Snow Carefully Everywhere Descending
Title: Snow Carefully Everywhere Descending
Author: Crinolynne
E-mail: wonderful.pistachio@gmail.com
Distribution: Feel free, but just send an e-mail to let me know first
Rating: PG-13
Category: A little bit of everything.
Disclaimer: Not mine, don't sue, I am a poor boy from a poor family, etc. Spoilers: Never Again Summary: He grinds his teeth a bit, wondering how Ed Jerse coaxed her to open like jasmine under the moonlight. Author's Notes: Thank you so much to Dasha K for beta reading. The title is from e.e. cummings and is my most favoritey-favorite poem. Mulder reads Gavin de Becker.
^^^^^
The ride is long, silence stretching between the mile markers. They’re on the outskirts of Baltimore, blackened slush crusted along 95, the occasional crumbling Christmas tree discarded on the shoulder. Scully’s skimming faxes about a dead girl in a locked room. She runs a highlighter over the page.
“Hey,” Mulder says. Psychologist, and he doesn’t know how to ask what in the hell is going on with her. Tattoo, one-night stand with some pretty-boy psychopath, and here she is reading autopsy notes like everything’s hunky dory.
“Hmm?” she replies, still riveted on the text.
“Are we okay?”
She looks up at this and cocks her head, puzzled. “Okay?”
“I was unkind.”
“Ah,” she says, attention back on her work. “You were.”
“And I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
He grinds his teeth a bit, wondering how Ed Jerse coaxed her to open like jasmine under the moonlight. “Scully, I just want to unders-“
“Mulder, not all of my stories begin and end with you.” She circles something on her document, flips through a few pages.
He is steely-eyed after that, and drives them north beneath a low sky heavy with snow.
^^^^^
They’re at The Peanut Bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, the air dusty with cracked shells and smelling of baseball games or anaphylaxis, depending on your perspective. Mulder’s got his heels hooked on the lower rung of the bar stool, eyes downcast as he plays with a matchbook and peers at his partner through his lashes.
The banker’s lamp above their table casts a murky light, obscuring the bruises on Scully’s Tudor features and darkening her eyes to a January gray. Even her hair appears less vibrant, the green glass of the lamp neutralizing its foxy color into something tamer, like a chocolate Lab.
A waitress comes over, hands them a pair of menus without a word. Mulder asks for two waters as she leaves, but she offers no sign that she has heard. Her lank ponytail switches back and forth as she plods off.
“Service is good,” Scully says, picking at a small hole on the laminated cover.
Goddamned Scully.
“We’re here for the ambiance,” Mulder replies, abandoning his matches for the bowl of peanuts. He snaps a few open, discarding the shells onto the floor. Something in him thrills at this encouraged defiance of social conventions.
“Mmm.” Her finger trails along the specials, idling over the cheesesteak and boardwalk fries.
He wants to ask if she had a cheesesteak in Philly, if that douchebag had shown her the sights (such as they were; Jesus, Philly of all places for a one-night stand) before he smashed her up like this, like a thing, left her cracked as the Liberty Bell.
“Thoughts on the body,” he leads, since she’s clearly not up for small talk. Which is fair, given that he had taken perverse pleasure in making her feel like shit yesterday before Skinner sent them right back up to the Keystone State.
Scully rolls a shelled peanut between her slightly crooked lips, which fascinates him. “Mmm,” she repeats, this time in a thoughtful tone. She chews the nut, then turns her interest back to the menu. “Not suicide. Livor’s inconsistent with position, but only moderately so. The killer was efficient and confident in his staging.” Taps the page. “The gyro looks good.”
“No ritualistic elements. The body’s pristine.”
Scully sighs. “So no signature, unless lack of signature counts. And no trace evidence. I’m still lost on the MO, beyond cardiac arrest as proximate cause. Tox’ll be a while.”
“So highly organized offender, white male, twenty to forty, issues with strong women, blah blah, the usual. Seen it a hundred times, right?” She can take that however she wants, he thinks. She wants to dump cases and get a tattoo and…and fuck some stranger? She wants to act unstable as hell and then get aggravated that the psychologist she works with is curious about it? He may not be the central character in her stories, as she says, but as a significant secondary, he wants rights to the script sometimes.
Scully stares at the neon signs over the bar, moving the napkin from her lap to the table. “Excuse me,” she says. “Restroom.”
