gift for dorasolo
Title: An Unexpected Hour
Author: S Z Grey (livejournal: szgrey, tumblr: keepingtrackoflosttime)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Tags: M&S friendship, hint of MSR. Contains religious themes, irreverence, anxiety, mention of Biblical apocalypse, abduction, loss of bodily autonomy, government complicity in experiments on unknowing human subjects. Set during season 3 (post-Revelations) with a flashback to season 2 (post-Firewalker).
Summary: This is a story about hope.
December 3, 1995
10:13am
She’s perched on a high stool in the window of a coffee shop, doing the Sunday Times crossword and watching the diner across the street, when her cell phone rings.
“Hello?”
“We got him,” Mulder says. He sounds winded but cheerful, and she closes her eyes with a rush of relief. Thank God.
She asks anyway. “The girls?”
“Alive and uninjured, and Bethany Cooper ID’ed the accomplice. You were right, it was the Nichols kid. The local PD sent someone to bring him in.”
“He hasn’t left the diner,” Scully says.
“Good. Thank you. Sorry you got stuck on stakeout duty.”
She shrugs. “The coffee’s good.” A police car turns onto the street and pulls up a few spaces away from the diner.
“Yeah, but you missed all the excitement of watching me tackle Gioia into a mud puddle,” Mulder says, grin in his voice. “You would have been impressed, it was very athletic.”
“I’m sure it was,” Scully says. “I hope you’re planning to change into something a little less athletic for the drive home, the motor pool guys are still mad at us for-”
“-the Swamp Thing incident, I know.”
“It was a thing in a swamp, Mulder, that doesn’t make it a Swamp Thing,” she says, smiling. “Don’t think I don’t hear you capitalizing it.”
“Don’t think I don’t hear you grinning, Scully.”
Across the street, two officers come out of Addie’s Diner with a thin teenage boy between them. “Phil Nichols has just been taken into custody.”
“Guess I’ll see him at the station,” Mulder says. “I’m catching a ride over with Deputy Wilson, I just have to give my statement and then I’ll meet you back at the motel.”
“I’ll see you there,” Scully says.
The coffee is good, so she pays fifty cents for a refill before leaving the shop. A sharp wind blows down the street, throwing up eddies of brown leaves, and she leans into it, pulling her coat around her. The Bureau sedan is only a block away, but her steps slow as she approaches it, arrested by the sound of singing. The voices drifting from the open church door are loud and joyful, hands clapping in time with the music. Scully stands at the foot of the broad stone steps, sipping her coffee, and listens.
My Lord, what a morning!
My Lord, what a morning!
Oh my Lord, what a morning,
when the stars begin to fall…..
when the stars begin to fall.
Scully looks up at a gray sky crisscrossed by bare branches and imagines falling stars. She thinks of the miracles she witnessed during the case in Ohio, the fear she confessed to a faceless priest in a Baltimore parish the day after her return: what if God is speaking, but no one is paying attention?
Looking to my God’s right hand, the congregation sings, and she finds herself humming along as she reads the sign beside the door.
KING METHODIST CHURCH
EST. 1891
JOIN US IN WORSHIP- ALL ARE WELCOME
SUNDAY SERVICES AT 7:30 AND 10:00
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT - THE LORD IS COMING
SERMON BY REV. SAMUEL CARVER: “KEEP AWAKE!”
The singers’ voices swell and subside, and a rolling baritone rings out. “Hear now the gospel of the Lord as it was given to Matthew,” the speaker says. “‘But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man…’”
Scully drinks the last of her coffee and mounts the steps, flattening the paper cup and slipping it into the pocket of her coat. She bows her head as she steps into the church, then looks around and sinks into an empty pew in the back.
“‘…they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away,” the man at the pulpit continues. “So too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.’”
Scully’s nails bite into her palms. The familiar words cut to the heart of her fear, her unsteady faith. One will be taken, and one will be left. She closes her eyes and sees a field of bright white light, a room full of solemn women holding pill bottles and baby food jars, a group of white-coated men bending over a body in a train car.
