Letters Lost in the Fire
1.
“This came across my desk.”
He was so full of shit sometimes.
From the Philadelphia field office, from Billings, Montana, or Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from a detective in Albany who went to school with Reggie Purdue. “I’m a popular guy,” he would say with a self-deprecating shrug, fidget with the knot of his tie. Flash her a smile. He was a go-getter, you had to give him that.
If she were her friend, she would’ve told herself to run far, far away from him a long, long time ago. That’s the kind of friend she was, back when she had friends.
She wouldn’t usually have let him talk her into this. No, wait. For one thing, that makes it sound exciting, and it isn’t. And it also isn’t true. He’d somehow managed to talk her right into her mid-thirties without blinking. But it’s the weekend, for one, and this also is not currently her job. Or his. She supposes Mulder is her job in a larger, cosmic sense, but that idea doesn’t bear thinking about for too long.
Work now is dull, pleasantly tiring. What it must be like for most people in the world. The only running she does is on the treadmill. She rations out the roll of wint-o-green Lifesavers she’s taken to keeping on her desk, a time-marking trick stolen from a woman across the bullpen. Her eyes burn from the firefly glow of computerized background checks. They leave promptly at 6:00 every day, saying their goodnights in the parking garage. She watches Jeopardy with her dinner; Mulder usually calls her. He is certain that Alex has taken to drinking, and wants to point out the accumulating evidence.
So. She shouldn’t have let him talk her into this, because it isn’t their job and it has nothing to do with anything and a crime hasn’t even been committed. No one is in trouble, danger is not lurking. But the prospect of being on the road with him, outside, even at the expense of her weekend, makes her feel like a trapped miner blinking and stumbling gratefully into the sunlight.
It’s Friday afternoon, 28 minutes into their hour-long lunch break. They count their days like this, now. It’s November, but the air is strangely warm, warm enough that they’ve sloughed off their coats and Scully’s shoes keep creeping off the back of her feet, like her toes are plotting an escape.
Mulder slides a file across the table. She stabs a baby tomato in his barely touched salad.
“Where were you keeping this?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
He probably had X-File sized pockets sewn into his trench. She maneuvers the tomato, biting it carefully to prevent an explosion, and opens the file.
“It came across my desk. The--”
“Liar.” She cuts him off before he can fabricate its provenance, which he kind of likes. There is not much cause for them to banter these days, so he’ll take it where he can get it.
His face is too pale, she thinks. Winter is coming, it’s here, but she wants to blow off the rest of the day and stretch out in the grass, steal the last vitamin D until spring. She is always vigilant with the SPF, she has to be. She even swipes at Mulder’s face with the tube she packs, telling him he’ll thank her later. He tells her to let him know exactly when that will be. Today, though, she thinks a little lobstering wouldn’t hurt either of them. She wants Mulder’s cheekbones to get pink, wants to see his freckles, that squinty, sun-dazed look that suits him so well.
“Okay, save me the trouble,” she says, tapping the file.
We should go on the road with this routine.
2.
And so that is how she finds herself in a non-reimbursable rental car with Mulder on a Saturday morning, having already spent several early hours on a plane, driving to a college town in Illinois, where the ghost of a pretty influenza victim named Alice is floating around the campus. Allegedly. Etc.
The windows of the car are cracked to break up the stifling, wet sweater warmth of a half-broken heater. Bleached prairie grass flashes past, some of it wild, some of it cultivated by the department of transportation.
Scully leans her head back contentedly, snuggling down in her seat, the sun warming stained glass patches of her legs.
“What?” he prods.
“What.” She lifts an eyelid to give him a sideways look.
“You look more pleased with yourself than usual.”
“Than usual? I am pleased,” she says without elaborating. She closes her eyes again, snakes the tips of her fingers out the window. The metal is cold.
“Uh huh,” he says.
He hadn’t called her the night before, better not to give her a chance to change her mind. He thought about taking his phone off the hook. He was surprised at his good luck when she walked out of her building at the appointed time, bag in hand. Too easy, there had to be a catch.
3.
