The Manxome Foe We Sought - 2/2
Title: The Manxome Foe We Sought
Author: amyhit
Summary: "You and your pretty partner look awfully close."
Rating: PG
Spoilers: for Pusher, also for Beyond the Sea and Grotesque.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: Mulder, Scully, literature, discussion, banter, and waiting. Why yes, I did write Stakeout Fic, but really, consider it a massive missing scene of sorts. This is something of an experimental piece. It references a lot of outside material. Having prior knowledge of the referenced texts is helpful but not necessary. tree deserves more than my thanks for betaing this one. She deserves possibly a parade (don't worry, V., even if you weren't 18 time zones away, I still couldn't commandeer a parade - you're safe from being mobbed by trombonists). All remaining mistakes are mine.
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This time Mulder makes the call. The result is the same: toneless, empty ringing. Nothing changes but the rain on the windshield, turning from speckles into half-hearted drops. Scully attempts to stretch her legs and feels one of her pumps come down on an empty condiment package. Mulder is not a person to have a designated place for garbage in his car. She’s actually surprised he didn’t just toss everything in the back seat.
“Fitzgerald or Hemingway?” she says, groping around at her feet to find the culprit bit of trash. Her partner makes a ‘bleck’ face. He looks as though she’d just assigned him a semester project.
“Fitzgerald’s just a little too maudlin. I do remember Gatsby being very appropriate at the time though. Decent dating advice.”
“Dare I ask?”
He holds out his hand for the trash she’s collected, depositing it with the collection he’s started in the driver’s side door. “‘Don’t kill yourself to make an impression.’”
“Mulder, I doubt you could fail to make an impression,” she says dryly. A memory of Phoebe Green and ‘a certain youthful indiscretion’ insinuates itself, and Scully thinks maybe the problem lay in that Phoebe liked to be impressed upon as often and as publicly as possible. A small sneer seems to come from nowhere and she coughs to cover it. “What about Hemingway? His protagonists weren’t exactly known for their gaiety.”
“Yeah, but at least they were actively miserable. They did things, they--”
“Drank in the middle of the afternoon, for one.”
He doesn’t seem to mind her mocking his logic. “Sometimes, yeah. They also ran with the bulls, and fought off sharks. Hell, a couple of them were guerilla fighters.” He rubs his 1 AM shadow edgily. “At least Jake Barnes wasn’t a coward.”
“He still didn’t get the girl,” she points out.
“He didn’t not get the girl. Besides, he was impotent.” She wishes he didn’t sound so cavalier - about impotence for Christ’s sake.
“Quelle chance,” she says, not very loudly. She takes him in: his good bones, smart and overstrung, his hands gripping his knees as though his legs could possibly have adventures without him. She is soberly nibbling the ridges off a Ritz cracker, but she isn’t hungry anymore.
“It was Gatsby who was emasculated; he never got up the nerve for anything. What’s worse than that, Scully? What’s worse than never doing anything?”
When Mulder was shot he bled so warm, so bright, and she thought, Oh god, his femur, the artery, I need to-- he needs-- he can’t-- while under her hands the blood welled faster, slower, faster with the beat of his heart. The wet splash as she gripped his thigh in the bad light turns her stomach even now. When the paramedics came she was kneeling over him. She looked up, startled, and they were shouting Agent! for her to get clear. As she scrambled away her hands left red scrawls on the ground. It came to mind then that she hadn’t given him a Christmas gift. She hadn’t wanted to presume.
Mulder’s got the driver’s seat shoved back far enough that his knees can jostle a little as he flexes on the balls of his feet. It’s not a lot of motion, just enough to shake her loose from her thoughts. He doesn’t seem to expect an answer to his question, which feels a relief - until she considers that it’s a question that answers itself, eventually.
*
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Mulder seems to take pleasure in crushing his empty soda can down small enough to fit in the door. “The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers?” Mulder asks over the noise of protesting metal. She waits patiently until he's finished.
“The former I guess.”
“Aw, c’mon, Scully, the Count has the personality of a sock puppet. There’ve been priests who’ve had more fun.”
Rolling her eyes, Scully reaches for her own drink, which she’s been saving at her feet. “Mulder, honestly - he was betrayed, demoralized, obsessed with vengeance. Despite that, he managed to become reputable and well educated, never mind wealthy--” She tries to ignore the way her partner is eyeing her root beer. “You try living in a cell for years. I doubt you’d fare better.”
“I’m not that arrogant, Scully,” he sasses. “Though I suppose it is all in how you define--”
“‘Reputable’ is not synonymous with ‘has reputation,’” she states.
“Figures.” He feels around under his seat and straightens up, clutching a fugitive water bottle. “Your turn,” he says, unhappily eyeing the bottle’s contents. She’s already prepared:
“The Tell Tale Heart or A Premature Burial?”
He indulges in a fake little shudder. “I did a report on Tetradoxin and cataleptic states for seventh grade science. I ended up tying a bell to my wrist before I’d go to sleep at night in case my parents accidentally buried me alive.” He is sniffing the water in the water bottle.
She can just imagine: young Mulder, a vector for all things macabre. He’d probably tried to keep flies in jars, a Swiss Army knife in the side of his polished shoe, Paracelsus in his head: ‘everything is poison, there is poison in everything.’ Of course, Mulder did wake up unable to move a muscle once. She remembers his terrified voice on Werber's old recording. Wordlessly she offers him her diet root beer.
“On the other hand,” he says after a couple of grateful gulps. “What self-respecting abnormal psychologist can talk down The Tell Tale Heart?” Without any warning, he changes the subject. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Through the Looking Glass?”
She blinks in surprise. “Mulder, the rules--”
“Lewis Carroll, Scully! We can't neglect the guy who gave us Jabberwocky.”
“O-- of course not, but you haven't answered yet.” She has known all along that there were no rules.
“A guy's gotta keep some mystery,” is all she gets in return.
*
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She was six when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released. Her mother had taken the children to the theatre, five Scullys all in a line in their clickety-clack seats, the youngest two swinging their legs in the colored dark. Scully remembers the outing - her brother's fingers wriggling in her popcorn, tumbling it onto her lap - and that her Father had left the day before with a wave and a salute. She doesn’t remember the movie, only Gene Wilder’s shining eyes as he recited O’Shaughnessy: ‘we are the dreamers of dreams.’
Reading the book years later, every day at noon for a school week she sat in the lunchroom and forgot to eat. On the fifth day Missy, who had a free period and homework to neglect, came by to eat Dana’s apple and drink her juice. ‘Aren’t you done with that thing yet?’ she said.
Dana was reading it again. ‘I really like this one,’ she mumbled. Missy read Seventeen and Tiger Beat - she was sceptical of anything that wasn’t written in a column. Dana had been wanting to talk to Missy about something for days, but now that Missy was here and talking Dana had to close her eyes to help settle the fluttering in her stomach. ‘Missy, can I talk to you about something?’
‘What? Hey, can I have your cookie?’ Missy didn’t wait for an answer but she did sit down to eat it, which meant she wasn’t going to run off. ‘Okay, what?’ she said when she’d gotten the cellophane wrapping off. Dana looked at her lap. She played with the cover of her book for a minute, feeling her face begin to heat. 'Just tell me already.'
‘I-- I think I sort of like someone.’ It felt like there was all this warm, unwanted commotion in her body.
‘What!’
‘I said, I think--’
‘I heard you the first time,’ Missy waved her off. ‘Really?’ she sounded delighted. ‘Hah! Who?’
Dana just kept looking at the book in her lap and playing with its pages, clutching it tighter. Missy had crushes all the time, and she talked about them - all the time - which is why Dana had wanted to ask Missy what it meant, but now she just wished she hadn’t said anything. This was clearly a stupid mistake - probably not even a crush - probably just, just something. ‘Um,’ she said, fidgeting with her book. Missy looked at the book now, and then at Dana again. There was a moment. Suddenly Missy snatched up the book and began waving it in the air.
‘On him? On him - on Charlie!’
Missy promptly stood and pranced, giggling, around the table with Dana’s book. ‘No. No, Missy, don’t--’
Missy was having none of it.
‘That’s hilarious Danes, it’s so cute.’
‘No, I--’
‘You do too, you do too!’
But she didn’t, not like this, not how Missy was making it be like, not - not Charlie. She had to stop Missy, make her understand, make this less awful than it was. She stood up from the table, all four-foot-seven and hot in the face. ‘I do NOT!’ That got Missy’s attention. Her sister halted on the other side of the table and stared at her.
‘Well what then?’ Missy huffed.
Dana only shrugged. It felt like all there was. How could she explain to Missy that what she loved, what she really really loved was that there were boys, and there was growing up, and there were grown up men who were just like boys, really, except they’d had all this time to know things she’d never even thought about, and have ideas, and there were ideas so good it felt like she was going blind just thinking about them, and that maybe she did like Charlie because in the story he was going to grow up to be just like Willy Wonka, but just like himself, too, and if he could, then maybe she could, and they wouldn’t go blind from thinking all those thoughts.
‘Give me my book back, Missy,’ she said, holding her shaking arm out across the table. She could see Missy thinking about being mean and not giving it back, but the bell rang for class, so she did. It didn’t really matter; Dana was just going to return it to the library right away anyway.
She hadn’t read Through the Looking Glass until Daniel pointed out that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician as well as a children’s classicist. She read Alice’s adventures as she read everything then, with an eye for purpose, and she closed the back cover feeling glad to be finished with it. Daniel would want to know what she thought. She thought maybe Carroll was a very good mathematician. She thought Alice’s plight was senseless, and further complicated, in all likelihood, by the author’s drug-induced irrationality. She thought it best not to pity Alice, who was never the right size. Alice would wake up eventually, after all, wasn’t that the point? Dana was not a child, and she was not given to nightmares. In fact, between the hospital and the weekends Daniel could get away, she was usually too exhausted to remember the dreams she had.
Mulder sweeps a hand through his hair, his eyebrows raised expectantly. Oh, she thinks, baffled to find she’s considering his answer not hers: Mulder likes both stories. Mulder isn’t like her. He enjoys the darkness, the enormity of ‘if.’ He will hold a candle to anything, hoping to see it better, but nothing holds a candle to him. Mulder likes what scares him and loves what overwhelms him - the proverbial snipes and snails and puppy dog tails. Both stories.
