Debriefing
Rating: PG
Category: S
Spoilers: Pine Bluff Variant
Keywords: Mulder/Scully UST
Summary: Scully's point of view of the events following pine
bluff variant.
Disclaimer: They're not mine; they belong to Fox and 1013.
Once upon her childhood, Dana and her family had driven a lot in
a succession of big old American cars. Ahab and Mom and Charlie had
sat in the front seat, with Bill and Melissa and herself in the back,
when they were all very young. She had had the shortest legs and
almost always had to sit in the middle if all six of them were in the
car, with Bill and Melissa taking more than their fair share of space,
arguing over who was the biggest dork, and having spitball fights
with straws they'd snatched from restaurants. The spitballs landed
mostly in Dana's hair. When Charlie had gotten older, and taller than
Dana, he had wanted to be in the backseat, and so Dana had been
shunted up to the front, half able to hear the other three kids in
the back squabbling and laughing and shooting spitballs that still,
every so often, landed in the back of her hair. Her father hadn't
wanted to be distracted as he drove, and so Dana and her mother had
talked only softly to each other, and Dana had leaned her head
against her mother's side and tried to sleep, and she had never liked
these car trips.
Dana had had a happy childhood, in the final assessment, but only
in the last few years had she learned to like driving for long periods
of time; it was one of the many minor, inconsequential gifts that
Mulder had given to her without either of them realizing it.
She still would have preferred to forego this trip.
***
He sat beside her with his eyes closed and his brows furrowed in
concentration. His hand with its splinted finger was resting on the
seat between them, and she could tell by the way he was holding his
shoulder that his hand was hurting. He hadn't taken the painkillers
the emergency room doctor had given him the night before last, saying
that he wanted his mind clear, and doubted that he'd taken one since.
"I think..." his voice was hesitant. "Is there a road coming up
soon? We need to take a left in a couple of minutes."
"We just passed a sign. There's a road coming up in one mile,"
said Skinner, looking back over his shoulder into the back seat at
the two of them.
"Yeah, that's probably it."
"Probably?" said Garrison. "I'd rather not make another wrong
turn."
They'd made two so far; each time Mulder had caught it before
they'd gone five minutes because the noises or the speed or something
had felt wrong. Mulder didn't defend himself, though. It was Skinner
who said, with the faint suggestion of a growl in his voice, "He was
only at the place twice, and each time he had a hood over his head--
we'll be lucky if we find the place at all."
Garrison said nothing, but slowed the car and took the turn. Scully
didn't check out the rear window, but she knew they led a caravan of
nondescript Fords in a procession that had woven through circular
routes and misdirections. It had been a quiet car ride, as no one
wanted to break Mulder's concentration. Skinner was right that this
was a long shot.
Scully had overheard Garrison telling Skinner that if Scully
hadn't interfered night before last, so that the people who had been
following Mulder had to head her off instead, they might have known
where they were going. She hadn't heard Skinner's reply, which had
been low, rumbling, and tinged with irritation, whether at her or
Garrison or just the situation, she didn't know. It galled her that
Garrison was right.
"We'll go fourteen minutes at about sixty miles per hour," said
Mulder.
"The speed limit here is only 40," objected Garrison.
"Yeah, 'cause terrorists would have such qualms about breaking the
speed limit," Mulder said. His voice sounded tired, the sarcasm
habitual.
If he had his eyes open, Mulder would reassure her with a glance
that he was all right, or maybe wink or roll his eyes. But he hadn't
wanted sight to interfere with his mental records of times,
directions, and approximate speed limits, so Scully sat in the
backseat across from him, watching the back of Skinner and Garrison's
heads. She felt as if she were ten again, and her parents were driving
her and Charlie to summer camp, and Mom had given Charlie some
bizarre mental riddle to pass the time and keep him from chattering.
