Lacuna 2/3
SUMMARY: I don’t have a choice, but I still choose you. (The Civil Wars, Poison and Wine)
RATING: R
SPOILERS: Milagro
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from 1013 to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thank you to The Right Honorable Fangirls Drinking and Debating Society for the encouragement, to maybe_amanda for being an outstanding beta and person in general, to wendelah1 for having a kind and nurturing spirit far beyond that which I deserve, and to fuckyeahdavidgillian for sucking me back in.
The word lacuna means a missing piece or unfilled space, and is also the Spanish word for crib.
Spoiler alert: This ends in an RST-type place despite initial evidence to the contrary.
***
“No ma’am, I can’t say that I do,” says the officer who claimed he would get her phone number. His name is Royles and he has an obnoxious dimple in his chin. “If Pete had a house in these parts, this would be the first I heard of it. We’d see him sleeping in his old truck, a big camo Chevy Suburban, in parking lots sometimes, out behind the Food Lion or the strip mall. Sometimes he’d spend a few nights at the El-Car, or in the drunk tank. Disappear for a few weeks, then roll back in to drink and fight and make a few bucks under the table. In fact, when we tracked his car down it was behinds the Lotta Suds Laundry. He’d been fixing their machines.”
“We were back at the crime scene this morning,” Scully says. “There weren’t any tire tracks. My guess is that whoever killed him somehow lured him out from wherever he was staying at the time.”
The officer shrugs expansively. “Could be, I don’t know.”
“Where’s his car now?” Mulder asks.
Royles gestures behind them, to the back of the building. “Impound lot. No prints, no trace. We checked.” He tosses Mulder the keys, as if daring him to contradict these findings.
Scully feels Royles’s eyes on her. She is not bothered so much by his gaze as she is by the fact that he makes no attempt to conceal it. “Anything else before we go, Officer Royles?”
He meets her eyes. “No ma’am, can’t say that there is.”
Mulder jangles the keyring. “We’ll return these when we’re finished.” He rests three fingers at Scully’s elbow and guides her to the door. “Asshole,” he mutters as they go outside.
“Whatever,” she says, scanning the lot for the truck.
“It seems fitting that we can’t find a camo truck,” Mulder observes, kicking the tires of an old Mustang. It groans, sheds a dandruff of rust.
Scully spots it at the back, waves Mulder over. “Camo my foot,” she sniffs. “That looks like someone got high and happened to have brown and green spray paint on hand.”
“The man was not an artiste, to be sure,” Mulder says, peering in the window. “Though he kept a tidy car.”
It’s true. The floor of the car has no fast food wrappers, soda bottles, cigarette butts, underwear, socks, condoms, or other detritus often found in semi-inhabited automobiles. There is a plastic hula girl on the dashboard, and a pair of aviator sunglasses clipped to the visor.
Mulder unlocks the doors, releasing cigarette ghosts and Old Spice. He climbs into the front seat and puts on the dead man’s sunglasses. “Yee-haw.” The glove compartment contains half a bag of miniature Hershey bars.
Scully goes into the back, and finds she must agree with Royles. The truck is spotless, other than smudges of fingerprint powder. On the floor between the second and third rows of seats she finds a green Coleman sleeping bag. “Guess this is for his Food Lion campouts,” she says. “Might as well take a look.”
They unroll the sleeping bag on the asphalt. Scully, on her hands and knees, slowly runs her hands along the worn nylon shell. “Nothing,” she says, though she’s not sure what she even expected to find. Unzipping the sleeping bag reveals a similar paucity of evidence. There are a few dark hairs clinging to the flannel lining. She puts them in a paper envelope, feeling disappointed.
“Damn their efficient hides,” Mulder says, twirling the keychain. “Okay, so. There are three keys on this ring. One to the car, one presumably to the house, and the third…”
“Vacation home?” She gets up, scowling at the runs in her stockings. Her new shoes will need to be buffed and polished after this.
“I’m thinking somewhere in the Hamptons, yes.”
Scully cups her hands for the keys, which Mulder tosses her. The keychain is emblazoned with a picture of a lasciviously grinning crab. “I Got My Crabs From Dirty Dick’s,” she reads, then turns it over. “Dirty Dick’s Crab House, North Myrtle Beach. Charming.”
“Jews have proscriptions against the consumption of seagoing pubic lice,” Mulder remarks. “Yahweh does not want them eaten.”
“Then He shouldn’t have made them taste so delicious with Old Bay,” Scully retorts. “Listen, we don’t know this area, Mulder. It’s a needle in a haystack trying to find this house. How do you want to play this?”
He sighs. ”I’m not sure. I’m tempted to let them ferret it out, then we can come back, pat them on the head, and take a look-see when they do. My concern is one of those idiots screwing up the scene to prove how big his dick is.”
Scully dangles the keychain with come-hither eyes. “Maybe we forget to return the keys.”
A slow grin spreads over his face. “Maybe we do.”
***
“I feel awful,” Mulder says, tossing pencils at the ceiling. “Agent Scully and I, we…..yes. Absolutely we will.” He gives her a thumbs-up, listening to the receiver for a moment. “You bet. As soon as you find something, you give us a call and we will drive back up with the keys to join your men.”
Gleeful, he props his feet on his desk, listens some more.
“Right, yeah. I’m thinking wooded area if he went to the trouble of painting that Chevy. It’ll be off the grid, so either solar panels or a chimney. Well or a stream for water. Yeah, I….uh huh. Uh huh, I see. Okay, well, thanks for your understanding, Chief. We just want the lock intact, so we’ll be up fast as you need us. About a two hour drive, no more. Yessir, you too.”
Mulder hangs up the phone, looking so smug that Scully can practically see the canary feathers hanging from his mouth.
“Oh, bravo Mr. Olivier,” she says. “Think they’ll turn anything up?
“They have a better shot than we do, to be honest. The scene backs up to a few hundred acres of wooded area. I gave them some pointers, but we are not local fauna, Scully. Thankfully. I say we give it three days before we call in a task force.” Mulder hates task forces. They require a level of fraternization that makes him more pedantic and asocial than usual.
She pours coffee from their bottomless pot. Yesterday morning she was sitting at Starbucks with whatshisname. Raphael. She’d taken a different run this morning, just in case, though she also put his number in her phone. Her line of work, you never know who might come in handy. “I’ve got a lunch appointment with Smialek from the Maryland ME’s office about that woman from Cunningham Falls. You want in?”
“I’ll pass. I want to look into a few things for a profile on our would-be Heinzelmann. I’m meeting with a folklorist at the embassy.”
“That’s a thing? Embassy folklorist?”
“Ja, iss gut.” He winces when a pencil hits him in the head.
“Right, well, I want to go look at those hairs from the sleeping bag.”
“Have fun. I’ll be talking ghosties and ghoulies with a fraulein.”
Scully grabs the envelope of hair from his desk. “Don’t make any sausage jokes,” she advises before leaving the office. She hears Mulder chuckling as the door closes.
***^^
The lab is bright with fluorescent bulbs bouncing off of stainless steel and white Formica.
“Agent Scully,” says a lab tech she’d taught years ago. “It’s good to see you.”
She smiles, searching her memory for a name. “You too,” she says. “I don’t get over here as much as I’d like.” Dara, Darla, Delia. Delia Ostrow, that was it. “Will I be in anyone’s way over there, Delia?” She nods at a nearby lab bench.
The woman shakes her head. “Not at all. Dr. Roloson and I are running some PCRs, just let us know if you need anything.”
Rachel Roloson, another one of her girls, waves amiably from beside a centrifuge. “Agent Scully.”
Delia joins her, and the two of them are lost in their work by the time Scully settles down at her microscope. She makes a wet mount of one of the hairs, then flips the tape recorder on.
“Hair is dark, root indicates it fell out naturally rather than being pulled. Shaft has a large diameter and is round, with smooth cuticle edges. Distal end appears to have been cut with scissors. Medulla is present, and is surrounded by large pigment granules.” She pauses the tape here, makes a casting of the hair with clear nail polish before resuming her dictation. “Hair appears human, with an imbricate crenate pattern. It likely belongs to a person of Asian descent.”
Scully pauses to process what she just said. Pete does not appear to be of Asian descent. She calls to the two women at the nearby lab bench. “Rachel, Delia?”
“Agent Scully?”
“I need to run to the morgue for a sample. Can you just keep half an eye on this stuff for me?”
“Sure thing,” Delia says. “We’ll be here a while.”
Scully clips briskly to the morgue on her three inch heels and, instead of having an Igor pull up yesterday’s samples, she locates Pete in the fridge. She pulls about twenty hairs from all over his head and a half dozen from his groin, separating them into two plastic containers. The dead suffer many indignities at her hands.
The vials go into her lab coat pocket as she rubs her arms, tucks her fingers into her armpits to warm them up. She needs to have her iron checked.
Back through the labyrinthine hallways to the lab she was using. She pushes the swinging doors hard enough that one bangs into the wall, startling the other occupants of the room. “Sorry,” she says, ducking her head. Waggles her fingers in thanks at Delia and Rachel, who exchange a glance as she brushes past them to her scope.
Shit, shit, she left the tape recorder running. She’s short on time if she’s going to make lunch with Smialek, and decides to pick up here. She can have Danny edit the fifteen minute gap out for her later. Pete’s hair on the glass next to the sleeping bag hair, and her suspicions are confirmed.
“The unknown hairs do not appear to be from the victim,” she intones, sketching out her observations on a notepad. “All of the unknown hairs contain a solid medulla and large pigment granules, while the victim’s show absent or fragmented medullae and smaller pigment granules consistent with a Caucasian background. Hairs from both sources show an imbricate crenate pattern.”
Scully finishes her observations of a dozen other hairs and asks an intern to clean up and send the roots off for analysis. She can still make her lunch appointment if traffic isn’t bad. She goes out the back door to avoid chit chat, half-running through the maze of corridors and stairways. She can navigate this building in her dreams. Out to the garage and into her car, she catches her breath before putting the key into the ignition. Smoothes her hair down, chugs yesterday’s cold coffee. “You’re good,” she tells herself. “You are on a roll.”
The Taurus eases down the ramp and noses onto the Pennsylvania Avenue as she waits for a break in traffic. Scully puts her recording into the tape deck, wanting to listen to her autopsy notes and hair notes all at once.
“Begin autopsy on 37 year old white male,” Scully hears herself say as she squeals between a Mercedes and a garbage truck. She hates the flat drone of her voice on tape, but she often gets so lost in what she’s doing that the words seem to leave her without her full awareness. Her autopsy notes continue for another forty three minutes, until she sees the Baltimore skyline. Such as it is, anyway.
She listens to her first observations about the hair, and fast forwards to try and find the second part. She stops the tape, listening for her voice.
“-would be,” comes a muffled voice. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”
“Rachel,” answers Delia’s voice, “not everyone is as slutty as you.”
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”
Giggling, the sound of a centrifuge whirring.
Scully stares at the cassette deck. You absolutely should not eavesdrop, she tells herself. Have Danny scrub it out, focus on the hair.
