Title: Sfumato (WIP 3/?) Author: supernova Disclaimer: Not mine; don't sue. Rating: R Category: MSR, Angst-O-Rama Feedback: Feed me at supernova818@aol.com Archive: DO NOT ARCHIVE. Other than Ephemeral, this story will be archived exclusively at my site. http://www.angelfire.com/ms/KtblleStorage/main.html Author's Notes: "Sfumato" is the sequel to "The Marionette Rebellion". To understand parts of this story, you'll need to read MR first. The first parts of "Sfumato" have been posted one right after the other because portions of all three parts were written about a week ago. Now, I'm writing as I can, and so the updates from now on will be more spread out. Happy reading! Hugs and thanks to Beach for beta. --------------- Sfumato ---------- Chapter 2 --------------- They are making shadow puppets with their hands. The door that connects their room to Skinner's is ajar. Skinner snores loudly in his sleep and they look at one another and try not to laugh. Hope rolls onto her side and stares at her brother. "I know your secret," Hope says. "What secret?" William asks. An alligator dances on the ceiling. "I didn't know until you asked Daddy if Mommy was okay. Most of the time I can't read anyone, especially you, but it made you angry when he lied to you, and then I knew your secret." "You don't know anything, short stuff," William says. A butterfly flaps its wings against the wall. "How could you not tell him, Will?" Hope asks. Tears spill out of her blue eyes and she sits up on the bed. The butterfly flutters its way across the motel curtains, then stills, and disappears. "I'm tired, Hope. Let's go to sleep," William says. William pulls the scratchy blanket up to his chin and pretends to sleep. Hope's tears fall until sleep claims her. -X- The November night chills Dana Scully to the bone. A forceful gust of wind prickles her cheeks, causing her to grimace as the cold magnifies the pain in her jaw. She fumbles with the rope still clinging to her wrist, and breaks open a scab when she finally succeeds in loosening its hold on her. Her wrists are mottled with purple bruises, raw pink rings circle them like bracelets, but at least she is free. She begins to count backwards from ten; she thinks she might make it to seven. Ten, nine, eight, seven- Mulder yanks open the door in the nick of time. Her gaze travels then length of his body several times. They stare at each other with a mixture of joy and sadness vying for residence in their hearts. He wraps his arms around himself to ward off the cold. She leans back against his car; he walks over to her, and holds out his hand. "I thought you might be cold," he says. She is cold, and so she takes the proffered promise of warmth, sliding into his jacket as she has done so many times before. She is engulfed in a sea of navy blue twill. The arms are too long and the bottom edge brushes her kneecaps. It smells like a woman who isn't her. She takes it off and walks around the parked cars in the driveway, to the side yard, and deposits the jacket into the trashcan used for weeds and dead grass. He watches her and doesn't comment. "It smelled like her," Scully says as she repositions herself against the car. Mulder looks skyward and prays for a miracle. "Are Hope and William okay?" she asks. "Yeah, they're fine. Skinner is with them. I'm going to pick them up tomorrow in D.C.," Mulder replies. Scully shifts against the car and glances up at Mulder. "You hit her," she says. "I've never seen you strike a woman; I didn't think you had it in you." He bites down on the inside of his cheek. Unable to defend himself, he nods, and doesn't know how to feel about his lack of remorse. All he can think is that she deserved it. "I'm glad you did," she says softly. "Where have you been, Scully?" He has so many questions and decides to start with the most obvious. "Not surfing the galaxy if that's what you were thinking," she laughs. "Who did this to you?" he asks, gently brushing his hand over the bruises on her face. He pretends not to notice when she winces and leans away from him. "No one you know," is all she says in response. He gathers that she doesn't know who did this to her either; at least not by name or previous association. "What's the last thing you remember, Scully? When were you last home?" he questions. "A month ago," she answers. "A month ago?" "Yeah." "That can't be right, Scully. I've done nothing but think about this for the past two days and that cannot be right." He's agitated and the concrete driveway is rough against the bottoms of his bare feet. "How long do you think I've been gone, Mulder?" she asks without looking at him. "The night you-" he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to untangle his pronouns. "She called one night and said she was going to be late. Hours after she said she'd be home she came in and told me she'd been held up at work, and that she'd been involved in a car accident. That night alone wouldn't have made me suspect anything was wrong. In fact, there were days I thought I was losing my mind because one day the clues were there and the next day they weren't. That night sticks out most in my mind, though. She had that car accident three months ago, Scully. You've been gone for three months." Scully wistfully nods and gazes