(no subject)
Title: Mouth and Laugh
Author: amyhit
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nisei, 731, Abduction Arc.
Summary: "Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve"
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: After much tinkering I finally have a finished fic. I should probably mention that in "Ghost in the Machine," Mulder affably claims the basement has 'no heat or windows'. Given the presence of the skylight, it may have been a facetious remark, however GitM does provide the precedent for how the issue is broached in this fic. Thanks to tree for her very prompt, very helpful beta. Further trivia notes at the end.
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Later on, we'll conspire,
As we dream by the fire.
To face unafraid,
The plans that we've made,
Walking in a winter wonderland.
--Winter Wonderland by Felix Bernard and R. B. Smith
All morning they keep busy with backdated paperwork, Scully perched at her desk, Mulder lounging behind his, each of them throwing out ideas for how to legitimize their expenses in the eyes of those who are watching, correcting each other, suggesting particular phraseology to explain away another missing Sig without blaming paranormal causes, or another lost security deposit with Lariat - another hospital bill. Mulder keeps halting whatever he is doing in order to peer back at the skylight. Once he actually stops dead in the middle of a line of writing. Even through the dirty glass the light filtering in from the outside world has the unmistakable frosted whiteness of fresh snow. Snow that has not yet become entirely trampled into slush. And since every time he looks, she catches his movement and looks as well, together they're worse than two first graders, scuffing their shoes, waiting for a dismissal bell that stubbornly refuses to ring.
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They can't have been in the office more than half an hour before Mulder gathers himself up from the desk and stalks to the door where their coats are hanging with wet hems. He begins going through the heavy masses of wool and lining, searching the pockets. He is searching her coat not his. Scully eyes him from behind the side desk where she is hard at work on a formidable mountain of paperwork. "Mulder," she says.
He looks around but doesn't pause what he's doing. "Yeah?"
"Are you looking for something?"
"Uuuumm...." He draws it out until he finds what he is looking for. "These," he says. He turns and heads back towards the desk, bringing her otter-brown suede gloves with him. For some reason he isn't wearing his shoes. "Good thing last winter hit record lows," he says, "otherwise they never would've gotten someone down here to install this." Instead of retaking his seat he crouches in the corner behind the desk, where the baseboard heater is.
"What are you doing?"
He raises his head and peers over the desk at her, grinning, then holds up one of her gloves and waves it. "Glove rehab, Scully. They need to dry out."
"Mulder, I can--" she falters, sighs. "It's not necessary for you to--"
"I can't believe you don't own a windshield scraper, Scully. Me, I can understand. I'm of the school that believes these menial tasks are what credit cards are for. But I don't own a nice pair of gloves that get the worst of it every time it snows." He rises from the corner and stands on one leg while he warms his other foot on the heater. She watches him teetering in place.
"Don't let them get too hot," she says finally. The tone of her voice is just slightly strained, obstructed by what's unspoken; some frustration perhaps, something. A bit of snow has melted into water on the glass of the skylight. Mulder nearly looses his balance staring too intently up at it. He looks around when she clears her throat, but by that time she has begun another page of drudgery, her eyes trained on the work in front of her.
This morning Scully's hair has been granted slight liberty by the snowy dampness that has dried in it. She won't fix it in the office. She'll slip off to the washroom, even if it's only to tidy it with her fingers. Right now, from where Mulder is standing, he can't see her face - only the copper locks and whorls of her hair.
As he looks on, Mulder's own fingers begin to curl.
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Their first winter as partners the weather had been mild enough, and, ironically, the hallway leading up to the office was usually fairly warm, so they'd simply kept the door open, and Scully had forgone skirts in favor of pants whenever the morning weather report warned of a particularly chilly day ahead.
The next winter was awful. Her return to the office coincided with a bitter cold snap that had them blowing into their hands and wearing their coats indoors much of the time. After the hospital allowed her to discharge herself, Scully had remained privately, inexorably subdued for several weeks. All the while, Mulder had denied that he was in fact deliberately keeping them in the office - denied it to everyone including himself. December began with temperatures hovering at twenty-nine degrees for most of a week, with no snow to soften the chill. Mulder began going twice as often for fresh coffee and conspicuously hanging his coat on the back of Scully's chair, as if by its very presence it might provide some warmth. Then one Thursday night it dropped to eighteen degrees. When Scully arrived to work the next morning Mulder had already been there, and gone. He'd left a thermometer sitting on the desk. It read fifty-eight degrees. Mulder was half an hour late to work that day, and when he finally returned he tossed the thermometer in a drawer without a word. The following Monday there was a baseboard heater attached against the back wall, partially hidden behind the cupboards. It fit neatly in amidst the assemblage of metal cabinets, endless paper, and bric-a-brac. Mulder was late again, and when he showed up he appeared not to realize anything was different. Scully did not ask who he'd grabbed by the collar to get it done. When she was going home that evening she looked down into the trash can and the thermometer was there, but she didn't comment.
