For all of the anons who have asked for more in The Fisher King universe, here you go. New chapter below, main fic linked.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
A man takes a woman and she disappears. It’s an old story.
The media will tell you she’s pretty, always. Sometimes she is and sometimes she isn’t, but she’s given the grace in her tragedy.
Dana is, though. In the way of Celtic priestesses and Roman goddesses and Renaissance women so achingly beautiful they were allowed to let their hair flow like corn. Like gold. Like rivers.
She has cheekbones like granite hillsides in winter.
Like Persephone in spring.
“She’s dead,” says the Captain. Says Margaret. Says Bill. Charlie calls with non-committal love from from Venezuela. Charlie calls with non-committal love from Norway.
If she’s alive she’s raped. She’s tortured, she’s broken But Catholics love the sanctified dead.
“She’s alive,” says Melissa, over an uncut celadon nested in a swirl of tarot cards..
Tara looks away in disgust. In fear.
Duane Barry was Mulder’s own particular monster, his brother in arms and paranoia.
An empty place in him wants to welcome Barry, wants him to fill the lacuna of Samantha. He imagines smoothing neatly over him, like spackling drywall.
But Barry takes Dana and, that, Mulder cannot forgive. He wants to hurt Barry for a long time in a way that they discuss in hushed awed voices after battlefield frenzies. He wants all of Barry’s insides on the outside, twitching and wet.
He gathers Dana’s animals to him, brings them into his home. He strokes their fur in his bed, he loves their angled predators’ faces that, like his, have eyes at the front of their heads.
Mulder fucks a suspect with the mindless short term satisfaction of scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds. He hates himself and god, it’s good, the hating. He fucks her below the pagan sun and the Captain’s god and dares the universe to punish him. It’s a ripped hangnail, it’s his tongue against a toothache, it’s boxer briefs against a hardon at his desk.
He suffers with relish and, like most of the Scullys, he believes that his suffering will provoke tenderness from the universe. He bites the golden cross like an X-ray plate.
He wonders if anyone can see inside him at all.
He claps Bill on the back at the airport. He kisses Tara’s silky cheek, smells her knockoff Chanel #5.
Bill looks at him like a boy at Christmas, like Mulder’s the Grownup and can promise him everything.
“I love my sister,”. Bill says, as though it’s a shibboleth.
“So do I,” Mulder replies.
It’s the first time he talks about someone else’s sister and means it.
She turns up at the hospital like a message in a bottle. She is soft and pale and bloated and alive. He kisses her cheek like a Torah. He kisses her cheek like the earth of his true homeland.
Mulder holds a vigil for her as though she’s bound to Yggdrasil. Nine days and nine nights and perhaps she’s gained all knowledge. Perhaps she understands the runes.
Or maybe he does - who is the sacrifice and who is the sacrificed? Odin, spear-pierced, died for himself like Dana’s own god.
Melissa holds her sister’s hand. She holds his hand too, at the same time, her mass of red hair like ivy in the fall. She murmurs nothingness to the cold white stone of the moon.
“The moon is female,” Melissa confides to him at 2 AM over cheap wine and shrimp fried rice. “She’s the spiritual mother-guardian off all women.”
He says that he agrees, because it’s as true as any other fucking thing.
Margaret’s gaze is the sky before a shuttle launch, the Captain’s handshake the last thing you feel before your soul is ferried across the Acheron and the Styx.
Odin gave up his eye for the deep knowledge. Mulder would give up his eye for surety of her safety. He’ll give up both for what he brought to her. He understands why people suffer for communion with their gods now.
He understands why they surrendered hearts to bleed down the stones. He understands that prayers are a way to articulate fear.
Dana opens her eyes like a Marian apparition.
“Mulder?” she says, frowning.
He feels her voice the way magnets feel true north. “Hi,” he breathes, after days of planning the perfect response for this moment.
She blinks. “Did I fall asleep?” she mumbles. “Where are we? What happened?”
He kisses her knuckles, the delicate papyrus inside of her blue-tinted wrist. He marvels at the engineering of her thumb.
“You took a nap,” he says, rather breathless. Rather choked.
“Mmmm,” Dana says. She laces her fingers through his, she curls onto her side. She takes in the hospital room, frowning.
Then she seems to remember. “Ohhhh,” she whispers, eyes wide. “Am I okay?”
He nods. “Nothing serious.”
Mulder watches her breathing, watches her come back to life. He’ll press the call button in a moment, will alert the cavalry. He will make the Appropriate Telephone Calls.
Through the open blinds he sees the moon peer in. He says a prayer of thanks to its blank silver face, just in case Melissa is right.
