By Jennifer Maurer
jenbird72@verizon.net
 

DISCLAIMERS: Good gravy, hasn't the statute of limitations run
out yet?
SPOILERS: Orison
RATING: PG
CATEGORY: S/A, no keywords
ARCHIVE: I'm sending to Ephemeral, and via there to Gossamer.
Everyone else, please ask first.
SUMMARY: "There all the thing are waxen neat, and set in decorous
lines."

COMMENTS: Last week I dragged my big ol' storage tub of X-Files
tapes out of the closet and watched a few episodes. God, I miss
that show! When it was good, I mean. Back in the days when the
"monster of the week" was Pusher or Donnie Pfaster, instead of a
banana slug or Burt Reynolds. Remember that? Ah, good times.

Thanks to Michelle Kiefer for a great beta, and to Kestabrook for
the recommendation.

Send me feedback, or I'll run you a cold bath:
jenbird72@verizon.net
 

"Her mind lives in a quiet room,
A narrow room, and tall,
With pretty lamps to quench the gloom
And mottoes on the wall.
 
There all the things are waxen neat
And set in decorous lines;
And there are posies, round and sweet,
And little, straightened vines.
 
Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart,
Out wailing in the rain."

-Dorothy Parker, "Interior"
 
 

WAXEN NEAT
By: Jennifer Maurer <jenbird72@verizon.net>

A week has passed since you shot and killed Donnie Pfaster, and
you can't take it anymore: you beg Mulder to go back to work.
You've been staying at his apartment since what you'll refer to
only as "the incident," and he hasn't let you out of his sight,
except to go to the bathroom; even then, you suspect, he's
hovering right outside the door, although you haven't caught him
at it. Yet.

"Mulder, go," you coax him, "There's no reason why both of us
should sit at home waiting for OPR's decision. You know you're
dying to get back."

"Not without you, Scully."

But in some ways he is, you can tell. The first two or three days
he was chivalry itself, letting you pick everything from what to
eat to what to watch on TV. He dabbed antibiotic ointment on the
cuts on your back, pestered the police every day to be done with
your apartment, and even took you shopping for a few things you'd
forgotten to bring with you when you left.

Mulder has gradually settled back into a more normal level of
interaction, good-naturedly squabbling over wanting to watch ESPN
and couldn't we eat something besides Chinese or Italian tonight,
Scully, please?

Still, all the niceness is starting to get to you. You appreciate
it, but feel, sometimes, that you don't quite deserve it.

Mulder's never this nice unless something terrible has happened,
which it obviously has. But you want to start moving on, put it
behind you. A part of that is things going back to normal. Or at
least as normal as they can be, until OPR and Karen Kosseff clear
you for duty again. If you can't be back in the field, watching
Mulder go back is the next best thing, you decide.

"I don't want to leave you alone," he says. "I'm still worried
about you."

"I'll be fine," you reassure him, "And I promise I will call you
if I need you."

This promise from you, unheard of in your entire time with
Mulder, is what finally gets him out the door the next morning.
He stops with one hand on the doorknob and looks back at you.
You're on the couch with a cup of coffee; you smile at him, and
make a little shooing motion with your hand. The smile, you can
see, is further reassurance to him, and he returns it before he
goes.

You're sick of the morning shows by now, and they're not nearly
as much fun without Mulder around to make amusing comments. You
attempt a quiet, lazy morning sipping coffee over the paper, but
the rustling pages sound too loud in the quiet apartment, and the
ink stains on your fingers reminds you of things you'd rather not
think about just now. You finish the pot of coffee just to have
something to do, although you know that much caffeine is only
going to make you jumpy now and irritable later.

It's the act of folding the paper back together that gives you
the idea: you're going to clean Mulder's apartment. God knows it
could use it. A cursory check of the cabinets under his kitchen
and bathroom sinks confirms your suspicions: Mulder keeps very
little in the way of cleaning supplies around. You're slightly
amazed he even has a vacuum cleaner. You rub your hands together
and think: this might even be fun. He'll certainly be surprised.