“‘…if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’”
Like a thief in the night, Mulder’s voice teases in her mind. Better watch out, hide your valuables, Jesus is coming. She smiles in spite of herself.
“Praise to you, Lord Jesus,” the congregation murmurs as she slips out into the cold morning.
Driving back to the motel, Scully thinks about falling stars. Be ready, the gospel writer says, but how could one possibly prepare for the end of the world? Try as she might, she can’t imagine welcoming the apocalypse. The Rapture, it’s supposed to be rapturous, but all she sees are the MUFON women, unsmiling and kind. Most of us have been taken many times. By men, she knows, but the knowledge doesn’t help. Men or monsters, angels or aliens, she goes cold at the thought of being taken again.
She’d felt miserably, helplessly angry when she woke up to find that months of her life had been stolen from her, and she'd grown more frustrated and impatient with each day she passed in her hospital room, surrounded by slowly deflating balloons and dying flowers while the world went on without her. Determined to reclaim her life, she'd chafed against her mother’s concern, her partner’s desire to protect her, her own sense of fragility. Hope, for Scully, was best pursued through action. Just as she had after her father's death the year before, she'd gone back to work as soon as she could.
And look how well that worked out, she thinks wryly.
Within a few days of her return to the field, she and Mulder had been immured in an isolation chamber deep under Fort Marlene. A month of blank walls and bland food, squats and crunches and pushups and endless games of Scrabble with a battered board and two partial sets of letters, a month without seeing the sky. She washed her hair with shampoo that smelled too strongly of green apples and left her hair dry and brittle, and wore Army-issue gray sweats that she had to roll at the wrists and ankles, and almost every morning she woke with her heart racing, overwhelmed with a half-conscious conviction that she was paralyzed.
She didn’t tell Mulder. It might have helped to talk about it, but she couldn’t bear to give up the last vestiges of her privacy. They were so exposed in their isolation, spending every day and night within thirty feet of one another and in full view of whatever observers might step up to the reinforced window. They yielded up blood and stool samples to be tested for contamination, submitted to medical exams conducted by impersonal technicians dressed as if for space travel, stepped into body scanners...
They knew, she realizes, reaching half-consciously to rub the back of her neck. They knew, and they knew not to tell me.
She shivers.
November 27, 1994
7:31am
Scully wakes with a start, pulse pounding in her throat.
I’m losing more time, she thinks, staring at the blank ceiling. Something in her shudders at the sight of the windowless white room, the interchangeable USAMRIID personnel faceless and silent in their pressurized suits.
She looks over at the other cot. Mulder is stretched on his back, feet hanging off the end of his too-short cot, tossing a crumpled ball of paper into the air and catching it. “Whoa, oh, we’re halfway there,” he sings under his breath. “Whoa, oh, living in a.. square… room… under an army base…”
She laughs and flings her pillow at him.
He catches it, dropping the paper, and throws it back. “Pop quiz, Scully. You know what day this is?"
"Sunday?"
"This is the glorious midpoint of our stay in Uncle Sam's most state-of-the-art basement. Two weeks down, two to go." He grins broadly. "And yes, it's Sunday, you get a point."
She sits up and stretches, counting the days in her head. Thursday was Thanksgiving, that means-- "It's Hope Sunday, actually, the first Sunday of advent. It's early this year. Do I get another point for that?" She smiles, thinking of how they used to take turns lighting the advent wreath- four candles, four weeks, four children. Missy would recite under her breath as the match moved from wick to wick, hope, peace, joy, love.
"Advent, huh?" He feels around on the floor for the crumpled paper, goes back to tossing it. "The season of waiting. Seems appropriate."
"I know." She sighs. "Two weeks, and it feels like forever."
"Hang in there, Scully, the end is in sight." Mulder bounces his clump of paper off the ceiling. "At least we're waiting for something we know is coming," he adds quietly.
There's a bitter echo in his voice, and she thinks of his months of fruitless searching, his refusal to give up hope. I came back, she doesn't say.