Who is she kidding?
She rewinds the tape. “…to a person of Asian descent.” She hears herself ask the women to watch her table, hears the sharp report of her heels on the linoleum.
A moment of silence, then Rachel speaks. “She did NOT look like that when we had her. How red is her hair, Jesus.”
Bitch.
“Hey, good for her,” says Delia. “I can’t pull off red, I tried.”
“I think the carpet matches the drapes and all, but she gets it done. Covering up gray, whatever. I would. How old is she, anyway?”
Old enough to slap you, Scully thinks. And enough rank to get away with it.
“I heard she went to med school when she was 19 or something. Early admissions and finished college in three years. She’s a certified genius, I think.”
“I heard she was screwing her professors.”
Scully feels her jaw drop. She wills herself to hit stop, but knows it won’t happen.
“Agent Scully? No way,” Delia says. “No fucking way. She’s so…you know. Scully.”
A thump, muttering she can’t pick up. Come on, come on, gossip louder you ungrateful little assholes. She puts on her blinker to get onto Lombard Street, half afraid she’ll make her appointment before the conversation ends.
Then, “…Willis when she was at the Academy.”
“Oh, shit, yeah I did hear that!” says Delia. “You go, Scully.”
Scully is appalled, her cheeks flaming. This…this is what people think of her?
“Well, good for her now, anyway,” Rachel says. Her voice is muffled now, and Scully remembers the woman was wearing a surgical mask when she returned from the morgue. “I mean, Fox Mulder, come on. Who wouldn’t?”
Laughter, more mumbling. Scully prays for a red light.
“Right? Do you think he’s actually crazy or what?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not BSU, his crazy isn’t my problem. I swam laps the next lane over from him a few times and he can believe in whatever the hell he wants as long as he shows up and looks that pretty. I heard he’s a serious nympho though.”
“I’ll take a number.”
This is more than she can process. She forgets that she and Mulder don’t live in their own insulated bubble, that two people who lurk in basements and chase flying saucers might arouse a bit of interest. And she did what they said, she had…but it wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t.
Was it?
Delia is speaking again. “So is the, uh, consorting verified, or what? You think they’re on his desk in their suits down there or something? A little alien probing, know what I mean? Those were some hot shoes. You don’t just start wearing those for nothing.”
“I certainly would be,” comes Rachel’s voice. The tape has caught up with itself. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”
“Rachel, not everyone is as slutty as you.”
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”
Scully pulls up in front of Attman’s Deli and parks the car. She has no name for the emotions swirling through her, but she is certain of one thing.
She’s calling Raphael Thaler after lunch.
***
The Baltimore Beltway, such a poor imitation of the real thing, is sluggish at this time, people heading out of work early for a few extra hours of weekend in Annapolis or Philly or, if they are feeling ambitious, Skyline Drive. There are cozy inns and hotels along the 95 corridor, tucked away places for lovers to eat blueberry pancakes among rooms full of reproduction antiques and crocheted doilies. She has visited some of them. There was a place in Easton with Jack Willis, set right up against the Chesapeake Bay. They went crabbing off a pier out back, and the lady of the house steamed their catch with sweet corn. Scully wishes she had let him talk her into skinny-dipping that night, my god it was August and so hot, what was she afraid of?
It would be nice, she reflects, to spend an evening with a man who didn’t want her liver or her fingers or her hair or her heart. Who, perhaps, just want to split a bottle of the amusing house red and go to bed. Sexual objectification seems almost innocent to her at this point and it’s been too damned long.
Clearly she hasn’t got a reputation to protect.
Scully pulls out her phone, grateful for the foresight that compelled her to save his number, as the business card got destroyed in the wash. She brings up his information, hits send. The phone rings a few times and she’s about ready to chicken out when he answers. “Hello, Raphael? This, um, this is Dana Scully. We met on the -“
“Hey, Dana No Relation! I didn’t expect you to call.”
She is amused by his forthrightness. “That makes two of us I guess.”
“Ha, so what can I do for you?”
There’s a cheerful arrogance in his voice that appeals to her, makes her feel cocky and flirtatious. It’s Friday, and she’s only 35. “I find myself uncharacteristically free this evening. I was wondering whether you were, um, around. For dinner, maybe. Drinks.”
“Oh, uncharacteristically? Rubbing in our social calendar, are we?”
She laughs. “I mean, I’m not working. I’m usually working.”
Heavy sigh from Raphael. “I have a team happy hour tonight, so -“
She feels herself blush for no reason she can pinpoint. “I understand, it’s short notice. Maybe another time.”
“Slow down there, No Relation. I was going to say ‘so I’d be particularly pleased by a better offer.’ Give a guy a chance to finish a sentence.”
Grateful that he can’t see, Scully presses a hand to her eyes. Fuck, fuck, is she this out of practice? “Um,” she mumbles. “I’m not great at this.”
“Let me try, then. Hey, is this Dana Scully? Dana, this is Raphael Thaler, we met a couple of days ago when I poured coffee all over you.”
“It’s nice to hear from you.” She is somewhere between charmed and mortified, with no bets on the winner.
“Listen, I realize that this is really short notice and I’m probably the last person you wanted to hear from, but do you happen to have any plans tonight? I know you have some kind of Very Important Government Job and usually work Friday nights, but, well, there’s this lame happy hour at work that I’d love to have an excuse to get out of.”
“You know, it happens that I am free this evening,” she says, in a measured voice, changing lanes and speeding up to ten miles per hour.
“Oh, that’s awesome! I’m really glad I took a chance and called you and that we had a conversation with pauses in it and exchanged vital information without leaping to conclusions.”
“I’m hanging up,” she warns.
“Okay, okay. I don’t know the area too well yet. I had lunch at some place last week, La Shama….lama…something.”
“Chaumiere? On M Street?” Nice, romantic-ish, but not uncomfortably so. She considers this an acceptable offer, and there is a fireplace.
“That’s the one. You finish your Big Important Job in time to meet me at 7?”
“I can work something out.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says, with a confessional air.
“See you at 7,” Scully replies, and puts her phone away. She merges onto 295, homeward bound.
***
“What’s up, doc?” Mulder calls when she opens the door.
“Helicopters,” she says, depositing her coat on a chair stacked with binders. “Satellites. Clouds.”
“So literal, you science types. How’s the Cunningham Falls thing?”
Empty eye sockets, the thick muscles of the thighs all slashed and carved, she doesn’t want to talk about it. “They’re getting her settled in downstairs.”
Mulder knows the depth of the silence in her and does not plumb it. “The Germans,” he says, “are a dark people. I had read the original Grimms’ years ago, but she had some new ones for me.”
Scully pours some coffee into an FBI mug, glances sidelong at her partner. She thinks of the women in the lab, 8 inches, Deely, and her memory of his nude body backs this up. This is ridiculous, she is ridiculous, standing here and looking at him like she’s a high school freshman stuck in the elevator with the captain of the football team. It’s only Mulder, she reprimands herself, this is just Padgett’s nonsense and too much time alone. Your life is not wholly contained in this room. She sets about organizing her latest stack of postmortem findings.
“…reminiscent of Heinzelmann,” Mulder says, and she realizes she has not been listening at all.
She covers it up by passing him the coffee she just poured. “Long day for both of us, it sounds like. Those hairs in the sleeping bag, Mulder, they belong to someone of Asian descent. I sent them off for further analysis, and hopefully his house will tell us whose they were.”
“Hooker?”
“Mmmm, could be but I don’t think so. It looked like it was from someone pretty young, or at least someone who took very good care of their hair. And it had been cut recently. Short, just a few inches.”
“Not typical for a working girl. You sure it wasn’t pubic?”
“It didn’t look like it, too straight. Also Asian, I think.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. We’ll just hope they turn up his shanty and we can get it sorted out. I’m working on a profile tonight. We’ll get some lo mein to fuel the process.” He just assumes she’s coming, and not unfairly.
“Ah,” Scully says, fiddling with paper clips, “I will actually have to turn down that invitation.”
“We can get fajitas instead, if you want.
“It’s not the cuisine, Mulder. I have, I’m going out. With someone.”
Mulder looks up, confused. “Like a date?”
She snorts. “I believe that is the intent, yes.”
“Who’s the lucky fella?” he drawls, a white collar John Wayne.
She shrugs, like she has dates all the time. “Some guy I met the other day. Seems nice.” She checks herself before she provides more information. It would be embarrassing to sound excited.
“Getting any new ink?” Mulder asks, which is both mean and expected, but he’s looking at something under a jeweler’s loupe and she can’t give him the haughty expression he deserves.
“Probably a dolphin on my ankle if I don’t go ahead and get my tongue pierced.” Think about that with your lo mein tonight, smartass.
Mulder’s shoulders are hunched as he inspects whatever arcane thing has his interest. “Please let me be there when you teww Thkinner why yow tounge’th aw thwowwen.”
“Haven’t heard anything from the guys in Felton, I guess,” she says, because this subject is beyond exhausted, batted around out of habit like two old housecats with a weary mouse.
“Nope.” He tucks the loupe and the rock (it looks like a rock, could be a Martian coprolite or the Black Orlov diamond, who knows) into his desk drawer. “I’ll call you if I hear anything, I left them my number.”
Of course you did, of course it’s your case and your division and your goddamned office and - why is she angry?
She’s not, she realizes. She’s bored and looking for stimulation. “Sounds good, just keep me posted. Email me what you get done on the profile tonight too, if you don’t mind.”
“As you wish.” Mulder tips the brim of an imaginary hat. “So where’s this guy taking you?”
“He’s not taking me anywhere,” she says. A bit prim, that, but the distinction’s important. “I’m meeting him at La Chaumiere.”
“Oooh la la,” says Mulder. “French.”
She files a few documents in their clanky old metal drawers, uncomfortable with his interest. “I’m going to go makes some notes on that body they sent over before I head out. I’ll probably see you tomorrow or Sunday, I guess.”
“Au revoir,” Mulder says, sounding like Inspector Clouseau or possibly Julia Child. “Bon appetit.”
She rolls her eyes, annoyed, and brushes past him to retrieve her coat. Mulder must have caught her aura in the slipstream because he grabs the tail of her jacket, tugging her back.
She turns, startled. “What?”
“Have a good time tonight, Scully.” His voice, his eyes, soft. “Really.”
She runs her fingers through her hair, offering him a smile. “Thanks, Mulder. But it’s no big deal. Let me know if anything is up.”
“Helicopters?” he asks slyly, releasing her jacket. “Satellites? Clouds?”
“Good night, Mulder. Don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite.”
“Bon soir, Scully.”
***
She goes for the bottom half of her charcoal skirt suit and a thin sweater the indeterminate blue of skim milk. She runs a wooden comb through her hair to break up the severity of the hairspray, brushes her teeth, re-blacks her golden lashes. Scully knows she’s attractive, that her body is slim and that each pale breast remains high and firm, even if it’s just a handful. She knows her eyes are her best feature, that her lips are crooked but full, and that her long nose is interesting next to the pert Barbie doll features surgeons churn out these days.