Mulder eyes her sidelong; her height requires her to shimmy to the edge of the tall stool and hop down in an undignified fashion. He watches her stride through the room - linoleum the color of old computers, of old bones - and resents the pairs of eyes that follow her dark, trim figure. They have no idea about her, he thinks. They can’t possibly begin to imagine her, the complexity of the brain cloistered behind that bruised and lovely face. They cannot fathom the things her sea-deep eyes have watched unfold.
He wants to tell her that whatever went down in Philly is over, that it doesn’t matter, that of all shits the universe contains, he gives none of them at all. As long as she will talk to him about this, it’s okay. Mulder’s thought about kissing her lately, the way her mouth would taste of lipstick and coffee, her hair perfumed with a mixture of morgue and Pantene.
He’d give up the idea if it meant she’d talk. He’d sacrifice the pleasures of the flesh for higher goals which, he reflects with some irony, is the kind of trade-off that comes with working with a Catholic girl.
The waitress comes back with a plastic pitcher of water, and he wishes it were beer. She juts her chin towards the menu. “Youse ready t’order?”
“Burger, medium rare, no onions. Gyro for the lady, extra tzatziki. Side salad instead of fries, vinaigrette on the side.”
The waitress grins as she gathers the menus. “She got you trained, huh?”
Mulder offers a sheepish expression, like Scully’s his ball-busting girlfriend, like they’re a pair of lovers who dress up in suits to slum it at a small-town bar on a Thursday. He wonders if people think he’s the one who beat her. He wonders if any of them see the proud set of her jaw and think she probably had it coming.
Scully’s headed back to the table now; he can see her lipstick’s been freshened, her hair smoothed over. There’s a trace of powder on her collar.
“I ordered,” he said, as she climbs back up. “No fries.”
She rests her chin on her hands, pale and smooth as latex except for the defensive wounds. “Don’t you think it’s interesting that Jerse allegedly had a psychotic break, but possessed the wherewithal for that level of organization?” Some of her defensive wounds are on the inside, too, and she doctors them with logic.
“I’d say it’s uncommon.” He has some idea of where she’s going with this sudden frankness, and treads carefully.
“The frenzy of his attack on me and on the neighbor…that usually indicates disorganized asocial. But his ability to maintain a facade of normalcy; it indicates prior experience, don’t you think? It indicates premeditation.”
He hates being right sometimes. “Scully, you couldn’t have-“
She shakes her head. “Ted Bundy was highly organized until the end, and was by all accounts quite charming despite the sociopathy. Perception is reality, and organized sociopaths are adept at manipulating perception. What I mean is…hmm.” She shells a peanut, presses her thumb inside the hull.
He stills, as though movement will cause her to retreat.
“I was not entirely myself the other evening.” Scully’s laugh is rueful, her eyes at middle distance. “So I wonder if I saw something in him without realizing it, and if something in me responded to that. A meeting of the subconscious minds, so to speak.” She sips at her water like a hummingbird, jewel-bright and watchful.
Mulder swallows, thinking that Ed Jerse probably looked at her like half the guys in here; like a piece of white-collar ass, like a naughty librarian whose garters they want to snap. And, in Jerse’s case, kill and torch. But who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Who knows which of these yokels likes kiddie porn, snuff, rape…all of the violence in which sex is just another kind of weapon. He recently read that at core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.
“There was no rape kit,” he ventures.
She looks him in the eye. “He wasn’t violent until the next day.” Until after we had consensual sex, she doesn’t say, but he hears it. He dislikes the fact with a possessiveness that leaves him feeling cheap. He hears something else in her voice as well, but can’t figure it out. Defensive, maybe.
He holds Scully’s gaze, the cold winter light of it. “You were comfortable spending the night, Scully. Your instincts are good. You are not self-destructive.”
She glances sideways as the waitress sets their food down. “I got a tattoo of a snake devouring itself. You don’t think that represents self-destruction?”
“What’s the line between self-destruction and rebirth? A phoenix, an ouroboros, reincarnation. Brahma and Shiva.” He gestures with his burger as he talks, punctuating the statement with a large bite.
Scully spoons tzatziki onto her sandwich before cutting it up. She dislikes handling messy food. “Conceptually, I agree. But you know me, Mulder. This is not how I recharge.” A flush seeps onto her cheeks. “Why would I do this? Why would I get a tattoo I’ve never wanted and spend the night with a stranger?”
His brow furrows. “You feel as though you were acting without clear control of your decisions?”
