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i was listening to an elizabeth vandiver lecture on the greek pantheon where she points out the theme in greek myths where male lovers of goddesses often end up suffering in some way, and how that can be seen to tie into the ancient greek preoccupation with who penetrates who (the higher status person may penetrate the lower status person, and never vice versa). within that framework, someone like ganymede is "safe" from narrative punishment because being a passive mortal eromenos of zeus is in accordance with the hierarchy, while tithonus, willing or unwilling, commits an offense against the "order of things" by penetrating and impregnating eos.
vandiver uses the union of aphrodite and anchises to illustrate how consent is not a factor at all (in the hymn, anchises is very aware that he mustn't have sex with a goddess, but aphrodite tricks him into it). even unknowing, he commits an outrage by sleeping with a goddess, and is in various traditions eventually struck lame, blinded or killed by a thunderbolt.
i think this theory adds an interesting facet to the beginning of the odyssey, where calypso then has odysseus basically locked into a perpetual outrage-against-the-gods loop by forcing him to be her lover. are the seven years trapped on her island a narrative punishment for that? is it why he needs literal divine intervention to break the loop and escape?
Every now and then over the past 30 years, I’ll be reading something unrelated and have an “oh, so that’s why that X-Files episode is called that” epiphany.
Rotating Laomedon's thought process in my mind... When the gods asked him for payment in building his walls, did he think of Ganymede and Tithonus?
The latter is consistently his son, and some sources say the former was too. The gods gave divine horses as recompense for Ganymede, but did they ever give anything for Tithonus? Ganymede received eternal youth, whilst Tithonus was immortal but continued aging into a living death through the gods' trickery
Then, Apollo and Poseidon ask payment for building Troy's walls. Laomedon refuses, even threatening them. The gods had already taken so much. In his mind, why should he give anything more to anyone?
Of course, this leads to calamity. To appease their wrath, he is forced to sacrifice another child, his daughter Hesione. When the demigod Heracles rescues her, he wants Laomedon's divine horses in return – those same horses given in exchange for Ganymede....
Obviously it was foolish, but I can see why he crashed out again
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Summary: For the anon prompt “Five Times A Character Didn’t Die”
Title: Ahead Into Galilee
By: Aloysia Virgata
Rating: M
Category: MSR
Timeline: Pilot - Requiem
Notes: Thanks to @slippinmickeys for the read-through!
***
For the anon prompt “Five Times A Character Didn’t Die”
I.
She isn’t an innocent like Scully’s mother. His mother knows about clones and viruses and labs where horrors are created. He bets she knows about Emily but by god Emily’s name will not pass his lips in front of her.
Scully has apologized for her older brother, but Bill is a tyro’s practice next to Elizabeth Kuiper Mulder.
“A baby,” she sniffs. “With your…partner. It’s a bit déclassé, Fox. And an Irish Catholic girl, really.”
He doesn’t bother acting offended. “Sorry, I don’t have a blonde WASP secretary and the nice Jewish mothers won’t let their daughters talk to me since Jenny Silverberg’s Sweet Sixteen. Biological clock was ticking and Scully is the best I could do. You’ve a grandchild on the way. Mazel tov.”
Teena regards her son for a long moment. “You had your first marriage annulled. I suppose the Vatican will let her marry you, Diana aside. You can have the wedding at the Vineyard if you want, my expense of course. I’ll give you the house as a wedding present, though heaven knows your father’s estate left you a bundle. Not that you act like it, Fox. Still in that awful apartment; have you even sold his house? The lawyers say 2.2 at least.”
Mulder coughs out a mouthful of lemonade. He imagines Scully in some silk taffeta meringue gown, his mother’s garden club friends trying to shame her for knowing mid-century military aircraft.
“Mom, really, we hav-“
She holds up a veined, beautiful hand. “Fox, it’s time you stopped running around with a gun.”
Mulder gapes. “You and Dad are literally the reason I run around with a gun, are you fucking kidding me with this shit?”
Teena purses her lips. “Watch your language, Fox William. I’m still your mother.”
He sighs. He sighs and he understands that he has a child coming and that his mother loves him in the terrible, unconscionable, best way that she knows how. He understands his own inamorata is a very new sort of woman.
“Sorry, Mom,” Mulder says. Refills both their cups of lemonade and leans back in his Adirondack rocker.
“How was Bellefleur?” his mother asks at length.
He stares. “What?”
“I’m trying to make conversation. Nothing too eventful, I hope? Not for Agent Scully, with a baby coming?”
Mulder narrows his eyes. “No more than usual. Made contact with a few old…connections. Why?”
She smiles, just a little. Just a softening at the edge of her upper lip. A curl of a patrician nostril. “I made contact with a few old connections too, Fox. Remember this conversation sometime down the road. Your sister was a dandelion clock, no matter what I tried back then.”
He asks for answers. Begs.
She dismisses him as ever.
“Mom, please, this baby, Scully and I need to know things.”
Teena says no more and he drives home, furious.
***
II.