Today was the first time either of them has specifically spoken of it since.
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Come lunchtime Mulder is hunched over the desk top, the full length of one forearm braced beside a report he is currently stalled on: how to explain another lost cell phone? It was jarred from his hand as he clung to the top of a moving train. The wind had lashed over his face while the metal of the boxcar chilled him through his clothes. He has told Scully what happened: boxcar 82517, a transitory laboratory, the amorphous truth of it spirited away in shadows. He has told her things that will not be believed, no matter how he puts them down on paper. "'Always tell the truth,'" he mumbles disdainfully, "'that way you don't have to remember what you said.'"
"The doctor from MASH?" Scully guesses.
"Mark Twain," he says, curling his lips, his smile wan but perhaps sincere.
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Scully opts to eat her lunch in the office, but Mulder declares defiantly that he's going out to revel in the timeless wonder of H2O - that it is such a champion for individuality. "The same could be said of anything," she insists. "Snowflakes are simply the layman's example of a basic principle." He grouses playfully about her having "grown up" so that she "no longer appreciates the magic" of it. She calmly watches him shoving his arms through his coat sleeves and tests the warmth of her coffee.
Five minutes later he's back. His entire right side is spattered with gritty slush. He shakes out his right sleeve with an expression of bland contempt. "Was it deliberate?" she asks, getting up to help him out of his coat.
"They seemed to swerve when they saw me, yeah." He toes off his shoes without stooping to undo the laces and carries them over to the vent. "It wasn't even snowing anymore," he says. "Must've stopped hours ago." With his drooping shoulders and his fingers hooked gingerly into the heels of his shoes, it doesn't even matter that he's wearing a suit; he looks entirely like a young boy.
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While she stabs at her salad, Scully continues to jot down pieces of relevant information on the form in front of her. Meanwhile, Mulder tosses around a Mandarin orange. When that gets old he peels it, absurdly slowly, so as to keep the peel in one piece. She watches him from the corner of her eye, pretending not to be drawn in by this pointless project; this careful, dexterous, pointless project.
They both know that Mulder generally completes one bureaucratic article for every two of hers, but Scully doesn't call him on it. His creative ingenuity has helped them get away with some of their most incredible expenditures; ones no amount of her efficient double speak could explain. And it's not his fault that while she finds her career fitting less and less within the bounds of authority, she becomes all the more determined to leave no I undotted or T uncrossed. Well... hardly his fault.
Mulder's sodden spirits resuscitate with his blood sugar, and he quietly begins humming something that sounds suspiciously like a Christmas carol. She huffs when she catches the tune, and raises her eyebrow almost archly. "Winter Wonderland?"
He breaks off, considers her a moment. "So, Scully," he says, "if you were going to build a snowman, who would you pretend it was?"
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While Mulder is off procuring them fresh coffee Scully's pen runs out of ink. She stands to get a refill and suddenly, as she looks up from her work, the myopia of long hours of diligent focus simply blinks away. She looks around the office with clear vision. A line of winter light is drawn across the basement floor, edging into the room. Mulder's chair is in the fall of the light, as is a portion of the desk. Outside the clouds have thinned, but the sun is still covered. The light she steps into has only the faintest warmth. It seems to stream into the room, stirring the hidden silt of dust mites - yet the entire office is exquisitely still, breathless somehow.
The ink refills are in the main desk. Mulder has rearranged things recently and she has to try several drawers before she finds what she's looking for. He has left a page of writing half-finished, his pen laying uncapped on top of his work. She has never said that she likes his writing - the way it is unembellished: long extenders scrawling out, no space left at the edge of the page, things crossed out, things written back in, and vague lines everywhere, joining one sentence to another. His writing is more familiar than anyone's but her own. And it is nothing like her own. She tucks her hair behind her ear, carefully, as she leans over the open page.
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Mulder comes back and catches her there, sees her there, standing behind the desk. "Proofreading?" he asks. She looks up abruptly to where he is lingering near the door. Despite the cold weather, she is wearing a skirt today, and the backs of her knees are touching his chair. He comes around the side of the desk, close to her. "How'd I do, Doc?" he drawls. "Will Uncle Sam approve?"
She turns sideways, slipping narrowly past him. All in a flash she feels feisty, wants to parry his artful feint. "Mulder, you have the penmanship of a madman," she says.
"Oooh-- but I thought graphology was for charlatans, Scully."
Smiling, she holds his eyes as she takes the coffee he offers her. She leans her hip against the side of the desk, facing him, and sips slowly, being careful not to scald her tongue. He follows suit, and for a moment they stand in caffeine communion. Then she breaks her stance, turns, and goes back to the other desk. She shuffles a few papers, and he can be heard doing the same.