“Scully?” he prompts. “You still playing?”
“Neither.” She shrugs - tries to take a deeper breath. “I-- uh-- didn’t really like either. I didn’t think they were--” But none of this means anything, does it? Impulsively, she grabs the drink away from him and takes a swig, then shoves it back. “I’m not like you, Mulder,” she says suddenly. She notices Mulder smudge the rim of the soda can where she drank from with his thumb, once. Probably worried about cooties, she thinks.
“Maybe it depends on the day. That’s how it is for me.” He turns to look out the driver’s side window and she can only see his jaw where it meets his ear. A full five seconds pass before she understands he is talking about books, about liking books. She gulps and nods dumbly. It is horrible, really, feeling as nonsensical as she often does, around someone who is as devastatingly good at nonsense as Mulder.
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The minute she opens her mouth the similarities occur to her, but not before. Beside her Mulder has stopped his spontaneous bongo drumming on the steering wheel. She holds her breath and waits.
“Never read it,” he says. Okay, she thinks, all right, she can exhale again. But then he says, “Tell me about it.” He says it in that casual way, and leans back even further in his seat, raising his hands to the ceiling to rub against the pile. She thinks, Oh God, that’s so much worse. “Scully?” he asks.
“You’ll have heard the story, Mulder. A girl that gets trapped inside a building during the Second World War.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about it.”
“Then you don’t--”
“But not with Scullyvision. I want to know what you gleaned from it.” He stops playing with the ceiling upholstery long enough to bat his eyelashes at her sideways. He can’t possibly have made the connection, she thinks. If he can give her those eyes - the long shadows of his eyelashes fringing his cheeks - and ask her like that, it can’t possibly have occurred to him, the similarities. She tries to draft a version of this story in her head without using the words ‘little girl,’ ‘brave girl,’ ‘Jewish girl,’ ‘innocent,’ ‘trapped there for years,’ ‘betrayed,’ ‘family torn apart,’ ‘utterly unfair,’ ‘ugly thing,’ ‘damn ugly thing,’ ‘god damn unfair ugly thing.’ She tries to make it a story that doesn’t end with, ‘never made it out alive.’
“So how ‘bout that story, Scully? It’s past our bedtimes already.”
Doesn’t he see that this is a story she doesn’t want to tell? Not to Mulder, not Mulder, whom she suspects of buying a whole gallon of milk even though half goes bad each time, because he hates looking at the faces of the missing kids on the cartons when there’s nothing he can do. She considers reaching out and pressing the radio dial; not saying anything at all, just losing herself in whatever phone-in station his radio happens to be tuned to. But she doesn’t do that. Instead she fixes him with a look. It’s her very strongest look.
She takes one more deep breath, and then begins. “It’s the story of a young girl, living in hiding in Amsterdam during the last years of World War Two.” Scully fights the urge to close her eyes against this. She must continue. “She became trapped inside a part of her father’s boarded up office building for almost, uh-- almost two years, and while she was there she-- she wrote a diary about all the things that happened around her, so that when it was over - when the war was over - someone--” Scully clears her throat. “They found her diary, and they read it, and had to have known what it meant - what it would mean to the people who had been through their own wars.”
Mulder looks in her eyes and she looks back. What else can she do? It really is a very sad story. She expects Mulder to ask her Frank’s age at the time, what she looked like, what she was like. He surprises her. “Was it close to over, Scully, when they caught her?”
“A couple weeks. Maybe a month.”
“A month.” He nods. “Huh.”
Of course Frank died of typhoid, starvation, a fall from the bed. She wasn’t granted a hot, blind death; what Scully views as the immeasurably small dignity of a bullet. Scully says nothing of that, of how They used her up first. Her doctor’s mind wanders amid the carnage: fabric the color of fouled earth, bodies the color of dirty soap, so anemic that the blood had withered from them - barely blood enough to live by, die by. “Was it any good?” asks Mulder.
Was it any good.
She won’t tell him she’d had little time to think of its implications amidst the snapping of latex gloves and the pungent antiseptic and the students, students, students - some of them older than her, most of them taller, all of them asking her questions, questions, questions - jostling around her to see the body, another body, any body, to see her scalpel glide expertly into the hepatic artery - gleaming metal and blood and dark, heavy liver tissue under her blade - and hear her say: ‘enlarged bile duct, indicative of what?’ In truth she'd read Frank’s story only because someone had left a few tattered books in the on-call room.
“No, of-- of course not,” stammers Scully. “It was very hard to...” But then she thinks of Frank on the paperback cover, awkward and joyful for the world’s kindness. Frank in a cold vacant factory in Amsterdam, writing, ‘I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out’ and Scully’s throat feels very narrow and she almost can’t stop her mouth from turning.
“You know, Mulder, I’ve always felt that when people call it the story of a girl, what it means is that it’s her story to tell, and that’s the beauty of it, that she told it so honestly. It isn’t even really a war story the way she tells it, there’s so much--” and her mouth does bend bitterly downwards now, but she catches it quickly, forcing the rest. “There’s so much hope - ceaseless hope, really. So yes, it was, very good in a way.”
Mulder purses his lips for a moment, then goes back to tracing patterns on the ceiling. She can’t remember what the other choice was. “We should market you some Scullyvision glasses, Scully,” he says. “I bet they’d sell like hotcakes.”
She wonders if any of what just happened happened, or if maybe they aren’t merely talking about books.
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Modell isn’t going to show. About forty minutes ago when Scully stopped subtly casing the parking lot every two minutes, Mulder realized that the night was ebbing fruitlessly into morning. He'd felt something earlier, some kind of prickle at the nape, and so had she, though he’d be wasting his breath to ask her. Beside him Scully rolls down her window and then rolls it back up in vain. The condensation is as thick as ever, only now with thin streaks in it, barely wide enough to peer out of. She scowls, at which he shrugs uselessly. “The Waste Land or Howl?”
“I haven’t read Howl.”
Mulder shakes his head, dismayed. “Not into beat poetry, Scully? Okay, we’ll do a subcategory: there are five parts to The Waste Land, which is your favorite?”
“Where in the rule book does it say you get to have subcategories, Mulder?” She is pouting, really pouting. He looks away and down and back but she hasn’t stopped so he looks away again because it’s rude to stare.
“Under the ‘Conversation is Not an Exact Science’ clause, Scully.” She only narrows her eyes.
He huffs on the window and writes a few words. “Not that one,” she says after reading them. He’s written ‘HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME.’ “Maybe ‘What the Thunder Said.’”
“And what did the thunder say?” he quizzes. She flashes him the glare she reserves for when he’s being a know-it-all, which is ironic considering he actually doesn’t know what the thunder said. “It said, ‘One-one thousand, two-one thousand.'"
She rolls her eyes - gestures to the phrase on the window. “Your favorite?”
“‘A Game of Chess’? Nah, probably ‘Burial of the Dead.’”
“‘April is the cruelest month,’” she says, yawning.
Mulder presses a hand to his chest as though smitten. “Wooing me with poetry, Scully?” He tries to remember a few complete lines to retaliate with. He looks out over the dash at the brown February fog that has settled in amongst the parked cars for the night, gnawing his lip introspectively.
Memory warps and wefts amid his soda pop buzz and a head full of unwritten case notes. Scully must sense he is plotting something because when he turns his focus on her she peaks an enquiring eyebrow. “‘We came back late, your arms full, and your hair wet, and I couldn’t speak; my eyes failed. I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.’” That’s enough. It’s the sort of thing she won’t know - too sweet for her sensible palate - which makes it good, he thinks. He is curious to know what she will make of it.
But Scully isn’t talking. Is she cringing inwardly at the mockery he’s made of old Thomas? He’s fairly certain he got it right. Never recite poetry to a woman, he thinks. It’s like thinking you can recite sunlight to a plant.
“Is this more residual memory from your time at Oxford?”
“Yeah,” He nods casually.
“I see,” she says. “And I suppose Phoebe was greatly impressed by it.” She is obviously teasing, but her inflection is...missing. She smoothes her sleeves down her arms with focus.
“Don’t know,” he mumbles. “I don’t think she ever read it.”
*
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The picnic is now definitively over. Rations have been consumed, garbage has been collected and compacted by force into the driver’s side door compartment, and crumbs have been swept carelessly off seats onto the floor (or carefully off the seat into Scully’s hands).
“DC or Marvel?” she poses while fighting with the packet of her moist towelette.
Mulder makes a ‘gimmie’ motion and she passes it over for him to open with his teeth. The cloth inside is dry. “Hang on a second.” He roots around in the glove box and comes out with two more packets. “Here,” he says, shredding the tops off of both packets at once. These have also gone dry. Scully frowns, embarrassed. She isn’t usually a messy eater.
“Not messy,” he says. “Hungry.” They could both use his but in his boredom he recently used it to wipe down his keys, the steering wheel, and the top of one of his shoes.
“Mulder, I’m fine,” she assures him, sighing. “I’ll just--” and she holds up her hands as delicately as she can manage with sticky fingers. It’ll be pretty embarrassing on the off chance she has to handcuff anyone.
“Just wipe them off on the upholstery,” he suggests in all seriousness. He ignores her derisive sniff, already looking around the car. What he comes up with is the stray water bottle from before. “Here,” he says, holding it up and screwing off the lid. “Stale but guaranteed non-toxic.”
She looks at her suit, which is miraculously still clean, and then doubtfully at the bottle of Disani. She is distantly aware of being at the unique impasse between misery and hilarity which stems from it being only about four hours until the time she usually gets out of bed. She wonders what bizarre fixation Mulder has with her hands that he will not let her alone. “I think I’ll pass, thanks, Mulder.”
“No, here,” he says, dragging her hands across the car so they’re over his lap instead of hers. He has already dowsed the waded up towelette with water and she barely has time to register a protest before he begins to swab her fingers. She looks down as a few drops of water darken the fabric of his pants. Surprised, she turns her hands over in a feeble attempt to grasp the cloth. He swabs her palms as if it were what she’d had in mind, uncurling her fingers with the hand that isn’t busy swabbing.