Charlie had tended towards hyperactivity. Dana had been quiet so as
not to bother her parents, and had done the mental tasks her mom had
given Charlie before looking out at the passing road, and fifteen
seconds later Charlie would burst out with the answer. Her mother
would compliment him and give him something else to do, and her father
would keep looking out at the road, thinking about whatever he thought
about when he was driving, as far away as he was when he was on the
sea.
It was a stupid connection, she told herself. Garrison was an
irritable and probably dishonest version of her father, and Skinner a
completely inappropriate substitute for her mother. Mulder could be
hyperactive, but he was so tired now that any residual nervous energy
had been wiped away, and his concentration wasn't on some inane
childhood game but on a deadly serious adult one. Yet Dana felt the
same as she had then, young and bored and vaguely resentful,
disconnected from the others in the car. She wanted to be driving,
in control of the car, arguing with Mulder over the radio station
and the latest case they were working on and whatever else came to
mind. She wanted to lean back and watch Mulder drive, his hands
capable and beautiful on the steering wheel, and know that (barring
alien or government intervention) she could talk or stay quiet or
sleep and he would get them there safely, wherever there was.
"You'll turn soon," Mulder said.
"Right or left?" Garrison asked.
"Right. Slow down to thirty; the road'll be dirt here. And then
it'll be five minutes to another right turn, and then two minutes
after that a turn onto what I think was some sort of driveway into
the compound."
Garrison relayed this information to the other cars, telling them
to look out, they didn't know how soon the compound came up, and while
the New Spartans had probably abandoned it, they didn't want to walk
into an ambush.
They saw the compound before they'd turned onto the final road,
and Scully reached over and touched Mulder's arm. The habit of silence
hung heavily over her, and she didn't say his name to alert him.
Opening his eyes, he looked around and nodded slightly.
"This it?" asked Skinner.
"Yeah, this is it."
His eyes were quick and alert and revealed very little about how
he felt about returning to this place. He seemed merely curious, an
interested bystander on a slightly boring tour, visiting the place
where an FBI agent named Mulder had almost been executed yesterday.
***
They proceeded cautiously, but the compound was abandoned, and
after a quick search Garrison instructed Mulder to take them through
events while the agents looked around for evidence. He held a small
tape recorder, and Scully knew that he liked his job, this power he
had to control the tempo of events by asking his questions and
demanding clarifications. He was the actor enjoying his own
performance, the understudy to Leamus who had this chance in the
spotlight since Mulder had refused to do the debriefing with the other
man.
Mulder's voice was even as he described events, whatever emotion
that he had been feeling at the time gone. "Haley was sitting there
when I came in, and they sat me down across from him."
"How do you know he was sitting when you came in?"
"I didn't hear any movement, any chairs scraping or anything."
"Go on."
"They sat me down across from him, and put the restraints on."
The restraints were still attached to the desk. An agent was
dusting the table for fingerprints.
Whatever else Garrison was, and she didn't think he was much
better than Leamus, Scully had to admit that he was good at
debriefing. He walked Mulder through events step by step, asking not
only what was said but how Haley had sat, what hand gestures he had
used. Skinner stood a little out of the way, arms folded, showing no
reaction when Mulder described himself knocking the goateed skinhead
across the room.
"There's blood on the floor," Garrison reported.
"His nose bled," Mulder explained colorlessly. "Not badly."
She had read Mulder's account of events, and so she knew what had
been said and done in this room, but she could imagine it more clearly
now, as Garrison had Mulder sit where he had sat, asking how close the
skinhead had been.
She knew that sometime, later, she would be proud of him. She would
be angry that he hadn't told her of this before she had forced the
truth from Skinner and Leamus, but she would still be proud of what
he had done. Haley had trusted him, he had undergone torture and kept
control of the situation, and he had brought them back to this hidden
place to give them a word perfect account of events.
The victory was somewhat hollow, of course, since their own
government had been jerking them around. She felt a small shiver run
through her, but the other men were focused on Mulder's words and
didn't notice. Haley, wearing gloves, was a memory evoked by Mulder's
words, sitting across from him holding a deadly toxin and demanding
surveillance tapes. And Mulder's image was there as well, hurt and
trapped and brilliant, knowing he might die having lied to her.