"Feels like a snow day," he says after a while, but there is something in his voice like a catch, and it's as if he were saying something else entirely.
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By four in the afternoon Scully admits - "under duress," she wants it on record - that she might actually be a "wily, renegade fibber" beneath her "polished, by-the-book exterior" - at least where matters of Bureau documentation are concerned. Mulder, flippant, provides the phraseology in this case. She gives him a stern glance. It's true, there was a time not so long ago when it would have been unthinkable, the amount of wilful obfuscation she now commits simply to keep their mishaps and adventures out of OPR's iron clutches. Dana Scully would've disapproved of this woman and her sleight of hand: her pen sharper than the proverbial sword, her poker face in the AD's office, and the satisfaction she derives from reclaiming the cold metal of her gun off the nightstand every morning. But all of this doesn't mean Mulder is supposed to take notice of her. Her life, at times, seems to have taken on the absurdity of a Sunday morning cartoon: the cliff on which she treads has crumbled to nothing, yet she is still walking forwards. Mulder speeds by, makes her look down, and at times she is more than a little furious with him, impervious to such things as he seems.
"Mulder, you seem to be calling me insubordinate as if it were a good thing," she says cooly.
"Sure." He stretches at length, unselfconscious, his limbs tensing and relaxing. "It's the basic Yin and Yang principle. You're a lot of good things, Scully. It stands to reason that some of them are bound to be bad."
She puzzles this out a moment, fruitlessly. How simple, and oblique. Unable to think of a better response, she purses her lips and says nothing.
Some moments later she is kneeling on the floor in front of one of the filing cabinets. Mulder is having a disagreement with his calculator over a number it keeps giving him. He punches the same button a few times over before tossing the calculator on the desk, defeated. Suddenly she sits back on her heels. "Mulder, what the hell does that mean?"
He looks over at her. She is kneeling with the hem of her skirt tucked under her knees and her hair tucked behind her ears. She is altogether very tucked. He gives her that look which is deadpan in aspect, but is secretly a full fledged grin if you know how to read it. Then he goes back to his calculator. "Scully, I think this calculator is missing time," he muses. "It keeps telling me our total expenditures in West Allis aren't enough for us to have stayed all five nights."
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At seven PM Scully finally begins gathering together everything that remains in front of her: tomorrow's duties. The pleasant boldness of the lamps, casting their variant spheres of light about the office, are not helping her waning resolve any. It's been dark since the early evening - the kind of dim, oncoming darkness that had gathered for a long time in the room before it had finally overcome their sense that it was daytime still. Scully had been the first to turn on a lamp, and Mulder, noticing that it was suddenly much easier to see the page, looked up from an article he was reading concerning various forms of anthropomorphism. "'And then the lighting of the lamps,'" he said quietly, smiling. The glow cast rich brown tones back into the darkness of his hair and eyes. The winter evening had indeed settled down.
Mulder watches her as she prepares to leave for home, glancing up from his studies several times to mark her progress. She is quiet in pushing her chair out from the desk, and in pushing it back again - her motions measured and succinct. As though he will not notice her absence if she does not disrupt him in leaving. She is donning her extra layers at the door when he finally speaks. "Do you still have those Isotoner boots you wore in the arctic?" he says offhandedly. She pauses.
He pops the cap back on the highlighter he's been using and discards it on the desk. As though trained, it rolls off the other side, onto the floor where he can't reach it without getting up. She looks from it to him with pursed lips. He cranes his neck to see where it landed. After a moment she relents and crosses to it. Stooping with her coat over one arm, she picks it up and sets it back on the desk. "Yes, I still have them. Why?"
"How do you feel about snowmen, Scully?"
She props her thumb against her cheekbone and presses her fingers against her forehead. "Mulder," she says warningly, "if this is about the abominable snowman..."
He snags the highlighter off the desk and tosses it onto the counter behind him, leaning back in his chair and putting his legs up. "Just regular snowmen, to my knowledge," he says, "except that uh-- " He is still in his sock feet. She raises an eyebrow.
"Except?" she prompts.
"They've been disappearing in Maine for a couple of weeks now."
She crosses her arms, but her expression doesn't change. "Disappearing," she says. It's been awfully cold in Maine this week.
He nods. "Or possibly walking out of their yards."
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Stopped at a light on Constitution avenue, fog creeps over the windshield until she can't see out. Fortunately it's a long light. She turns the vents on high and waits as the glass clears. The radio is off and she's driving in relative in silence - oddly complacent with the commute that lies ahead of her. The traffic is bad in this weather, of course - car horns honking up and down the street; but she doesn't mind giving her attention to the road. It's an easier thing to attend to than most of what crowds her head these days. Her windshield wipers keep her company, whining and redrawing the same streaks endlessly.