“Mulder!” she manages to come out with.
He retreats, leaving her the cloth. “Yeah?”
She rubs it between her fingers a few more times but they are already clean now, and slightly cool from the astringent in the cloth. She has nothing left to protest. Wordlessly, she folds it up into a neat square before giving it to him to put in the door with the rest of the garbage. “DC or Marvel?” she says.
He grins at her reversion to the game. “Can I say Darkhorse?”
Scully thinks it over, tentatively smelling the watery antiseptic scent on her palms. “Yes, of course,” she says, barely smiling behind her hand.
*
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Scully keeps yawning, small sighing yawns, which are driving him crazy. They make him yawn too, and his yawns are big galumphing things. For amusement he pulls down the sunshade and positions it so that his nose looks as large as possible.
“Let’s go with Lord of the Rings or, uh, the Bible,” he says to his reflection. He is half joking. Neither of them is really taking any of it seriously at this point.
“New Testament or Old?” Scully deadpans. Is she being sincere? She could be. Scully has a lethal deadpan. “I’m kidding, Mulder. Besides my obvious bias, I’ve only read one of the elected texts.”
Mulder can’t help it that his mouth falls open. Who the hell has never read- “And the Church is alright with that?” He smirks facetiously. She gives him an arch stare and he reforms. “In all seriousness though-- you’re telling me you haven’t read the most epic story of all time?”
“The most epic story? Tolkien. Elves and Wizards, Mulder." She almost looks amused. "That’s a little presumptuous. There are places in the world where a claim like that could get you into trouble, even by your standards.”
“The most epic fictional story of all time, then,” he says impatiently.
This does not appease her. “Mulder, you don't believe in a religion. You think the Bible's fictional as well.”
“Right now, I mostly don’t believe you haven’t read this story. It may qualify you as an X-File. In fact, you could be the last of your kind, Scully.” He thinks suddenly of the Jersey devil, no devil at all. She’d left footprints on his clothes that he’d kept and hadn’t washed out. She was the last of her kind. Scully is even lovelier, more civilized too. She keeps a fingernail brush in her suitcase - she even uses it - and once in the woods she broke down and handed him a vial of citronella to keep the bugs off, then scooped her hair aside and waited while he dabbed an arc of scent from ear to ear. When he was done he felt bad for the mosquitoes, who went hungry. Scully has no natural habitat, either. She is unnatural - can make a home out of a suitcase, a hospital out of a first aid kit, he’s seen it. “We’ll have to keep you a secret - we can’t have the authorities finding out,” he says.
She huffs defensively. “It’s not as though it’s a story I’ve never heard of. I know the plot: a hegira or a fated quest, the anthropomorphizing of an object - they’re age-old elements of storytelling. And the significance of circles or spherical shapes is particularly common. The ancient Egyptians believed the sun to be the Eye of Ra - a decimating force - and in Grecian times the original myth of Pandora held that the ills of the world were not kept in a box but in a clay jar--” she makes a circle with her hands as though loosely holding a jar. “--which Pandora opened, unleashing them upon the world. The Holy Grail was a chalice imitating the shape of a womb. Even the most commonly sighted UFOs are purported to appear as saucers.”
Mulder tilts the sunshade enough to see her reflected in it without her noticing. His partner looks momentarily flushed, post-diatribe.
“You’re right, about all of it, Scully, but see none of those stories have hobbits.”
She notices his trick with the visor and pointedly ignores it. “I was under the impression hobbits were troglodytic and meddlesome,” she states flatly. “And that they were generally short in stature. Not qualities common of legends.”
“That’s exactly why they play such a vital role - the very idea that the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a hobbit is compelling. We can all relate to it in that it echoes the inadequacy of the human condition.”
“So, what, no one can be a hero in an even fight; they all have to be underdogs?”
He is going to correct her, but realizes he can’t think of how. He hunches into his seat, a little crestfallen. “It’s a good thing we don’t bet on them, hey Scully, or we’d all be broke.”
She scrutinizes him, as steadily as always, and he feels her bright, sharp focus, as though some part of him were being held in very cold water. “I’m not sure I believe that, Mulder,” she says. “I think heroic deeds are done every day, out of a need to do good, nothing more.” She slowly tucks her tidying fingers around the arc of her ear, introspective now. “You really believe as human beings we’re inadequate, Mulder?”
He shrugs. He is admiring the darkness outside. The rain has stopped but nothing has dried yet and it all looks sharp.
He thinks of circles, of symbols, and adventure. He thinks of her. She has stepped over pentagrams, pinning them to the floor with her drastic shoes. He likens her to Charon, a celestial kedge, her nearness altering his course; only she is lambent out here in the dark. He has seen saucers in the sky. They have blinded him, stupefied him, and ultimately passed him over. He is earthbound, cripplingly so, and he hopes for more than he knows how to ask for, or believe in.
Together they have passed through towns, through turbulence on rocky flights, through state lines on back road highways, tracking this or that - peril or a place to sleep. They have fought for their passage and each other. After the highway signs that see them out of towns and then the ones that welcome them in, he finds her with a confirmative sideways glance. Borders are nothing more than lines and legislature to her, but he feels as though they’ve made some kind of leap. One he needs to be sure she’s made with him. If she is sleeping he might make noise to wake her. ‘New state,’ he’ll say. To which she’ll usually utter something about Maryland, or Virginia, and her voice will be that rough kind of gorgeous that is the other reason he wakes her.
One weekend when he’s forgotten to renew his cable subscription and his basketball’s gone soft on the shelf, and she’s either really not home or it’s him specifically she is screening against, he scrounges up a yard stick and a map of America and he draws it out in lines, the places they’ve been. It takes a long time, and when he’s done Washington is on one side and their travels fan a crooked sphere from sea to sea. This is their journey. The lines of it look like a tattered dandelion, a ghost of strange seeds they have sown.
“I think we are a little inadequate, yeah,” he answers. “In an infinite universe we are confined by finite life spans. I’d say that’s your proof of inadequacy right there.”
“Proof,” she says. The word seems almost to hum.
She has seen it, unfurling under scopes and gleaming over skylines, has stood breathless. He has stood beside her, just as breathless; no room inside for anything but this, a place to start. She is a foot farther from the sky than he is, but she can rattle off Kepler's planetary laws like children's rhymes. He locates her at an angle in his mirror, a panel of Scully: two eyes and that narrow fin of nose. She is watching the lot. Her eyes are silver in the light, and oh yes, this is really what yearning means - this blinding crescendo of feeling. She is generally short in stature, while he is plenty meddlesome, and he wonders how many questions they will ask. One by one, he makes believe they are going to ask them all.
*
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*
“I dunno, Mul’er,” she says, succumbing to another yawn. “By general comparison they’re very similar stories. Though I suppose by its resounding impact alone, I would choose 1984.”
“Not that similar,” he insists. His voice has begun to take on a subtle lulling quality, making him sound closer than he ought to. It gives her pause, draws her face in from the nightscape seared by the streetlights. The interior of the car only seems to have gotten darker - as dark as a cave - as the night has drawn on. “I can think of at least one significant difference between the two stories.” His fingers prance strange choreography on the steering wheel. Watching, she thinks of hypnotism tactics, her latest studies. She thinks she ought to look away.
“Besides the word count?” He nods keenly, clearly hoping she will guess. “Well...Orwell’s protagonist failed in all respects, as opposed to Anthem wherein the protagonist succeeded, clearly, by securing his right to freedom. I’d say that’s pretty significant.”
“Sure, there’s that,” he breezes.
“But?” She is in her upright seat and he is in his reclined one, smiling a sleuthy, halogen grin by the glow of the radio clock. He sits there waiting for her to guess again and she is too numbed by inactivity to protest. “Both stories center around adult males,” she begins, a little heavily. “Pariahs to their civilization, conducting themselves secretly and in seclusion. Both stories utilize a dystopian reality, anti-collectivism ideology,” she ticks the points off loosely on her fingers. “As well as clear allusions to political agendas such as Communism and Nazism. I’m not sure what ‘significant difference’ you think I’m missing.”
“The humanity of a protagonist is at the heart of any story,” he reasons.
Hobbits, right. She gives in to the urge to roll her eyes. “So one protagonist had some ‘human’ quality the other lacked...” He says nothing, smiling. “A name?” she hazards.
“Warmer.”
"Privacy, then - his own space."
"Warmer."
In close proximity she’s been finding it increasingly difficult to remember they both exist simultaneously. She gets a sense with him of playing particle/wave. She scarcely knows her own properties, though she tries to draw herself in smart lines. And she argues with him, god help her, she argues. Meanwhile he crowds her into corners and out of her senses; her instincts register provocation, allure, a sort of ‘magnétisme animal,’ if she is honest with herself. She dons stern shoes that exaggerate the sense she has of her own body, as well as lengthen her stride. In the real world, in grocery stores and malls, she walks too fast - it looks strange - and she feels pent up all the time. As tall as he is and as sure-footed in the scree of his insane theories, it is all she can do to be tall with her eyes and sure with her voice, determined not to forget herself entirely. She feels ‘panic’ as it was originally intended: drawn away from the path, following the lure of something ariose and unseen into the dark, dark woods.
This is conspiracy, what they’re doing tonight. All four doors are power locked and they’re breathing together. She is reminded that it is the efforts of their bodies evidenced on the windows. Her mouth’s gone dry, her feet are cold under the dash, and her jacket is in accordion folds behind her in the seat. She must've broken out in pale gooseflesh hours ago, and she’s a little dehydrated now, so that when she does remember herself, finally, it’s all at once; a surge like electricity come silently to set her clocks back, Oh... Oh, god--
--and she feels privately, horribly charmed.
“An ally,” she hears Mulder say. Apparently he’s interpreted her silence as a forfeit.
She makes an involuntary little hmm-ing noise in her throat, which she can’t catch back, and shakes her head minutely. “Pardon?” She heard him, but in a way it’s like she didn’t.
“You remember-- uh--” he snaps his fingers. “They ran him out of town but she-- she had his back. They both had some kind of serial numbers, I can’t remember, but I think he called her ‘Golden One.’”
