Show Me State...
AN: If you haven’t figured out reading these stories over the years, my home state is Missouri, so I do like to poke gentle fun at it. Also, bear with me for now. I am in a new job, applying for a Ph.D. program, and experiencing relationship angst, so yeah, it’s a tad busy. But I haven’t forgotten!
It was their first serious case since the incident in Kansas City that had landed Mulder with a broken jaw. As fate would have it, they were back in the state of Missouri.
“It is St. Louis,” Scully tried to reason as they gathered their luggage and made for the rental counter. Mulder didn’t look reassured.
“They call it the Show Me State for a reason. Crazy things seem to happen here.”
“I don’t know, Mulder, sounds like your kind of place,” she teased lightly, earning a dark glare. She only laughed. “Honestly, of all the places we’ve been to over all the years, we’ve only been to Missouri a handful of times.”
“We had to have been here more than that.”
Mulder’s eidetic memory clearly was stuttering today, a rarity for him to ever have it falter. “No, we’ve been here three times. Once, years ago, we had a cold case involving that female cop who was the descendant of a serial killer?”
“BJ,” Mulder recalled, a hint of a lecherous smile leaping to life despite Scully’s disapproving frown. “How could I forget her?”
“I don’t know,” she remarked blandly, continuing. “We had the case in Kansas City with Betty and Lulu. That’s it.”
“You sure it wasn’t more?”
“Positive.” She directed him towards the rental car counter, pulling out her badge from her things.
“What about the chicken plant?”
“Arkansas.”
“And the strange, mad scientist?”
“Same?”
“What about the guy who could control the weather with his emotions?”
“Which one, the teenager video game player or the weatherman?”
“Both.”
“One was in Oklahoma, the other in Kansas,” she replied, passing her badge across the counter to the smiling woman. After pleasantries regarding flights and assurances that they would enjoy their time in St. Louis, a fact Scully highly doubted, she had them both sign paperwork before directing them to wait for a shuttle in front of the terminal. Scully moved to do as she was bid, waiting for Mulder who lingered, frowning quizzically.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he muttered vaguely, waving off her concern. “It’s just…surprising you remember all that.”
“Surprising you don’t with your memory,” she teased. She only earned a pained smile out of him. “All the small towns and strange things we have seen, I suppose they all meld together.”
“I guess,” he sighed, shoving hands into his pockets as he loped beside her. “I feel we’ve been everywhere.”
“We’ve not made it to Hawaii yet. I’m still waiting for one of those cases.”
“You and me both.”
“Why aren’t their cases from Hawaii? I mean, we have them from so many other places.”
Mulder only shrugged, sliding sunglasses on as they stepped into the bright, August sunlight of Missouri. “I think Hawaiians are a lot more accepting of the strange things that happen there. They are a people and a culture that have grown up with a relationship to the spirits of the land. Unlike us whites, who think we can conquer everything and find out we are mere peons when it comes to important shit in the universe.”
Spirits and part of the land? Scully snorted, unsure if Mulder was serious or merely talking out of his ass. She plucked at the jacket that clung to her sticky skin. “I don’t know about spirits of the land and white guilt have less to do with the fact that it isn’t here.”
“Well, yes, last I checked Hawaii was in the middle of the South Pacific, Scully. A+ for geography.”
She rolled her eyes at his attitude. “I meant not here, Mulder. Not St. Louis.”
She could almost see his eyes blink behind the darkened lenses. “You know, maybe I woke up slow this morning, but I’m still not following this train.”
“Think about it, Mulder. All the cases we’ve ever worked, we weren’t in big cities often and never exotic locals. We were in small towns and suburbs. We were in those hidden corners of civilization, where people think they are quiet and safe. Close knit towns where anything new or different is something to be feared.”
“You saying that because you dislike small towns?”
That much was true, she wasn’t a fan of the small town mindset, she never had been. “I’m saying it because it makes sense, Mulder. Think of it, all the places we’ve been, small town Pennsylvania, the middle of nowhere in Idaho, a church in Tennessee, a logging community in Oregon, these are places where folk tales and legends come to life.”
“What, because they are bored, ignorant, or backwards?” There was no masking the defensiveness in Mulder’s tone. Scully knew she was stepping on sacred cows and walked very carefully as she considered what to say next.