“I feel as though I wasn’t making decisions. I was being impulsive. I was engaging in risky behavior for no reason I can define.” Scully sighs in frustration, stabbing her fork into a chunk of meat. She chews it fiercely.
“That’s kind of what an impulse is. It’s pure id. It’s defined by lack of reason.” He signals the waitress over and orders that pitcher of beer after all. “Look, Scully. I’m not your priest. I can’t absolve you. And I’m not really much of a Freudian, so I’m no help there either. What I can tell you is that you will never live up to your own Platonic ideal of yourself. You have to let that go.”
“There’s a yawning gap between Platonic ideal and my weekend, to be fair.”
“I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”
Scully smiles, and it goes all the way up to her eyes. She gestures for the beer-carrying waitress to pour her a glass, then takes a drink. “So your professional opinion is that I’m over-thinking things and just wanted to cut loose?”
He lifts his own glass, swirling the contents a bit. “Your actions surprised me. But the truth is that I’ve been worried about the toll the X-Files have taken on you. On your life. You were in a relationship with that guy when you first joined, what was his name? Nathan?”
“Ethan. God, I’d forgotten him.”
“Ethan, right. You dated, Scully. But your sister’s murder, the time you spend away from home, do you still see your friends much?” He keeps his tone gentle without pity or judgment. He is anxious at the thought of his life becoming hers, at her sunny apartment growing dark and cluttered with the trappings of abstruse tragedy.
She blinks in disbelief. “So, what? This was some desperate stunt as I drag towards inexorable and isolated spinsterhood?”
He holds his hands up in defense. “I’m just voicing a concern.”
She tenses for a moment, relaxes, and lets out a breath through her nose. “What about you, Mulder? What about your little place in Home? I mean, without the incest and murder.”
Incest is hard without a family, he thinks, with something beyond even the bounds of gallows humor. “In another life, sure. I’d like that. But I’m thirty-four years old and not exactly J. Edgar’s Most Eligible. My schedule is…well. Exceeded in unattractiveness only by my reputation.” He eats a pickle slice from his burger. “My dad was away a lot. It was hard, especially when Samantha disappeared.”
Scully nods in understanding. “Ahab was always away too. We moved so much, it was rough on my mom. A lot of the domestic drudgery fell to Melissa.”
They eat and drink in silence for a time. Outside, snow begins to swirl beneath the sodium vapor streetlamps. He thinks of tobogganing with Sam while his parents argued in the kitchen, of making angels on the hillside. He thinks of ski weekends with Diana, with Phoebe, before they’d gone off into the night as well. All those dark-haired girls.
“So you’re okay?” he asks, as Scully poaches some of his fries. “You’re not ready to run screaming for the hills yet? Put in for a transfer to something less ectoplasmic?”
She shrugs. “I knew what kind of hours I signed up for with the FBI, Mulder. And at this point I’d rather spend them with you than doing wire taps and mail fraud. I’m becoming rather well-traveled, if nothing else. Even the notoriety is fun at times. I think we scare people.”
“Implied instability: it’s why we never run out of office supplies. But hey, we’ll always have mutant stakeouts to keep us humble.”
“Even if I don’t bring you iced tea?” She finishes her beer, refills the glass halfway.
“Love’s overrated. I’ll take fate any day, Scully.”
“I’ve been rethinking that, actually. I’m going with Stockholm Syndrome.”
He grins at her, holding up his glass.
Scully clinks hers against it. “Slainte,” she says, in her best brogue.
“L’chaim,” he replies, and takes a drink.
They watch the snow fall, bundled-up Pennsylvanians trudging by with scarves over their chins. The waitress clears their plates and for a while, there’s no dead body, no boogeyman waiting under the bed.
Scully doodles in the condensation on the window. “Mulder, what I said earlier…I was unkind as well. You’ve seldom been anything other than supportive. This has just been rather embarrassing for me. Professionally and personally.”
He thinks of Kristen Kilar, grateful that she had the decency to immolate herself after their illicit encounter instead of handing him over to her murderous little coven. “I understand.”
“Thank you.” She gets down from her chair. “Shall we?”
He rises, shrugging into his coat. He holds Scully’s out and she slips into it with her Katharine Hepburn polish. They walk to the front register to pay, feeling cold seep around the front door. It eddies in when Scully opens it. The flakes are falling thickly now, blowing sideways in a howling wind. She wrinkles her nose unhappily, ducking her head against the diving snow.
The door shuts behind him. He follows her into the storm.