They are careful not to flash their badges, preface their names with “Special Agent,” use the letters F, B, or I, act as though they are there in any sort of official capacity. But it’s amazing what people will tell you when you look as though you can make them tell you something. Long coats and notebooks, Mulder marvels, these things that give them legitimacy.
In her evenly right-slanting hand, Scully takes notes.
All morning, and all afternoon, she patiently asks questions, listens to fidgety sorority sisters explain how they heard something in the shower, how nothing will stay hung on one, cold wall, how someone’s boyfriend saw a girl in a long nightgown (and no one wears long nightgowns, you know), speaks with a tenured professor who had performed tests on the wood of a grandfather clock which was given to the college as a gift from the dead girl’s parents. Results: inconclusive. The clock is said to be haunted, but so is the infirmary where the girl died, and so is the community bathroom, apparently, as well as various and sundry other dorm rooms. The spirit is surprisingly mobile. She is said to like turning electronics off and on.
No one is being terrorized. No deaths have occurred, no one has even been hurt. As far as ghost stories go, it’s pretty tame. The professor explains that Alice is looking for love letters from her boyfriend, a soldier killed in France. Did they even say boyfriend back then? Her love, her best guy, her fella. Boyfriend sounds so undignified. She never even knew he was dead. Scully appreciates the difficulty of labeling men who did things like get themselves blown up in foreign countries without telling you. She’d like to talk to good old Alice. The love letters she would never find were burnt to a crisp with her clothes, her books, her linens, everything she’d touched. Homecoming bonfires must not have seemed very festive anymore.
Despite all that, Scully does not roll her eyes, doesn’t use the word “alleged,” doesn’t explain to anyone why ghosts do not exist. Not even to Mulder. She nods and she takes notes. Serious ones, just-the-facts-ma’am notes. The kind she took the first month she worked with Mulder, before she started adding a smart-aleck running commentary for his benefit.
They take a tour of the county history museum, entrance fee: Your Generosity Is Appreciated. They each shove a five dollar bill into the plexiglas cube under the watchful eye of Doris, the elderly docent who leads them around the converted log cabin. They learn more about pioneer hygiene practices than they ever could have hoped. Mulder pays 51 cents to smash a penny.
4.
Mulder narrows his eyes at her over a checker board on the porch at Cracker Barrel. Cars fly past at an alarming rate up on the highway, each one a miniature tunnel of sound, expanding and then contracting. They are, the two of them, a black hole in the middle of senior citizens, interstate travelers, college kids filling their bellies with alcohol-absorbing starch.
Scully traipses a red checker in an impressive zigzag across the board and he throws his head back in defeat.
His tie and coat are in the backseat of their car and his sleeves are rolled up, even though the air is sharp and cool. Scully has the sleeves of her cardigan pulled down below the sleeves of her coat, over her hands, and she can see the hair on Mulder’s forearms standing up. She shivers.
“Aren’t you cold?” She already knows what he’ll say. Men, with their I’m-not-cold. One of her pet theories is that he only brought a few layers to Antarctica because he wanted to show off, traipsing around in a vest, his hair wet and nose sweetly snuffly.
In response, Mulder huffs and puffs and admires his fogged breath hanging in the air.
After dinner, while Scully pays the bill, Mulder buys giant boxes of candy in the crowded, old timey gift shop. As he stands in line, Scully tosses him a roll of dusty Necco wafers to add to their loot. In the car, she shows him how they used to play Communion with them when they were kids. She carefully places an orange disc on her pink tongue and has to tell him to keep his eyes on the road.
“Me next,” he says.
“You’re not Catholic,” she tells him.
“I’ll convert.”
He keeps glancing over at her and letting the wheel go slack and she’s afraid they’re going to end up in a ditch, so she takes out a licorice wafer and slips it in his mouth to shut him up.
5.
Mulder had smuggled home files that are no longer his, and had in turn smuggled them there, to his motel room. So now they read in comfortable silence, sucking on root beer barrels and electric blue taffy. They pass x-rays back and forth, blurry photos, typed pages from bewildered sheriff’s departments that are sure to remain bewildered because they aren’t allowed to help. It felt like they’d been grounded by the Bureau. Now they’re sneaking out, breaking curfew. Scully has taken over his bed, and his giraffe legs are slung over the arm of a chair.