You're making a list of supplies when the phone rings. Three
guesses who it is.

"I think I should come home. There's too big a risk of me getting
into trouble, being here by myself."

"I'm sure enough stuff has piled up on your desk to keep you
occupied. Besides, I was just about to go out, myself."

"You were?" Mulder sounds inordinately pleased at this. "Where?"

"I'm just running a few errands. Nothing exciting."

"Scully, listen, whatever you need, I can pick up for you on my
way home."

"Mulder, it's about time I went somewhere other than a review
board or therapist's appointment. I can do this."

"Okay. I guess I'll see you tonight, then."

"Yes, you will. Behave yourself."

You hang up on Mulder's whine of "that's no fun" and finish your
list. You feel slightly ridiculous at how much this idea has
lifted your spirits, but you're actually looking forward to
cleaning this place up and seeing Mulder's surprise when he gets
home. He's done so much for you. This is one small thing you can
do in return. You actually like to clean, in a way; setting
things back in order, scrubbing them until they shine has always
soothed you. Melissa thought you were nuts, but you thought your
father, with his love of Navy rules, understood.

You want to get out and about. Drive your car. Go to the
supermarket. Things normal people do. You can't be an FBI agent
for now, and while you've never been much of a domestic type, it
seems to be your only other option of keeping busy. So off you
go.

You return with three bags of supplies, including laundry
detergent to wash the sheets on Mulder's bed, where you've been
sleeping for the past week. Mulder insisted he prefers the couch,
but now you're determined to give him back his bed with clean,
sweet-smelling sheets. For years you've been in the habit of
changing your own sheets right before you go out of town on a
case, so you have fresh ones to come home to. It's a wonderful
feeling, sliding into your own clean, soft bed after days of
lumpy hotel mattresses and scratchy hotel sheets.

Mulder should experience this feeling, you decide.

You strip the bed and take his sheets, along with a few random
other bits of clothing scattered around the room, down to the
basement laundry room. Back upstairs, you roll up your sleeves,
snap on a pair of rubber gloves, and dive in.

The next few hours pass in a haze of scrubbing, polishing, and
tidying. You fill Mulder's bookcase back up with books and
magazines he has left scattered on every flat surface. You dust
corners that probably haven't seen the light of day since you
started working with him. You put his kitchen in spotless order
and then go back to the basement to bring up an armload of warm
linen, fresh from the dryer, and make his bed with military
neatness. You examine his shirts, decided you don't have time to
hunt down his iron, if he has one, and tackle his bathroom
instead.

By the time you've finished, using your last ounce of elbow
grease against the soap scum in his tub, you are exhausted but
also satisfied with a job well done. As you watch the last of the
rinse water swirl down the drain, you realize that it's the
longest you've gone without thinking about Donnie Pfaster...and
that for once in the past week, leaning over a tub did not
terrify you.

Your back, still not healed from your beating at Pfaster's hands,
screams in pain as you rise from your knees and try to straighten
up. How long were you down there, scrubbing the grime from
Mulder's bachelor tub? You're not sure, but your back says it was
too long. A brief twinge of fear shadows your satisfaction.
Spending the whole day cleaning suddenly seems less like planning
a surprise for Mulder and a little more like an obsession someone
such as Donnie Pfaster might have.

<No!>

Your last task is to put Mulder's new stash of cleaning supplies
neatly away. He may never touch them again, but at least they'll
be there should some of your influence rub off on him. You
hobble, still bent over, to his couch and settle back with a long
sigh, a heating pad tucked behind your lower back. You take a
deep breath, enjoying the lemon smell of furniture polish, with
just a hint of bleach wafting in from the bathroom. These are the
smells of your own home, of all the homes you grew up in, and on
that comfort you drift off to sleep.

You dream of countless moving days as a child, helping your
mother and sister pack and unpack, over and over. In the dream
you all work hard, but your body doesn't hurt. You could do this
all day, tidying and sorting and making each new place feel like
home.

You hear your mother calling to you from somewhere in the house,
but she doesn't call you by your first name.

"Scully. Scully?"