She turns left on 17th and drives along one end of the reflecting pool. Tonight it's nothing but a huge dark rectangle, spanning the length of the snowy grass. Birds congregate on the WWII memorial, hopping and trading their posts. All the park benches are empty this evening.
It must be the weather's doing - this continued sense that something is happening, something involute, blooming in her throat for days. Except that it hasn't just been days - it's been so much longer. She has no idea how long. It's in her pulse and toeing along the edges of her vision - a shadow she could sew back in its place if only she could catch it. Magical thinking infiltrates Scully's life now, reorders her thoughts. It must be the weather, though, bringing it on this way, so strong. A pressure ridge, and now snow-- and Mulder is wrong - wrong. She's not too much of a grown up to appreciate this magic.
Her grip on the steering wheel tightens fractionally.
Leaving the office this evening, she'd nearly forgotten her gloves. Mulder had moved them up to the bookshelf that morning so they wouldn't burn on the heater. She'd asked him where he put them, but instead of just telling her, he'd brought them to her while she stood at the door. He'd given her only one at first, so she took it and put it on, focusing on her hands while he stood needlessly near. She'd flexed her fingers and looked up expectantly, so her gave her the second one. "A bit of a change from the latex; I'm not sure I'd recognize you," he'd joked, watching her pull them on exactly the same way, with the same practice as she would a pair of surgical rubbers.
On the bridge the car's tires hum over the glossy black pavement. All the snow here has been driven into columns of slush along the roadsides. A strand of orangey streetlights stretches into the distance, the snow seeming to fall heaviest beneath them. Below the bridge, the Potomac with its great black appetite devours and devours the falling whiteness. There is a pervasive sense of the night's gentle weight, as snow begins to gather in earnest, pressing soft and cold over everything.
When her phone rings it startles her. "Scully," she answers, prepared to postpone the call for another time.
"How hard is it snowing where you are?" Mulder.
His voice sounds tinny, like he's calling from his cell phone. He must've gone home after she did. "About as hard as it's snowing where you are, Mulder, unless you've learned that trick your purported snowmen are using, and relocated yourself to snowier climes." He chuckles. He has the shortest laugh, the softest laugh. She's gotten used to listening for it over phone lines, otherwise it's all but inaudible. "Is there something we forgot to discuss at the office?" she asks. She waits expectantly for more snowman propaganda, something to convince her this joke of a case demands their investigation.
"Merry Christmas, Scully," he says.
She straightens a tiny bit, unconsciously glancing at the passenger seat. She exhales, smiling. "Mulder, Christmas is over a week away."
"Yeah, but 'Merry' is hardly a legitimate sentiment on its own."
More silence. Her tongue darts quickly along her dry lips, and she switches the phone to her other ear. Mulder should certainly not be calling her now, should he - for no reason? Not even for no reason, but to wish her a Merry something-or-other after they already spent all day together.
"Feeling sentimental, Mulder?" She pays attention to the road, the cars speeding in the opposite direction, the center line blurred by melting slush. She has to be careful.
"Must be something in the air," Mulder says, almost glib.
He'd asked her earlier, who would she pretend her snowman was? Not Parson Brown, he knew that much, nor a circus clown neither. "Out of anyone in the world, Scully," he'd said. "I wouldn't," she'd answered plainly.
There was a time that would have been true.
Her car has nearly reached the end of the bridge now. Ahead of her Columbia Island looms out of the dark, a huge black form immerging from the choppy gleam of the river. Just beyond lies Arlington Cemetery, with stony monuments and narrow streets; headstones topped in white, only a few of them dusted off by recent visitors. The snow plows won't have reached beyond the main roads yet, so Scully follows the parkway north towards the Iwo Jima memorial, skirting the cemetery all together. It's a longer route this way, but besides the treacherous driving conditions, she's seen too many headstones in her life to ever mistake them for scenery.
She feels breathless and provisionary, tired and hungry. Survival feels like a luxury this year - hers and Mulder's. It is almost more than she can bear, to be alive and have Mulder to talk to in the dark, his voice like a fractal pattern unspooling across her senses. She hears him turn the dashboard heater off in his car, hears his breath over the line, faintly. She must keep her eyes on the road, mustn't close them, no matter what, no matter how this feels.
"Merry snow day, Mulder," she says softly. Meanwhile the wiper blades thump and arc across the windshield, steady as a heartbeat. Steadier than some.
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End
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And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh[...]
--T. S. Eliot, 'Preludes'
More Notes: Mulder is quoting (who else but) Eliot when he says, "and then the lighting of the lamps." The narrative also loosely quotes Eliot in the line: 'The winter evening had indeed settled down'. All uses of Eliot, including the title and synopsis, are from 'Preludes'.