Scully tries to focus on some external point that isn’t him in this drowsy little car. “Right. Yes, I remember. That’s, uh-- that’s very forward of him.”
“I dunno, Scully, he was lost in the woods; she saved his ass. If that doesn’t deserve the title...”
She says nothing and he doesn’t continue. She can no longer seem to keep from slouching into her straight-backed seat. All this time she’s been livened and warmed by their conversation while, unbeknownst to her, weariness has crept into her smallest muscles. The tiny levator palbraes of her eyes are barely heeding her demands to hold his gaze. She struggles, rapt and tired at once - it even hurts a little. Meanwhile, her hands in her lap have become conspicuous fists. She slides them around her middle and holds on.
“The Unconquered,” she mumbles, her head against the window. The glass chills her temple. It’s wet and uncomfortable and she lifts away from it immediately, easing onto her other hip. “That was his name in return.” Her ear presses against the seat. She feels her hair whisper over her face and blindly drags it back. Mulder says nothing.
Her hands begin to loosen gradually from where she has crossed them against her ribs. She doesn’t feel a thing until one of them pats softly into her lap, then she starts awake, immediately embarrassed. Her gaze rises to find Mulder...and finds that he is already looking at her. A tremor travels through her.
“Yeah,” he says - to her it seems from out of nowhere - “I knew it had to be something crazy like that.”
She stamps her feet to warm them up, and she swears he startles.
*
*
*
February 27, 1996
Fairfax Mercy Hospital,
Alexandria, Virginia
8:17 p.m.
Mulder has made the assumption she’ll need a ride home from Fairfax Mercy Hospital, so when she takes a seat in the waiting room and rests a back issue of National Geographic on her crossed legs he looks perplexed.
“I’m going to wait. I have some questions about Modell’s medical records I’m hoping an oncologist can clear up,” she explains. She’d been inquiring at the front desk when he came out of the washroom, a few splashes of water on his shirt.
She watches him glance around the waiting room at all the chairs that are empty two and three in a row. She’s chosen an end chair, blocked in by a sleeping boy and beside that an agitated woman with a cell phone to her ear.
“The specialist’s in surgery now. He’s expected to be another hour at least.” She flips a page and two more go with it but, since she can’t find her reading glasses anyway, it doesn’t much matter. “You should go home, Mulder; get some rest. I’m fine here. I’ll call a cab when I’m ready to leave.”
He shakes his head, snagging a magazine off a nearby chair. “It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, and you need both pairs of yours. Why don’t I just wait?”
“Mulder, go home,” she says. He lowers his issue of Cosmopolitan.
“You don’t want a ride?”
She wants a ride. She wants to sit in his car with that damn stupid heater that doesn’t work and argue with him until she forgets herself. She wants him to argue with her until he loosens his tie and rolls up his sleeves and starts saying her name every fifth word because it’s in his psychologist’s training. She wants to agree to disagree. She wants to lock them both in his car and not let them out until she realizes that he could easily get her killed, and he realizes that he could easily get himself killed, and they both get a goddamn clue and realize that either way it wouldn’t be something they could live with. She wants to lock herself against him, arms and legs, face and chest and fingers - wants his body so close, so badly, it’s as though it were a magnet of blood. She knows bodies; she can predict the weight of his heart - his manic, romantic, idiot heart - it's 1/200th of his body weight. She knows all about bodies, and looking at his, she wants everything that’s in there.
“I’ll catch a cab,” she says and smiles.
Once he’s gone she places her magazine on top of his on the center table and stares at her hands while she waits.
*
*
*
February 27, 1996
Scully's Apt. #35, 1419
Georgetown, DC
9:42 p.m.
He sits in his car under the streetlight outside his apartment for a good half hour without ever reaching for the door latch. He’s too exhausted to go up there and hate himself to sleep. When he notices her glasses on the dashboard, forgotten, it’s all the reason he needs to drive across town.
He knocks softly at first but she doesn’t come, so he knocks louder until his knuckles smart. He’s got them poised for a third try when the door swings open, leaving him with his fist in the air. “Hey, Scully, whatcha doing?” She is still in her rumpled suit and there’s a shawl spilling over her arms but she isn’t sleepy-eyed. In fact, she looks a bit startled.
“Mulder, what--”
“You forgot your book.” He holds it up. “Oh, and you might need these.” From his coat pocket he produces her glasses. A kettle begins to boil behind her, too shrill to ignore. She closes her eyes against the intrusion.
“Just a moment.” She pads away, leaving the door not exactly wide open, but enough so that when she comes back to find him sitting on the arm of her couch, rubbing the lenses of her glasses on his t-shirt, she looks as though she’d expected him there.
“So you did read Ginsberg.” He leans over the copy of The Norton Anthology she’s left open on the coffee table beside her charging laptop. She shifts her grip on her mug carefully. She’s underlined a few words in pencil. “‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’” he reads. “Quite a memorable start.”
She studies her Earl Grey. She hasn’t offered him anything, nothing to keep him here, but he isn’t leaving yet. He’s already played Lady Macbeth - washed, washed, washed the spent gunpowder off his hands - and it isn’t enough. If it were up to him he might just stay here all the long years until his cells sloughed away and grew back again and he was a completely new person, one who’d never heard her beg him for her life. Since it’s really up to her, he counts on at least being allowed to stay until her tea is cool enough to drink. “It was a gift from Charlie - one of his favorites, actually, but it never struck me before now.”
He batters forward a couple of pages to see that Scully has also underlined the ending, and a place near it where Ginsberg tells his friend from the asylum, ‘while you are not safe, I am not safe.’ “Perspective changes,” he says.
“I suppose it does.” She delicately closes the book in front of him. “Thank you for bringing my glasses.”
He blinks, reluctant to rise from the arm of the couch. Another moment and he’s up, shuffling toward the door. She retrieves her glasses from the table and follows him there. As she puts them on he is dismissing her thanks, but is interrupted when they clatter to the floor. Scully makes a pained sound at the impact and reflexively grasps for them anyway. In an instant he’s snatched them up and is examining them for damage. There doesn’t seem to be any harm done, but she might do him some once he tells her what he’s done.
“Mulder?” she holds out her hand for them.
“I, uh--” he fiddles pathetically with the nose pieces. “I tried them on.”
For a minute she refuses to meet his eyes. She looks at his chest and then at her door and then at her tea. Nervously he shifts from foot to foot. With a slight tremor, she braves a sip of tea, and that - Mulder looks on, stunned - is when she begins to laugh. Weakly at first and then harder, shoulders hunched, doing her very best not to spit a mouthful of tea on her partner. She is gestalt when she laughs, vivid and unknowable, and even with his memory he can’t ever imagine it when he tries.
“Hey, careful.” He comes out of his state in time to remove the mug from her hands before she tips it. She manages to glare at him, but only laughs harder. As she bends over slightly her hair swings forward, revealing her scalp, almost bright in its paleness. He tries not to think about how large the hole would’ve been.
The fit of laughter is followed by a jag of Scully-demure coughing, which she hides in her hand. Afterward, she collects herself and observes him levelly. She is wry, clearly exhausted, and her hands and cheeks are pink from hot tea. He wonders how the hell he is supposed to leave now, with the tarantellas of her laughter like poltergeist activity in his head. He gives her back her glasses, which she slips into her collar. “Hey, Scully, you wanna play a game?”
“Do you have any eights?” she follows lazily.
In Mulder’s mind is an image of Carl Solomon at the end of Howl, devastated and insane, journeying the night roads across America to arrive at his friend’s small door. “We can’t play Go Fish, Scully,” he says. “We’d have all each other’s cards.”
*
*
*
End
*
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Notes and Things:
If it doesn't go without saying, my own impressions of the numerous texts discussed in this fic do not consistently mirror the impressions held by Mulder and Scully. Neither did I intend to write Mulder and Scully's held impressions as unequivocal. With any luck their expressed impressions come across as being well-thought and reasonable. Just the same, I'd be shocked if anyone agreed with their interpretations across the board. Contention between reader and fic is, in this case, pretty much a foregone conclusion.
-the title comes from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
-"...got a case of the Mean Reds?": When you are afraid of something, but you don't know what it is. Used in the novel Breakfast At Tiffanys.
-“Those are really 'horrorshow' choices...”: ‘Horrorshow’ is the words used in A Clockwork Orange to mean ‘excellent'. In the novel (as in its use here) the irony of the word is that what is being described as ‘horrorshow’ is often, in fact, quite horrific.
-the 15th of Av: A Jewish holiday. I doubt Mulder considers himself Jewish, but it seems very probable that Teena does.
-“‘This is not an exit,’ Scully murmurs...”: In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman - having finally come to terms with the inescapable fact of his monstrosity, finds himself in a bar starring at a sign over a door. The sign reads ‘this is not an exit’. It is, of course, highly symbolic.
-“...your Annie Oakley interventions”: Annie was a prodigy gunman in the mid to late 1800's. Her aim was legendary.
-"'Damn you,' she thinks a little hotly, 'we didn't all recieve a Congratulatory First...’": Oxford’s own special way of saying you’re an academic ace.
-“Well I haven’t exactly had occasion to engineer a V-2 rocket lately...”: The very loose focus of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow is on engineering and/or obtaining cutting-edge WWII weaponry.
-The Great Gatsby’s 'dating advice', “don’t kill yourself to make an impression.”: Gatsby, in a last desperate attempt to woo the object of his ardent affection, essentially kills himself for her benefit.
-“HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME”: A reiteration from Eliot’s poem ‘A Game of Chess’.
-“‘We came back late, your arms full, and your hair wet, and I couldn’t speak; my eyes failed. I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.’”: from Eliot's Burrial of the Dead.
-“He likens her to Charon...”: Pluto’s moon. Charon does not orbit Pluto. They revolve face to face.
-"...he crowds her into corners and out of her senses; her instincts register provocation, allure, a sort of ‘magnétisme animal’": A magnetic fluid or ethereal medium residing in the bodies of animate beings, as postulated by Franz Mesmer. Later became ‘animal magnetism’, but originally lacked such definite sexual connotation.