Fellig disappears into some new alias and it’s not worth tracking him down.
Ritter is put on leave and Mulder finds him in a parking garage. He beats the living shit out of him and it doesn’t fix anything, but it feels pretty good. He cries for a while after that, in the darkest corner of a terrible bar on M Street.
Ritter, with three broken ribs and his jaw wired, has the good sense to say he was mugged by two unidentifiable assailants.
Mulder resigns, effective immediately. He throws his phone into the Potomac. He doesn’t go to her funeral. He doesn’t go to Margaret Scully or his apartment or his office ever again.
*
He goes to his father, with two vials of genetic material. “You owe us both,” he says, in a voice like granite.
*
He calls his newborn daughter Sylvia Charlotte for no reason other than finding it pretty. The names have no intrinsic meaning, no history to him. She has a dense thatch of black hair and her mother’s eyes. She has plump, dimpled hands and feet like Parker House rolls. She has impeccable government documents.
Mulder is smitten immediately. He holds her to his bare chest. He dances with her at 2 AM, he reads to her, he buys preposterous baby gear and tiny clothes far more stylish than his own. He is certain that she is, at minimum, the most exceptional baby of all time.
Sylvie toddles behind him along Lake Tashmoo, dragging lobster pots. Sylvie does his makeup and puts his hair in barrettes. Sylvie has both her first piano recital and her first tee-ball game at five.
*
“How come you don’t have a mom?” Kate asks her while they build a sand castle together.
“I’m adopted,” Sylvie says, sticking little pebbles onto the top of the castle. “My dad picked me out himself, so it’s just us.”
“Cool,” Kate says. “That’s lucky to get picked out. I was just borned.”
“Yep.”
They return to their work, Sylvie’s dog Queequeg keeping watch.
***
III.
“Fucking Christ. Sit still if you don’t want me to screw up your remaining hair.”
She sits still, a baby sister always. “Don’t make it too brassy, Miss. You know I can pay you, right?”
Cancer thin and white and brittle as Bernadette of Lourdes. But even Bernadette said she’d seen ghosts and Scully could never, could not ever -
Missy scoffs, offended. “Hey, Danes, are you fucking your partner? Charlie says yes and Bill says you wouldn’t. I’ve got $250 on this, so be honest with your only sister.”
Scully (she’s always Scully now, but she’d never tell Missy) jerks back, aghast.
Missy lightly slaps her hollow face. “Be still.”
“Then don’t ask me questions like that!” Scully knows her cheeks are hot. “Do you guys actually have a pool?”
Missy, lushly tressed and curvaceous and cinnamon-sugar alive, laughs. “Dana Katherine Scully, are you engaged in unconsecrated sexual congress with your FBI partner? Please note, for the court records, that I know about your cardiology professor and your FBI instructor so like…?”
Looking-glass Scully watches her sister do something complicated with a clip, with foils and a tiny brush. Watches her own Lenten-rose face, a Jabbereock, with eyes of flame.
Scully is quiet for several more seconds. She wishes she could explain the hot verging energy of the basement. The way science and conjecture and cryptozoology entangle in unholy alchemy along the margins of her education into… them.
The way it feels to have the emperor of all maladies raise a scepter in her sinus; the king of terrors claim a throne in her heart.
I’m dying, Missy, I’m dying, the oncogenes, they….p53, I … dead already, Missy, please…
“Dana? Bear in mind I’ve seen him and smelled him and I would fuck him silly myself.” Missy, fresh as a peach, clips back another section of hair.
Scully sucks in air like an Everest climber at the Death Zone. 500 more feet and she’ll make it. 100. Top of the world, the ice and the oxygen forgotten, she-
She can win, she can be the best, she can summit, she -
(Green Boots, still desiccated and unidentified up there.)
“Yes,” she breathes. Someone should know the truth at her grave.
“Good girl,” Missy says. Kisses her sister’s concave temple. “And no, we didn’t have a pool, little sister.”
***
IV.
The endless halls are painted a washed-out sea green that is somehow the opposite of color. A suffocating silence that is more than the absence of sound.
She flashes her badge to the sentry who squints, then nods, then lets her in.
Roche propped up in the narrow bed. He’s even thinner than he was when Mulder shot him, even grayer.
“Agent Scully,” he says, affable as ever. “I thought those were your footsteps. Forgive me for not getting up.”
He grins at his own joke. His face looks like an animated skull.
Scully settles into the hard vinyl chair. She sees that Roche is handcuffed to the hospital bed, which seems a very pointed kind of gesture.
“Turns out your partner is a shit marksman, who knew? Where is Agent Mulder, by the way? Didn’t he want to come see his handiwork?”
“No,” Scully replies. “He’s not like you.”
“Mmmm, I wonder. You know, they say it’s a miracle I can breathe on my own with this kind of C4 damage. Plus I can move three fingers on my left hand.” Roche waggles them slightly.
Scully pulls a yellow legal pad and a good pen from her bag. “I guess basketball is out for a while.”