Author: amyhit
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nisei, 731, Abduction Arc.
Summary: "Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve"
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's Notes: After much tinkering I finally have a finished fic. I should probably mention that in "Ghost in the Machine," Mulder affably claims the basement has 'no heat or windows'. Given the presence of the skylight, it may have been a facetious remark, however GitM does provide the precedent for how the issue is broached in this fic. Thanks to tree for her very prompt, very helpful beta. Further trivia notes at the end.
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Later on, we'll conspire,
As we dream by the fire.
To face unafraid,
The plans that we've made,
Walking in a winter wonderland.
--Winter Wonderland by Felix Bernard and R. B. Smith
All morning they keep busy with backdated paperwork, Scully perched at her desk, Mulder lounging behind his, each of them throwing out ideas for how to legitimize their expenses in the eyes of those who are watching, correcting each other, suggesting particular phraseology to explain away another missing Sig without blaming paranormal causes, or another lost security deposit with Lariat - another hospital bill. Mulder keeps halting whatever he is doing in order to peer back at the skylight. Once he actually stops dead in the middle of a line of writing. Even through the dirty glass the light filtering in from the outside world has the unmistakable frosted whiteness of fresh snow. Snow that has not yet become entirely trampled into slush. And since every time he looks, she catches his movement and looks as well, together they're worse than two first graders, scuffing their shoes, waiting for a dismissal bell that stubbornly refuses to ring.
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They can't have been in the office more than half an hour before Mulder gathers himself up from the desk and stalks to the door where their coats are hanging with wet hems. He begins going through the heavy masses of wool and lining, searching the pockets. He is searching her coat not his. Scully eyes him from behind the side desk where she is hard at work on a formidable mountain of paperwork. "Mulder," she says.
He looks around but doesn't pause what he's doing. "Yeah?"
"Are you looking for something?"
"Uuuumm...." He draws it out until he finds what he is looking for. "These," he says. He turns and heads back towards the desk, bringing her otter-brown suede gloves with him. For some reason he isn't wearing his shoes. "Good thing last winter hit record lows," he says, "otherwise they never would've gotten someone down here to install this." Instead of retaking his seat he crouches in the corner behind the desk, where the baseboard heater is.
"What are you doing?"
He raises his head and peers over the desk at her, grinning, then holds up one of her gloves and waves it. "Glove rehab, Scully. They need to dry out."
"Mulder, I can--" she falters, sighs. "It's not necessary for you to--"
"I can't believe you don't own a windshield scraper, Scully. Me, I can understand. I'm of the school that believes these menial tasks are what credit cards are for. But I don't own a nice pair of gloves that get the worst of it every time it snows." He rises from the corner and stands on one leg while he warms his other foot on the heater. She watches him teetering in place.
"Don't let them get too hot," she says finally. The tone of her voice is just slightly strained, obstructed by what's unspoken; some frustration perhaps, something. A bit of snow has melted into water on the glass of the skylight. Mulder nearly looses his balance staring too intently up at it. He looks around when she clears her throat, but by that time she has begun another page of drudgery, her eyes trained on the work in front of her.
This morning Scully's hair has been granted slight liberty by the snowy dampness that has dried in it. She won't fix it in the office. She'll slip off to the washroom, even if it's only to tidy it with her fingers. Right now, from where Mulder is standing, he can't see her face - only the copper locks and whorls of her hair.
As he looks on, Mulder's own fingers begin to curl.
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Their first winter as partners the weather had been mild enough, and, ironically, the hallway leading up to the office was usually fairly warm, so they'd simply kept the door open, and Scully had forgone skirts in favor of pants whenever the morning weather report warned of a particularly chilly day ahead.
The next winter was awful. Her return to the office coincided with a bitter cold snap that had them blowing into their hands and wearing their coats indoors much of the time. After the hospital allowed her to discharge herself, Scully had remained privately, inexorably subdued for several weeks. All the while, Mulder had denied that he was in fact deliberately keeping them in the office - denied it to everyone including himself. December began with temperatures hovering at twenty-nine degrees for most of a week, with no snow to soften the chill. Mulder began going twice as often for fresh coffee and conspicuously hanging his coat on the back of Scully's chair, as if by its very presence it might provide some warmth. Then one Thursday night it dropped to eighteen degrees. When Scully arrived to work the next morning Mulder had already been there, and gone. He'd left a thermometer sitting on the desk. It read fifty-eight degrees. Mulder was half an hour late to work that day, and when he finally returned he tossed the thermometer in a drawer without a word. The following Monday there was a baseboard heater attached against the back wall, partially hidden behind the cupboards. It fit neatly in amidst the assemblage of metal cabinets, endless paper, and bric-a-brac. Mulder was late again, and when he showed up he appeared not to realize anything was different. Scully did not ask who he'd grabbed by the collar to get it done. When she was going home that evening she looked down into the trash can and the thermometer was there, but she didn't comment.