“I don’t know. I think it’s more because they are…normal. Slow. Change happens less quickly there, so something out of the ordinary sticks out. Think about it, would an alien necessarily stick out in a place like New York or Los Angeles, where weird things happen everyday?”
“How very post-modern of you,” Mulder teased, a slow smile creeping lazily, finally over his face. “I fear I’ve had a bad effect on you.”
Scully returned his grin with one of her own. “Do you deny it?”
“No,” he drawled thoughtfully, fingers searching a pocket for one of his ever-present packet of sunflower seeds. “I think that there is something intrinsic to the small community that breeds fear of change, of the unknown. The clannishness, the skepticism of the outside work, it makes them afraid of those things that they don’t understand. Yet, those same things, when viewed from the perspective of someone who is less fearful of the strange, the different, the outside, can be seen as moments of awe, even wonder, with the potential of hope.”
“And so we come back to why we are in the Show Me State.” She circled back to the point of this conversation in the first place. “We have a strange crime, a weird happenstance, something that people in a small town don’t understand, and yet we investigate it because it is weird, strange, and promises something we haven’t seen before with our jaded eyes.”
“A state full of skeptics and we come to find and X-file. There is a certain delicious irony to that.”
“Enough to make you forgive them for a broken jaw?”
Mulder hummed thoughtfully around the sunflower seed poised carefully between his teeth. “My jaw still hurts when it rains, you know.”
“You are such a baby,” she muttered in mild disgust.
“Yeah, but if I whine enough you take pity on me, don’t you?”
His eyebrows waggled suggestively over his sunglasses and she knew he was right. Mulder had her wrapped around his fingers, and there was no help for it.
“So, Mulder, in a state full of skeptics, you think we can find whatever it is that made that man’s face look like he tried to kiss a meat grinder?”
“Not sure, but I’d like to know how a slacker loser could possibly make a man’s skin grow up over his mouth like that.”
Scully could have replied that it was medically impossible to do without surgery. She could have suggested instead a medical condition or perhaps a chemical interaction that could have produced those results. Instead, she pulled a face as she pretended to consider the various, sane possibilities.
“I think it was some weird shit, Mulder,” she nodded with an authoritative air.
“See, there’s a reason a kept you around all these years,” he laughed as the rental company shuttle pulled slowly to their curb. “That’s my kind of talk.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Mulder, you have rubbed off on me.”
“More than you know, Scully,” he chuckled as the van pulled to a stop. “More than you know.”
It was their first serious case since the incident in Kansas City that had landed Mulder with a broken jaw. As fate would have it, they were back in the state of Missouri.
“It is St. Louis,” Scully tried to reason as they gathered their luggage and made for the rental counter. Mulder didn’t look reassured.
“They call it the Show Me State for a reason. Crazy things seem to happen here.”
“I don’t know, Mulder, sounds like your kind of place,” she teased lightly, earning a dark glare. She only laughed. “Honestly, of all the places we’ve been to over all the years, we’ve only been to Missouri a handful of times.”
“We had to have been here more than that.”
Mulder’s eidetic memory clearly was stuttering today, a rarity for him to ever have it falter. “No, we’ve been here three times. Once, years ago, we had a cold case involving that female cop who was the descendant of a serial killer?”
“BJ,” Mulder recalled, a hint of a lecherous smile leaping to life despite Scully’s disapproving frown. “How could I forget her?”
“I don’t know,” she remarked blandly, continuing. “We had the case in Kansas City with Betty and Lulu. That’s it.”
“You sure it wasn’t more?”
“Positive.” She directed him towards the rental car counter, pulling out her badge from her things.
“What about the chicken plant?”
“Arkansas.”
“And the strange, mad scientist?”
“Same?”
“What about the guy who could control the weather with his emotions?”
“Which one, the teenager video game player or the weatherman?”
“Both.”
“One was in Oklahoma, the other in Kansas,” she replied, passing her badge across the counter to the smiling woman. After pleasantries regarding flights and assurances that they would enjoy their time in St. Louis, a fact Scully highly doubted, she had them both sign paperwork before directing them to wait for a shuttle in front of the terminal. Scully moved to do as she was bid, waiting for Mulder who lingered, frowning quizzically.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he muttered vaguely, waving off her concern. “It’s just…surprising you remember all that.”
“Surprising you don’t with your memory,” she teased. She only earned a pained smile out of him. “All the small towns and strange things we have seen, I suppose they all meld together.”