***
"This is where they burned the money. Bremer played the tape
recorder--he was standing here. This is where Jacob Haley and I
knelt."
There were slight depressions in the ground. They'd be able to get
casts of at least some of the various, scattered footprints.
"How many men were there? Where were they standing?"
The jeans he'd worn yesterday had been black. He'd probably gotten
mud on the knees, and they'd sit in a laundry basket until the mud
was caked on and he finally got around to bringing all his dirty
clothes to the laundromat. Although he took great care of his suits,
he let his other laundry pile up. He'd gone home and changed into one
of those beautifully cut, carefully pressed suits sometime between
last night and this morning's debriefings; she didn't know if he'd
slept as well.
She hadn't. She'd sat on the living room sofa, too wound up to even
lie in bed, and cursed. She was her father's daughter, and had learned
more from him than just what he'd wanted her to know, and she'd cursed
Skinner and Mulder and the New Spartans and Leamus until she'd cried,
a little.
Around dawn, the crying had left her with a sort of peace that
wasn't peace at all but numbness, and she'd watched her apartment grow
lighter before taking a shower and putting on makeup to hide her
fatigue.
Men didn't have recourse to makeup; Mulder looked like hell.
"He said that he didn't want the other men to be witness to the
murder of a federal agent, so he told me to walk there."
"Did you have any indication at this point that he had another
reason for drawing you away from the others?"
"No."
She wondered, as they began the walk to Mulder's execution, what
he had been thinking. Scully had never understood the cliche about
one's life flashing before one's eyes. Maybe she had never accepted
death enough to let that happen, or at least the only death she had
accepted had been the slow one of cancer.
She wondered if he'd thought of her, although she would probably
never ask.
White translucent plastic hung in the windless air, making Scully
feel as if she was caught not in a debriefing but on the set of a
cryptic, postmodernist play. She could vaguely hear the other agents
still working, but the four of them walked in a silent bubble, Mulder
in the lead. Garrison strode behind him, tape recorder momentarily
clicked off, a born bureaucrat with unfriendly brown eyes who had a
habit of looking at her chest when he talked to her. She was next,
Skinner making little noise behind her.
"Bremer stopped here. He told me to kneel."
"Where was the other man standing?"
"Here. He fell here."
"There is what appears to be blood on the ground, presumably
belonging to the unidentified subject," Garrison informed his tape.
"Agent Mulder, in your professional opinion, did August Bremer intend
to kill the unidentified subject when he drew both of you away from
the group?"
"Yes."
There were indentations where Mulder had knelt, where the other
man had fallen; they were very close together.
Scully looked at the ground. He had probably looked down when he
had knelt. It was ordinary ground, nothing much to look at, although
more varied and interesting than were (just for example) hospital
sheets. Raising her head, she regarded the bleak, gray sky, and then
let her eyes trace Mulder's path to the car that Bremer had directed
him to.
Skinner gestured for some of the agents who had been following them
to determine where the trail led. Scully watched Garrison observe the
shapelier of the two female agents there. His expression wasn't openly
lecherous, but his eyes tracked her movements.
Mulder touched her back, very lightly, just below her hairline, as
he passed behind her to talk to another agent. It steadied her; she
thought that maybe it steadied him as well.
***
"Shit, Scully, the debriefing on this one's gonna last for the rest
of our *lives,*" he complained later, leaning against the car.
Garrison and Skinner were issuing final instructions to various agents
before they headed back to headquarters.
If situations were reversed, and Mulder had fed her some platitude
like "you're lucky to *be* alive," she would have wanted to slap him,
so she simply commented, "Bitch, bitch, bitch." Out of the corner of
her eye, she saw him smile slightly.
"How's your hand?" she asked.
"It's fine."
"Did you take any of the painkillers?"