Today was the first time either of them has specifically spoken of it since.
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Come lunchtime Mulder is hunched over the desk top, the full length of one forearm braced beside a report he is currently stalled on: how to explain another lost cell phone? It was jarred from his hand as he clung to the top of a moving train. The wind had lashed over his face while the metal of the boxcar chilled him through his clothes. He has told Scully what happened: boxcar 82517, a transitory laboratory, the amorphous truth of it spirited away in shadows. He has told her things that will not be believed, no matter how he puts them down on paper. "'Always tell the truth,'" he mumbles disdainfully, "'that way you don't have to remember what you said.'"
"The doctor from MASH?" Scully guesses.
"Mark Twain," he says, curling his lips, his smile wan but perhaps sincere.
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Scully opts to eat her lunch in the office, but Mulder declares defiantly that he's going out to revel in the timeless wonder of H2O - that it is such a champion for individuality. "The same could be said of anything," she insists. "Snowflakes are simply the layman's example of a basic principle." He grouses playfully about her having "grown up" so that she "no longer appreciates the magic" of it. She calmly watches him shoving his arms through his coat sleeves and tests the warmth of her coffee.
Five minutes later he's back. His entire right side is spattered with gritty slush. He shakes out his right sleeve with an expression of bland contempt. "Was it deliberate?" she asks, getting up to help him out of his coat.
"They seemed to swerve when they saw me, yeah." He toes off his shoes without stooping to undo the laces and carries them over to the vent. "It wasn't even snowing anymore," he says. "Must've stopped hours ago." With his drooping shoulders and his fingers hooked gingerly into the heels of his shoes, it doesn't even matter that he's wearing a suit; he looks entirely like a young boy.
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While she stabs at her salad, Scully continues to jot down pieces of relevant information on the form in front of her. Meanwhile, Mulder tosses around a Mandarin orange. When that gets old he peels it, absurdly slowly, so as to keep the peel in one piece. She watches him from the corner of her eye, pretending not to be drawn in by this pointless project; this careful, dexterous, pointless project.
They both know that Mulder generally completes one bureaucratic article for every two of hers, but Scully doesn't call him on it. His creative ingenuity has helped them get away with some of their most incredible expenditures; ones no amount of her efficient double speak could explain. And it's not his fault that while she finds her career fitting less and less within the bounds of authority, she becomes all the more determined to leave no I undotted or T uncrossed. Well... hardly his fault.
Mulder's sodden spirits resuscitate with his blood sugar, and he quietly begins humming something that sounds suspiciously like a Christmas carol. She huffs when she catches the tune, and raises her eyebrow almost archly. "Winter Wonderland?"
He breaks off, considers her a moment. "So, Scully," he says, "if you were going to build a snowman, who would you pretend it was?"
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While Mulder is off procuring them fresh coffee Scully's pen runs out of ink. She stands to get a refill and suddenly, as she looks up from her work, the myopia of long hours of diligent focus simply blinks away. She looks around the office with clear vision. A line of winter light is drawn across the basement floor, edging into the room. Mulder's chair is in the fall of the light, as is a portion of the desk. Outside the clouds have thinned, but the sun is still covered. The light she steps into has only the faintest warmth. It seems to stream into the room, stirring the hidden silt of dust mites - yet the entire office is exquisitely still, breathless somehow.
The ink refills are in the main desk. Mulder has rearranged things recently and she has to try several drawers before she finds what she's looking for. He has left a page of writing half-finished, his pen laying uncapped on top of his work. She has never said that she likes his writing - the way it is unembellished: long extenders scrawling out, no space left at the edge of the page, things crossed out, things written back in, and vague lines everywhere, joining one sentence to another. His writing is more familiar than anyone's but her own. And it is nothing like her own. She tucks her hair behind her ear, carefully, as she leans over the open page.
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Mulder comes back and catches her there, sees her there, standing behind the desk. "Proofreading?" he asks. She looks up abruptly to where he is lingering near the door. Despite the cold weather, she is wearing a skirt today, and the backs of her knees are touching his chair. He comes around the side of the desk, close to her. "How'd I do, Doc?" he drawls. "Will Uncle Sam approve?"
She turns sideways, slipping narrowly past him. All in a flash she feels feisty, wants to parry his artful feint. "Mulder, you have the penmanship of a madman," she says.
"Oooh-- but I thought graphology was for charlatans, Scully."
Smiling, she holds his eyes as she takes the coffee he offers her. She leans her hip against the side of the desk, facing him, and sips slowly, being careful not to scald her tongue. He follows suit, and for a moment they stand in caffeine communion. Then she breaks her stance, turns, and goes back to the other desk. She shuffles a few papers, and he can be heard doing the same.
