Disclaimer 1: Okay, so during the discussion on the nature of evil, I got this horrible idea. I wrote this to exorcise it, mostly. I would very much appreciate any comments/critiques of either concept or execution. This is based on a slightly alternative interpretation to a scene in "Talitha Cumi" than had occurred to me previously. I've gone back and watched the scene in question several times after this idea occurred to me, and I still think this is a valid possibility. My dates and ages may be somewhat screwed up (noncanonical, at the very least), but then we know so little about Mrs. Mulder (unless her given name is "mom"). This is dark, but not NC17, and may be a bit sketchier than my already-sketchy style usually is. I live by "Show, don't tell," but some things are best left implied. ***In other words, this has some potentially disturbing images and actions, ***largely based on some thoughts about the nature of power between people ***and how it is wielded. Disclaimer (legal): The characters used or mentioned herein belong not to me, but to CC, 10-13, FoxTV and lots of other wealthy folks with high-powered lawyers. They are not mine and are used respectfully but without permission. ************ Other Victims by Sara VanLooy svanlooy@mail.coin.missouri.edu **** "I was always better than he was. But then, that could be said of so many things...." She slammed the French doors behind her, not caring if they broke. She'd be happy if they did break--it would let in the wind and the rain and the animals, and allow this place to begin to rot away until it disappeared. She hated it with the sort of passion a woman of her age wasn't supposed to feel. But she was stuck with it, like an albatross around her neck. She couldn't sell it and be done with it. For some perverse reason, her late, ex-husband had willed the damn place back to her, "in trust for Fox.." But Fox was 35 years old, damn it all! Why, in God's name, had Bill given it to her, knowing how she felt about it? She had once allowed herself the *very* uncharitable thought of wondering if Bill clung to the place because Samantha might be . .. . buried there. Not a pleasant idea, and she hadn't entertained it for long. Somehow, she was sure she'd know if that were true. The place would feel different. Hell, the place would have better memories than it did now. She let her eyes drift over the sheeted furniture, the framed pieces on the walls, until they passed over an empty spot amidst the clutter of nautical art and seaside watercolors, a place with a nail but no picture hanging from it. Unconsciously, she raised a hand to rub the back of her head , touching an old scar there. But she couldn't stop the memory from coming, once it had started...... ************ She was a quarter-century younger in the memory, and a good deal happier. She and Bill had just celebrated their tenth anniversary, and were still deeply in love. His job kept them apart a great deal, but she looked forward very much to their times together. At the moment, she was waiting up late for him. She had brought the children up to the summerhouse shortly after school let out, and Bill was going to join them for a precious week of vacation. But he had called to say he was going to be quite late; he hadn't been able to leave town until several hours after dinnertime. She was standing on the terrace above the water, looking up at the stars. THere was so little light interference here that she could see the Milky Way spreading across the sky above her. She loved to sit out here with Bill at night after the kids were in bed. They would sit quietly, her head resting on his shoulder, and watch the night sky, seeing who could spot satellites first and if either of them would see any falling stars. Sometimes the soft noise of the waves would lull her to sleep. A knock at the door interrupted these pleasant thoughts. She sighed--she'd been hoping that Bill would come straight out here when he arrived, but obviously he'd forgotten his key. He knew she'd regret having broken the spell of the night as much as she did. But she opened the door not to Bill, but to his best friend and co-worker. He stood alone, a lit cigarette in his mouth, in the faint light that streamed onto the porch from the living room. "Oh! It's you! I mean, Bill didn't tell me you were coming up this weekend. I would have had the guest bedroom ready for you if I'd known..." She was surprised and a little uneasy to see him there without Bill. He was always friendly enough in his way, but he seemed distant, somehow. As though he were storing information for later use. Out of all her husband's colleagues whom they dealt with socially, this man was the one she knew the least about. And frankly, the one she liked least, except maybe for that German man who had once had the gall to defend Hitler in her house. He shook his head at her offer of a cup of coffee, instead remaining standing near the door with an odd look on his face. He took off his overcoat slowly, but held it and his hat in his hand, almost pensively. "Mrs. Mulder..." He