She’s come into herself in the past few years, gotten a good stylist and an even better tailor. There’s only Mulder to impress most days, but she’s glad of it anyway. If anyone knows the value of a well-cut suit, it’s Mulder with his careless Armani and Hickey Freeman. It must be nice to grow up with money, with someone to teach you how to do that. The Mulders had more houses than the Scullys had cars.
Her shoes are good now too - she’s up a number of pay grades from her Thom McAns and better quality means higher heels.
She’s always been a sucker for a heel.
As if warding off an evil eye summoned by her frank self-awareness, Scully makes a moue of distaste in the mirror. She pretends the whole evening will be a chore, but the fact is that she’s looking forward to it.
There are too many men in her life, and yet somehow here she is in pursuit of another. But this is someone different, someone sane, someone not bent on destroying himself or her. She is not a talisman to him, she is not a voice in his head or some tight-ass federale come to steal his star. She’s just a woman he’d like to talk to.
Scully grabs a black purse, one of three handbags she owns, and plucks fuzz from the lapel of her black coat. The coat is plain and warm, highlights the autumn gloss of her hair. Scully smiles a little, practices looking engaging. Will she go home with him? She could. She very well might. She thinks of Missy saying redheads should have more fun than blondes
Thinks of Donnie Pfaster and turns away from the glass.
***
At La Chaumiere, Scully’s tucked into the gunfighter’s seat. The stone walls are warm and rosy from the fireplace and the red leather upholstery. She wants desperately to feel indifferent, but finds herself scanning the room for Raphael.
She fidgets with a butter knife, checks her teeth in it while wondering again what made her call. Was it Padgett or Mulder or some unholy combination of the two? She remembers a story she read in college, The Appointment in Samara, and wonders if there are choices.
“Hey,” says Raphael, “you’re not sharpening those, are you?” He bares his incisors.
Jesus. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
Raphael sits, shrugs his coat over the chair. He’s as handsome as she remembers, like an ad for Scandinavia.
“So what’s this big important government job you have,” he asks, skimming the menu. “You’ve been vague.”
“I work for the FBI,” Scully says, like she’s an independent contractor instead having half an office at the Bureau’s dark heart.
Raphael’s eyes widen and she is inwardly pleased. For all the times the actual job wears her down, she does enjoy the cachet.
“Really?” he asks. “That’s pretty cool. What’s it like?” He taps at something on the wine list when the waitress comes by.
Scully considers this. She pictures the corpse she handled just hours ago, a trypophobic horrorshow of maggot holes and parasitoid wasps. A baby ringneck snake was tucked into the left eye socket. She has concluded that she wants very much to go home with Raphael, to have ordinary sex with an ordinary person. If she can get pregnant she would like to do that too, and would never bother him about it. She wants a baby all her own.
“It’s mostly a lot of paperwork,” she says at last. Washes down the lie with a sip of the Malbec the waitress pours.
Raphael grins; accountants understand paperwork. “So it’s not like Silence of The Lambs?”
Laughs a little at that like it’s the first time she’s heard it. “They must have cut the scenes where Clarice was filling out car rental forms in triplicate.”
“Bummer, I was hoping for lurid tales of the BSU.”
God, she thinks. Everyone thinks they know me after that damned movie. Scully has a faint snobbery of citizens using company lingo. She sees her hand next to the wine bottle and feels detached from it, the soft pink ovals of her nails, the paper cut on the back of her thumb. She watches her fingers pick at a bread crumb on the table. “What kind of accounting do you do?”
A chuckle. “The kind that’s only interesting to other accountants. I’m sort of an itinerant nitpicker checking in on large organizations before getting sent elsewhere. You ready to order?”
His knee bumps against hers when he turns to wave the waitress back over, and Scully is surprised by the tingle that runs down her spine at so brief a contact. She wants pull him on top of her, his bland good looks and inoffensive cologne. She can see his apartment in her mind’s eye: lots of neutral furnishings, abstract paintings with strong masculine shapes. Calvin Klein bedding in blue and gray plaid. He’d have a Water-Pik on the vanity, Architectural Digest and Men’s Health on the coffee table.
They order cassoulet and the roast chicken, which comes with bread and lots of coarse mustard. Scully gets it for lunch sometimes, with Mulder, when they eat real food together. They never order wine.
The waitress, having refilled their water glasses, slips away on legs so white and soft that Scully thinks of breadsticks.
Raphael clears his throat, looking a little uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an arrogant asshole, but I just, uh, I feel like I should be clear on the point that I’m only in town for another few months.”
It would be unkind to tell him this reassures her. “I remembered that when I called,” she says.
“Okay, good, I just…it’s hard. But I guess you travel a lot.”
You have no idea how far I’ve traveled, Scully thinks. I don’t. “I do, yes. It can be exhausting.”
Raphael looks relieved to have found a kindred spirit. “People don’t always realize how stressful it can be,” he says. “It sounds fun, right, seeing the world on someone else’s dime? But trying to have friends, a family…”
“A houseplant,” Scully chimes in.
They share a laugh.
“You probably hear this all the time,” Raphael begins, “but your hair is really something. I love red hair.”
Scully has indeed heard this many times. Red hair seems to encourage people to share their unseemly fantasies. She tenses a little, waiting.
“My little sister loved Anne of Green Gables,” he says. “I read her all the books, a chapter a night. I guess she worked into my psyche.”
Scully likes Anne Shirley too, and approves of this explanation. “How old is your sister?” Please don’t let her be dead or dying or missing or maimed.
“Francesca is…let’s see. Almost 9 years younger than me, so eighteen in May.”
Dear god, he’s an infant.
“Just you two?” she asks, mouthing thank you as the waitress sets their food down.
“I think the big age gap scared them off of trying again. How about you? You have an only-child air about you.”
Scully could tell him second daughter stories, detail the results of her Hogan assessment and Meyers Briggs score. Explain what it’s like to be unremarkable in a military family and become fixated on the idea of shining so bright that even the captain would notice the glow. Instead she laughs like it’s a compliment and says “No, I’m one of four. Third from the top.”
“I always thought it would be fun to be part of a big family,” he says, spearing a chunk of sausage with his fork.
“It has its moments.”
They sit for a while, eating, sizing each other up.
“So did you always want to be an FBI agent?” Raphael asks after a time. “That seems like a big commitment. A round the clock kind of job. “
Scully rests her fork on the plate, wishing anything in her life had an easy answer. “I’m, uh, actually I’m a doctor. I joined the FBI during my residency. It seemed like a good way to help people.”
Raphael lets out a low, impressed whistle. “I have to tell you, I’m developing an inferiority complex here. Is it weird if I ask to see your badge?” He looks shy but earnest.
“This is a first,” she says, but finds the request endearing. Scully pulls it from her bag, then passes it over. The picture’s pretty good.
Raphael flips it open with a near childlike glee. “This is really cool,” he says. “My inner 10 year old is practically peeing himself right now. Raphael Thaler, FBI.”
Scully envies his comfort with himself, with his excitement. She thinks years back to Mulder at NASA, and doesn’t know how to be that way. Everything in her is so carefully measured.
He closes the badge and passes it back to her. “So, is this why you’re single?”
She blinks slowly. “That’s a rather personal question.”
Raphael looks puzzled by her accusatory tone. “Well, yeah, I don’t know much about you yet, so I have to ask personal question. You’re very good looking, you’re obviously intelligent, probably have terrific stories for cocktail parties…so what gives?”
“Well, so, there’s the travel thing,” she stalls.
“Sure.” Expectant silence.
Scully taps her badge against her fingertips, trying to be patient. She’s spent all of two hours with him and he thinks he can just start asking the questions her mother knows better than to bring up? Though her mother had casually brought up the crib again on Tuesday, do you want me to keep it in storage, Dana, I don’t mind of course, I just wanted to know because -
“Dana?”
Gentle sigh. She politely told Congress to go to hell, why is she caving here? She decides to blame Mulder, being as her complex personal life does technically have a lot to do with him. “My partner and I spend so much of our time together, I think it’s hard to have anything left after that, I mean, at the end of the day, for someone else. It’s, um…it’s a strange kind of relationship.”
He nods, looking thoughtful. “Makes sense. Is your partner a doctor too?”
“He has a PhD, but he’s not a medical doctor, no. Mulder’s degree is in psychology.”
“His name is - oh, yeah, FBI agents do the last name thing, right? Should I call you Scully?” He is amused by the suggestion.
Tight smile, when did her last name become so intimate? “I’m off the clock right now, Dana’s fine. So what about you then? What’s your, uh, excuse?” She is not comfortable listing his good qualities for him.
“For me, really, it’s just the travel. I see my apartment in New York maybe 5 or 6 times a year. I enjoy what I do, but I’ll switch gears down the road I guess, give up my nomadic ways.”
“I love New York,” she says, almost shy. It feels touristy to love a place like New York, like she’s a rube who longs to dance on the big pianny at Fay-O Schwartz. What she really loves is the Staten Island Ferry, which her father took them all on when she was a kid. Ellis Island was too expensive on one military income. They had squeezed the six of them into a hotel room for four, split two overstuffed sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli.
“Everyone loves New York!” Raphael enthuses. “I’d never want to live anywhere else when I decide to stop being a gypsy. If I want to get a knish at 2 AM, or hire a transsexual Lucille Ball impersonator, I can do these things.”
“I didn’t know there was much call for transsexual Lucille Ball impersonators,” Scully observes, though she can see the appeal of a 2 AM knish.
“They have lady ones too, whatever you need.”
Scully is aware of her stiffness, her unease with conversations that don’t have a specific outcome in mind. She doesn’t want to be this person tonight. “The first time I ever went I was a kid and my parents took us on this big vacation. I had read in a book that people in New York rode the subway, and I didn’t know quite what that was, but I was excited to do it. In my head I envisioned it as something you sat on, you know, like those twenty-five cent rides outside the grocery store.” She chuckles at the memory, remembering her confusion when the graffiti-ed train had come clanking up.
“Maybe you could visit sometime,” he suggests. Scully startles to feel Raphael’s hand atop her own. His winter sea eyes are crinkled at the corners, and she knows that, like the cops in Felton, he cannot see all the ways things are. He doesn’t know that she is microchipped and tattooed, that she is the mother of stolen, dead things. He doesn’t know that she was herself stolen and dead, that she has been scraped out and touched by things from the stars and that she has spoken with the ghosts she claims not to believe in. He doesn’t know that she is a facade, her own Galatea.
Her eyes take in his square-tipped fingers on her knuckles, the gingham cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt. She is afraid that she will cry with the frustration, the exhaustion, of having to pretend at normalcy. Her ever-shrinking social sphere has left her stumbling over simple interactions like this. The self pity makes her angry. Resolved.
Scully looks up at him through her sooty lashes, knows she looks fetching and seductive like this. She smiles a little, the way she did at her reflection earlier. “Do you mind if I order another bottle of wine?”
Raphael grins. “Is my company that unbearable?”
Her airy laugh is the one she’d learned as Mulder’s - Rob’s - wife. “Not at all. The fire’s just not keeping me very warm.” She loads the response with as much meaning as she can.