"Know what else today is? It's the twenty-first anniversary of Samantha’s abduction. I still picture her as eight years old, but if she’s alive out there somewhere, she’s twenty-nine now. I could pass her in the street and never know it.” He hurls the paper, grabs for it on the rebound and misses. It hits the floor with a hollow tap and skids under Scully’s cot. “Sometimes I wonder if I have.”
"Well," she says slowly, "that's something to hope for, then, isn't it?"
December 10, 1995
11:21pm
The stars are falling.
“Make a wish,” Mulder says, nudging her in the ribs with the point of his elbow.
Scully jabs back with her own elbow, smiling when he winces theatrically and raises his palms in surrender. "Shouldn't that be two wishes?" she says. "No, wait- three. Five. Seven?" More meteors streak across the sky, too fast for her to count them all.
"Make as many wishes as you like." He puts his arm around her, carefully, as though she might flinch away.
Instead, she leans in. It's a cold night for standing on rooftops. "I'm good," she says.
Notes:
1. “My Lord, What a Morning” is an African-American spiritual dating back to sometime in the nineteenth century. Versions of it appear in many hymnals, including that of the United Methodist Church. The singers in this story give a more joyful and up-tempo rendition than is typical.
2. The Biblical passage read in the church service is Matthew 24:36-44, New Revised Standard Version. These verses were the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent in 1995 according to the Revised Standard Lectionary. It was also the reading for this past Advent, and it was listening to it while attending church during a visit to my parents that planted the seed of this story.
3. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, is the only United States Department of Defense lab with Biosafety Level 4 research and biocontainment facilities, so it’s the most realistic location for Mulder and Scully to be quarantined post-Firewalker. Fort Marlene is the fictionalized X-Files version of Fort Detrick.
4. Mulder sings a brief improvisation on Bon Jovi’s 1986 pop hit “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
5. In the final scene they're watching the Geminid meteor shower, which was visible from the 4th to the 16th of December in 1995 and peaked on the 13th, a few nights after I have Mulder and Scully watching it. The Geminids are the only major meteor shower that give a good showing before midnight, according to the American Meteor Society, and thus could plausibly be watched at 11:21.
Author: S Z Grey (livejournal: szgrey, tumblr: keepingtrackoflosttime)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Tags: M&S friendship, hint of MSR. Contains religious themes, irreverence, anxiety, mention of Biblical apocalypse, abduction, loss of bodily autonomy, government complicity in experiments on unknowing human subjects. Set during season 3 (post-Revelations) with a flashback to season 2 (post-Firewalker).
Summary: This is a story about hope.
December 3, 1995
10:13am
She’s perched on a high stool in the window of a coffee shop, doing the Sunday Times crossword and watching the diner across the street, when her cell phone rings.
“Hello?”
“We got him,” Mulder says. He sounds winded but cheerful, and she closes her eyes with a rush of relief. Thank God.
She asks anyway. “The girls?”
“Alive and uninjured, and Bethany Cooper ID’ed the accomplice. You were right, it was the Nichols kid. The local PD sent someone to bring him in.”
“He hasn’t left the diner,” Scully says.
“Good. Thank you. Sorry you got stuck on stakeout duty.”
She shrugs. “The coffee’s good.” A police car turns onto the street and pulls up a few spaces away from the diner.
“Yeah, but you missed all the excitement of watching me tackle Gioia into a mud puddle,” Mulder says, grin in his voice. “You would have been impressed, it was very athletic.”
“I’m sure it was,” Scully says. “I hope you’re planning to change into something a little less athletic for the drive home, the motor pool guys are still mad at us for-”
“-the Swamp Thing incident, I know.”
“It was a thing in a swamp, Mulder, that doesn’t make it a Swamp Thing,” she says, smiling. “Don’t think I don’t hear you capitalizing it.”
“Don’t think I don’t hear you grinning, Scully.”
Across the street, two officers come out of Addie’s Diner with a thin teenage boy between them. “Phil Nichols has just been taken into custody.”
“Guess I’ll see him at the station,” Mulder says. “I’m catching a ride over with Deputy Wilson, I just have to give my statement and then I’ll meet you back at the motel.”
