it hurts him with terrible need and a worse sense of shame, a horror that the dream has brought it against his will. This is the fourth evening of the nightmare, and it is only getting worse. The shark teeth… he shudders, forces himself out of bed and into the shower where he jacks off for relief and hates himself just a little.

He will run, he thinks. When the sun lightens the eastern horizon, he will run the beach and get this nightmare out of his head, get himself back together. It’s why he’s here, after all, in this place of childhood discomfort.

Some monsters live in the ocean, some on land. Some worm their way into the head and won’t let go. Monte Propps is behind bars now, but his wrenching grip on Mulder’s brain cannot be put away so easily. Two weeks mandatory leave for psychological recovery: so here he is.

The morning dawns gray and foggy and cold. His feet slap against the hard-packed sand while he tries to outrun his thoughts. To outrun the sight of a child flayed, its organs displayed like some bloodstained, eldritch alphabet—all but the heart, which is missing (consumed). He pushes these thoughts back. He runs. He pounds the sand. He seeps into, is swallowed by, the gray. I will dissolve, he thinks. I will dissolve into the fog and I will leave Propps behind. I will heal as I have been told to do.

But his attention is caught, snagged, ripped away from the colorless beach, by something… red. Hair. A woman’s hair. She is reading, taking notes on the beach. At dawn. In October.

He slows. He stops in front of her.

-

She has three weeks before her licensing exam, before she can begin her final two years of med school and she cannot fuck this up. The sea, she thinks. She needs the sea to calm her, to settle her mind so she can study, so she can do this right, so she can prove them all wrong.

Dana Scully rents a cottage on the other side of the country in a town called Quonochontaug that promises sea and silence and solitude. She reads. She writes. She listens to the ancient tides that groan and crash against the land.

She has spotted him before, this haunted man who runs every day and who barely looks up to notice the world around him. Once, in the grocery store, she watched him buy a loaf of white bread, a jar of peanut butter, and sunflower seeds. Yesterday she saw him at the sea-edge at dusk, staring at the dark place where the water met the sky—not even a line, but a blueblack smudge: the marriage of unfathomable depths and impossible cosmic distance.

There is some kind of magnetism that draws him to her now. She feels it and sees it working on him at once. He stands before her, curious.

“Hi,” he says.

“I’ve seen you,” she says.

-

At a small diner she watches him pick at his eggs and toast while she swallows ravenously her omelette. His eyes—she can’t get over the depth of them, the darkness that shades them, the hoods that droop over them from some hidden anguish and lack of sleep. She feels him like the moon in her blood, but she has no explanation. It is a wild thing. She wants him to take her into the bathroom and fuck her stupid against the ugly tile. She blushes. She shakes her head. What is wrong with her?

“My father doesn’t respect me any more.”

“My sister was abducted from our home when I was twelve.”

They vomit out secrets into the ramshackle diner like a dam has broken somewhere. Neither can stop. She tells him about medical school. He tells her about the FBI. She tells him (blushing) how her mother found condoms in her dresser and how her father wouldn’t look her in the eye for a month. He tells her about Propps, even the goriest details, the worst things, and she doesn’t even flinch. He tells her everything except one. He doesn’t tell her about the dreams.

He pays and she thanks him, pulling her toggle-button sweater tight against her waist as they walk into the mid-morning breeze. The fog has cleared but the clouds still hang low. Dried leaves skitter across the parking lot.

“Look for me tomorrow,” she says.

He will.

-

This time when he wakes from the nightmare, he is standing at the open back door of the summerhouse, staring at the dunes. His feet are wet. He is wearing jeans with damp bottoms that he knows he didn’t go to sleep in.

He still hears it, in his head: some sound he cannot name. It’s like a word he can’t remember, a melody he can’t quite grasp. It is like a fishhook, tugging at his cerebellum. A word bubbles to the surface, a whispered word, what it thinks he wants. He hears a whispered Samantha, and goes queasy at the conflation of this monstrous thing and his little sister. The thought… He feels it rising. He coughs. He vomits onto the back porch and then drags himself inside. He locks the door and leans against it. What is happening to him?