Author: amyhit
Summary: "You and your pretty partner look awfully close."
Rating: PG
Spoilers: for Pusher, also for Beyond the Sea and Grotesque.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: Mulder, Scully, literature, discussion, banter, and waiting. Why yes, I did write Stakeout Fic, but really, consider it a massive missing scene of sorts. This is something of an experimental piece. It references a lot of outside material. Having prior knowledge of the referenced texts is helpful but not necessary. tree deserves more than my thanks for betaing this one. She deserves possibly a parade (don't worry, V., even if you weren't 18 time zones away, I still couldn't commandeer a parade - you're safe from being mobbed by trombonists). All remaining mistakes are mine.
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*
This time Mulder makes the call. The result is the same: toneless, empty ringing. Nothing changes but the rain on the windshield, turning from speckles into half-hearted drops. Scully attempts to stretch her legs and feels one of her pumps come down on an empty condiment package. Mulder is not a person to have a designated place for garbage in his car. She’s actually surprised he didn’t just toss everything in the back seat.
“Fitzgerald or Hemingway?” she says, groping around at her feet to find the culprit bit of trash. Her partner makes a ‘bleck’ face. He looks as though she’d just assigned him a semester project.
“Fitzgerald’s just a little too maudlin. I do remember Gatsby being very appropriate at the time though. Decent dating advice.”
“Dare I ask?”
He holds out his hand for the trash she’s collected, depositing it with the collection he’s started in the driver’s side door. “‘Don’t kill yourself to make an impression.’”
“Mulder, I doubt you could fail to make an impression,” she says dryly. A memory of Phoebe Green and ‘a certain youthful indiscretion’ insinuates itself, and Scully thinks maybe the problem lay in that Phoebe liked to be impressed upon as often and as publicly as possible. A small sneer seems to come from nowhere and she coughs to cover it. “What about Hemingway? His protagonists weren’t exactly known for their gaiety.”
“Yeah, but at least they were actively miserable. They did things, they--”
“Drank in the middle of the afternoon, for one.”
He doesn’t seem to mind her mocking his logic. “Sometimes, yeah. They also ran with the bulls, and fought off sharks. Hell, a couple of them were guerilla fighters.” He rubs his 1 AM shadow edgily. “At least Jake Barnes wasn’t a coward.”
“He still didn’t get the girl,” she points out.
“He didn’t not get the girl. Besides, he was impotent.” She wishes he didn’t sound so cavalier - about impotence for Christ’s sake.
“Quelle chance,” she says, not very loudly. She takes him in: his good bones, smart and overstrung, his hands gripping his knees as though his legs could possibly have adventures without him. She is soberly nibbling the ridges off a Ritz cracker, but she isn’t hungry anymore.
“It was Gatsby who was emasculated; he never got up the nerve for anything. What’s worse than that, Scully? What’s worse than never doing anything?”
When Mulder was shot he bled so warm, so bright, and she thought, Oh god, his femur, the artery, I need to-- he needs-- he can’t-- while under her hands the blood welled faster, slower, faster with the beat of his heart. The wet splash as she gripped his thigh in the bad light turns her stomach even now. When the paramedics came she was kneeling over him. She looked up, startled, and they were shouting Agent! for her to get clear. As she scrambled away her hands left red scrawls on the ground. It came to mind then that she hadn’t given him a Christmas gift. She hadn’t wanted to presume.
Mulder’s got the driver’s seat shoved back far enough that his knees can jostle a little as he flexes on the balls of his feet. It’s not a lot of motion, just enough to shake her loose from her thoughts. He doesn’t seem to expect an answer to his question, which feels a relief - until she considers that it’s a question that answers itself, eventually.
*
*
*
Mulder seems to take pleasure in crushing his empty soda can down small enough to fit in the door. “The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers?” Mulder asks over the noise of protesting metal. She waits patiently until he's finished.
“The former I guess.”
“Aw, c’mon, Scully, the Count has the personality of a sock puppet. There’ve been priests who’ve had more fun.”
Rolling her eyes, Scully reaches for her own drink, which she’s been saving at her feet. “Mulder, honestly - he was betrayed, demoralized, obsessed with vengeance. Despite that, he managed to become reputable and well educated, never mind wealthy--” She tries to ignore the way her partner is eyeing her root beer. “You try living in a cell for years. I doubt you’d fare better.”
“I’m not that arrogant, Scully,” he sasses. “Though I suppose it is all in how you define--”
“‘Reputable’ is not synonymous with ‘has reputation,’” she states.
“Figures.” He feels around under his seat and straightens up, clutching a fugitive water bottle. “Your turn,” he says, unhappily eyeing the bottle’s contents. She’s already prepared:
“The Tell Tale Heart or A Premature Burial?”
He indulges in a fake little shudder. “I did a report on Tetradoxin and cataleptic states for seventh grade science. I ended up tying a bell to my wrist before I’d go to sleep at night in case my parents accidentally buried me alive.” He is sniffing the water in the water bottle.
She can just imagine: young Mulder, a vector for all things macabre. He’d probably tried to keep flies in jars, a Swiss Army knife in the side of his polished shoe, Paracelsus in his head: ‘everything is poison, there is poison in everything.’ Of course, Mulder did wake up unable to move a muscle once. She remembers his terrified voice on Werber's old recording. Wordlessly she offers him her diet root beer.
“On the other hand,” he says after a couple of grateful gulps. “What self-respecting abnormal psychologist can talk down The Tell Tale Heart?” Without any warning, he changes the subject. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Through the Looking Glass?”
She blinks in surprise. “Mulder, the rules--”
“Lewis Carroll, Scully! We can't neglect the guy who gave us Jabberwocky.”
“O-- of course not, but you haven't answered yet.” She has known all along that there were no rules.
“A guy's gotta keep some mystery,” is all she gets in return.
*
*
*
She was six when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released. Her mother had taken the children to the theatre, five Scullys all in a line in their clickety-clack seats, the youngest two swinging their legs in the colored dark. Scully remembers the outing - her brother's fingers wriggling in her popcorn, tumbling it onto her lap - and that her Father had left the day before with a wave and a salute. She doesn’t remember the movie, only Gene Wilder’s shining eyes as he recited O’Shaughnessy: ‘we are the dreamers of dreams.’
Reading the book years later, every day at noon for a school week she sat in the lunchroom and forgot to eat. On the fifth day Missy, who had a free period and homework to neglect, came by to eat Dana’s apple and drink her juice. ‘Aren’t you done with that thing yet?’ she said.
Dana was reading it again. ‘I really like this one,’ she mumbled. Missy read Seventeen and Tiger Beat - she was sceptical of anything that wasn’t written in a column. Dana had been wanting to talk to Missy about something for days, but now that Missy was here and talking Dana had to close her eyes to help settle the fluttering in her stomach. ‘Missy, can I talk to you about something?’
‘What? Hey, can I have your cookie?’ Missy didn’t wait for an answer but she did sit down to eat it, which meant she wasn’t going to run off. ‘Okay, what?’ she said when she’d gotten the cellophane wrapping off. Dana looked at her lap. She played with the cover of her book for a minute, feeling her face begin to heat. 'Just tell me already.'
‘I-- I think I sort of like someone.’ It felt like there was all this warm, unwanted commotion in her body.
‘What!’
‘I said, I think--’
‘I heard you the first time,’ Missy waved her off. ‘Really?’ she sounded delighted. ‘Hah! Who?’
Dana just kept looking at the book in her lap and playing with its pages, clutching it tighter. Missy had crushes all the time, and she talked about them - all the time - which is why Dana had wanted to ask Missy what it meant, but now she just wished she hadn’t said anything. This was clearly a stupid mistake - probably not even a crush - probably just, just something. ‘Um,’ she said, fidgeting with her book. Missy looked at the book now, and then at Dana again. There was a moment. Suddenly Missy snatched up the book and began waving it in the air.
‘On him? On him - on Charlie!’
Missy promptly stood and pranced, giggling, around the table with Dana’s book. ‘No. No, Missy, don’t--’
Missy was having none of it.
‘That’s hilarious Danes, it’s so cute.’
‘No, I--’
‘You do too, you do too!’
But she didn’t, not like this, not how Missy was making it be like, not - not Charlie. She had to stop Missy, make her understand, make this less awful than it was. She stood up from the table, all four-foot-seven and hot in the face. ‘I do NOT!’ That got Missy’s attention. Her sister halted on the other side of the table and stared at her.
‘Well what then?’ Missy huffed.
Dana only shrugged. It felt like all there was. How could she explain to Missy that what she loved, what she really really loved was that there were boys, and there was growing up, and there were grown up men who were just like boys, really, except they’d had all this time to know things she’d never even thought about, and have ideas, and there were ideas so good it felt like she was going blind just thinking about them, and that maybe she did like Charlie because in the story he was going to grow up to be just like Willy Wonka, but just like himself, too, and if he could, then maybe she could, and they wouldn’t go blind from thinking all those thoughts.
‘Give me my book back, Missy,’ she said, holding her shaking arm out across the table. She could see Missy thinking about being mean and not giving it back, but the bell rang for class, so she did. It didn’t really matter; Dana was just going to return it to the library right away anyway.
She hadn’t read Through the Looking Glass until Daniel pointed out that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician as well as a children’s classicist. She read Alice’s adventures as she read everything then, with an eye for purpose, and she closed the back cover feeling glad to be finished with it. Daniel would want to know what she thought. She thought maybe Carroll was a very good mathematician. She thought Alice’s plight was senseless, and further complicated, in all likelihood, by the author’s drug-induced irrationality. She thought it best not to pity Alice, who was never the right size. Alice would wake up eventually, after all, wasn’t that the point? Dana was not a child, and she was not given to nightmares. In fact, between the hospital and the weekends Daniel could get away, she was usually too exhausted to remember the dreams she had.
Mulder sweeps a hand through his hair, his eyebrows raised expectantly. Oh, she thinks, baffled to find she’s considering his answer not hers: Mulder likes both stories. Mulder isn’t like her. He enjoys the darkness, the enormity of ‘if.’ He will hold a candle to anything, hoping to see it better, but nothing holds a candle to him. Mulder likes what scares him and loves what overwhelms him - the proverbial snipes and snails and puppy dog tails. Both stories.