"Feels like a snow day," he says after a while, but there is something in his voice like a catch, and it's as if he were saying something else entirely.
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By four in the afternoon Scully admits - "under duress," she wants it on record - that she might actually be a "wily, renegade fibber" beneath her "polished, by-the-book exterior" - at least where matters of Bureau documentation are concerned. Mulder, flippant, provides the phraseology in this case. She gives him a stern glance. It's true, there was a time not so long ago when it would have been unthinkable, the amount of wilful obfuscation she now commits simply to keep their mishaps and adventures out of OPR's iron clutches. Dana Scully would've disapproved of this woman and her sleight of hand: her pen sharper than the proverbial sword, her poker face in the AD's office, and the satisfaction she derives from reclaiming the cold metal of her gun off the nightstand every morning. But all of this doesn't mean Mulder is supposed to take notice of her. Her life, at times, seems to have taken on the absurdity of a Sunday morning cartoon: the cliff on which she treads has crumbled to nothing, yet she is still walking forwards. Mulder speeds by, makes her look down, and at times she is more than a little furious with him, impervious to such things as he seems.
"Mulder, you seem to be calling me insubordinate as if it were a good thing," she says cooly.
"Sure." He stretches at length, unselfconscious, his limbs tensing and relaxing. "It's the basic Yin and Yang principle. You're a lot of good things, Scully. It stands to reason that some of them are bound to be bad."
She puzzles this out a moment, fruitlessly. How simple, and oblique. Unable to think of a better response, she purses her lips and says nothing.
Some moments later she is kneeling on the floor in front of one of the filing cabinets. Mulder is having a disagreement with his calculator over a number it keeps giving him. He punches the same button a few times over before tossing the calculator on the desk, defeated. Suddenly she sits back on her heels. "Mulder, what the hell does that mean?"
He looks over at her. She is kneeling with the hem of her skirt tucked under her knees and her hair tucked behind her ears. She is altogether very tucked. He gives her that look which is deadpan in aspect, but is secretly a full fledged grin if you know how to read it. Then he goes back to his calculator. "Scully, I think this calculator is missing time," he muses. "It keeps telling me our total expenditures in West Allis aren't enough for us to have stayed all five nights."
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At seven PM Scully finally begins gathering together everything that remains in front of her: tomorrow's duties. The pleasant boldness of the lamps, casting their variant spheres of light about the office, are not helping her waning resolve any. It's been dark since the early evening - the kind of dim, oncoming darkness that had gathered for a long time in the room before it had finally overcome their sense that it was daytime still. Scully had been the first to turn on a lamp, and Mulder, noticing that it was suddenly much easier to see the page, looked up from an article he was reading concerning various forms of anthropomorphism. "'And then the lighting of the lamps,'" he said quietly, smiling. The glow cast rich brown tones back into the darkness of his hair and eyes. The winter evening had indeed settled down.
Mulder watches her as she prepares to leave for home, glancing up from his studies several times to mark her progress. She is quiet in pushing her chair out from the desk, and in pushing it back again - her motions measured and succinct. As though he will not notice her absence if she does not disrupt him in leaving. She is donning her extra layers at the door when he finally speaks. "Do you still have those Isotoner boots you wore in the arctic?" he says offhandedly. She pauses.
He pops the cap back on the highlighter he's been using and discards it on the desk. As though trained, it rolls off the other side, onto the floor where he can't reach it without getting up. She looks from it to him with pursed lips. He cranes his neck to see where it landed. After a moment she relents and crosses to it. Stooping with her coat over one arm, she picks it up and sets it back on the desk. "Yes, I still have them. Why?"
"How do you feel about snowmen, Scully?"
She props her thumb against her cheekbone and presses her fingers against her forehead. "Mulder," she says warningly, "if this is about the abominable snowman..."
He snags the highlighter off the desk and tosses it onto the counter behind him, leaning back in his chair and putting his legs up. "Just regular snowmen, to my knowledge," he says, "except that uh-- " He is still in his sock feet. She raises an eyebrow.
"Except?" she prompts.
"They've been disappearing in Maine for a couple of weeks now."
She crosses her arms, but her expression doesn't change. "Disappearing," she says. It's been awfully cold in Maine this week.
He nods. "Or possibly walking out of their yards."
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Stopped at a light on Constitution avenue, fog creeps over the windshield until she can't see out. Fortunately it's a long light. She turns the vents on high and waits as the glass clears. The radio is off and she's driving in relative in silence - oddly complacent with the commute that lies ahead of her. The traffic is bad in this weather, of course - car horns honking up and down the street; but she doesn't mind giving her attention to the road. It's an easier thing to attend to than most of what crowds her head these days. Her windshield wipers keep her company, whining and redrawing the same streaks endlessly.