You drag your eyelids open, turn your head towards the sound.
It's Mulder, kneeling down next to the couch, looking at you with
concern.

"Hey, did you see what I did?" you ask with a sleepy smile.

"Scully, I've been trying to call you. Why didn't you pick up?"

"Oh. I guess I fell asleep. What time is it?"

"After six. I just got in. I was calling to see what you wanted
to do about dinner."

Still smiling, you hum in contentment and pat Mulder's arm. This
"old married couple" routine that you've fallen into is rather
alarming to your sense of independence, but a comfort just the
same.

With popping knees Mulder hauls himself up off the floor and sits
down on the edge of the couch next to you. You scoot closer to
the back to make more room for him.

"It's hot," he says in puzzlement, putting his hand down between
your bodies. "Why is it so hot?"

"It's what? Oh, the heating pad. I have it under my back."

You shift again and you can feel the heat stinging the cuts on
your shoulders. You grasp Mulder's shoulder and haul yourself up
into a sitting position, click off the heating pad, and let it
slide off the couch onto the floor. You lean against Mulder
companionably. In the twilit apartment, still shaking off sleep,
it seems a perfectly natural thing to do.

"Your back bothering you that much?" Mulder asks, drawing gentle
circles on it with his fingertips.

"Not because of..." you make a vague gesture over your shoulder
meant to indicate the cuts from the mirror. "I had a busy day
today. Didn't you notice?"

He looks around.

"Notice what?"

"Here, you need the lights to appreciate the full effect." Before
Mulder can stop you, you swing your legs around him and get to
your feet. You shuffle over to the desk lamp and switch it on.

"Ta da."

"Ta...da?" Mulder echoes, still not seeing it.

"Mulder, come on. Take a deep breath...anything smell different?"

Mulder complies.

"It's kind of...oh, you cleaned up a bit, huh?" he asks.

"'A bit'? Mulder, I scrubbed this place from top to bottom."

As soon as the words are out of your mouth you wish you could
take them back. Mulder's hesitant look, a combination of
uneasiness and pleasure, only reinforces that feeling. You're
thinking he's not sure whether to be flattered you went to all
this trouble for him, or seriously concerned about your state of
mind.

"I even cleaned the...bathroom," you finish in a whisper, and
stare at your feet. Why the hell did this ever seem like a good
idea? You feel like the worst kind of fool now -- a sad, pathetic
one. You open your mouth to try and lighten the moment with a
weak joke, but Mulder beats you to it with some false happiness
of his own.

"Aw, Scully, I'm sorry. I should have noticed right off the bat.
Let me go take a look at the bathroom."

You don't follow him as he walks off down the hall. You just keep
staring at your feet, tears stinging your eyes. You will yourself
not to let them fall. By the time Mulder comes back into the
living room, your eyes are dry again, your lips pressed into a
thin line.

"Damn. Not only can I see my face in the mirror, but in the tile,
too. You do good work, Scully."

"Don't patronize me," you mutter, still not looking at him.

"I'm not. Everything looks great. You obviously put a lot of
effort into this, and I appreciate that."

"Don't talk to me like that!"

"Like what?"

"Like...that!" you say, waving your hands at him, angry that
you're unable to find the words for what you mean. "Like you feel
sorry for me. Like I'm some sad recluse and you're throwing me a
crumb of praise for some stupid housework."

Mulder crosses the room to stand before you and put gentle hands
on your shoulders. When you still refuse to look up at him, he
slides his fingers under your chin and tips your head up. You
tense and back away from him, not out of anger, but because his
gesture reminds you too much of another time when he did this
very same thing...

The first time you encountered Donnie Pfaster.

God, you're sick of thinking about that bastard.

"Scully, don't.." Mulder says, reaching for you again. This time
you resist the urge to flee. Mulder slides his hands down your
arms to clasp your hands in his own.

"Don't think I'm not grateful for all the work you've done around
here," he says, ducking his head to try and catch your gaze; you
reluctantly peep up at him through your eyelashes. "Because I am.
This place hasn't looked so good in years."