"Nah. I'm doing okay. I'll take some aspirin when I get home or
something." Mulder didn't take medication when he didn't have to, and
he bought his aspirin not in bottles but in little bubble sheets--
harder to tamper with. Scully still bought her medications bottled,
but she varied the stores she bought from, and she always check the
seal very, very carefully.
"Get plenty of sleep, too. No, I'm serious. Your body needs some
time to recover."
"Gotta get through the rest of the day, first. Garrison wants to
go over the surveillance tapes again, I think. Have me give
descriptions of the men behind the masks."
"I thought you did that already."
"Yep."
She rolled her eyes.
"My thoughts exactly," he told her. "And then tomorrow, we get to
go over everything from the first phone call on. Yippee skippee."
The first phone call, she now knew, had come when she had been on
a weekend away at her mother's house. And Mulder, in a rare and
uncharacteristic fit of "I can't disturb Scully's life away from the
office," hadn't called her. Instead, he'd gone into the office to
check out what background the FBI had on the New Spartans. That he
had passed Skinner in the halls had been, in Scully's view,
unfortunate.
"Mulder," she said, "next time call."
"I will," he said, and she looked up to see acknowledgement and
regret in his eyes. She nodded. She wanted to ask him to promise,
but Dana had learned from her father that the words "I will" from a
person of honor were enough.
He turned back to watch Skinner and Garrison, who were now walking
towards them, and sighed. "On the road again. And to think I once
thought that being in the backseat of a car with a pretty girl would
be a *good* thing."
"Under the right circumstances..." she said demurely, and was
rewarded by a surprised look and then his slow smile.
***
The trip back was shorter now that they knew where they were and
could cut out some of the evasions, but it was still too long.
Garrison had an endless supply of questions (many of them the same
questions rephrased in new and exciting ways), and Mulder's answers
were progressively more flippant and hard-edged. Garrison wouldn't
admit that Bremer was government, that the toxin was government-
engineered, and Mulder's narrative made little sense without these
facts. Scully momentarily wished for the silence of the drive there.
This was sadly like a college road trip gone bad, on the second day
down to Florida for Spring break, when everyone was hot and cranky
and the car was making unidentifiable strange noises, and the two
people who had never gotten along were getting increasingly snarkier
with each other. Skinner turned back to give Mulder a warning glare
at one point, and Mulder modulated his words accordingly, but the
undertone of sarcasm remained the same.
Thinking of Florida inevitably led to their last trip there, also
in the backseat of a car with Mulder. Scully had banished "what ifs"
about major events in her life from any part of her mind; she knew
the answers had the power to break her and Mulder both (what if she
had reached Melissa on the phone in time? what if hadn't found the
chip in her neck? what if he had never handed her the implant they
had found in Duane Barry?) But she occasionally permitted herself to
imagine how small circumstances might have been changed. She imagined
now what the trip to Florida would have been like if the bureau had
not been so intent on cost-effectiveness, if she and Mulder had driven
down by themselves, dressed in casual clothes, with no monsters en
route. Mulder would have griped about seminars for the first forty
miles until she would have yelled at him, and then he would have
sulked for awhile, and somewhere around mile sixty or seventy they
would have found something to talk about. And the way back...she
suddenly had a vivid image of driving on a sunny day, speed up to
eighty and the radio loud. Mulder slouched in the passenger seat of
her dreams in jeans and t-shirt, eating sunflower seeds and scoring
a point on his mental chalkboard each time he made her laugh.
***
They were mostly back to the Hoover building ("Think that the fact
that we work for a vacuum company explains why so many of our agents
suck, Scully?" Mulder had once said) when Garrison's phone rang. His
side of the conversation was terse and unrevealing, and he pulled into
a nearby parking lot of a gas station. Other Fords followed. Garrison
got out of the car and waved the other agents out, a loose circle of
dark suits.
"Gentlemen." He paused, as if remembering that the Boys' Club had
been infiltrated, and added so scrupulously that it was an insult,
"and ladies...I've just been informed that another body has been
found. They suspect it's Haley. A state trooper found the car and
suspected a toxin, and the description made it back to us. We'll head
out to the scene. It's on..." he started telling them. Haley hadn't
made it far from the compound.