“I guess,” he sighed, shoving hands into his pockets as he loped beside her. “I feel we’ve been everywhere.”
“We’ve not made it to Hawaii yet. I’m still waiting for one of those cases.”
“You and me both.”
“Why aren’t their cases from Hawaii? I mean, we have them from so many other places.”
Mulder only shrugged, sliding sunglasses on as they stepped into the bright, August sunlight of Missouri. “I think Hawaiians are a lot more accepting of the strange things that happen there. They are a people and a culture that have grown up with a relationship to the spirits of the land. Unlike us whites, who think we can conquer everything and find out we are mere peons when it comes to important shit in the universe.”
Spirits and part of the land? Scully snorted, unsure if Mulder was serious or merely talking out of his ass. She plucked at the jacket that clung to her sticky skin. “I don’t know about spirits of the land and white guilt have less to do with the fact that it isn’t here.”
“Well, yes, last I checked Hawaii was in the middle of the South Pacific, Scully. A+ for geography.”
She rolled her eyes at his attitude. “I meant not here, Mulder. Not St. Louis.”
She could almost see his eyes blink behind the darkened lenses. “You know, maybe I woke up slow this morning, but I’m still not following this train.”
“Think about it, Mulder. All the cases we’ve ever worked, we weren’t in big cities often and never exotic locals. We were in small towns and suburbs. We were in those hidden corners of civilization, where people think they are quiet and safe. Close knit towns where anything new or different is something to be feared.”
“You saying that because you dislike small towns?”
That much was true, she wasn’t a fan of the small town mindset, she never had been. “I’m saying it because it makes sense, Mulder. Think of it, all the places we’ve been, small town Pennsylvania, the middle of nowhere in Idaho, a church in Tennessee, a logging community in Oregon, these are places where folk tales and legends come to life.”
“What, because they are bored, ignorant, or backwards?” There was no masking the defensiveness in Mulder’s tone. Scully knew she was stepping on sacred cows and walked very carefully as she considered what to say next.
“I don’t know. I think it’s more because they are…normal. Slow. Change happens less quickly there, so something out of the ordinary sticks out. Think about it, would an alien necessarily stick out in a place like New York or Los Angeles, where weird things happen everyday?”
“How very post-modern of you,” Mulder teased, a slow smile creeping lazily, finally over his face. “I fear I’ve had a bad effect on you.”
Scully returned his grin with one of her own. “Do you deny it?”
“No,” he drawled thoughtfully, fingers searching a pocket for one of his ever-present packet of sunflower seeds. “I think that there is something intrinsic to the small community that breeds fear of change, of the unknown. The clannishness, the skepticism of the outside work, it makes them afraid of those things that they don’t understand. Yet, those same things, when viewed from the perspective of someone who is less fearful of the strange, the different, the outside, can be seen as moments of awe, even wonder, with the potential of hope.”
“And so we come back to why we are in the Show Me State.” She circled back to the point of this conversation in the first place. “We have a strange crime, a weird happenstance, something that people in a small town don’t understand, and yet we investigate it because it is weird, strange, and promises something we haven’t seen before with our jaded eyes.”
“A state full of skeptics and we come to find and X-file. There is a certain delicious irony to that.”
“Enough to make you forgive them for a broken jaw?”
Mulder hummed thoughtfully around the sunflower seed poised carefully between his teeth. “My jaw still hurts when it rains, you know.”
“You are such a baby,” she muttered in mild disgust.
“Yeah, but if I whine enough you take pity on me, don’t you?”
His eyebrows waggled suggestively over his sunglasses and she knew he was right. Mulder had her wrapped around his fingers, and there was no help for it.
“So, Mulder, in a state full of skeptics, you think we can find whatever it is that made that man’s face look like he tried to kiss a meat grinder?”
“Not sure, but I’d like to know how a slacker loser could possibly make a man’s skin grow up over his mouth like that.”
Scully could have replied that it was medically impossible to do without surgery. She could have suggested instead a medical condition or perhaps a chemical interaction that could have produced those results. Instead, she pulled a face as she pretended to consider the various, sane possibilities.
“I think it was some weird shit, Mulder,” she nodded with an authoritative air.
“See, there’s a reason a kept you around all these years,” he laughed as the rental company shuttle pulled slowly to their curb. “That’s my kind of talk.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Mulder, you have rubbed off on me.”
“More than you know, Scully,” he chuckled as the van pulled to a stop. “More than you know.”