She turns left on 17th and drives along one end of the reflecting pool. Tonight it's nothing but a huge dark rectangle, spanning the length of the snowy grass. Birds congregate on the WWII memorial, hopping and trading their posts. All the park benches are empty this evening.
It must be the weather's doing - this continued sense that something is happening, something involute, blooming in her throat for days. Except that it hasn't just been days - it's been so much longer. She has no idea how long. It's in her pulse and toeing along the edges of her vision - a shadow she could sew back in its place if only she could catch it. Magical thinking infiltrates Scully's life now, reorders her thoughts. It must be the weather, though, bringing it on this way, so strong. A pressure ridge, and now snow-- and Mulder is wrong - wrong. She's not too much of a grown up to appreciate this magic.
Her grip on the steering wheel tightens fractionally.
Leaving the office this evening, she'd nearly forgotten her gloves. Mulder had moved them up to the bookshelf that morning so they wouldn't burn on the heater. She'd asked him where he put them, but instead of just telling her, he'd brought them to her while she stood at the door. He'd given her only one at first, so she took it and put it on, focusing on her hands while he stood needlessly near. She'd flexed her fingers and looked up expectantly, so her gave her the second one. "A bit of a change from the latex; I'm not sure I'd recognize you," he'd joked, watching her pull them on exactly the same way, with the same practice as she would a pair of surgical rubbers.
On the bridge the car's tires hum over the glossy black pavement. All the snow here has been driven into columns of slush along the roadsides. A strand of orangey streetlights stretches into the distance, the snow seeming to fall heaviest beneath them. Below the bridge, the Potomac with its great black appetite devours and devours the falling whiteness. There is a pervasive sense of the night's gentle weight, as snow begins to gather in earnest, pressing soft and cold over everything.
When her phone rings it startles her. "Scully," she answers, prepared to postpone the call for another time.
"How hard is it snowing where you are?" Mulder.
His voice sounds tinny, like he's calling from his cell phone. He must've gone home after she did. "About as hard as it's snowing where you are, Mulder, unless you've learned that trick your purported snowmen are using, and relocated yourself to snowier climes." He chuckles. He has the shortest laugh, the softest laugh. She's gotten used to listening for it over phone lines, otherwise it's all but inaudible. "Is there something we forgot to discuss at the office?" she asks. She waits expectantly for more snowman propaganda, something to convince her this joke of a case demands their investigation.
"Merry Christmas, Scully," he says.
She straightens a tiny bit, unconsciously glancing at the passenger seat. She exhales, smiling. "Mulder, Christmas is over a week away."
"Yeah, but 'Merry' is hardly a legitimate sentiment on its own."
More silence. Her tongue darts quickly along her dry lips, and she switches the phone to her other ear. Mulder should certainly not be calling her now, should he - for no reason? Not even for no reason, but to wish her a Merry something-or-other after they already spent all day together.
"Feeling sentimental, Mulder?" She pays attention to the road, the cars speeding in the opposite direction, the center line blurred by melting slush. She has to be careful.
"Must be something in the air," Mulder says, almost glib.
He'd asked her earlier, who would she pretend her snowman was? Not Parson Brown, he knew that much, nor a circus clown neither. "Out of anyone in the world, Scully," he'd said. "I wouldn't," she'd answered plainly.
There was a time that would have been true.
Her car has nearly reached the end of the bridge now. Ahead of her Columbia Island looms out of the dark, a huge black form immerging from the choppy gleam of the river. Just beyond lies Arlington Cemetery, with stony monuments and narrow streets; headstones topped in white, only a few of them dusted off by recent visitors. The snow plows won't have reached beyond the main roads yet, so Scully follows the parkway north towards the Iwo Jima memorial, skirting the cemetery all together. It's a longer route this way, but besides the treacherous driving conditions, she's seen too many headstones in her life to ever mistake them for scenery.
She feels breathless and provisionary, tired and hungry. Survival feels like a luxury this year - hers and Mulder's. It is almost more than she can bear, to be alive and have Mulder to talk to in the dark, his voice like a fractal pattern unspooling across her senses. She hears him turn the dashboard heater off in his car, hears his breath over the line, faintly. She must keep her eyes on the road, mustn't close them, no matter what, no matter how this feels.
"Merry snow day, Mulder," she says softly. Meanwhile the wiper blades thump and arc across the windshield, steady as a heartbeat. Steadier than some.
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End
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And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh[...]
--T. S. Eliot, 'Preludes'
More Notes: Mulder is quoting (who else but) Eliot when he says, "and then the lighting of the lamps." The narrative also loosely quotes Eliot in the line: 'The winter evening had indeed settled down'. All uses of Eliot, including the title and synopsis, are from 'Preludes'.