"They must have put it...they gave him back his keys, Scully,"
Mulder said, low and strangled, behind her. "They fucking sprayed it
on his keys."
"You don't think that it could have been on the car itself?" Scully
asked him. Garrison was still issuing instructions, but Skinner was
listening to her and Mulder's low-voiced conversation.
"No, I...the steering wheel? No, the car was parked there
beforehand. They gave him back his keys. They fucking...I was...I
wanted...I thought about trying to grab them and make a run for it,
but..." he laughed harshly and shook his head. "Talk about getting
more than you fucking wish for."
"If it was on his keys, then it didn't act immediately, not like
at the park," said Skinner, reacting to the content instead of the
profanity.
"Different concentrations, maybe?" said Scully.
"His keys weren't on a ring. They were in one of those leather
key holders; he only would have touched them when he turned the
ignition," Mulder said. Maybe it took a little while to work. Shit.
Bremer was wearing gloves. He wasn't when he was burning the money.
He must have put them on when they were spraying the toxin. Dammit,
I missed that."
"You couldn't have known, Mulder." And if he had noticed
consciously, he would have assumed that Bremer had put on gloves to
keep fingerprints off the gun, Scully thought but didn't say.
"Garrison's coming back," Skinner told them, and it was only when
they were back in the car that Scully realized that he had said that
in a tone of warning, and knew that he didn't trust Garrison either.
***
While not uninteresting from the viewpoint of science, Haley's body
did not yield much new knowledge. They had met another car or two
of agents and lab techs there, all of them were being very careful
around the car, as they didn't know what might have been exposed to
the toxin.
"It'll give us more of a clue as to the specifics of the
contagion," Scully said to Garrison.
"When will you be able to determine the time of death?"
"We'll know more from the autopsy," Scully replied. "From the
distance to the compound, he probably didn't make it far."
"Right. You'll be doing the autopsy?"
"She's scheduled to do it tomorrow," Skinner said, coming up
behind her. "The other agents are going to comb through the area,
but I don't think you'll need either Agent Mulder or Agent Scully for
that?" (Bless him for giving them the courtesy of their titles in
front of Garrison.)
"No, but..."
"Good, then, they can take one of the bureau cars back. It's past
6:00. Agent Mulder will be at your office at 9:00 tomorrow, if that's
a good time for you?" From the way he'd phrased that, it wasn't a
real question. Garrison gave in with ill grace, and Skinner handed her
a set of keys. She hoped that he understood that her thank you was
for more than just that.
***
Mulder slept beside her, head tilted uncomfortably, hand laid
carefully on the seat beside him. When he'd gotten into the car he'd
looked tired but professional, suit and (relatively) subdued tie in
place, a GQ cover boy. Some alchemy had transformed him as he slept,
rumpling the suit and ruffling his hair into spikes and cowlicks,
until he was an eight year old who'd worn himself out.
When her cell phone rang, she grabbed it quickly, before it could
wake him. She looked over (yep, still out like a light) and answered
softly, "Scully."
"Geez, Dana, the FBI won't even let you say hello?"
"Charlie? How are you?"
"Good, great in fact. How are you?"
"I'm fine...returning from a crime scene."
"It's 6:00. Don't they ever let you go home?" He said it more
jokingly than Bill would have, and she responded without heat or
offense.
"Yeah, I'm sure you get off exactly at 5 every day."
"Don't I wish. Listen, reason I'm calling is to tell you to keep
your calender open. I'm gonna be in town for a week about a month
from now."
"That's great. Just you, or Julia and the kids, too?"
"All of us. Hey, maybe we could bring the kids in to see you at
work. Jason thinks it's really neat that his Auntie Dana packs heat."
"It'll be good to see them again. Have you called Mom yet?"
"Yeah--she's already planning stuff. Maybe I shouldn't have given
her this much notice."