“Scully?” he prompts. “You still playing?”
“Neither.” She shrugs - tries to take a deeper breath. “I-- uh-- didn’t really like either. I didn’t think they were--” But none of this means anything, does it? Impulsively, she grabs the drink away from him and takes a swig, then shoves it back. “I’m not like you, Mulder,” she says suddenly. She notices Mulder smudge the rim of the soda can where she drank from with his thumb, once. Probably worried about cooties, she thinks.
“Maybe it depends on the day. That’s how it is for me.” He turns to look out the driver’s side window and she can only see his jaw where it meets his ear. A full five seconds pass before she understands he is talking about books, about liking books. She gulps and nods dumbly. It is horrible, really, feeling as nonsensical as she often does, around someone who is as devastatingly good at nonsense as Mulder.
*
*
*
The minute she opens her mouth the similarities occur to her, but not before. Beside her Mulder has stopped his spontaneous bongo drumming on the steering wheel. She holds her breath and waits.
“Never read it,” he says. Okay, she thinks, all right, she can exhale again. But then he says, “Tell me about it.” He says it in that casual way, and leans back even further in his seat, raising his hands to the ceiling to rub against the pile. She thinks, Oh God, that’s so much worse. “Scully?” he asks.
“You’ll have heard the story, Mulder. A girl that gets trapped inside a building during the Second World War.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about it.”
“Then you don’t--”
“But not with Scullyvision. I want to know what you gleaned from it.” He stops playing with the ceiling upholstery long enough to bat his eyelashes at her sideways. He can’t possibly have made the connection, she thinks. If he can give her those eyes - the long shadows of his eyelashes fringing his cheeks - and ask her like that, it can’t possibly have occurred to him, the similarities. She tries to draft a version of this story in her head without using the words ‘little girl,’ ‘brave girl,’ ‘Jewish girl,’ ‘innocent,’ ‘trapped there for years,’ ‘betrayed,’ ‘family torn apart,’ ‘utterly unfair,’ ‘ugly thing,’ ‘damn ugly thing,’ ‘god damn unfair ugly thing.’ She tries to make it a story that doesn’t end with, ‘never made it out alive.’
“So how ‘bout that story, Scully? It’s past our bedtimes already.”
Doesn’t he see that this is a story she doesn’t want to tell? Not to Mulder, not Mulder, whom she suspects of buying a whole gallon of milk even though half goes bad each time, because he hates looking at the faces of the missing kids on the cartons when there’s nothing he can do. She considers reaching out and pressing the radio dial; not saying anything at all, just losing herself in whatever phone-in station his radio happens to be tuned to. But she doesn’t do that. Instead she fixes him with a look. It’s her very strongest look.
She takes one more deep breath, and then begins. “It’s the story of a young girl, living in hiding in Amsterdam during the last years of World War Two.” Scully fights the urge to close her eyes against this. She must continue. “She became trapped inside a part of her father’s boarded up office building for almost, uh-- almost two years, and while she was there she-- she wrote a diary about all the things that happened around her, so that when it was over - when the war was over - someone--” Scully clears her throat. “They found her diary, and they read it, and had to have known what it meant - what it would mean to the people who had been through their own wars.”
Mulder looks in her eyes and she looks back. What else can she do? It really is a very sad story. She expects Mulder to ask her Frank’s age at the time, what she looked like, what she was like. He surprises her. “Was it close to over, Scully, when they caught her?”
“A couple weeks. Maybe a month.”
“A month.” He nods. “Huh.”
Of course Frank died of typhoid, starvation, a fall from the bed. She wasn’t granted a hot, blind death; what Scully views as the immeasurably small dignity of a bullet. Scully says nothing of that, of how They used her up first. Her doctor’s mind wanders amid the carnage: fabric the color of fouled earth, bodies the color of dirty soap, so anemic that the blood had withered from them - barely blood enough to live by, die by. “Was it any good?” asks Mulder.
Was it any good.
She won’t tell him she’d had little time to think of its implications amidst the snapping of latex gloves and the pungent antiseptic and the students, students, students - some of them older than her, most of them taller, all of them asking her questions, questions, questions - jostling around her to see the body, another body, any body, to see her scalpel glide expertly into the hepatic artery - gleaming metal and blood and dark, heavy liver tissue under her blade - and hear her say: ‘enlarged bile duct, indicative of what?’ In truth she'd read Frank’s story only because someone had left a few tattered books in the on-call room.
“No, of-- of course not,” stammers Scully. “It was very hard to...” But then she thinks of Frank on the paperback cover, awkward and joyful for the world’s kindness. Frank in a cold vacant factory in Amsterdam, writing, ‘I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out’ and Scully’s throat feels very narrow and she almost can’t stop her mouth from turning.
“You know, Mulder, I’ve always felt that when people call it the story of a girl, what it means is that it’s her story to tell, and that’s the beauty of it, that she told it so honestly. It isn’t even really a war story the way she tells it, there’s so much--” and her mouth does bend bitterly downwards now, but she catches it quickly, forcing the rest. “There’s so much hope - ceaseless hope, really. So yes, it was, very good in a way.”
Mulder purses his lips for a moment, then goes back to tracing patterns on the ceiling. She can’t remember what the other choice was. “We should market you some Scullyvision glasses, Scully,” he says. “I bet they’d sell like hotcakes.”
She wonders if any of what just happened happened, or if maybe they aren’t merely talking about books.
*
*
*
Modell isn’t going to show. About forty minutes ago when Scully stopped subtly casing the parking lot every two minutes, Mulder realized that the night was ebbing fruitlessly into morning. He'd felt something earlier, some kind of prickle at the nape, and so had she, though he’d be wasting his breath to ask her. Beside him Scully rolls down her window and then rolls it back up in vain. The condensation is as thick as ever, only now with thin streaks in it, barely wide enough to peer out of. She scowls, at which he shrugs uselessly. “The Waste Land or Howl?”
“I haven’t read Howl.”
Mulder shakes his head, dismayed. “Not into beat poetry, Scully? Okay, we’ll do a subcategory: there are five parts to The Waste Land, which is your favorite?”
“Where in the rule book does it say you get to have subcategories, Mulder?” She is pouting, really pouting. He looks away and down and back but she hasn’t stopped so he looks away again because it’s rude to stare.
“Under the ‘Conversation is Not an Exact Science’ clause, Scully.” She only narrows her eyes.
He huffs on the window and writes a few words. “Not that one,” she says after reading them. He’s written ‘HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME.’ “Maybe ‘What the Thunder Said.’”
“And what did the thunder say?” he quizzes. She flashes him the glare she reserves for when he’s being a know-it-all, which is ironic considering he actually doesn’t know what the thunder said. “It said, ‘One-one thousand, two-one thousand.'"
She rolls her eyes - gestures to the phrase on the window. “Your favorite?”
“‘A Game of Chess’? Nah, probably ‘Burial of the Dead.’”
“‘April is the cruelest month,’” she says, yawning.
Mulder presses a hand to his chest as though smitten. “Wooing me with poetry, Scully?” He tries to remember a few complete lines to retaliate with. He looks out over the dash at the brown February fog that has settled in amongst the parked cars for the night, gnawing his lip introspectively.
Memory warps and wefts amid his soda pop buzz and a head full of unwritten case notes. Scully must sense he is plotting something because when he turns his focus on her she peaks an enquiring eyebrow. “‘We came back late, your arms full, and your hair wet, and I couldn’t speak; my eyes failed. I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.’” That’s enough. It’s the sort of thing she won’t know - too sweet for her sensible palate - which makes it good, he thinks. He is curious to know what she will make of it.
But Scully isn’t talking. Is she cringing inwardly at the mockery he’s made of old Thomas? He’s fairly certain he got it right. Never recite poetry to a woman, he thinks. It’s like thinking you can recite sunlight to a plant.
“Is this more residual memory from your time at Oxford?”
“Yeah,” He nods casually.
“I see,” she says. “And I suppose Phoebe was greatly impressed by it.” She is obviously teasing, but her inflection is...missing. She smoothes her sleeves down her arms with focus.
“Don’t know,” he mumbles. “I don’t think she ever read it.”
*
*
*
The picnic is now definitively over. Rations have been consumed, garbage has been collected and compacted by force into the driver’s side door compartment, and crumbs have been swept carelessly off seats onto the floor (or carefully off the seat into Scully’s hands).
“DC or Marvel?” she poses while fighting with the packet of her moist towelette.
Mulder makes a ‘gimmie’ motion and she passes it over for him to open with his teeth. The cloth inside is dry. “Hang on a second.” He roots around in the glove box and comes out with two more packets. “Here,” he says, shredding the tops off of both packets at once. These have also gone dry. Scully frowns, embarrassed. She isn’t usually a messy eater.
“Not messy,” he says. “Hungry.” They could both use his but in his boredom he recently used it to wipe down his keys, the steering wheel, and the top of one of his shoes.
“Mulder, I’m fine,” she assures him, sighing. “I’ll just--” and she holds up her hands as delicately as she can manage with sticky fingers. It’ll be pretty embarrassing on the off chance she has to handcuff anyone.
“Just wipe them off on the upholstery,” he suggests in all seriousness. He ignores her derisive sniff, already looking around the car. What he comes up with is the stray water bottle from before. “Here,” he says, holding it up and screwing off the lid. “Stale but guaranteed non-toxic.”
She looks at her suit, which is miraculously still clean, and then doubtfully at the bottle of Disani. She is distantly aware of being at the unique impasse between misery and hilarity which stems from it being only about four hours until the time she usually gets out of bed. She wonders what bizarre fixation Mulder has with her hands that he will not let her alone. “I think I’ll pass, thanks, Mulder.”
“No, here,” he says, dragging her hands across the car so they’re over his lap instead of hers. He has already dowsed the waded up towelette with water and she barely has time to register a protest before he begins to swab her fingers. She looks down as a few drops of water darken the fabric of his pants. Surprised, she turns her hands over in a feeble attempt to grasp the cloth. He swabs her palms as if it were what she’d had in mind, uncurling her fingers with the hand that isn’t busy swabbing.
