"Suttee" by Jintian (NC-17)

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Fandom: THE X FILES
Pairing: Scully/Doggett, smidgen of MSR
Author on LJ: hesychasm
Author Website: the jinjoint

Why this must be read:

This is an early S8 story completely unlike my previous S8 recommendation -- but equally convincing. Jintian gives us a Scully who's lost to everything but self-punishment and a Doggett who's just plain lost, sex and rage wrapped up in character revelation. When Jintian first posted this, I told her I wasn't sure I liked it -- but I was damn sure affected by it. I still feel the same way.

On car rides when they have cases, she always pretends to be absorbed by the scenery outside her window. At those times the silence between them lies thick, like a dead thing refusing to be bothered. But this is just something that has to exist, he knows, something they don't acknowledge. A corpse stumbled over in a pitch-dark room.

There was an ancient custom in India, called a suttee. If a husband died, his wife was to throw herself on his funeral pyre, to burn along with the body of her beloved. It was thought that once he was gone, her purpose for living was gone, as well.

Does she realize, he wonders, that she's enacting her own version of that everyday?

"Suttee"