always called her that--Mrs. Mulder. Like she didn't have a name of her own. That was fine with her, she supposed-- she avoided calling him *anything* if she could help it. "Mrs. Mulder, your husband has been. . . delayed. . .on his way out of town. He was called to a meeting just after he called you." "Oh." She paused, but he didn't seem as though he were going to continue. "Did he ask you to come all the way up here to tell me that?" "No, no." He spoke in that precise way that she especially detested. "I was sent by our superiors to leave a message for him when he gets here." "What would that be?" she asked. He didn't answer right away. Not in words, anyway, but his meaning was clear enough as he grasped her shoulders firmly and pulled her towards him. Feeling her resistance, he brought his mouth near her ear and murmured, "This doesn't have to be entirely unpleasant for you, Mrs. Mulder." She wriggled out of his grasp angrily. "Get your hands *off* me!" "Well, if that's your answer, then we'll have to do this the hard way. And this makes a stronger message for Bill, doesn't it?" With that, he held her more firmly and shoved her against the wall so that she cracked her head against a painting. The pain stunned her, but he repeated the action twice more before doing what he had come there to do. He had timed his visit and departure well, because when Bill's key turned in the lock an unmeasurable time later, she was still lying on the floor, holding her aching head in her hands. He gave a horrified gasp and rushed to crouch beside her, taking off his trenchcoat to cover her trembling body. He held her gently while he folded his clean handkerchief into a pad and pressed it tightly against the back of her head. "I'll call the police, love. What happened? Can you tell me? Do you remember?" She could remember. She could remember the smell of smoky clothes, and the sound of buttons being ripped, and the precise way he had spoken to her afterwards. She had still been too dazed to do more than whisper, but she had asked, over and over, "Why? Why?" His reply was brusque. "Why you? Because Bill values you more than he values his own life." She shook her head slowly, trying to clear it. He took that to mean he had answered the wrong question. "Ah, Why *me*?... If we had sent a stranger in a black ski mask you might have fought harder. You might have awakened the children. Because if it were a stranger, you might have gotten sympathy from whoever you dared to tell." He paused for several heartbeats before continuing, as if to give his next sentence maximum impact. "And because when I heard the assignment was available, I asked for it." She had spat at him then, wanting more than anything to get up, to find the gun she knew Bill kept hidden in the nightstand, to shoot this man in the stomach and watch him bleed in agony. But she was sick and dizzy and hurt, and before she could make her body move, he was picking up his coat and moving back towards the door. "As I said before, Mrs. Mulder. I'd hoped that you'd be more amenable to the idea. Maybe you'll become used to it-- in time." And he had left. Now Bill was looking frantically through the drawer under the phone for the number of the local police station, asking her if she could remember what had happened, and before she could think she heard herself saying, "He said it was a message for you." Bill froze, his hands moving away from the phone. He pushed the papers and phone book back in the drawer and came to sit beside her. "Oh." "Hadn't we better call the police?" she asked slowly. He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Well, I don't know how much they can do, I mean, he's long gone, right?" She nodded slowly, and after another moment he went on. "And since they'd never be able to make an arrest, perhaps its better that we never let this get out." He waited for her assent, but she was silent now. He continued, more uncomfortably, "After all, we don't want the neighbors talking. And how would we explain to the children....." She got up slowly as he was talking and stumbled towards the phone herself, pulling Bill's coat further around herself. But as she reached for it, she could sense Bill's growing fear. He'd not told her much of what his work was, but she knew that it was secret, and the glimpses she had seen had made her very uncomfortable. Bill worked for men of great power and little accountability, doing things that to her seemed marginally legal. And she knew then that the 'message' had been to both of them. If she were to report this, Bill's 'superiors' would no doubt have plenty of evidence to show she'd been perfectly willing, that this was part of a long affair, that she was an angry, vindictive woman. They'd destroy her reputation and make her family's life hell. And she couldn't put her children through that. With a soft sigh of defeat, she put the phone down. Bill tried to hide his relief, but she could see his shoulders relax, and he came to sit beside her, saying, "I'm sorry, honey. I'm so sorry." They sat