He takes it, and calls the waitress back to bring the check.
***
She lay her damp cheek against Raphael’s chest for a time, listening to the steady rush of his heart until he drifted into a quiet sleep. Scully sits up now, wonders if she will ever feel comfortable being unconscious around another person again. It strikes her as ironic that “sleeping together” is the accepted euphemism for a sexual relationship when it’s one of the more anxiety-inducing situations she can imagine.
Made Rob - Mulder - sleep on the couch in California. (But is that why, Dana? Is anxiety why he was exiled a floor away? What were you really afraid would happen? And how was it any different from those nights at fleabag motels when you shared a sagging bed? But it was, oh, it was.)
Her thighs are sore, she suspects there is blood streaked on them. It feels like she had her hymen broken anew, though not in a bad way. Her mouth is bruised and tender from kissing and wine. She’d forgotten that she likes kissing. It’s more intimate than the act that followed, in a way. Mulder probably knows some Jungian tale about why we eroticize a simulation of devouring our lovers. Kissing implies such trust; teeth and skulls and soft fleshy parts all coming together. Whatever the vernacular may imply, sex scarcely involves bones.
Raphael had his mouth on her hollow gunshot belly, his mouth on the cradle of her hips, his mouth -
She’d lied and said she was on birth control, but he wore a condom anyway. AIDS, paternity suits. These modern times.
Drunk, she’d considered reaching into the trash and…but no. Not quite to that point yet.
Yet.
I’ll just hold onto it a while longer, Dana. It’s a shame Matthew didn’t get to use it, but the shipping would have been outrageous and you know how Tara can be, you’re so beautiful and still young, is it Fox? I’m your mother, you can tell me.
Raphael stirs in the dark and she flinches, drops her head to her drawn knees in something very much like shame. He hadn’t offered to ride the couch like Jerse (he was Ed that night, Dana, he was Jerse when they arrested him) had and that’s fine, it reiterates that this is nothing like that.
She’d been so reckless in Philadelphia, broken and terrified like a wild thing with its leg in a trap. She wanted Ed to yank her free even if she lost the limb.
But this, here, this is okay. They’re in his bed together, no post-coital avoidance, no shame or slinking out. Raphael is bared to where the blanket lays across his hips and she hasn’t got a stitch on either. She hadn’t realized how much she missed sex, that healthy, active people are hardwired for it. She missed the mindless dopamine-serotonin cycle of pleasure; no thinking, no speaking, just action and reaction. Thinks about how she couldn't meet Mulder's eye when she said I think you know me better than that.
Moonlight falls on the night table, her phone next to his with the alarm set. She has to be out of here by 8, ready in case there’s a drive back to Delaware.
Scully unfurls, a night blooming flower, to rise and gather clothes from the floor in anticipation of morning. She drapes them over the armchair, smoothing everything out and, though she knows it’s ridiculous, she tucks her underwear beneath her sweater he way she does at the gynecologist’s office.
The floor creaks and she reaches for her gun.
“Jeeeeesus,” she breathes, mortified. She huffs out a few soothing breaths, waits for the storm surge of adrenaline to recede.
She pads back over to the bed, then sits gently at the edge. Her companion turns, then opens his eyes into the darkness around them.
“Hey,” he says, yawning. “You’re not sneaking out are you?”
She looks past him to the moon, shakes her head.
“Good,” he says. “Come back to bed.”
She closes her eyes for a long blink, wishing he were not awake. It makes her feel vulnerable, out of control. But there’s no helping it, and she lies down on her side, so tense her head barely makes a dip in the pillow. “Good night, don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite,” she murmurs without thinking.
“The what?”
“Nothing, good night.”
Raphael’s hand is heavy as a manacle at her elbow, but slides to the sheet as he drifts back into unconsciousness. Scully stays wide-eyed and alert until she is certain that he is out. He seems an even sleeper, and she does not believe he will stir again until morning.
She dreams that she is swimming, weightless and bare, in the waves beneath the harvest moon.
***
Her eyes open and she is fully awake. There is no disorientation, no morning-after confusion or regret, just a glance at her watch to confirm that she has not overslept. She sees Raphael’s t-shirt on the floor and, moving carefully so as not to put herself in too undignified a position, she retrieves it. She is sitting when she pulls it on, but it seems to come to well down her thighs. She likes wearing a man’s clothes like this, the musky scents of sweat and cologne and deodorant mingling with an undetectable pheromone that calls in a low voice to her animal brain.
Last night was good. There is a very attractive man next to her in the bed, attractive and intelligent and funny. She is satisfied that she does not emit a frequency detectable only to sociopaths and damaged psyches. She can have this, in some way or another, if she chooses it.
Scully yawns widely, hears a little popping sound in her jaw and covers her mouth with the back of her hand. “Excuse me,” she murmurs to no one, a habit from the nuns.
They drank wine last night, a lot of it, and Scully reluctantly swings her legs to the floor to go to the bathroom. The sheets are warm and soft and her eyes ache a bit even though the gray flannel curtains obscure the risen sun. Her mouth is dry, an unpleasant taste in the back of her throat.
The shirt is nearly to the tops of her knees when she stands and she feels childlike in it, her hair rumpled and her eyes sticky with sleep and sweat. She rubs at them with balled fists as she walks to the bathroom, flinching when her feet hit the tile. A chill rises in her, and Scully scuffs her feet on the plush bathmat to warm up.
The toilet seat is cold on her thighs, which are not bloody after all. She runs the tap until the water pouring from the faucet is steaming, then scrubs her hands and face. A folded length of toilet paper makes a serviceable toothbrush. Scully sees her red-knuckled hands on the edge of the basin, the freckles across her nose and cheeks. There are crows’ feet and smile lines to prove she is capable of sustained joy. She helps herself to some of Raphael’s lotion for her face, her lips. She gives herself what Missy called a whore’s bath; soap between her legs, rinsed away with one of the navy washcloths stacked in a basket.
In the bedroom her phone chirps, a muffled sound through the door. She tosses the washcloth into the hamper, hoping the ringer doesn’t wake Raphael, as accountants probably get to sleep in on the weekends.
The phone goes silent as she opens the door.
“’lo? This is Raphael,” he says into her phone. “This better be good.”
Shit.
Mom or Mulder? Frozen on the threshold, she can’t decide which is worse. Oh, Jesus, what if it’s Skinner?
“Oh, gosh,” he says, alert now. “I’m so sorry, I thought this was my…jeez, yeah, Dana’s right here.” He waves the phone at her, looking like a disgraced member of the Norse pantheon.
“I’m sorry,” he mouths, blushing. “Habit.”
Scully shrugs, what’s done is done. She takes the phone with an air of resignation, settles onto the bed. “Hello?”
“Morning, sunshine. Sorry if I woke you.” Mulder, the least of all possible evils.
“You didn’t.”
“Guess your date went well, huh?” So fucking condescending sometimes.
“What’s up, Mulder?” She senses Raphael perk up beside her. She wonders if this makes him uncomfortable at all, her talking to her partner in bed with him, but she doubts it. That’s the sort of neurosis she has. Mustn’t project.
“…around 7,” she hears from her phone, and tunes back into Radio Mulder, the channel that always comes in clearest. “I said we could be there by 11 if we hustle.”
Scully rises to retrieve the clothes she’d prepared in the small hours of the morning. She feels Raphael’s eyes on her and turns to regard him. He makes a gesture to indicate the t-shirt, then gives her a thumbs up. She smiles back. God, this is nice.
“I don’t guess the kid is there,” she asks, tucking to phone between her shoulder and her ear. She steps into her underwear with as much modesty as the shirt can provide. There’s no need to be coy, but she doesn’t want to put on a show, either.
There’s a long pause. “We’re not going to find him,” Mulder says with certainty. “Not until he wants to be found.”
Scully rolls her eyes for no reason other than form’s sake, buttons her skirt. “Can you pick me up in an hour?”
“That enough time?”
She’s positive the question isn’t innocent, but refuses to indulge him this morning. “I need to throw some things in a bag.” Shower, put on clothes that don’t reek of sex.
“I’ll bring coffee.” He sounds…irritated?
She hangs up without saying goodbye, because all of their conversations are really one ongoing conversation with very long pauses in it. She pulls Raphael’s shirt off and tosses it to the bed. Forgoing her bra, she slips her sweater back on, the fine knit so soft against her bare skin. Her nipples tighten at the sensation. Scully ignores it, stepping into her shoes like armor.
“You talk like a cop,” Raphael remarks. “On the phone, I mean. You’re so….clipped.”
Funny, she thought she always sounded like that. “Really?” She tucks her bra into her sleeve like one of Aunt Olive’s lace hankies.
“Yeah,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow. “I can actually imagine you arresting someone now. It’s kind of hot, especially with the heels and no bra.” He winks.
She longs to ask him why, why men have naughty cop fantasies and naughty librarian fantasies and naughty teacher fantasies. But she doesn’t know how, not even with Mulder, and says “Thanks, I think,” instead.
Raphael leans over to grab his boxers from the floor. “I was going to make breakfast,” he tells her as he dresses, “but it sounds like you’re in a hurry.”
Scully shrugs, holds her palms up to say what can you do?
“How about some coffee while I call you a cab? I won’t even spill it on you first.”
That smile could light up a town. “I’d like that.” She retrieves her coat as Raphael grabs his actual phone from the night table. He has the cab company on speed dial too.
He reports that the cab will be 10 minutes, just enough time for a quick cup before she hits the road again. It’s true what she told him, her houseplants always die.
The burbling of the coffee pot, the smell of grounds. Raphael’s kitchen is modern, lots of black and chrome. Some cobalt glassware, which she covets. There’s a sale at Pier One, maybe she’ll go shopping when she gets home. It would be nice to have new wineglasses, just in case…
“…case are you working on?” Raphael asks. “Anything I’d know?” He’s holding a mug out to her.
“Thanks. Um, maybe, but it’s an ongoing investigation. I can’t discuss it right now.” She tries to seem apologetic because his fascination with her badge was so charming.
“Gotcha. I had a good time last night, Dana. And I don’t just mean, you know, after dinner.”
“I did too.” She drinks the coffee, which scalds her mouth. She has an asbestos palate at this point and scarcely notices. “I’m glad I called you.”
“Me too. I wish our schedules were less crappy. Take me up on that New York visit sometime, hmm?”
A horn beeps downstairs, making them both glance at the window. “I’d like that,” Scully says. She really, really would.
They walk to the door, Raphael wearing only boxers and his khakis, the unbelted pants hanging at his hips. “Go catch some bad guys, No Relation,” he tells her as she steps into the hall.
“I’ll do my best.”
“I know you won’t call,” Raphael tells her, his hands in his pockets. “But I really did have a great night. You’re interesting. Even when you don’t say much, you’re interesting.”
The horn beeps again, but she asks why he doesn’t think she’ll call.
He smiles at her, almost indulgent. “Because,” he explains, “you never gave me your number. Trust me, I know a one night stand when I see it.” He kisses her softly on the mouth, then closes the door.