“Mulder!” she manages to come out with.
He retreats, leaving her the cloth. “Yeah?”
She rubs it between her fingers a few more times but they are already clean now, and slightly cool from the astringent in the cloth. She has nothing left to protest. Wordlessly, she folds it up into a neat square before giving it to him to put in the door with the rest of the garbage. “DC or Marvel?” she says.
He grins at her reversion to the game. “Can I say Darkhorse?”
Scully thinks it over, tentatively smelling the watery antiseptic scent on her palms. “Yes, of course,” she says, barely smiling behind her hand.
*
*
*
Scully keeps yawning, small sighing yawns, which are driving him crazy. They make him yawn too, and his yawns are big galumphing things. For amusement he pulls down the sunshade and positions it so that his nose looks as large as possible.
“Let’s go with Lord of the Rings or, uh, the Bible,” he says to his reflection. He is half joking. Neither of them is really taking any of it seriously at this point.
“New Testament or Old?” Scully deadpans. Is she being sincere? She could be. Scully has a lethal deadpan. “I’m kidding, Mulder. Besides my obvious bias, I’ve only read one of the elected texts.”
Mulder can’t help it that his mouth falls open. Who the hell has never read- “And the Church is alright with that?” He smirks facetiously. She gives him an arch stare and he reforms. “In all seriousness though-- you’re telling me you haven’t read the most epic story of all time?”
“The most epic story? Tolkien. Elves and Wizards, Mulder." She almost looks amused. "That’s a little presumptuous. There are places in the world where a claim like that could get you into trouble, even by your standards.”
“The most epic fictional story of all time, then,” he says impatiently.
This does not appease her. “Mulder, you don't believe in a religion. You think the Bible's fictional as well.”
“Right now, I mostly don’t believe you haven’t read this story. It may qualify you as an X-File. In fact, you could be the last of your kind, Scully.” He thinks suddenly of the Jersey devil, no devil at all. She’d left footprints on his clothes that he’d kept and hadn’t washed out. She was the last of her kind. Scully is even lovelier, more civilized too. She keeps a fingernail brush in her suitcase - she even uses it - and once in the woods she broke down and handed him a vial of citronella to keep the bugs off, then scooped her hair aside and waited while he dabbed an arc of scent from ear to ear. When he was done he felt bad for the mosquitoes, who went hungry. Scully has no natural habitat, either. She is unnatural - can make a home out of a suitcase, a hospital out of a first aid kit, he’s seen it. “We’ll have to keep you a secret - we can’t have the authorities finding out,” he says.
She huffs defensively. “It’s not as though it’s a story I’ve never heard of. I know the plot: a hegira or a fated quest, the anthropomorphizing of an object - they’re age-old elements of storytelling. And the significance of circles or spherical shapes is particularly common. The ancient Egyptians believed the sun to be the Eye of Ra - a decimating force - and in Grecian times the original myth of Pandora held that the ills of the world were not kept in a box but in a clay jar--” she makes a circle with her hands as though loosely holding a jar. “--which Pandora opened, unleashing them upon the world. The Holy Grail was a chalice imitating the shape of a womb. Even the most commonly sighted UFOs are purported to appear as saucers.”
Mulder tilts the sunshade enough to see her reflected in it without her noticing. His partner looks momentarily flushed, post-diatribe.
“You’re right, about all of it, Scully, but see none of those stories have hobbits.”
She notices his trick with the visor and pointedly ignores it. “I was under the impression hobbits were troglodytic and meddlesome,” she states flatly. “And that they were generally short in stature. Not qualities common of legends.”
“That’s exactly why they play such a vital role - the very idea that the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a hobbit is compelling. We can all relate to it in that it echoes the inadequacy of the human condition.”
“So, what, no one can be a hero in an even fight; they all have to be underdogs?”
He is going to correct her, but realizes he can’t think of how. He hunches into his seat, a little crestfallen. “It’s a good thing we don’t bet on them, hey Scully, or we’d all be broke.”
She scrutinizes him, as steadily as always, and he feels her bright, sharp focus, as though some part of him were being held in very cold water. “I’m not sure I believe that, Mulder,” she says. “I think heroic deeds are done every day, out of a need to do good, nothing more.” She slowly tucks her tidying fingers around the arc of her ear, introspective now. “You really believe as human beings we’re inadequate, Mulder?”
He shrugs. He is admiring the darkness outside. The rain has stopped but nothing has dried yet and it all looks sharp.
He thinks of circles, of symbols, and adventure. He thinks of her. She has stepped over pentagrams, pinning them to the floor with her drastic shoes. He likens her to Charon, a celestial kedge, her nearness altering his course; only she is lambent out here in the dark. He has seen saucers in the sky. They have blinded him, stupefied him, and ultimately passed him over. He is earthbound, cripplingly so, and he hopes for more than he knows how to ask for, or believe in.
Together they have passed through towns, through turbulence on rocky flights, through state lines on back road highways, tracking this or that - peril or a place to sleep. They have fought for their passage and each other. After the highway signs that see them out of towns and then the ones that welcome them in, he finds her with a confirmative sideways glance. Borders are nothing more than lines and legislature to her, but he feels as though they’ve made some kind of leap. One he needs to be sure she’s made with him. If she is sleeping he might make noise to wake her. ‘New state,’ he’ll say. To which she’ll usually utter something about Maryland, or Virginia, and her voice will be that rough kind of gorgeous that is the other reason he wakes her.
One weekend when he’s forgotten to renew his cable subscription and his basketball’s gone soft on the shelf, and she’s either really not home or it’s him specifically she is screening against, he scrounges up a yard stick and a map of America and he draws it out in lines, the places they’ve been. It takes a long time, and when he’s done Washington is on one side and their travels fan a crooked sphere from sea to sea. This is their journey. The lines of it look like a tattered dandelion, a ghost of strange seeds they have sown.
“I think we are a little inadequate, yeah,” he answers. “In an infinite universe we are confined by finite life spans. I’d say that’s your proof of inadequacy right there.”
“Proof,” she says. The word seems almost to hum.
She has seen it, unfurling under scopes and gleaming over skylines, has stood breathless. He has stood beside her, just as breathless; no room inside for anything but this, a place to start. She is a foot farther from the sky than he is, but she can rattle off Kepler's planetary laws like children's rhymes. He locates her at an angle in his mirror, a panel of Scully: two eyes and that narrow fin of nose. She is watching the lot. Her eyes are silver in the light, and oh yes, this is really what yearning means - this blinding crescendo of feeling. She is generally short in stature, while he is plenty meddlesome, and he wonders how many questions they will ask. One by one, he makes believe they are going to ask them all.
*
*
*
“I dunno, Mul’er,” she says, succumbing to another yawn. “By general comparison they’re very similar stories. Though I suppose by its resounding impact alone, I would choose 1984.”
“Not that similar,” he insists. His voice has begun to take on a subtle lulling quality, making him sound closer than he ought to. It gives her pause, draws her face in from the nightscape seared by the streetlights. The interior of the car only seems to have gotten darker - as dark as a cave - as the night has drawn on. “I can think of at least one significant difference between the two stories.” His fingers prance strange choreography on the steering wheel. Watching, she thinks of hypnotism tactics, her latest studies. She thinks she ought to look away.
“Besides the word count?” He nods keenly, clearly hoping she will guess. “Well...Orwell’s protagonist failed in all respects, as opposed to Anthem wherein the protagonist succeeded, clearly, by securing his right to freedom. I’d say that’s pretty significant.”
“Sure, there’s that,” he breezes.
“But?” She is in her upright seat and he is in his reclined one, smiling a sleuthy, halogen grin by the glow of the radio clock. He sits there waiting for her to guess again and she is too numbed by inactivity to protest. “Both stories center around adult males,” she begins, a little heavily. “Pariahs to their civilization, conducting themselves secretly and in seclusion. Both stories utilize a dystopian reality, anti-collectivism ideology,” she ticks the points off loosely on her fingers. “As well as clear allusions to political agendas such as Communism and Nazism. I’m not sure what ‘significant difference’ you think I’m missing.”
“The humanity of a protagonist is at the heart of any story,” he reasons.
Hobbits, right. She gives in to the urge to roll her eyes. “So one protagonist had some ‘human’ quality the other lacked...” He says nothing, smiling. “A name?” she hazards.
“Warmer.”
"Privacy, then - his own space."
"Warmer."
In close proximity she’s been finding it increasingly difficult to remember they both exist simultaneously. She gets a sense with him of playing particle/wave. She scarcely knows her own properties, though she tries to draw herself in smart lines. And she argues with him, god help her, she argues. Meanwhile he crowds her into corners and out of her senses; her instincts register provocation, allure, a sort of ‘magnétisme animal,’ if she is honest with herself. She dons stern shoes that exaggerate the sense she has of her own body, as well as lengthen her stride. In the real world, in grocery stores and malls, she walks too fast - it looks strange - and she feels pent up all the time. As tall as he is and as sure-footed in the scree of his insane theories, it is all she can do to be tall with her eyes and sure with her voice, determined not to forget herself entirely. She feels ‘panic’ as it was originally intended: drawn away from the path, following the lure of something ariose and unseen into the dark, dark woods.
This is conspiracy, what they’re doing tonight. All four doors are power locked and they’re breathing together. She is reminded that it is the efforts of their bodies evidenced on the windows. Her mouth’s gone dry, her feet are cold under the dash, and her jacket is in accordion folds behind her in the seat. She must've broken out in pale gooseflesh hours ago, and she’s a little dehydrated now, so that when she does remember herself, finally, it’s all at once; a surge like electricity come silently to set her clocks back, Oh... Oh, god--
--and she feels privately, horribly charmed.
“An ally,” she hears Mulder say. Apparently he’s interpreted her silence as a forfeit.
She makes an involuntary little hmm-ing noise in her throat, which she can’t catch back, and shakes her head minutely. “Pardon?” She heard him, but in a way it’s like she didn’t.
“You remember-- uh--” he snaps his fingers. “They ran him out of town but she-- she had his back. They both had some kind of serial numbers, I can’t remember, but I think he called her ‘Golden One.’”