“I guess. Other than the breathing and half the left hand, I’m completely paralyzed below the armpits. My lawyers are going to have a field day.”
She smiles politely. “I don’t think so.”
Roche laughs. “No? You don’t think the ACLU will be all over this?”
“No. I really don’t. You were shot because you abducted a little girl after escaping federal custody. And Agent Mulder was able to preserve your life. No one cares about you, Mr. Roche.”
She draws out a little curlicue in the pad, so it looks like she’s writing.
Roche’s face hardens. “And the sucker punch from your partner?”
“It was reported. Disciplinary action was taken.” She doodles a series of cubes.
He scoffs. “I doubt it was even the proverbial slap on the wrist. Why are you here, really?”
Scully looks up, eyebrows raised. “I’m a doctor and an FBI agent. My partner shot you. I thought a follow-up was only appropriate.”
“Cut the bullshit,” Roche snaps. “God, it must gnaw at you that he missed.”
“Why is that?”
Moves those three fingers again, Roche does. “You were a nice little Catholic girl once, weren’t you? Little kilt, little blouse. You haven’t changed much, though you’re rather too old for my tastes now.”
Roche leers and she knows, knows, that she is right. But she’s not ready to end this. Not yet.
“I was.” It takes so much to keep her voice conversational when she longs to give him what she is certain that he wants.
Roche tilts his head. “I don’t believe in god. I believe that before we are born is nothing and after we are dead is nothing. I’m not afraid of dying. But you? You believe I’ll pay for all of this again and again. You believe there is retribution after this…mortal coil. Don’t you want me there now?”
She does, she does.
Scully shrugs. “You’ll get there in time. I won’t see what happens, it makes no difference to me.”
He laughs, a genuine laugh, and it’s horrible in his cadaverous face. “Keep lying like that and we’ll end up in Hell together.”
“That’s for God to decide.”
Here it comes, she knows. Here it comes. She stays steady.
Roche’s face suddenly sly. “Perhaps you are His instrument, Agent Scully.”
She feigns confusion. “Mr. Roche, I-“
“Kill me,” he says. “You can finish what Mulder couldn’t finish himself, though I bet you do that for him all the time.” Roche winks lewdly as he goads her.
“Primum non nocere,” Scully replies, prim.
“A doctor, as you say. You’d get away with it, Scully. Come on, a little air bubble between the toes. For old times’ sake.”
He’s trying to sound light and chatty, but she hears the panic in his voice. She’s his only chance to escape mindless years in soiled diapers, parked in front of a flickering television. A blank wall. Night.
Scully fixes him with a long, cool stare. The one even Skinner doesn’t like. “I should think our prior interactions made it clear that I would never harm a prisoner duri-“
“Ahhh, but you want to,” he cajoles. “Come on, Scully. All those pretty hearts. The little girl you saved is going to be fucked up forever. One more kiddy-diddler off the taxpayers’ dime, Dana.”
She shakes her head, chuckles a bit in spite of herself. “They were cheering outside Bundy's execution. The taxpayers will love knowing you’re suffering. We’re savages at heart, I’m afraid.”
“You knew I’d ask,” Roche hisses, dropping the act. “You’re eating this up, you fucking bitch. You fucking cunt. You’re nothing to Fox Mulder, you realize that, you’re a piece of ass to him so you might as well do one real thing in your worthless life.”
She prays her voice will be steady. “I’ve already had you put on extended suicide watch; told them to check the staff. I told them you’d ask.” She holds up a mini tape recorder.
His eyes go black. She sees now what those little girls saw in their last moments, the genial salesman mask removed.
“I swear to your fucking coward god that I will walk again just to rip your fucking heart out of your fucking whore throat,” Roche spits, face contorted.
She rises. “Thank you, will there be anything else?”
A choked howl of rage that follows her out into the hall.
“Fucking BITCH!” Roche roars after her. “I swear to-“
The door closes.
Her heart soars.
***
V.
A storm outside and mosquito bites on her back and shame still fuchsia on her face. She’s wearing the best robe she could afford, the color of poison apples. She bought it at a Macy’s sale with her first credit card.
The scent of hot wax in the cheap, oatmeal-colored room. The overlay of the scents Mulder favors.
“Tore the family apart. No one would talk about it. There were no facts to confront, nothing to offer any hope.”
She thinks of her three siblings, her rowdy cousins, and her chest clenches. What would she be without her sprawling, tumultuous family?
“What did you do?” she breathes. The dark is so tender and velvet-soft. Frames her partner’s long lashes and good cheekbones like a Rembrandt. Chiaroscuros
(Dana no. Dana, didn’t you learn anything after Jack?)
“Eventually I went off to school in England, I came back and got recruited by the Bureau. Seems I had a natural aptitude for applying behavioral models to criminal cases.”
Scully gazes down at Mulder with a tenderness she hadn’t expected in this impossible assignment. In this unfair humanistic trial.
“You’ll find him, Samantha,” she says. She strokes her partner’s fall of inky hair. She feels so alive.