down the street of their suburban neighborhood. Streetlights are staggered down either side of the road and cast shadowy light in the otherwise dark night. Cars line the curb in front of Taylor and Michael Greggs' house; they must be having a party. The Greggs' always throw one hell of a party. When Scully and Mulder first moved into the neighborhood Taylor invited them over for dinner. William and Michael Jr. hit it off and have been best friends ever since. Taylor has a great recipe for pasta salad. Scully remembers the Christmas party Taylor and Mike threw last year. Both she and Mulder had a little too much to drink. Taylor, however, was laughing-hysterically-stumbling-around drunk. Towards the end of the night, Taylor had thrown an arm around her shoulder, and whispered in her ear that Scully had the perfect life. How quickly things change. She doesn't look at him as she begins to speak, "She must have called you that night. She was probably trying to buy some time. She knew if she didn't call that you'd come looking for me. Dara was created so that you wouldn't look for me when I went missing. They couldn't have you interfering in their plans." She pauses in her exposition, disbelief working its way into every pore of her being, the hurt so encompassing that she slides down the cold metal of the car behind her and sits down on the driveway. Looking down at her wrists, she continues on, "It was me that night, Mulder. I was the one who had the car accident. It was me on the floor in your office. It was me-" she stops when she sees the look on his face. She gives him a moment to absorb what she's said. Let it sink in slowly she thinks to herself; it will be easier that way. "They were returning -me- that night, Mulder." "What? What the hell do you mean they were returning you? I'm an old man now, Scully. You're going to have to draw a diagram or something because I have no idea what is going on." "I didn't either until a month ago," she says. Her jawbone aches. The man she's referred to as Son-of-a-bitch for the past month, tried to cop a feel two weeks ago. She kicked him so hard in the balls he didn't come visit her for almost five days. When he deigned to grace her with his presence he made sure she knew how he felt about having his manhood kicked up into his throat. She smiles now, because getting the shit beaten out of her aside, he didn't try to touch her again. "They've been taking me intermittently since February, Mulder. They were returning me that night." Scully closes her eyes the past month an unending horror show playing behind her eyelids. She doesn't want to think about it, but to try and think about anything else is futile. Only in the last month has she begun to remember the previous abductions. She thinks of them as trial runs, rehearsals for the main event. A month ago they decided the master plan had worked. They'd integrated Dara into hers and Mulder's lives and Dara was ready for her award winning performance. The switch was successful and they had Scully all to themselves with no fear of interference by Fox Mulder. Three days into her month of captivity, and an onslaught of previously forgotten but now remembered memories in her grasp, she'd curled herself into a ball and tried to pretend it wasn't true. When Mother Fucker had come for her later that day, and drug her kicking and screaming to an all too familiar room where they performed test after test on her, it had been harder to deny. Mother Fucker, as she liked to call him, had to pick her up off the table when they were done, because she was unable to walk. He half threw her into her room, which for all intents and purposes was her jail cell. She'd emptied the contents of her stomach into a brown, plastic trashcan, and tried to focus on Mulder. Despite what they'd been telling her, she knew that Mulder would look for her, and that he would find her. He always did. Hours later there had been a soft rap, rap, rap on her door. Usually people didn't knock; she remembers thinking that. She'd forced herself off the bed, and smoothed back her hair. She remembers opening the door and looking in a mirror. The woman introduced herself as Dara, and laughed about how men were so creative in science, yet so boring when it came to the details. Dara, Dana, Dara, Dana. She remembers thinking Mulder might not be looking for her after all. Dara had circled her like a wolf smelling fresh meat. It wasn't long before she took a bite. 'You have a great family, Dana,' Dara sneered. A shit-eating grin had spread across her face. Scully remembers standing there like an idiot just nodding and staring. 'Hope is such a sweet little girl. Your son is pussy whipped, though. He's got that Oedipal complex down cold.' The force of Scully's hand against Dara's cheek had caused Dara's entire body to turn in time with the blow. Immediately Son-of-a-bitch had come in and restrained Scully. Profanities and threats fell from Scully's mouth, but it didn't matter, Dara had the upper hand and they both knew it. With Dara's next words, she'd only further proved the point. 