Scully tries to focus on some external point that isn’t him in this drowsy little car. “Right. Yes, I remember. That’s, uh-- that’s very forward of him.”
“I dunno, Scully, he was lost in the woods; she saved his ass. If that doesn’t deserve the title...”
She says nothing and he doesn’t continue. She can no longer seem to keep from slouching into her straight-backed seat. All this time she’s been livened and warmed by their conversation while, unbeknownst to her, weariness has crept into her smallest muscles. The tiny levator palbraes of her eyes are barely heeding her demands to hold his gaze. She struggles, rapt and tired at once - it even hurts a little. Meanwhile, her hands in her lap have become conspicuous fists. She slides them around her middle and holds on.
“The Unconquered,” she mumbles, her head against the window. The glass chills her temple. It’s wet and uncomfortable and she lifts away from it immediately, easing onto her other hip. “That was his name in return.” Her ear presses against the seat. She feels her hair whisper over her face and blindly drags it back. Mulder says nothing.
Her hands begin to loosen gradually from where she has crossed them against her ribs. She doesn’t feel a thing until one of them pats softly into her lap, then she starts awake, immediately embarrassed. Her gaze rises to find Mulder...and finds that he is already looking at her. A tremor travels through her.
“Yeah,” he says - to her it seems from out of nowhere - “I knew it had to be something crazy like that.”
She stamps her feet to warm them up, and she swears he startles.
*
*
*
February 27, 1996
Fairfax Mercy Hospital,
Alexandria, Virginia
8:17 p.m.
Mulder has made the assumption she’ll need a ride home from Fairfax Mercy Hospital, so when she takes a seat in the waiting room and rests a back issue of National Geographic on her crossed legs he looks perplexed.
“I’m going to wait. I have some questions about Modell’s medical records I’m hoping an oncologist can clear up,” she explains. She’d been inquiring at the front desk when he came out of the washroom, a few splashes of water on his shirt.
She watches him glance around the waiting room at all the chairs that are empty two and three in a row. She’s chosen an end chair, blocked in by a sleeping boy and beside that an agitated woman with a cell phone to her ear.
“The specialist’s in surgery now. He’s expected to be another hour at least.” She flips a page and two more go with it but, since she can’t find her reading glasses anyway, it doesn’t much matter. “You should go home, Mulder; get some rest. I’m fine here. I’ll call a cab when I’m ready to leave.”
He shakes his head, snagging a magazine off a nearby chair. “It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, and you need both pairs of yours. Why don’t I just wait?”
“Mulder, go home,” she says. He lowers his issue of Cosmopolitan.
“You don’t want a ride?”
She wants a ride. She wants to sit in his car with that damn stupid heater that doesn’t work and argue with him until she forgets herself. She wants him to argue with her until he loosens his tie and rolls up his sleeves and starts saying her name every fifth word because it’s in his psychologist’s training. She wants to agree to disagree. She wants to lock them both in his car and not let them out until she realizes that he could easily get her killed, and he realizes that he could easily get himself killed, and they both get a goddamn clue and realize that either way it wouldn’t be something they could live with. She wants to lock herself against him, arms and legs, face and chest and fingers - wants his body so close, so badly, it’s as though it were a magnet of blood. She knows bodies; she can predict the weight of his heart - his manic, romantic, idiot heart - it's 1/200th of his body weight. She knows all about bodies, and looking at his, she wants everything that’s in there.
“I’ll catch a cab,” she says and smiles.
Once he’s gone she places her magazine on top of his on the center table and stares at her hands while she waits.
*
*
*
February 27, 1996
Scully's Apt. #35, 1419
Georgetown, DC
9:42 p.m.
He sits in his car under the streetlight outside his apartment for a good half hour without ever reaching for the door latch. He’s too exhausted to go up there and hate himself to sleep. When he notices her glasses on the dashboard, forgotten, it’s all the reason he needs to drive across town.
He knocks softly at first but she doesn’t come, so he knocks louder until his knuckles smart. He’s got them poised for a third try when the door swings open, leaving him with his fist in the air. “Hey, Scully, whatcha doing?” She is still in her rumpled suit and there’s a shawl spilling over her arms but she isn’t sleepy-eyed. In fact, she looks a bit startled.
“Mulder, what--”
“You forgot your book.” He holds it up. “Oh, and you might need these.” From his coat pocket he produces her glasses. A kettle begins to boil behind her, too shrill to ignore. She closes her eyes against the intrusion.
“Just a moment.” She pads away, leaving the door not exactly wide open, but enough so that when she comes back to find him sitting on the arm of her couch, rubbing the lenses of her glasses on his t-shirt, she looks as though she’d expected him there.
“So you did read Ginsberg.” He leans over the copy of The Norton Anthology she’s left open on the coffee table beside her charging laptop. She shifts her grip on her mug carefully. She’s underlined a few words in pencil. “‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’” he reads. “Quite a memorable start.”
She studies her Earl Grey. She hasn’t offered him anything, nothing to keep him here, but he isn’t leaving yet. He’s already played Lady Macbeth - washed, washed, washed the spent gunpowder off his hands - and it isn’t enough. If it were up to him he might just stay here all the long years until his cells sloughed away and grew back again and he was a completely new person, one who’d never heard her beg him for her life. Since it’s really up to her, he counts on at least being allowed to stay until her tea is cool enough to drink. “It was a gift from Charlie - one of his favorites, actually, but it never struck me before now.”
He batters forward a couple of pages to see that Scully has also underlined the ending, and a place near it where Ginsberg tells his friend from the asylum, ‘while you are not safe, I am not safe.’ “Perspective changes,” he says.
“I suppose it does.” She delicately closes the book in front of him. “Thank you for bringing my glasses.”
He blinks, reluctant to rise from the arm of the couch. Another moment and he’s up, shuffling toward the door. She retrieves her glasses from the table and follows him there. As she puts them on he is dismissing her thanks, but is interrupted when they clatter to the floor. Scully makes a pained sound at the impact and reflexively grasps for them anyway. In an instant he’s snatched them up and is examining them for damage. There doesn’t seem to be any harm done, but she might do him some once he tells her what he’s done.
“Mulder?” she holds out her hand for them.
“I, uh--” he fiddles pathetically with the nose pieces. “I tried them on.”
For a minute she refuses to meet his eyes. She looks at his chest and then at her door and then at her tea. Nervously he shifts from foot to foot. With a slight tremor, she braves a sip of tea, and that - Mulder looks on, stunned - is when she begins to laugh. Weakly at first and then harder, shoulders hunched, doing her very best not to spit a mouthful of tea on her partner. She is gestalt when she laughs, vivid and unknowable, and even with his memory he can’t ever imagine it when he tries.
“Hey, careful.” He comes out of his state in time to remove the mug from her hands before she tips it. She manages to glare at him, but only laughs harder. As she bends over slightly her hair swings forward, revealing her scalp, almost bright in its paleness. He tries not to think about how large the hole would’ve been.
The fit of laughter is followed by a jag of Scully-demure coughing, which she hides in her hand. Afterward, she collects herself and observes him levelly. She is wry, clearly exhausted, and her hands and cheeks are pink from hot tea. He wonders how the hell he is supposed to leave now, with the tarantellas of her laughter like poltergeist activity in his head. He gives her back her glasses, which she slips into her collar. “Hey, Scully, you wanna play a game?”
“Do you have any eights?” she follows lazily.
In Mulder’s mind is an image of Carl Solomon at the end of Howl, devastated and insane, journeying the night roads across America to arrive at his friend’s small door. “We can’t play Go Fish, Scully,” he says. “We’d have all each other’s cards.”
*
*
*
End
*
*
*
Notes and Things:
If it doesn't go without saying, my own impressions of the numerous texts discussed in this fic do not consistently mirror the impressions held by Mulder and Scully. Neither did I intend to write Mulder and Scully's held impressions as unequivocal. With any luck their expressed impressions come across as being well-thought and reasonable. Just the same, I'd be shocked if anyone agreed with their interpretations across the board. Contention between reader and fic is, in this case, pretty much a foregone conclusion.
-the title comes from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
-"...got a case of the Mean Reds?": When you are afraid of something, but you don't know what it is. Used in the novel Breakfast At Tiffanys.
-“Those are really 'horrorshow' choices...”: ‘Horrorshow’ is the words used in A Clockwork Orange to mean ‘excellent'. In the novel (as in its use here) the irony of the word is that what is being described as ‘horrorshow’ is often, in fact, quite horrific.
-the 15th of Av: A Jewish holiday. I doubt Mulder considers himself Jewish, but it seems very probable that Teena does.
-“‘This is not an exit,’ Scully murmurs...”: In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman - having finally come to terms with the inescapable fact of his monstrosity, finds himself in a bar starring at a sign over a door. The sign reads ‘this is not an exit’. It is, of course, highly symbolic.
-“...your Annie Oakley interventions”: Annie was a prodigy gunman in the mid to late 1800's. Her aim was legendary.
-"'Damn you,' she thinks a little hotly, 'we didn't all recieve a Congratulatory First...’": Oxford’s own special way of saying you’re an academic ace.
-“Well I haven’t exactly had occasion to engineer a V-2 rocket lately...”: The very loose focus of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow is on engineering and/or obtaining cutting-edge WWII weaponry.
-The Great Gatsby’s 'dating advice', “don’t kill yourself to make an impression.”: Gatsby, in a last desperate attempt to woo the object of his ardent affection, essentially kills himself for her benefit.
-“HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME”: A reiteration from Eliot’s poem ‘A Game of Chess’.
-“‘We came back late, your arms full, and your hair wet, and I couldn’t speak; my eyes failed. I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.’”: from Eliot's Burrial of the Dead.
-“He likens her to Charon...”: Pluto’s moon. Charon does not orbit Pluto. They revolve face to face.
-"...he crowds her into corners and out of her senses; her instincts register provocation, allure, a sort of ‘magnétisme animal’": A magnetic fluid or ethereal medium residing in the bodies of animate beings, as postulated by Franz Mesmer. Later became ‘animal magnetism’, but originally lacked such definite sexual connotation.