***
End Part 2/3
RATING: R
SPOILERS: Milagro
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from 1013 to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thank you to The Right Honorable Fangirls Drinking and Debating Society for the encouragement, to maybe_amanda for being an outstanding beta and person in general, to wendelah1 for having a kind and nurturing spirit far beyond that which I deserve, and to fuckyeahdavidgillian for sucking me back in.
The word lacuna means a missing piece or unfilled space, and is also the Spanish word for crib.
Spoiler alert: This ends in an RST-type place despite initial evidence to the contrary.
***
“No ma’am, I can’t say that I do,” says the officer who claimed he would get her phone number. His name is Royles and he has an obnoxious dimple in his chin. “If Pete had a house in these parts, this would be the first I heard of it. We’d see him sleeping in his old truck, a big camo Chevy Suburban, in parking lots sometimes, out behind the Food Lion or the strip mall. Sometimes he’d spend a few nights at the El-Car, or in the drunk tank. Disappear for a few weeks, then roll back in to drink and fight and make a few bucks under the table. In fact, when we tracked his car down it was behinds the Lotta Suds Laundry. He’d been fixing their machines.”
“We were back at the crime scene this morning,” Scully says. “There weren’t any tire tracks. My guess is that whoever killed him somehow lured him out from wherever he was staying at the time.”
The officer shrugs expansively. “Could be, I don’t know.”
“Where’s his car now?” Mulder asks.
Royles gestures behind them, to the back of the building. “Impound lot. No prints, no trace. We checked.” He tosses Mulder the keys, as if daring him to contradict these findings.
Scully feels Royles’s eyes on her. She is not bothered so much by his gaze as she is by the fact that he makes no attempt to conceal it. “Anything else before we go, Officer Royles?”
He meets her eyes. “No ma’am, can’t say that there is.”
Mulder jangles the keyring. “We’ll return these when we’re finished.” He rests three fingers at Scully’s elbow and guides her to the door. “Asshole,” he mutters as they go outside.
“Whatever,” she says, scanning the lot for the truck.
“It seems fitting that we can’t find a camo truck,” Mulder observes, kicking the tires of an old Mustang. It groans, sheds a dandruff of rust.
Scully spots it at the back, waves Mulder over. “Camo my foot,” she sniffs. “That looks like someone got high and happened to have brown and green spray paint on hand.”
“The man was not an artiste, to be sure,” Mulder says, peering in the window. “Though he kept a tidy car.”
It’s true. The floor of the car has no fast food wrappers, soda bottles, cigarette butts, underwear, socks, condoms, or other detritus often found in semi-inhabited automobiles. There is a plastic hula girl on the dashboard, and a pair of aviator sunglasses clipped to the visor.
Mulder unlocks the doors, releasing cigarette ghosts and Old Spice. He climbs into the front seat and puts on the dead man’s sunglasses. “Yee-haw.” The glove compartment contains half a bag of miniature Hershey bars.
Scully goes into the back, and finds she must agree with Royles. The truck is spotless, other than smudges of fingerprint powder. On the floor between the second and third rows of seats she finds a green Coleman sleeping bag. “Guess this is for his Food Lion campouts,” she says. “Might as well take a look.”
They unroll the sleeping bag on the asphalt. Scully, on her hands and knees, slowly runs her hands along the worn nylon shell. “Nothing,” she says, though she’s not sure what she even expected to find. Unzipping the sleeping bag reveals a similar paucity of evidence. There are a few dark hairs clinging to the flannel lining. She puts them in a paper envelope, feeling disappointed.
“Damn their efficient hides,” Mulder says, twirling the keychain. “Okay, so. There are three keys on this ring. One to the car, one presumably to the house, and the third…”
“Vacation home?” She gets up, scowling at the runs in her stockings. Her new shoes will need to be buffed and polished after this.
“I’m thinking somewhere in the Hamptons, yes.”
Scully cups her hands for the keys, which Mulder tosses her. The keychain is emblazoned with a picture of a lasciviously grinning crab. “I Got My Crabs From Dirty Dick’s,” she reads, then turns it over. “Dirty Dick’s Crab House, North Myrtle Beach. Charming.”
“Jews have proscriptions against the consumption of seagoing pubic lice,” Mulder remarks. “Yahweh does not want them eaten.”
“Then He shouldn’t have made them taste so delicious with Old Bay,” Scully retorts. “Listen, we don’t know this area, Mulder. It’s a needle in a haystack trying to find this house. How do you want to play this?”
He sighs. ”I’m not sure. I’m tempted to let them ferret it out, then we can come back, pat them on the head, and take a look-see when they do. My concern is one of those idiots screwing up the scene to prove how big his dick is.”
Scully dangles the keychain with come-hither eyes. “Maybe we forget to return the keys.”
A slow grin spreads over his face. “Maybe we do.”
***
“I feel awful,” Mulder says, tossing pencils at the ceiling. “Agent Scully and I, we…..yes. Absolutely we will.” He gives her a thumbs-up, listening to the receiver for a moment. “You bet. As soon as you find something, you give us a call and we will drive back up with the keys to join your men.”
Gleeful, he props his feet on his desk, listens some more.
“Right, yeah. I’m thinking wooded area if he went to the trouble of painting that Chevy. It’ll be off the grid, so either solar panels or a chimney. Well or a stream for water. Yeah, I….uh huh. Uh huh, I see. Okay, well, thanks for your understanding, Chief. We just want the lock intact, so we’ll be up fast as you need us. About a two hour drive, no more. Yessir, you too.”
Mulder hangs up the phone, looking so smug that Scully can practically see the canary feathers hanging from his mouth.
“Oh, bravo Mr. Olivier,” she says. “Think they’ll turn anything up?
“They have a better shot than we do, to be honest. The scene backs up to a few hundred acres of wooded area. I gave them some pointers, but we are not local fauna, Scully. Thankfully. I say we give it three days before we call in a task force.” Mulder hates task forces. They require a level of fraternization that makes him more pedantic and asocial than usual.
She pours coffee from their bottomless pot. Yesterday morning she was sitting at Starbucks with whatshisname. Raphael. She’d taken a different run this morning, just in case, though she also put his number in her phone. Her line of work, you never know who might come in handy. “I’ve got a lunch appointment with Smialek from the Maryland ME’s office about that woman from Cunningham Falls. You want in?”
“I’ll pass. I want to look into a few things for a profile on our would-be Heinzelmann. I’m meeting with a folklorist at the embassy.”
“That’s a thing? Embassy folklorist?”
“Ja, iss gut.” He winces when a pencil hits him in the head.
“Right, well, I want to go look at those hairs from the sleeping bag.”
“Have fun. I’ll be talking ghosties and ghoulies with a fraulein.”
Scully grabs the envelope of hair from his desk. “Don’t make any sausage jokes,” she advises before leaving the office. She hears Mulder chuckling as the door closes.
***^^
The lab is bright with fluorescent bulbs bouncing off of stainless steel and white Formica.
“Agent Scully,” says a lab tech she’d taught years ago. “It’s good to see you.”
She smiles, searching her memory for a name. “You too,” she says. “I don’t get over here as much as I’d like.” Dara, Darla, Delia. Delia Ostrow, that was it. “Will I be in anyone’s way over there, Delia?” She nods at a nearby lab bench.
The woman shakes her head. “Not at all. Dr. Roloson and I are running some PCRs, just let us know if you need anything.”
Rachel Roloson, another one of her girls, waves amiably from beside a centrifuge. “Agent Scully.”
Delia joins her, and the two of them are lost in their work by the time Scully settles down at her microscope. She makes a wet mount of one of the hairs, then flips the tape recorder on.
“Hair is dark, root indicates it fell out naturally rather than being pulled. Shaft has a large diameter and is round, with smooth cuticle edges. Distal end appears to have been cut with scissors. Medulla is present, and is surrounded by large pigment granules.” She pauses the tape here, makes a casting of the hair with clear nail polish before resuming her dictation. “Hair appears human, with an imbricate crenate pattern. It likely belongs to a person of Asian descent.”
Scully pauses to process what she just said. Pete does not appear to be of Asian descent. She calls to the two women at the nearby lab bench. “Rachel, Delia?”
“Agent Scully?”
“I need to run to the morgue for a sample. Can you just keep half an eye on this stuff for me?”
“Sure thing,” Delia says. “We’ll be here a while.”
Scully clips briskly to the morgue on her three inch heels and, instead of having an Igor pull up yesterday’s samples, she locates Pete in the fridge. She pulls about twenty hairs from all over his head and a half dozen from his groin, separating them into two plastic containers. The dead suffer many indignities at her hands.
The vials go into her lab coat pocket as she rubs her arms, tucks her fingers into her armpits to warm them up. She needs to have her iron checked.
Back through the labyrinthine hallways to the lab she was using. She pushes the swinging doors hard enough that one bangs into the wall, startling the other occupants of the room. “Sorry,” she says, ducking her head. Waggles her fingers in thanks at Delia and Rachel, who exchange a glance as she brushes past them to her scope.
Shit, shit, she left the tape recorder running. She’s short on time if she’s going to make lunch with Smialek, and decides to pick up here. She can have Danny edit the fifteen minute gap out for her later. Pete’s hair on the glass next to the sleeping bag hair, and her suspicions are confirmed.
“The unknown hairs do not appear to be from the victim,” she intones, sketching out her observations on a notepad. “All of the unknown hairs contain a solid medulla and large pigment granules, while the victim’s show absent or fragmented medullae and smaller pigment granules consistent with a Caucasian background. Hairs from both sources show an imbricate crenate pattern.”
Scully finishes her observations of a dozen other hairs and asks an intern to clean up and send the roots off for analysis. She can still make her lunch appointment if traffic isn’t bad. She goes out the back door to avoid chit chat, half-running through the maze of corridors and stairways. She can navigate this building in her dreams. Out to the garage and into her car, she catches her breath before putting the key into the ignition. Smoothes her hair down, chugs yesterday’s cold coffee. “You’re good,” she tells herself. “You are on a roll.”
The Taurus eases down the ramp and noses onto the Pennsylvania Avenue as she waits for a break in traffic. Scully puts her recording into the tape deck, wanting to listen to her autopsy notes and hair notes all at once.
“Begin autopsy on 37 year old white male,” Scully hears herself say as she squeals between a Mercedes and a garbage truck. She hates the flat drone of her voice on tape, but she often gets so lost in what she’s doing that the words seem to leave her without her full awareness. Her autopsy notes continue for another forty three minutes, until she sees the Baltimore skyline. Such as it is, anyway.
She listens to her first observations about the hair, and fast forwards to try and find the second part. She stops the tape, listening for her voice.
“-would be,” comes a muffled voice. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”
“Rachel,” answers Delia’s voice, “not everyone is as slutty as you.”
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”
Giggling, the sound of a centrifuge whirring.
Scully stares at the cassette deck. You absolutely should not eavesdrop, she tells herself. Have Danny scrub it out, focus on the hair.
Who is she kidding?