At this last statement, a corner of your mouth quirks up in the
beginning of a smile; Mulder notices and relaxes visibly.

"It's just that...I'm concerned about the reasons why you felt
you needed to do this."

"I *wanted* to do it. I wanted to do something nice for you. To
say thank you for...letting me stay here."

"Scully, you don't have to thank me for that. For any of it."

"I know. But I still wanted to. I needed to do something
*useful*, Mulder, and this was the only thing I could think of."

You look him full in the face now; in your tone is a plea for him
to understand. Mulder looks like he wants to say something more
for a moment, then sighs and lets it go, dropping your hands as
well.

"How about Thai for dinner?" is all he says.

The evening eventually falls into the same pattern as the others:
dinner, TV, some inconsequential talk, then bed. No talk of
Pfaster or the OPR hearing or your uncertain status as an FBI
agent. Tonight, however, you insist on taking the couch, and send
Mulder off to his own bed. If he notices the clean sheets, he
doesn't comment on it.

The next morning finds Mulder at home again; you give him a look,
but he just makes some vague comment about "working from home
today." He does in fact fire up his laptop and make every
appearance of working, but you know he's really there to keep an
eye on you. You sit quietly and flip through the TV channels,
determined to appear as normal as possible. The thought makes you
smother a smile. Mulder probably wouldn't know normal if it
walked up and bit him on the ass. Sitting around doing nothing
all day isn't normal for you, either, but apparently it's what
Mulder expects of you right now.

That afternoon, your cell phone rings; it's the Georgetown
police, calling to tell you that your apartment has finally been
released as a crime scene. You have mixed emotions about this: as
comforting as it's been to stay with Mulder, you miss being in
your own surroundings. On the other hand, the thought of facing
the mess your struggle with Pfaster left behind makes you feel so
weary. Part of you is ready to rush in and start another clean-up
job; the rest of you would like nothing better than to hang with
Mulder at his place for, say, the rest of your life. You thank
the detective, hang up, and turn to Mulder, who of course has
been watching you the whole time.

"That was the police. They're done with my apartment. I can go
home whenever I'm ready."

"Are you ready, Scully?"

Maybe he expects you to want to leave right this minute. Another
day of doing nothing much has left you lethargic, though, and
your back still hurts from cleaning Mulder's apartment yesterday.

"Maybe tomorrow," you say, turning back to the TV. You can feel
Mulder's eyes on you for a long time, but you won't look at him.
Finally he turns back to his work.

The next day, Mulder goes back to the office, and expects you to
ride with him, but not to work. You have an appointment with
Karen Kosseff, another session of mandatory counseling. Your
appointment isn't until the afternoon, though, and Mulder is
leaving much earlier than that.

"Why don't you ride in with me, sit in the office and keep me
company until your appointment," he suggests.

He means well, but the suggestion is a slap in the face. You're
good for nothing but "keeping company" right now; you can't do
any real work. You contemplate what your future could be like if
OPR determines that you're not to fit to work for the FBI ever
again. You can't spend the rest of your career, or what's left of
it, sitting in the basement keeping Mulder company. Yet right now
you can think of nothing else you'd rather do, if you can't work,
than to watch him. Work vicariously thought him, you might say.

"Thanks, Mulder, but no. I was thinking I might go home for
awhile before I see Karen."

He is instantly full of concern again; is that pity you see in
there, too?

"Why don't you wait, and we'll go over together after work. I
don't want you to try and do all that yourself."

Do "all that." Clean up that mess, you think. He doesn't want you
to clean it up by yourself. The mess that you made.

"I just want to take a look around," you tell him, "See what
needs to be done. I won't be long. After my appointment, maybe we
can grab a late lunch."

The invitation, another uncharacteristic gesture on your part,
once again seems to reassure him. You may not be handling this
quite the way he'd like, but at least you're not completely
shutting yourself off from him, either. Mulder agrees to your
plan, and leaves for work.