"She's just excited to see you again. Listen, Charlie, can I call
you back tonight? I'd like...it's been a long time since we've talked,
and I can't now, I'm in the car."
"Yeah, we'll be in. Safe driving, okay?"
"Yeah, always. You know, I was just thinking today, about those
long trips we used to take as kids...remember those?"
"Remember them? They were great. I'd love to give my kids the
same thing. Some of my best childhood memories took place in that
car."
"Oh...well, yeah, they were fun," said Scully, feeling oddly
disappointed. She frowned a little. Strange, that Charlie remembered
events so differently. "Well, I'll talk to you this evening."
"Talk to you then, Red."
"Don't call me that, Chuckles."
"Ouch. Okay, okay. Talk to you tonight, Dana."
"Bye."
She clicked the off button.
"Chuckles?" Mulder asked softly. She started and glanced over. He
was still rumpled, but with his eyes open he was never anywhere close
to eight years old.
"An old nickname of Charlie's. He had a weird laugh when he was a
kid. Sorry to wake you."
"No, it's ok." He shifted in his seat and she could feel his eyes
on her. Not calculating, like Garrison, but watching all the same. "So
what is he not supposed to call you?"
Could this be avoided? No. "Red."
He yawned. "There's a nickname that shows a lot of imagination."
"It wasn't because...uh..." she thought better of what she had
been about to say.
"What?" Mulder never let anything drop.
"It wasn't because I was redheaded, at least not directly."
"So why? C'mon, give."
"Okay, okay. So I hated being a redhead when I was a kid. Everyone
expected you to have a temper and freckles."
"You have freckles?"
She ignored him. "I wanted to be blonde; Melissa wanted to be a
hairdresser. She bought some hair dye, we told the storekeeper and
my mom that it was for a science project, and when we got home she
put the dye in, and then she tried to cut my hair--she should
have cut my hair first, but what did we know? Mom walked in
and sort of shrieked, and Melissa jumped and cut off this big hunk
right in back. The only thing my mom could do was even it out. The dye
took six weeks to wear out, and until then I was basically this little
blond kid with hair like a boy's. Naturally, Bill and Charlie and
every other kid on base started calling me Red."
She looked over at the passenger seat, where Mulder was grinning
at her, and smiled a little herself.
"Bet you were cute...Blondie."
"Yeah, well, I didn't try going blonde again until college."
"Really?" He sounded intrigued, and she was expecting it and didn't
flinch in surprise when his hand reached over to finger a few strands
of hair, lifting them up to examine the color.
"Reddish blond. We were going to Florida for Spring break and I
wanted a change. The dye job worked fine; the rest of it was the
road trip from hell."
His hand touched her shoulder briefly before he moved it back; she
could feel the weight of the splint. "Run into the mothmen?"
"Flat tire, broken radiator, and Sara found out that Jen was
sleeping with her boyfriend. Typical road trip. I never had much luck
with them." Why was she telling Mulder this? She looked over. He
didn't seem bored, though, only reflective.
"You know, that's one thing about going to Oxford. We took a lot
of trips, you know, sightseeing, but we always took the train. And
we backpacked in Europe once. But no cars."
"You went to Europe?"
"Yeah. The summer before graduation, two of my friends and I went.
Staying in hostels and all that. We'd all broken up with girlfriends.
It was a male bonding thing."
She was glad he'd had some semblance of normality in his life.
"Good summer?"
"The best. No pressure, no schedule, no hassle. But I guess I
missed the great American tradition of the Spring break road trip."
"Poor baby. You'd think we do enough driving to make up for it."
"It's not the same if it's business, Scully."
"So, next long weekend, go on a road trip," she said lightly. Not
that he would ever leave the X-files for that long.
"Yeah, but where we gonna go?"
She wasn't sure how she'd been included in his road trip. But then,
she doubted he was serious. She played along. "I'm not driving to
Roswell."
"Where's your sense of adventure? Okay, how 'bout Atlantic City?"