She rewinds the tape. “…to a person of Asian descent.” She hears herself ask the women to watch her table, hears the sharp report of her heels on the linoleum.
A moment of silence, then Rachel speaks. “She did NOT look like that when we had her. How red is her hair, Jesus.”
Bitch.
“Hey, good for her,” says Delia. “I can’t pull off red, I tried.”
“I think the carpet matches the drapes and all, but she gets it done. Covering up gray, whatever. I would. How old is she, anyway?”
Old enough to slap you, Scully thinks. And enough rank to get away with it.
“I heard she went to med school when she was 19 or something. Early admissions and finished college in three years. She’s a certified genius, I think.”
“I heard she was screwing her professors.”
Scully feels her jaw drop. She wills herself to hit stop, but knows it won’t happen.
“Agent Scully? No way,” Delia says. “No fucking way. She’s so…you know. Scully.”
A thump, muttering she can’t pick up. Come on, come on, gossip louder you ungrateful little assholes. She puts on her blinker to get onto Lombard Street, half afraid she’ll make her appointment before the conversation ends.
Then, “…Willis when she was at the Academy.”
“Oh, shit, yeah I did hear that!” says Delia. “You go, Scully.”
Scully is appalled, her cheeks flaming. This…this is what people think of her?
“Well, good for her now, anyway,” Rachel says. Her voice is muffled now, and Scully remembers the woman was wearing a surgical mask when she returned from the morgue. “I mean, Fox Mulder, come on. Who wouldn’t?”
Laughter, more mumbling. Scully prays for a red light.
“Right? Do you think he’s actually crazy or what?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not BSU, his crazy isn’t my problem. I swam laps the next lane over from him a few times and he can believe in whatever the hell he wants as long as he shows up and looks that pretty. I heard he’s a serious nympho though.”
“I’ll take a number.”
This is more than she can process. She forgets that she and Mulder don’t live in their own insulated bubble, that two people who lurk in basements and chase flying saucers might arouse a bit of interest. And she did what they said, she had…but it wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t.
Was it?
Delia is speaking again. “So is the, uh, consorting verified, or what? You think they’re on his desk in their suits down there or something? A little alien probing, know what I mean? Those were some hot shoes. You don’t just start wearing those for nothing.”
“I certainly would be,” comes Rachel’s voice. The tape has caught up with itself. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”
“Rachel, not everyone is as slutty as you.”
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”
Scully pulls up in front of Attman’s Deli and parks the car. She has no name for the emotions swirling through her, but she is certain of one thing.
She’s calling Raphael Thaler after lunch.
***
The Baltimore Beltway, such a poor imitation of the real thing, is sluggish at this time, people heading out of work early for a few extra hours of weekend in Annapolis or Philly or, if they are feeling ambitious, Skyline Drive. There are cozy inns and hotels along the 95 corridor, tucked away places for lovers to eat blueberry pancakes among rooms full of reproduction antiques and crocheted doilies. She has visited some of them. There was a place in Easton with Jack Willis, set right up against the Chesapeake Bay. They went crabbing off a pier out back, and the lady of the house steamed their catch with sweet corn. Scully wishes she had let him talk her into skinny-dipping that night, my god it was August and so hot, what was she afraid of?
It would be nice, she reflects, to spend an evening with a man who didn’t want her liver or her fingers or her hair or her heart. Who, perhaps, just want to split a bottle of the amusing house red and go to bed. Sexual objectification seems almost innocent to her at this point and it’s been too damned long.
Clearly she hasn’t got a reputation to protect.
Scully pulls out her phone, grateful for the foresight that compelled her to save his number, as the business card got destroyed in the wash. She brings up his information, hits send. The phone rings a few times and she’s about ready to chicken out when he answers. “Hello, Raphael? This, um, this is Dana Scully. We met on the -“
“Hey, Dana No Relation! I didn’t expect you to call.”
She is amused by his forthrightness. “That makes two of us I guess.”
“Ha, so what can I do for you?”
There’s a cheerful arrogance in his voice that appeals to her, makes her feel cocky and flirtatious. It’s Friday, and she’s only 35. “I find myself uncharacteristically free this evening. I was wondering whether you were, um, around. For dinner, maybe. Drinks.”
“Oh, uncharacteristically? Rubbing in our social calendar, are we?”
She laughs. “I mean, I’m not working. I’m usually working.”
Heavy sigh from Raphael. “I have a team happy hour tonight, so -“
She feels herself blush for no reason she can pinpoint. “I understand, it’s short notice. Maybe another time.”
“Slow down there, No Relation. I was going to say ‘so I’d be particularly pleased by a better offer.’ Give a guy a chance to finish a sentence.”
Grateful that he can’t see, Scully presses a hand to her eyes. Fuck, fuck, is she this out of practice? “Um,” she mumbles. “I’m not great at this.”
“Let me try, then. Hey, is this Dana Scully? Dana, this is Raphael Thaler, we met a couple of days ago when I poured coffee all over you.”
“It’s nice to hear from you.” She is somewhere between charmed and mortified, with no bets on the winner.
“Listen, I realize that this is really short notice and I’m probably the last person you wanted to hear from, but do you happen to have any plans tonight? I know you have some kind of Very Important Government Job and usually work Friday nights, but, well, there’s this lame happy hour at work that I’d love to have an excuse to get out of.”
“You know, it happens that I am free this evening,” she says, in a measured voice, changing lanes and speeding up to ten miles per hour.
“Oh, that’s awesome! I’m really glad I took a chance and called you and that we had a conversation with pauses in it and exchanged vital information without leaping to conclusions.”
“I’m hanging up,” she warns.
“Okay, okay. I don’t know the area too well yet. I had lunch at some place last week, La Shama….lama…something.”
“Chaumiere? On M Street?” Nice, romantic-ish, but not uncomfortably so. She considers this an acceptable offer, and there is a fireplace.
“That’s the one. You finish your Big Important Job in time to meet me at 7?”
“I can work something out.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says, with a confessional air.
“See you at 7,” Scully replies, and puts her phone away. She merges onto 295, homeward bound.
***
“What’s up, doc?” Mulder calls when she opens the door.
“Helicopters,” she says, depositing her coat on a chair stacked with binders. “Satellites. Clouds.”
“So literal, you science types. How’s the Cunningham Falls thing?”
Empty eye sockets, the thick muscles of the thighs all slashed and carved, she doesn’t want to talk about it. “They’re getting her settled in downstairs.”
Mulder knows the depth of the silence in her and does not plumb it. “The Germans,” he says, “are a dark people. I had read the original Grimms’ years ago, but she had some new ones for me.”
Scully pours some coffee into an FBI mug, glances sidelong at her partner. She thinks of the women in the lab, 8 inches, Deely, and her memory of his nude body backs this up. This is ridiculous, she is ridiculous, standing here and looking at him like she’s a high school freshman stuck in the elevator with the captain of the football team. It’s only Mulder, she reprimands herself, this is just Padgett’s nonsense and too much time alone. Your life is not wholly contained in this room. She sets about organizing her latest stack of postmortem findings.
“…reminiscent of Heinzelmann,” Mulder says, and she realizes she has not been listening at all.
She covers it up by passing him the coffee she just poured. “Long day for both of us, it sounds like. Those hairs in the sleeping bag, Mulder, they belong to someone of Asian descent. I sent them off for further analysis, and hopefully his house will tell us whose they were.”
“Hooker?”
“Mmmm, could be but I don’t think so. It looked like it was from someone pretty young, or at least someone who took very good care of their hair. And it had been cut recently. Short, just a few inches.”
“Not typical for a working girl. You sure it wasn’t pubic?”
“It didn’t look like it, too straight. Also Asian, I think.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. We’ll just hope they turn up his shanty and we can get it sorted out. I’m working on a profile tonight. We’ll get some lo mein to fuel the process.” He just assumes she’s coming, and not unfairly.
“Ah,” Scully says, fiddling with paper clips, “I will actually have to turn down that invitation.”
“We can get fajitas instead, if you want.
“It’s not the cuisine, Mulder. I have, I’m going out. With someone.”
Mulder looks up, confused. “Like a date?”
She snorts. “I believe that is the intent, yes.”
“Who’s the lucky fella?” he drawls, a white collar John Wayne.
She shrugs, like she has dates all the time. “Some guy I met the other day. Seems nice.” She checks herself before she provides more information. It would be embarrassing to sound excited.
“Getting any new ink?” Mulder asks, which is both mean and expected, but he’s looking at something under a jeweler’s loupe and she can’t give him the haughty expression he deserves.
“Probably a dolphin on my ankle if I don’t go ahead and get my tongue pierced.” Think about that with your lo mein tonight, smartass.
Mulder’s shoulders are hunched as he inspects whatever arcane thing has his interest. “Please let me be there when you teww Thkinner why yow tounge’th aw thwowwen.”
“Haven’t heard anything from the guys in Felton, I guess,” she says, because this subject is beyond exhausted, batted around out of habit like two old housecats with a weary mouse.
“Nope.” He tucks the loupe and the rock (it looks like a rock, could be a Martian coprolite or the Black Orlov diamond, who knows) into his desk drawer. “I’ll call you if I hear anything, I left them my number.”
Of course you did, of course it’s your case and your division and your goddamned office and - why is she angry?
She’s not, she realizes. She’s bored and looking for stimulation. “Sounds good, just keep me posted. Email me what you get done on the profile tonight too, if you don’t mind.”
“As you wish.” Mulder tips the brim of an imaginary hat. “So where’s this guy taking you?”
“He’s not taking me anywhere,” she says. A bit prim, that, but the distinction’s important. “I’m meeting him at La Chaumiere.”
“Oooh la la,” says Mulder. “French.”
She files a few documents in their clanky old metal drawers, uncomfortable with his interest. “I’m going to go makes some notes on that body they sent over before I head out. I’ll probably see you tomorrow or Sunday, I guess.”
“Au revoir,” Mulder says, sounding like Inspector Clouseau or possibly Julia Child. “Bon appetit.”
She rolls her eyes, annoyed, and brushes past him to retrieve her coat. Mulder must have caught her aura in the slipstream because he grabs the tail of her jacket, tugging her back.
She turns, startled. “What?”
“Have a good time tonight, Scully.” His voice, his eyes, soft. “Really.”
She runs her fingers through her hair, offering him a smile. “Thanks, Mulder. But it’s no big deal. Let me know if anything is up.”
“Helicopters?” he asks slyly, releasing her jacket. “Satellites? Clouds?”
“Good night, Mulder. Don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite.”
“Bon soir, Scully.”
***
She goes for the bottom half of her charcoal skirt suit and a thin sweater the indeterminate blue of skim milk. She runs a wooden comb through her hair to break up the severity of the hairspray, brushes her teeth, re-blacks her golden lashes. Scully knows she’s attractive, that her body is slim and that each pale breast remains high and firm, even if it’s just a handful. She knows her eyes are her best feature, that her lips are crooked but full, and that her long nose is interesting next to the pert Barbie doll features surgeons churn out these days.