Scully goes out to get ice, she hates drinking country water without ice, and when she comes back in, she has the urgent need to get to the bottom of their trip.
“Did this really come across your desk?”
“Do I ever lie to you?”
(He was so full of shit sometimes.)
It was a trick, of course. He played things fast and loose, but somehow, it always fit together in his own head. He lied to her, frequently, but she also got the feeling that she was the only one he ever told the truth to, the whole truth and nothing but.
“Yes. Constantly.”
He’s chewing on a straw and he stops. “Do you think that?”
“Mulder,” she says, trying to keep this from going off the rails. You started it, she tells herself.
He puts the straw down, wet and crumpled.
“Maybe I do.” This was what he’d been afraid of. It was almost a relief to have the waiting over. His heart was pounding, spoiling for a fight.
“Don’t get broody, please, I’m having a very nice time.” She sits down primly on the edge of the bed, ironing the legs of her pants with her palms.
“Really.”
“Really.”
“Well, you’re the world’s worst liar, so I know it’s true.”
“I am not!” She flings an ice cube at him. He fishes it from his shirt and puts it in his mouth.
“I know it’s not anything,” he begins, once he’s chomped the ice down to nothing. “No crime has been committed. There’s no real reason for us to be here.”
“So why are we here, Mulder?” It comes out harsher than necessary, she feels petty for saying it, although a trip to Illinois for an entire weekend isn’t exactly petty. If he’d dragged her somewhere for the afternoon in the greater metropolitan D.C. area, then this would be petty. But she’s in a motel in Illinois and her dry cleaning is still going to be waiting for her when they get back, her unscrubbed bathtub, her nearly empty refrigerator.
“No one made you come. I hope you don’t feel like you have to be my babysitter,” he spits.
She bites the inside of her mouth.
“You know, I’m tired,” he says, as he unfolds himself from the chair and reaches around her to start clearing the bed of papers and files.
She clenches her fists, nails in palms, because her fists want to punch him in the face right now, and it’s her job to remind them that they don’t really want to do that. Not really. She stands up and walks to the door. He won’t look at her. He’s being bratty, acting like picking up these papers is the most fascinating thing he’s ever done. She wants to throw her shoe at his head. Would that be better or worse than a right hook?
She pauses when she’s on the sidewalk and turns around, grips the doorframe.
“Mulder.”
“What.” He doesn’t look up.
“I miss it, too.” He pauses, his back still toward her. “Work,” she says, “I miss it, too.”
He turns to her, then, rubbing his eyes. Feeling stupid.
“I know. Scully,” he says, “I know.
They nod at each other. Say goodnight.
6.
On Monday morning, she prints up a memo. (Misuse of government time, misuse of government property.) She signs it at the top next to her typed name, DS, and sets it on Mulder’s desk, walks away. He presses his thumb into the damp ink, coming up with a mirror image of her initials.
Special Agent Dana Scully is amenable, it says, in the future, to certain fact-gathering excursions of an unspecific nature, with unspecific goals, not related to currently assigned and sanctioned cases. Said excursions are not to interfere with said assigned and sanctioned cases. Said excursions should be presented to aforementioned Special Agent no fewer than 48 hours prior to departure. Said excursions will be swiftly curtailed if certain other Agents of record start being jerks while on the road.
She takes her time in the bathroom, dawdling at the drinking fountain. He says nothing when she returns, but the paper is gone, so she knows he’s read it. He says nothing about it the rest of the day and she starts to feel a little silly, like a junior high kid who took an inside joke more seriously than the rest of her friends.
When she gets home that night, she finds the crumpled up receipt from their lunchtime sandwiches in her coat pocket. On the back, it says, “Agreed.” It is signed with a loopy FM.
The phone rings. She doesn’t bother saying hello, and neither does he.
“The answer was ‘What is tequila?’ and he said they also would have accepted, ‘What is my pre-show drink of choice?’”
“Mulder.”
There’s a pause, and he clears his throat. She pictures his fish swimming bright and blue-green next to his head.
“Would I lie to you?”
She turns on the TV. “What is stonemasonry?” she says. “Never,” she says.
[earlyseason6, off-the-x-files, on-the-road]