'You must hate that your DNA helped create me. You must hate that somewhere in the darkest recesses of your nucleotides, there is something as evil as I am, just waiting to be born. You must hate the fact that I've been fucking Mulder since February. He doesn't even know the difference between us, Dana. Just accept that you aren't as, what was the catch phrase? One in five-billion as he thought you were.' She hadn't really believed Dara until tonight. Yes, they've been taking me since February, Scully thinks to herself. "At first, it was just for a day or two. They'd study me and she'd study you, and then they'd drug me so I wouldn't remember anything. Through post-hypnotic suggestion they'd force feed me all that I'd missed here at home, no one being the wiser," Scully stands up, the ground too cold for her to remain sitting, and resumes her earlier position against the car. "In the months before, when they'd take me for shorter spans of time, they would inject me with something. It was analogous to a truth serum multiplied by a million. Every time they took me, they'd get just a little bit more. They have been monitoring us for years, although I suspect their reasoning for monitoring us when we worked on the x files was for a different reason. What they wanted from me were the details that weren't in those files: how you take your coffee, what we talk about in bed, nicknames for the children, how I feel about you, that sort of thing. They wanted you to believe Dara was me so that you wouldn't come looking for me. Apparently, you are, to them, a formidable opponent," Scully smiles in spite of the direness of the situation, in agreement with her tormentors on that point. "During one of my longer stays, after the car accident, before they abducted me a month ago, I must have figured out what they were doing. I heard them talking about us, and referring to Project Raven. I think that triggered my memory. My recollection is still hazy, but I remember working to guard a few precious memories. I'd tell myself over and over that they couldn't have this or that one; I focused on a few, although I remember focusing on one more than the others. That's why she didn't know, Mulder. That's why she agreed with you about our first night together. She hadn't been given that memory so she had to trust you on blind faith." Mulder looks away, his eyes full of unshed tears, his hands fisting at his sides. "Earlier tonight they tied me up, blindfolded me, drove for a while, and finally dumped me in the front yard. The house was so quiet when I got home. I didn't think you were here at first, and then I heard movement upstairs. By the way, where is Spark?" Scully asks, curious. Click, click, click. She had fooled him, but not the fucking dog. How perversely pathetic. "Spark was run over in front of the house three weeks and four days ago," Mulder says, his fist making contact with the hood of his car. He remembers how upset Dara pretended to be. God, she had been so convincing. Scully lets out a gasp and murmurs a soft "damn it." Her voice is thick with emotion as she begins to speak again, " Anyway, I heard you yell at her to leave the lights on. I didn't know what to think so I walked up the stairs, turned the corner and started into the bedroom. You were undressing her-" "I'm sorry, Scully. I-" "It doesn't matter. You thought she was me," Scully says brusquely. "Actually, I was proving to myself that she wasn't you. You have to understand that I thought I was losing my mind, and I didn't want to hurt you by questioning who you were. I was testing her, and Scully, it does matter," Mulder retorts. "I don't want to talk about it anymore. We need to pack; we have to go pick up Hope and William tomorrow." "Scully, we have to talk about this," Mulder starts, before Scully interrupts him. "I said it doesn't matter. It's not your fault and no one is going to blame you but yourself," she says. "Scully, you need to be taken to a hospital. Let me take care of you." Mulder moves towards her, wanting to touch her so badly his fingers are tingling. She sidesteps him and starts towards their house. "I'm fine, Mulder. A little bruised, but otherwise I'm fine," she says over her shoulder. He decides to let it go for the moment. Glancing upwards, he sees the lights still on in their bedroom, "What are we going to do about Dara?" he asks. Scully stops her trek through the front yard and turns around, her gaze unwavering as she answers him, "You are going to bury her." "Why did they do this, Scully? Do you know why?" Mulder asks. Desperation is pulling him in every possible direction. Pale moonlight bathes her face; her expression is a mixture of amusement and despair. "Don't you know, Mulder? In a little over a year aliens are coming to take over this great planet of ours. Somewhere along the way, the men who have spent decades facilitating that very event were double-crossed. They want to survive. I was infected with the alien virus and lived to tell the tale. I've been to Africa and have seen an alien ship; I've held portions of omnipotence in the palm of my hand. I've seen things that were dead come alive again. I was barren and gave life to two children. I am the Holy Grail to their survival," she laughs at the absurdity of it all. She turns and goes inside without looking back. He stands in the driveway, eyes turned toward the stars, wondering if in a year the sky will fall, and then sighs, because for him it already has.