She’s come into herself in the past few years, gotten a good stylist and an even better tailor. There’s only Mulder to impress most days, but she’s glad of it anyway. If anyone knows the value of a well-cut suit, it’s Mulder with his careless Armani and Hickey Freeman. It must be nice to grow up with money, with someone to teach you how to do that. The Mulders had more houses than the Scullys had cars.
Her shoes are good now too - she’s up a number of pay grades from her Thom McAns and better quality means higher heels.
She’s always been a sucker for a heel.
As if warding off an evil eye summoned by her frank self-awareness, Scully makes a moue of distaste in the mirror. She pretends the whole evening will be a chore, but the fact is that she’s looking forward to it.
There are too many men in her life, and yet somehow here she is in pursuit of another. But this is someone different, someone sane, someone not bent on destroying himself or her. She is not a talisman to him, she is not a voice in his head or some tight-ass federale come to steal his star. She’s just a woman he’d like to talk to.
Scully grabs a black purse, one of three handbags she owns, and plucks fuzz from the lapel of her black coat. The coat is plain and warm, highlights the autumn gloss of her hair. Scully smiles a little, practices looking engaging. Will she go home with him? She could. She very well might. She thinks of Missy saying redheads should have more fun than blondes
Thinks of Donnie Pfaster and turns away from the glass.
***
At La Chaumiere, Scully’s tucked into the gunfighter’s seat. The stone walls are warm and rosy from the fireplace and the red leather upholstery. She wants desperately to feel indifferent, but finds herself scanning the room for Raphael.
She fidgets with a butter knife, checks her teeth in it while wondering again what made her call. Was it Padgett or Mulder or some unholy combination of the two? She remembers a story she read in college, The Appointment in Samara, and wonders if there are choices.
“Hey,” says Raphael, “you’re not sharpening those, are you?” He bares his incisors.
Jesus. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
Raphael sits, shrugs his coat over the chair. He’s as handsome as she remembers, like an ad for Scandinavia.
“So what’s this big important government job you have,” he asks, skimming the menu. “You’ve been vague.”
“I work for the FBI,” Scully says, like she’s an independent contractor instead having half an office at the Bureau’s dark heart.
Raphael’s eyes widen and she is inwardly pleased. For all the times the actual job wears her down, she does enjoy the cachet.
“Really?” he asks. “That’s pretty cool. What’s it like?” He taps at something on the wine list when the waitress comes by.
Scully considers this. She pictures the corpse she handled just hours ago, a trypophobic horrorshow of maggot holes and parasitoid wasps. A baby ringneck snake was tucked into the left eye socket. She has concluded that she wants very much to go home with Raphael, to have ordinary sex with an ordinary person. If she can get pregnant she would like to do that too, and would never bother him about it. She wants a baby all her own.
“It’s mostly a lot of paperwork,” she says at last. Washes down the lie with a sip of the Malbec the waitress pours.
Raphael grins; accountants understand paperwork. “So it’s not like Silence of The Lambs?”
Laughs a little at that like it’s the first time she’s heard it. “They must have cut the scenes where Clarice was filling out car rental forms in triplicate.”
“Bummer, I was hoping for lurid tales of the BSU.”
God, she thinks. Everyone thinks they know me after that damned movie. Scully has a faint snobbery of citizens using company lingo. She sees her hand next to the wine bottle and feels detached from it, the soft pink ovals of her nails, the paper cut on the back of her thumb. She watches her fingers pick at a bread crumb on the table. “What kind of accounting do you do?”
A chuckle. “The kind that’s only interesting to other accountants. I’m sort of an itinerant nitpicker checking in on large organizations before getting sent elsewhere. You ready to order?”
His knee bumps against hers when he turns to wave the waitress back over, and Scully is surprised by the tingle that runs down her spine at so brief a contact. She wants pull him on top of her, his bland good looks and inoffensive cologne. She can see his apartment in her mind’s eye: lots of neutral furnishings, abstract paintings with strong masculine shapes. Calvin Klein bedding in blue and gray plaid. He’d have a Water-Pik on the vanity, Architectural Digest and Men’s Health on the coffee table.
They order cassoulet and the roast chicken, which comes with bread and lots of coarse mustard. Scully gets it for lunch sometimes, with Mulder, when they eat real food together. They never order wine.
The waitress, having refilled their water glasses, slips away on legs so white and soft that Scully thinks of breadsticks.
Raphael clears his throat, looking a little uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an arrogant asshole, but I just, uh, I feel like I should be clear on the point that I’m only in town for another few months.”
It would be unkind to tell him this reassures her. “I remembered that when I called,” she says.
“Okay, good, I just…it’s hard. But I guess you travel a lot.”
You have no idea how far I’ve traveled, Scully thinks. I don’t. “I do, yes. It can be exhausting.”
Raphael looks relieved to have found a kindred spirit. “People don’t always realize how stressful it can be,” he says. “It sounds fun, right, seeing the world on someone else’s dime? But trying to have friends, a family…”
“A houseplant,” Scully chimes in.
They share a laugh.
“You probably hear this all the time,” Raphael begins, “but your hair is really something. I love red hair.”
Scully has indeed heard this many times. Red hair seems to encourage people to share their unseemly fantasies. She tenses a little, waiting.
“My little sister loved Anne of Green Gables,” he says. “I read her all the books, a chapter a night. I guess she worked into my psyche.”
Scully likes Anne Shirley too, and approves of this explanation. “How old is your sister?” Please don’t let her be dead or dying or missing or maimed.
“Francesca is…let’s see. Almost 9 years younger than me, so eighteen in May.”
Dear god, he’s an infant.
“Just you two?” she asks, mouthing thank you as the waitress sets their food down.
“I think the big age gap scared them off of trying again. How about you? You have an only-child air about you.”
Scully could tell him second daughter stories, detail the results of her Hogan assessment and Meyers Briggs score. Explain what it’s like to be unremarkable in a military family and become fixated on the idea of shining so bright that even the captain would notice the glow. Instead she laughs like it’s a compliment and says “No, I’m one of four. Third from the top.”
“I always thought it would be fun to be part of a big family,” he says, spearing a chunk of sausage with his fork.
“It has its moments.”
They sit for a while, eating, sizing each other up.
“So did you always want to be an FBI agent?” Raphael asks after a time. “That seems like a big commitment. A round the clock kind of job. “
Scully rests her fork on the plate, wishing anything in her life had an easy answer. “I’m, uh, actually I’m a doctor. I joined the FBI during my residency. It seemed like a good way to help people.”
Raphael lets out a low, impressed whistle. “I have to tell you, I’m developing an inferiority complex here. Is it weird if I ask to see your badge?” He looks shy but earnest.
“This is a first,” she says, but finds the request endearing. Scully pulls it from her bag, then passes it over. The picture’s pretty good.
Raphael flips it open with a near childlike glee. “This is really cool,” he says. “My inner 10 year old is practically peeing himself right now. Raphael Thaler, FBI.”
Scully envies his comfort with himself, with his excitement. She thinks years back to Mulder at NASA, and doesn’t know how to be that way. Everything in her is so carefully measured.
He closes the badge and passes it back to her. “So, is this why you’re single?”
She blinks slowly. “That’s a rather personal question.”
Raphael looks puzzled by her accusatory tone. “Well, yeah, I don’t know much about you yet, so I have to ask personal question. You’re very good looking, you’re obviously intelligent, probably have terrific stories for cocktail parties…so what gives?”
“Well, so, there’s the travel thing,” she stalls.
“Sure.” Expectant silence.
Scully taps her badge against her fingertips, trying to be patient. She’s spent all of two hours with him and he thinks he can just start asking the questions her mother knows better than to bring up? Though her mother had casually brought up the crib again on Tuesday, do you want me to keep it in storage, Dana, I don’t mind of course, I just wanted to know because -
“Dana?”
Gentle sigh. She politely told Congress to go to hell, why is she caving here? She decides to blame Mulder, being as her complex personal life does technically have a lot to do with him. “My partner and I spend so much of our time together, I think it’s hard to have anything left after that, I mean, at the end of the day, for someone else. It’s, um…it’s a strange kind of relationship.”
He nods, looking thoughtful. “Makes sense. Is your partner a doctor too?”
“He has a PhD, but he’s not a medical doctor, no. Mulder’s degree is in psychology.”
“His name is - oh, yeah, FBI agents do the last name thing, right? Should I call you Scully?” He is amused by the suggestion.
Tight smile, when did her last name become so intimate? “I’m off the clock right now, Dana’s fine. So what about you then? What’s your, uh, excuse?” She is not comfortable listing his good qualities for him.
“For me, really, it’s just the travel. I see my apartment in New York maybe 5 or 6 times a year. I enjoy what I do, but I’ll switch gears down the road I guess, give up my nomadic ways.”
“I love New York,” she says, almost shy. It feels touristy to love a place like New York, like she’s a rube who longs to dance on the big pianny at Fay-O Schwartz. What she really loves is the Staten Island Ferry, which her father took them all on when she was a kid. Ellis Island was too expensive on one military income. They had squeezed the six of them into a hotel room for four, split two overstuffed sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli.
“Everyone loves New York!” Raphael enthuses. “I’d never want to live anywhere else when I decide to stop being a gypsy. If I want to get a knish at 2 AM, or hire a transsexual Lucille Ball impersonator, I can do these things.”
“I didn’t know there was much call for transsexual Lucille Ball impersonators,” Scully observes, though she can see the appeal of a 2 AM knish.
“They have lady ones too, whatever you need.”
Scully is aware of her stiffness, her unease with conversations that don’t have a specific outcome in mind. She doesn’t want to be this person tonight. “The first time I ever went I was a kid and my parents took us on this big vacation. I had read in a book that people in New York rode the subway, and I didn’t know quite what that was, but I was excited to do it. In my head I envisioned it as something you sat on, you know, like those twenty-five cent rides outside the grocery store.” She chuckles at the memory, remembering her confusion when the graffiti-ed train had come clanking up.
“Maybe you could visit sometime,” he suggests. Scully startles to feel Raphael’s hand atop her own. His winter sea eyes are crinkled at the corners, and she knows that, like the cops in Felton, he cannot see all the ways things are. He doesn’t know that she is microchipped and tattooed, that she is the mother of stolen, dead things. He doesn’t know that she was herself stolen and dead, that she has been scraped out and touched by things from the stars and that she has spoken with the ghosts she claims not to believe in. He doesn’t know that she is a facade, her own Galatea.
Her eyes take in his square-tipped fingers on her knuckles, the gingham cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt. She is afraid that she will cry with the frustration, the exhaustion, of having to pretend at normalcy. Her ever-shrinking social sphere has left her stumbling over simple interactions like this. The self pity makes her angry. Resolved.
Scully looks up at him through her sooty lashes, knows she looks fetching and seductive like this. She smiles a little, the way she did at her reflection earlier. “Do you mind if I order another bottle of wine?”
Raphael grins. “Is my company that unbearable?”
Her airy laugh is the one she’d learned as Mulder’s - Rob’s - wife. “Not at all. The fire’s just not keeping me very warm.” She loads the response with as much meaning as she can.