Was he serious? No, this was only a game to take their minds off
a bad day. "Only if you promise not to tell all the passerby that
blackjack's a government conspiracy to divert their minds from the
upcoming alien invasion."
"You're gonna take all the fun out of it."
"One passerby."
"It's a deal."
"I'll pack my bags," she said dryly. She wasn't serious. They
didn't do down time together.
Was she?
"Uh, Scully?" She looked over. He was watching her, quizzical and
slightly hesitant. "You really mean this?"
Did she? Speed up to eighty, Trivial Pursuit Mulder in the
passenger seat telling her every strange gambling fact he knew ("Did
you know they found loaded dice in the ruins of Pompeii?" "Yep." "Oh.
But did you know that...")--she took a deep breath and let it go. "I
don't know," she admitted.
He nodded. "You don't have to or anything. But, you know, it might
be fun. Hell, we could even make this into a real road trip, pull in
the guys and all go down."
"I'm sure not going to spend any amount of time in that
dilapidated piece of crap they call a vehicle, listening to Frohike
and Langley try to harmonize on 99 bottles of beer on the wall."
"Okay, bad idea, what I meant was...this isn't...I mean...it might
just be fun." He frowned at her, with the slightly pitiful expression
on his face that begged her to understand what he meant. Which she
did; in Mulder logic, suggesting the Lone Gunmen come along was a way
of saying that this trip wasn't intended as a seduction and that she
could come along without fearing that he meant too much by it.
Fun. With a friend, which he was, for a weekend. Talk about
something other than work. Why not?
Because it might disturb the precarious weights and measures of
her life. Her and Mulder, without the work that acted as the scale
that kept the weights balanced.
"I guess...we'll see when a weekend come up." She suddenly felt
deflated.
"Right." Maybe, he was disappointed, or maybe just tired as he
yawned again.
"You can go back to sleep, if you want."
"No, I'm awake now. How much longer do we have?"
"About twenty minutes."
He settled into his seat. "You're gonna do the autopsy tomorrow?"
"Bright and early."
He nodded and remained quiet, leaning his head back and gazing out
at the road.
"Charlie's going to come visit."
"When?" He didn't sound too enthusiastic, but then he'd only met
Bill.
"Next month. He'll probably bring the kids in to work one day. The
FBI tour and all."
"Our glorious history, huh?"
"From Hoover on."
"Right up to Haley being killed by a CIA spook..."
He was brooding. Would brood for awhile over this case, she knew.
But then, so would she. He'd come so close to death. Again.
"You gonna take off when your brother comes?"
"Yeah, maybe, a day. Depends on when he's in." She said it
absently, thinking about government-designed treachery and bureacracy-
sanctioned deceit.
"You've got days coming," he said in a tone that told her that he
was trying to be noble and self-sacrificing and supportive of her
desire to be with her family.
"Yeah, I know...Mulder."
"Hmm?"
Thinking about death, and life, and her and Mulder in a car, Scully
let the words tumble out. "There's Memorial Day in a few weeks, and
that'll be a three day weekend."
The sky didn't fall in; lightning didn't strike. No aliens came
down to reproach her for not thinking of her job. No cryptic informant
called to beckon Mulder back to darkness.
She risked a glance at him. He seemed to be both puzzled and
peaceful. Maybe he felt as she did, as if she'd stepped off the cliff
only to find that the air was as buoyant and comfortable as water.
She could have laughed. This wasn't hard.
"So. So, Blondie. You, me, and the dealer?"
She almost wanted to laugh. Forget Eddie "what's stopping us" Van
Blundht, Mulder's obsessiveness, her own reticence. Forget August
Bremer and every government bureaucrat who would try to separate them
for their own ends. Forget every bad road trip she'd ever been on
than had been less than she'd expected it to be; she and Mulder were
going to play Roulette for stakes that didn't matter for once.
"Yeah." She could have laughed. Maybe she did. "Yeah, Mulder, let's
take a drive."
End (1/1)