“I’ll see you there,” Scully says.
The coffee is good, so she pays fifty cents for a refill before leaving the shop. A sharp wind blows down the street, throwing up eddies of brown leaves, and she leans into it, pulling her coat around her. The Bureau sedan is only a block away, but her steps slow as she approaches it, arrested by the sound of singing. The voices drifting from the open church door are loud and joyful, hands clapping in time with the music. Scully stands at the foot of the broad stone steps, sipping her coffee, and listens.
My Lord, what a morning!
My Lord, what a morning!
Oh my Lord, what a morning,
when the stars begin to fall…..
when the stars begin to fall.
Scully looks up at a gray sky crisscrossed by bare branches and imagines falling stars. She thinks of the miracles she witnessed during the case in Ohio, the fear she confessed to a faceless priest in a Baltimore parish the day after her return: what if God is speaking, but no one is paying attention?
Looking to my God’s right hand, the congregation sings, and she finds herself humming along as she reads the sign beside the door.
KING METHODIST CHURCH
EST. 1891
JOIN US IN WORSHIP- ALL ARE WELCOME
SUNDAY SERVICES AT 7:30 AND 10:00
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT - THE LORD IS COMING
SERMON BY REV. SAMUEL CARVER: “KEEP AWAKE!”
The singers’ voices swell and subside, and a rolling baritone rings out. “Hear now the gospel of the Lord as it was given to Matthew,” the speaker says. “‘But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man…’”
Scully drinks the last of her coffee and mounts the steps, flattening the paper cup and slipping it into the pocket of her coat. She bows her head as she steps into the church, then looks around and sinks into an empty pew in the back.
“‘…they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away,” the man at the pulpit continues. “So too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.’”
Scully’s nails bite into her palms. The familiar words cut to the heart of her fear, her unsteady faith. One will be taken, and one will be left. She closes her eyes and sees a field of bright white light, a room full of solemn women holding pill bottles and baby food jars, a group of white-coated men bending over a body in a train car.
“‘…if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’”
Like a thief in the night, Mulder’s voice teases in her mind. Better watch out, hide your valuables, Jesus is coming. She smiles in spite of herself.
“Praise to you, Lord Jesus,” the congregation murmurs as she slips out into the cold morning.
Driving back to the motel, Scully thinks about falling stars. Be ready, the gospel writer says, but how could one possibly prepare for the end of the world? Try as she might, she can’t imagine welcoming the apocalypse. The Rapture, it’s supposed to be rapturous, but all she sees are the MUFON women, unsmiling and kind. Most of us have been taken many times. By men, she knows, but the knowledge doesn’t help. Men or monsters, angels or aliens, she goes cold at the thought of being taken again.
She’d felt miserably, helplessly angry when she woke up to find that months of her life had been stolen from her, and she'd grown more frustrated and impatient with each day she passed in her hospital room, surrounded by slowly deflating balloons and dying flowers while the world went on without her. Determined to reclaim her life, she'd chafed against her mother’s concern, her partner’s desire to protect her, her own sense of fragility. Hope, for Scully, was best pursued through action. Just as she had after her father's death the year before, she'd gone back to work as soon as she could.
And look how well that worked out, she thinks wryly.
Within a few days of her return to the field, she and Mulder had been immured in an isolation chamber deep under Fort Marlene. A month of blank walls and bland food, squats and crunches and pushups and endless games of Scrabble with a battered board and two partial sets of letters, a month without seeing the sky. She washed her hair with shampoo that smelled too strongly of green apples and left her hair dry and brittle, and wore Army-issue gray sweats that she had to roll at the wrists and ankles, and almost every morning she woke with her heart racing, overwhelmed with a half-conscious conviction that she was paralyzed.
She didn’t tell Mulder. It might have helped to talk about it, but she couldn’t bear to give up the last vestiges of her privacy. They were so exposed in their isolation, spending every day and night within thirty feet of one another and in full view of whatever observers might step up to the reinforced window. They yielded up blood and stool samples to be tested for contamination, submitted to medical exams conducted by impersonal technicians dressed as if for space travel, stepped into body scanners...