He takes it, and calls the waitress back to bring the check.
***
She lay her damp cheek against Raphael’s chest for a time, listening to the steady rush of his heart until he drifted into a quiet sleep. Scully sits up now, wonders if she will ever feel comfortable being unconscious around another person again. It strikes her as ironic that “sleeping together” is the accepted euphemism for a sexual relationship when it’s one of the more anxiety-inducing situations she can imagine.
Made Rob - Mulder - sleep on the couch in California. (But is that why, Dana? Is anxiety why he was exiled a floor away? What were you really afraid would happen? And how was it any different from those nights at fleabag motels when you shared a sagging bed? But it was, oh, it was.)
Her thighs are sore, she suspects there is blood streaked on them. It feels like she had her hymen broken anew, though not in a bad way. Her mouth is bruised and tender from kissing and wine. She’d forgotten that she likes kissing. It’s more intimate than the act that followed, in a way. Mulder probably knows some Jungian tale about why we eroticize a simulation of devouring our lovers. Kissing implies such trust; teeth and skulls and soft fleshy parts all coming together. Whatever the vernacular may imply, sex scarcely involves bones.
Raphael had his mouth on her hollow gunshot belly, his mouth on the cradle of her hips, his mouth -
She’d lied and said she was on birth control, but he wore a condom anyway. AIDS, paternity suits. These modern times.
Drunk, she’d considered reaching into the trash and…but no. Not quite to that point yet.
Yet.
I’ll just hold onto it a while longer, Dana. It’s a shame Matthew didn’t get to use it, but the shipping would have been outrageous and you know how Tara can be, you’re so beautiful and still young, is it Fox? I’m your mother, you can tell me.
Raphael stirs in the dark and she flinches, drops her head to her drawn knees in something very much like shame. He hadn’t offered to ride the couch like Jerse (he was Ed that night, Dana, he was Jerse when they arrested him) had and that’s fine, it reiterates that this is nothing like that.
She’d been so reckless in Philadelphia, broken and terrified like a wild thing with its leg in a trap. She wanted Ed to yank her free even if she lost the limb.
But this, here, this is okay. They’re in his bed together, no post-coital avoidance, no shame or slinking out. Raphael is bared to where the blanket lays across his hips and she hasn’t got a stitch on either. She hadn’t realized how much she missed sex, that healthy, active people are hardwired for it. She missed the mindless dopamine-serotonin cycle of pleasure; no thinking, no speaking, just action and reaction. Thinks about how she couldn't meet Mulder's eye when she said I think you know me better than that.
Moonlight falls on the night table, her phone next to his with the alarm set. She has to be out of here by 8, ready in case there’s a drive back to Delaware.
Scully unfurls, a night blooming flower, to rise and gather clothes from the floor in anticipation of morning. She drapes them over the armchair, smoothing everything out and, though she knows it’s ridiculous, she tucks her underwear beneath her sweater he way she does at the gynecologist’s office.
The floor creaks and she reaches for her gun.
“Jeeeeesus,” she breathes, mortified. She huffs out a few soothing breaths, waits for the storm surge of adrenaline to recede.
She pads back over to the bed, then sits gently at the edge. Her companion turns, then opens his eyes into the darkness around them.
“Hey,” he says, yawning. “You’re not sneaking out are you?”
She looks past him to the moon, shakes her head.
“Good,” he says. “Come back to bed.”
She closes her eyes for a long blink, wishing he were not awake. It makes her feel vulnerable, out of control. But there’s no helping it, and she lies down on her side, so tense her head barely makes a dip in the pillow. “Good night, don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite,” she murmurs without thinking.
“The what?”
“Nothing, good night.”
Raphael’s hand is heavy as a manacle at her elbow, but slides to the sheet as he drifts back into unconsciousness. Scully stays wide-eyed and alert until she is certain that he is out. He seems an even sleeper, and she does not believe he will stir again until morning.
She dreams that she is swimming, weightless and bare, in the waves beneath the harvest moon.
***
Her eyes open and she is fully awake. There is no disorientation, no morning-after confusion or regret, just a glance at her watch to confirm that she has not overslept. She sees Raphael’s t-shirt on the floor and, moving carefully so as not to put herself in too undignified a position, she retrieves it. She is sitting when she pulls it on, but it seems to come to well down her thighs. She likes wearing a man’s clothes like this, the musky scents of sweat and cologne and deodorant mingling with an undetectable pheromone that calls in a low voice to her animal brain.
Last night was good. There is a very attractive man next to her in the bed, attractive and intelligent and funny. She is satisfied that she does not emit a frequency detectable only to sociopaths and damaged psyches. She can have this, in some way or another, if she chooses it.
Scully yawns widely, hears a little popping sound in her jaw and covers her mouth with the back of her hand. “Excuse me,” she murmurs to no one, a habit from the nuns.
They drank wine last night, a lot of it, and Scully reluctantly swings her legs to the floor to go to the bathroom. The sheets are warm and soft and her eyes ache a bit even though the gray flannel curtains obscure the risen sun. Her mouth is dry, an unpleasant taste in the back of her throat.
The shirt is nearly to the tops of her knees when she stands and she feels childlike in it, her hair rumpled and her eyes sticky with sleep and sweat. She rubs at them with balled fists as she walks to the bathroom, flinching when her feet hit the tile. A chill rises in her, and Scully scuffs her feet on the plush bathmat to warm up.
The toilet seat is cold on her thighs, which are not bloody after all. She runs the tap until the water pouring from the faucet is steaming, then scrubs her hands and face. A folded length of toilet paper makes a serviceable toothbrush. Scully sees her red-knuckled hands on the edge of the basin, the freckles across her nose and cheeks. There are crows’ feet and smile lines to prove she is capable of sustained joy. She helps herself to some of Raphael’s lotion for her face, her lips. She gives herself what Missy called a whore’s bath; soap between her legs, rinsed away with one of the navy washcloths stacked in a basket.
In the bedroom her phone chirps, a muffled sound through the door. She tosses the washcloth into the hamper, hoping the ringer doesn’t wake Raphael, as accountants probably get to sleep in on the weekends.
The phone goes silent as she opens the door.
“’lo? This is Raphael,” he says into her phone. “This better be good.”
Shit.
Mom or Mulder? Frozen on the threshold, she can’t decide which is worse. Oh, Jesus, what if it’s Skinner?
“Oh, gosh,” he says, alert now. “I’m so sorry, I thought this was my…jeez, yeah, Dana’s right here.” He waves the phone at her, looking like a disgraced member of the Norse pantheon.
“I’m sorry,” he mouths, blushing. “Habit.”
Scully shrugs, what’s done is done. She takes the phone with an air of resignation, settles onto the bed. “Hello?”
“Morning, sunshine. Sorry if I woke you.” Mulder, the least of all possible evils.
“You didn’t.”
“Guess your date went well, huh?” So fucking condescending sometimes.
“What’s up, Mulder?” She senses Raphael perk up beside her. She wonders if this makes him uncomfortable at all, her talking to her partner in bed with him, but she doubts it. That’s the sort of neurosis she has. Mustn’t project.
“…around 7,” she hears from her phone, and tunes back into Radio Mulder, the channel that always comes in clearest. “I said we could be there by 11 if we hustle.”
Scully rises to retrieve the clothes she’d prepared in the small hours of the morning. She feels Raphael’s eyes on her and turns to regard him. He makes a gesture to indicate the t-shirt, then gives her a thumbs up. She smiles back. God, this is nice.
“I don’t guess the kid is there,” she asks, tucking to phone between her shoulder and her ear. She steps into her underwear with as much modesty as the shirt can provide. There’s no need to be coy, but she doesn’t want to put on a show, either.
There’s a long pause. “We’re not going to find him,” Mulder says with certainty. “Not until he wants to be found.”
Scully rolls her eyes for no reason other than form’s sake, buttons her skirt. “Can you pick me up in an hour?”
“That enough time?”
She’s positive the question isn’t innocent, but refuses to indulge him this morning. “I need to throw some things in a bag.” Shower, put on clothes that don’t reek of sex.
“I’ll bring coffee.” He sounds…irritated?
She hangs up without saying goodbye, because all of their conversations are really one ongoing conversation with very long pauses in it. She pulls Raphael’s shirt off and tosses it to the bed. Forgoing her bra, she slips her sweater back on, the fine knit so soft against her bare skin. Her nipples tighten at the sensation. Scully ignores it, stepping into her shoes like armor.
“You talk like a cop,” Raphael remarks. “On the phone, I mean. You’re so….clipped.”
Funny, she thought she always sounded like that. “Really?” She tucks her bra into her sleeve like one of Aunt Olive’s lace hankies.
“Yeah,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow. “I can actually imagine you arresting someone now. It’s kind of hot, especially with the heels and no bra.” He winks.
She longs to ask him why, why men have naughty cop fantasies and naughty librarian fantasies and naughty teacher fantasies. But she doesn’t know how, not even with Mulder, and says “Thanks, I think,” instead.
Raphael leans over to grab his boxers from the floor. “I was going to make breakfast,” he tells her as he dresses, “but it sounds like you’re in a hurry.”
Scully shrugs, holds her palms up to say what can you do?
“How about some coffee while I call you a cab? I won’t even spill it on you first.”
That smile could light up a town. “I’d like that.” She retrieves her coat as Raphael grabs his actual phone from the night table. He has the cab company on speed dial too.
He reports that the cab will be 10 minutes, just enough time for a quick cup before she hits the road again. It’s true what she told him, her houseplants always die.
The burbling of the coffee pot, the smell of grounds. Raphael’s kitchen is modern, lots of black and chrome. Some cobalt glassware, which she covets. There’s a sale at Pier One, maybe she’ll go shopping when she gets home. It would be nice to have new wineglasses, just in case…
“…case are you working on?” Raphael asks. “Anything I’d know?” He’s holding a mug out to her.
“Thanks. Um, maybe, but it’s an ongoing investigation. I can’t discuss it right now.” She tries to seem apologetic because his fascination with her badge was so charming.
“Gotcha. I had a good time last night, Dana. And I don’t just mean, you know, after dinner.”
“I did too.” She drinks the coffee, which scalds her mouth. She has an asbestos palate at this point and scarcely notices. “I’m glad I called you.”
“Me too. I wish our schedules were less crappy. Take me up on that New York visit sometime, hmm?”
A horn beeps downstairs, making them both glance at the window. “I’d like that,” Scully says. She really, really would.
They walk to the door, Raphael wearing only boxers and his khakis, the unbelted pants hanging at his hips. “Go catch some bad guys, No Relation,” he tells her as she steps into the hall.
“I’ll do my best.”
“I know you won’t call,” Raphael tells her, his hands in his pockets. “But I really did have a great night. You’re interesting. Even when you don’t say much, you’re interesting.”
The horn beeps again, but she asks why he doesn’t think she’ll call.
He smiles at her, almost indulgent. “Because,” he explains, “you never gave me your number. Trust me, I know a one night stand when I see it.” He kisses her softly on the mouth, then closes the door.
***
End Part 2/3