You stay seated on his couch for another hour after he's gone,
your fists tightly clenched to keep your hands from shaking. You
can do this. It's your own apartment, for God's sake. Nobody,
least of all Donnie Pfaster, is going to drive you out of it.
It's your home, and you want to go home. So you're going.

You pull up in front of your building, glad that it's the middle
of the day and most of your neighbors won't be home. You don't
feel quite up to facing either their expressions of sympathy or
suggestions that you move out of the building; you're not sure
which to expect.

You walk inside and take the elevator to your floor, trying not
to remember that the last person to make this trip was Pfaster.

No, it was Mulder, when he came to save you and you shot Pfaster
right in front of Mulder's eyes.

<What made me pull the trigger?>

<You mean, what if it was God?>

<I mean, what if it wasn't?>

You're wrong again, you realize, when you see the yellow crime
scene tape across your door. The last to make this walk would
have been the police and paramedics. You had no memory of Mulder
calling them, but suddenly they were swarming your apartment,
asking questions that you couldn't begin to answer.

What were you doing all that time, before they arrived? Just
standing there, watching Pfaster bleed out in front of you?

You can't remember, now that you think about it.

You're still standing outside your door, growing angry at your
own hesitancy. This is not some sort of sacred or profane place.
It was briefly a crime scene, and now it is your home again. Your
home.

You reach out with a hand that trembles only a little to rip the
tape from the door and fit your keys into the locks.

The door swings wide and your first thought is, this is what
Mulder must have seen. He was here, by the door. Pfaster was over
there, behind the couch. You were nowhere in sight, not at first.

Pfaster turned to watch as you came down the hall towards him.

Mulder's voice, though the haze: "Did he hurt you?"

Pfaster's eyes hidden in shadow, just two black pools in his
face.

You wondered if he would change forms again. You *wanted* him to
change so Mulder would see it, too: this man, if you could call
him that, was more than a man.

He was evil. He needed to be destroyed.

In that instant you knew, somehow, what he had bragged to
Reverend Orison: "You cannot kill me."

"*I* can," you thought. And you did.

"Go back to hell!" you shout to the empty apartment, as you
shouted it to Pfaster when he had you pinned to the floor. You
slam the door shut behind you.

You take your coat off very slowly, to give yourself time to
collect yourself before you begin your walking tour of the wreck
of your home. You hang it on the coat rack, take a deep breath,
and turn around to face it.

It's just as bad as you remembered it. Worse, maybe.

Right in front of you is a large bloodstain that marks the spot
where Donnie Pfaster fell. Where he died. You hadn't really
thought about that until this moment: that monster died in your
home.

The rug is probably going to be a total loss.

You can't take your eyes off the stain as you inch off to your
left, making your way to the kitchen. Finally you tear your gaze
away and look around. No damage here; in fact, nothing much is
different, except for the fingerprint dust all over the counter.
You read in the police report what Pfaster had laid out on the
counter, with surgical precision: poultry shears, knives, plastic
bags filled with ice.

Ice to keep your severed fingers cold.

Mulder tried to stop you from reading the police report, but you
insisted. Now you wonder why it was so important. You didn't need
to read the report of what had gone on here. You lived it. You
can see it all still.

Giving the bloodstain a wide berth, you make your way down the
hall, stopping in the bathroom on your left. The candles were
blown out days ago, but the bathroom still reeks of their mingled
odors. You slowly gather up all the candles in the room and drop
them into the trash, one by one. Pfaster was careful; there's not
a drop of spilled wax, that you can see.

You resolutely push away the thought that Pfaster apparently
liked things neat, just as you do.

The tub is half-full of water, the bubbles long gone flat. You
know, without even testing the water, that it will be ice cold.
You can't bring yourself to reach down in that water to pull the
plug from the drain, so you leave it alone.

Leaving the bathroom, you continue down the hall to your bedroom.
The door has been left wide open, and even before you enter the
room you can see the mess.

You stop in the doorway, staring at a thousand reflections of
yourself in the shards of mirror that litter the floor. You
shiver and cup your elbows in your hands, feeling the scabs from
the cuts you sustained, crawling across the shards to try and
reach your gun.