They knew, she realizes, reaching half-consciously to rub the back of her neck. They knew, and they knew not to tell me.
She shivers.
November 27, 1994
7:31am
Scully wakes with a start, pulse pounding in her throat.
I’m losing more time, she thinks, staring at the blank ceiling. Something in her shudders at the sight of the windowless white room, the interchangeable USAMRIID personnel faceless and silent in their pressurized suits.
She looks over at the other cot. Mulder is stretched on his back, feet hanging off the end of his too-short cot, tossing a crumpled ball of paper into the air and catching it. “Whoa, oh, we’re halfway there,” he sings under his breath. “Whoa, oh, living in a.. square… room… under an army base…”
She laughs and flings her pillow at him.
He catches it, dropping the paper, and throws it back. “Pop quiz, Scully. You know what day this is?"
"Sunday?"
"This is the glorious midpoint of our stay in Uncle Sam's most state-of-the-art basement. Two weeks down, two to go." He grins broadly. "And yes, it's Sunday, you get a point."
She sits up and stretches, counting the days in her head. Thursday was Thanksgiving, that means-- "It's Hope Sunday, actually, the first Sunday of advent. It's early this year. Do I get another point for that?" She smiles, thinking of how they used to take turns lighting the advent wreath- four candles, four weeks, four children. Missy would recite under her breath as the match moved from wick to wick, hope, peace, joy, love.
"Advent, huh?" He feels around on the floor for the crumpled paper, goes back to tossing it. "The season of waiting. Seems appropriate."
"I know." She sighs. "Two weeks, and it feels like forever."
"Hang in there, Scully, the end is in sight." Mulder bounces his clump of paper off the ceiling. "At least we're waiting for something we know is coming," he adds quietly.
There's a bitter echo in his voice, and she thinks of his months of fruitless searching, his refusal to give up hope. I came back, she doesn't say.
"Know what else today is? It's the twenty-first anniversary of Samantha’s abduction. I still picture her as eight years old, but if she’s alive out there somewhere, she’s twenty-nine now. I could pass her in the street and never know it.” He hurls the paper, grabs for it on the rebound and misses. It hits the floor with a hollow tap and skids under Scully’s cot. “Sometimes I wonder if I have.”
"Well," she says slowly, "that's something to hope for, then, isn't it?"
December 10, 1995
11:21pm
The stars are falling.
“Make a wish,” Mulder says, nudging her in the ribs with the point of his elbow.
Scully jabs back with her own elbow, smiling when he winces theatrically and raises his palms in surrender. "Shouldn't that be two wishes?" she says. "No, wait- three. Five. Seven?" More meteors streak across the sky, too fast for her to count them all.
"Make as many wishes as you like." He puts his arm around her, carefully, as though she might flinch away.
Instead, she leans in. It's a cold night for standing on rooftops. "I'm good," she says.
Notes:
1. “My Lord, What a Morning” is an African-American spiritual dating back to sometime in the nineteenth century. Versions of it appear in many hymnals, including that of the United Methodist Church. The singers in this story give a more joyful and up-tempo rendition than is typical.
2. The Biblical passage read in the church service is Matthew 24:36-44, New Revised Standard Version. These verses were the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent in 1995 according to the Revised Standard Lectionary. It was also the reading for this past Advent, and it was listening to it while attending church during a visit to my parents that planted the seed of this story.
3. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, is the only United States Department of Defense lab with Biosafety Level 4 research and biocontainment facilities, so it’s the most realistic location for Mulder and Scully to be quarantined post-Firewalker. Fort Marlene is the fictionalized X-Files version of Fort Detrick.
4. Mulder sings a brief improvisation on Bon Jovi’s 1986 pop hit “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
5. In the final scene they're watching the Geminid meteor shower, which was visible from the 4th to the 16th of December in 1995 and peaked on the 13th, a few nights after I have Mulder and Scully watching it. The Geminids are the only major meteor shower that give a good showing before midnight, according to the American Meteor Society, and thus could plausibly be watched at 11:21.