When he sees Dan Scully next, the bright spot of light in this strange dark time, she is wearing khaki pants and a denim jacket, sitting on a beach chair. She has only one book with her this time. He slows to stop in front of her and she smiles at him.

“Hi,” he says.

“You look terrible,” she replies, brow furrowing with concern. “Come inside.”

She makes him tea and toast in her University of Maryland t-shirt, and thinks how stupid she must be to invite this strange man into her cottage where she sleeps alone.

“Dana,” he says to her while he tries to eat. “You love the sea.”

“I do,” she says, nodding but concerned, not sure where he’s headed.

“But it’s full of monsters,” he tells her. His eyes look so sad that she can’t help but reach out a hand to touch him. She wraps her fingers around his forearm and searches his broken face.

“Tell me,” she says.

-

He’s scared her away, he thinks. The thing will come for him again tonight, and he’s frightened away the only good thing he knew. She’d listened, though. She’d listened with sad eyes and hugged him and told him she’d look for him tomorrow. She’d said, “I need to think.” Think, not study. He would never see her again.

He drinks coffee at midnight, afraid of what sleep will bring. He turns on the TV, but the local stations go to static at one. He finds a black-and-white movie on UHF: Dementia 13.

It is not enough. He dozes. The thing comes back.

Its face mimics beauty, as do its naked breasts, its long legs. Its toes drag long lines in the sand with each step toward the pier. Black hair smooth down its back, it smiles at him with too-dark eyes and teeth that don’t belong in a human mouth. “You want me,” it whispers, and he tries to say no. He grips the railing, feels splinters in his hand. “You do.”

Behind her there’s a strange writhing on the beach. Fish, he sees. Fish and crabs and eels and ammonites long extinct and strange sharp-toothed and tumorous looking beasts, wriggling and scrambling from the water to their deaths at the feet of this treacherous being.

He recoils, squeezes the railing until his fingers burn. And yet he is drawn toward her, feels the compulsion in his spine, in his toes. He wants to wake up. He wants to…

He can’t.

He feels the compulsion pulling him under, pulling his hands free, stomping out his volition with every terrible beat of the creature’s heart.

-

Dana wakes suddenly as if startled. Not by a dream, but by something equally elusive. The cottage is silent, but she knows… She senses something wrong, and she’s learned not to ignore her instincts. Mulder, she thinks. His dreams. His nightmares. Danger, she thinks.

She pulls on boots and a jacket over her pajamas and rushes out into the dunes.

The water is black and the clouds have returned to block the moon—it is almost completely dark on the beach. Cold, too. She should have brought a flashlight.

“Mulder!” She calls, realizing that she doesn’t know exactly which house is his. She knows only the direction from which he passes in the morning.

She runs. She runs and runs, cursing the sand that sinks under her and makes it harder. “Mulder!” She yells again.

It’s stupid, she thinks. It’s stupid that she’s running in the dark along a pitch-black beach, looking for a man she hardly knows, screaming into the void on a completely irrational hunch. There is nothing rational left in her, though. There is only this impulse.

After what feels like half a mile, she stops short. The moon has broken free of the clouds and lights the beach silver. She sees him: he’s in the water.

“Mulder!” She screams, but he doesn’t hear. He is walking into the ocean. It is at his waist. The waves crash against him but he hardly notices. He just walks, one slow step after another. She crashes into the water after him, screaming his name.

When she’s close enough to see his face, it is pure horror: aguish, resistance, desperation. “Mulder!” She yells again. She grabs his shoulders, squeezes. But he won’t, can’t, snap out of it. The water is knocking her back, knocking her away from him, but she grips firm, uses the leverage of the next wave to hurl herself upward so she can throw her lips against his.

The water pushes, pushes at her, but she’s wrapped her arms around her neck to hold tight, and she’s kissing him awake. Finally, he stops his steady march forward as the water pushes against her back and his chest—so high now. She feels something shift, feels his balance break and he topples backward with the next wave. He shakes his head. He looks at her.

“Dana?” He asks.

“Yeah,” she says, and they drag each other back onto the cold sand where they hold each other tight.

—