This is going to be the worst to clean up; you just know, no
matter how many times you vacuum, you'll never get all the bits
of glass. Inevitably, you'll find more when you step on them in
your bare feet.

With slow, crunching steps, you make your way over to the
bookcase in the corner. You reach down and pull it upright,
letting the rest of the books spill out with the others already
on the floor. You push it back against the wall.

After a moment, it falls down.

When you lift it again, you can see the problem; the frame has
been bent, and the bookcase isn't stable enough to stand on its
own. Deep down, you know this will have to be discarded, too, but
still you stand it back up, pressing it tight into the corner as
though the force of your will can keep it standing.

As soon as you let go, it falls again.

You reach down blindly and fling the bookcase back up against the
wall with a bang. It crashes back down, leaving dents and chips
in the wall from your furious effort to make it stand.

You can't do this, you think, as you turn and flee the bedroom.
There's too much. You'll never get this place cleaned up. You
don't even know where to start.

Back in the living room, you stop short, having almost stepped in
the bloodstain. This is a problem with a simple solution: scrub
the stain out. You decide the chaos of your bedroom can wait for
later. You'll do this one thing now, and the rest can wait for
another day.

Unlike Mulder, you are well stocked with cleaning supplies, and
you take out a brush and the carpet cleaner. You have one of
those small machines that will steam stains out of carpet, but
this feels like a job that should be done by hand.

Atonement, maybe.

You spray the stain with cleanser, using the entire bottle in the
process. What was a blotch of sticky brown is now a cloud of
white foam. As you let the cleanser soak into the carpet, you
again entertain the though of just rolling up the rug and
throwing it away. Your stubborn streak refuses to let you give up
without a fight, however, and so after the prescribed amount of
time, you go down on your knees and start scrubbing.

It's not a short or simple process, cleaning such a large stain
that has set for so long. You scrub in neat circles, watching the
rusty stain fade to pink under your brush. The steady rhythm you
keep allows your mind to wander, going over thoughts you have
worked to avoid this past week.

That instant you knew Pfaster was in your closet, you threw
yourself against the door but he was too fast and strong for you.

The horror that you felt when he whispered, "I'm going to run you
a bath," was so overwhelming that all you could do was scream.

You saw your gun under the bed through the crack under your
closet door, tantalizingly close.

Your heart beat furiously as you crawled across broken glass for
it.

You wondered what Pfaster was doing now: had your bath filled,
was he coming for you, would he get there before you were free of
your bonds?

He came into the bedroom and you froze, but he kept going, back
into the bathroom.

Then the music stopped and you knew your time was at hand, knew
the struggle had narrowed to a fine point of good versus evil.
Only one of you was going to survive this fight, and it sure as
hell wasn't going to be Donnie Pfaster.

"Scully!"

You scream, fly up off your knees and over backwards, scrambling
away. You can't stop screaming.

You wonder if you ever really stopped, even after it was all
over.

"Scully, it's me! It's Mulder! Scully!"

It really is Mulder; he's down on the floor next to you now,
prying your arms away from your head so you can see him. You
stare at him, unable to speak, your screams trailing off into
panting. He doesn't say anything more, just gathers you into his
arms. You keep your arms crossed against your chest, unable to
reach out and hold him back.

"How did -- how did you find me?" you stammer when you finally
get your breath back.

<His mother used to own the house. Willed it to the sisters.>

"Karen Kosseff called me when you didn't keep your appointment. I
came right over when you didn't answer the phone."

You never even heard it ringing.

"Are you all right?"

You just shake your head. You can't get any words out.

"What happened here, Scully?" he asks. You pull away from him
enough to look over his shoulder at the bloodstain.

"I came home to clean up this mess," you whisper. There seems to
be nothing more to say. You look down at your hands; blood is
caked under your fingernails.

Mulder cups your face in his hands and raises your eyes to meet
his. This time you don't pull away. Instead you finally let the
tears come, and wrap your arms around Mulder to cry into his
shoulder.
 

~*End*~

So, how'd I do? Feedback me: jenbird72@verizon.net