in silence for a long time, his hand tentatively on her back, and she began to feel warm again. The pain and anger and fear receded as she repeated to herself until she could almost believe it. Bill broke the silence by clearing his throat slightly. "Honey, I. . . " "What?" "Did you see him? Did you know...." She turned to look at him again. He was staring at her with the mute appeal of a child who desperately wanted to be told that things were all right, that whatever was wrong wasn't entirely his fault. He wanted her to let him off the hook, to relieve him of the responsibity he must feel. She had seen that sort of look on Fox's face, and on Sam's, but it was oddly out of place on a grown man. She wondered what he'd do if she did tell him--what his excuse to her would be. "No. I didn't," she said slowly. "He was . . . wearing a black ski mask." *************** A gust of wind rattled the French Doors, calling her back to her present. She turned toward them, and saw that he was still standing on the terrace, looking in at her. And he was smiling that half-smile that made her want to kill him. She'd seen that little smile often since the night of his 'visit' as she had tried to call it even in her own mind. To Bill, that night had become "the night I worked late," as though there weren't hundreds of other nights that he'd come home late. They'd all been condensed down into that one night. But as much as she wished that she'd never seen the goddamned chainsmoking bastard again after his midnight visit, it wasn't true. The man had had the gall to come back as though nothing had happened. He smiled knowingly at her over Bill's shoulder as they shook hands in greeting. And worst of all, he leered. He groped and patted at her when the others weren't looking, and he whispered things at her, describing his act as a mutual one, as a "fling," as "our little affaire." And Bill never noticed anything. Or pretended never to notice or was too damned drunk to notice. And she had to live with it, because she knew that they were vulnerable. That Bill was trapped in this prison of his own making, his wife and children's fate hostage to the project he worked for. They were less cautious, after the fact, about hiding their project from her, and as she learned more about what they were doing, she began to loathe them all. Even before Bill stumbled home drunk one night and blurted out his horrible question, she had begun to dislike him, to resent his weakness and passivity and the way he intellectualized and rationalized his acts. It wasn't until the night they came home to find their son unconscious and their daughter gone that she began to hate him almost as much as she hated the others. Right now, though, the most evil man of the group was coming in through the back door. He smiled at the tears he saw in her eyes, and glanced over towards the empty space on the wall. "Remembering better days, my dear?" he said softly. At that, her fury overflowed. She had held so much back for so long, been so very angry and so impotent to act on it, that it felt like an explosion. She could feel her heart pounding, and her head throbbing in time with it, as she gritted her teeth and growled, "No. I'm wishing I'd had the guts to report you to the police and demand they arrest you. I'm wishing I'd told Bill what his 'best friend' did!" "Is that all? Well, Mrs. Mulder, *I* told Bill all about our assignation. Friends shouldn't keep those sorts of secrets. I'm sorry if your own . . . *guilty conscience* . . . kept you from being entirely open with your husband all those years ago." She stared in horror at him, unable to speak, blood pounding in her ears. "So you can rest easy. Bill did know what his best friend did. But wouldn't it be a shame if he had imputed certain . . .motives .. . . on his wife's unwillingness to be totally honest?" He turned and walked towards the front door, stopping only to extract his pack of Morley's and lighter from a pocket. "Good day, Mrs. Mulder." But if he said anything else, she couldn't hear it. The roaring in her ears had grown so loud it drowned out all other sounds, and her vision was going black around the edges, shrinking down until she couldn't see her hands before her face, couldn't reach for the phone, couldn't remember what she would say into the phone, if she even knew quite what it was for. Her last thought was her need to tell Fox something. He had to know. She would never tell the murdering bastard what he'd wanted, but Fox, Fox deserved the truth. If she could only remember what it was. ---End--- __________________________________________________________________________ XAngst Anonymous Member T h e Smart Young X-Phile #276 - - Lone Gunwoman #41 \ / Melissketeer X Skinner Chick Extreme Possibilities Member / \ EMXC Mysterious & Suspicious Founder - - -Riley- X-Files Fan Fic Lover F i l e s Co-Founder Anti-Spellin' Brigade (tm) _________________________________________________________________________ Visit the M&S homepage http://www.republic.se/xfiles Charctavius of the New Triumverate