Title: Moment of Inertia
Author: Pteropod (beth_monster@yahoo.com)
Category/Spoilers: Season eight through This Is Not
Happening
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Please ask; I'm very accommodating
Summary: Season eight
Disclaimer: These characters belong to Chris Carter and 1013
Productions, not to me. Bummer.
URL: http://www.pteropod.net/
Author's Notes: A blessing on the heads of JET and Maria
Nicole, for the gift of beta beyond compare. Thank you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
She is alive, fecund, fertile as springtime and burgeoning
with life, a miracle mother-goddess with baby-soft skin and
hair that needs cutting every three weeks. She waxes rotund
with life but the watering can sits empty under the sink,
halfway hidden behind the dish soap and a box of Brillo pads.
She watches her plants die, day after day, and sleeps on the
sofa more nights than not.
- - -
He reads through the X-Files in a weekend, and finds them
full of bullshit, absurdity, brilliance, and death.
He feels entitled at first, reading files about garbage
monsters and brain-sucking teenagers as if they were written
just for his entertained eyes. The cases are ridiculous,
impossible, documented in ass-covering reports with words
like 'allegedly' and 'postulate'.
He reads file after file without connecting them to his
world, and then he reads about Dana Scully getting shot in
the gut by Special Agent Peyton Ritter.
He drops his head to his hands and thinks that she'll want a
new partner no more than she wanted to lose the old one.
- - -
Her seatbelt feels tight, binding about her middle as she
drives to Baltimore, pinning her to the seat until she
fumbles it undone in the middle lane of I-95. A swerve into
the left lane as she stretches it to its full extent and
clicks it shut.
When she gets out of the car she pulls her overnight bag from
the trunk, a deliberate, square-shouldered motion. The walk
up the driveway is paced and premeditated, clackity clack.
She falls into her mother's arms at the door, clutching like
a child, head buried against a bony shoulder and sobbing into
the crevice of a collarbone.
She spends the night curled in fetal position, her mother's
hand stroking her hair. In the morning they go to Barnes &
Noble and buy books about the first nine months of life.
Fetal nutrition, the importance of protein and vegetables.
- - -
For all his flesh and pumping blood he's less of a presence
in this room than Mulder is. Whenever he reaches outside his
area her glare warns him not to touch anything, not to leave
whorling fingerprints where they aren't wanted.
A pencil drops from the ceiling and beans Scully, right on
the melon. She reaches around and puts it in a drawer, barely
looking up from her reading. Doggett studies his shoes.
After Scully leaves for the night he stands in front of the
bulletin board, hands clasped behind his back. Toward the
lower left corner is a picture of the two of them. The day
must've been cold, pinked nostrils puffing out steam.
They're squatting in a field, coat hems sloshed with mud, and
Scully is pointing at something on the ground. Can't tell
what, from the photo. Something small. Mulder's arm is
extending -- in another second his hand will reach hers.
- - -
A body in motion tends to remain in motion, so she pendulum-
swings from work to home and back to work again. Each
morning she pulls on a suit, tests the button at the
waistband. Wonders when it will pop.
- - -
They eat breakfast together in Idaho, and then lunch on the
plane back to DC. Add two days of meals while chasing a man-
shaped bat or a bat-shaped man and he thinks he has a handle
on her. Dana Scully drinks herbal tea instead of coffee and
seems to be waging a war against wheat. She won't eat bread
or tortillas or pasta or cereal and picks the insides out of
sandwiches. He doesn't want to ask, but she's eaten four
salads in three days and he's taxi-stand punchy. He can't
help himself. Wheat, she tells him with a glance down to her
watch, causes dampness. He stares at the top of her head as
she picks up her suitcase, and stops himself from asking what
kind of dampness.
- - -
Her world has become bloated, threatening to burst its seams.
It began just below the navel, biology laying waste to one
hundred sit-ups every night since she turned twenty-five.
Now everything presses against its boundaries.
She drives to work each morning and the nights follow her in,
bleary-eyed and dragging, murmuring about UFO activity
hotspots and aliens with human faces. She can hold the
cosmos together until noon but the prenatal vitamins she
takes on the sly at lunchtime threaten to pop out of their
bottle, spill onto the floor in a clatter of folic acid and
iron.
- - -
She starts every night with arithmetic. Counting by sevens,
counting backward by sevens, the multiples of seven up to
seven hundred. Numbers stack up in her brain, fill columns
and rows and then leak into the spaces in between when she
moves on to the constants. The world begins and ends with
pi, but she's never been able to hold on to more than the
first twenty digits. 3.14159265358979323846. Planck's
constant is 6.6261 times ten to the negative thirty-four
Joule-seconds; the permeability of vacuum is four pi times
ten to the negative seven Newtons over Angstroms squared.
But constants are constant, teaching her nothing, and tonight
she's long since moved on to trigonometric identities.
John Doggett cut a slug out of her back with a pocketknife.
She prefers to ignore it, and pretends she never clutched at
her belly as he sliced into her like he was gutting a fish.
She's taken to wearing turtlenecks and shirts with high
collars.
- - -
The second desk turned the office into a maze of narrow
passages, below decks on a bulky administrative boat. The
smirking maintenance man dumped the desk in the middle of the
room, leaving Doggett to drag it to the side and shrug in
Scully's direction. It would've made sense to shift Mulder's
desk a few inches to make more room, but he didn't suggest it
and she didn't offer.
When they're in town they sit across from each other for
hours at a time, shuffling paper and breathing the same air.
They turn aside for each other's phone calls, as if looking
the other way means they can't hear every word.
Scully drinks tea, always herbal, from an alien-head mug and
eats lunch at her desk. Salad every day, lettuce and
broccoli and mushrooms and chickpeas and peppers. An
abundance of bean sprouts. Sometimes tofu.
- - -
Three times she's done the laundry; this is the fourth.
She folded the t-shirts the first time and found she couldn't
put them on top of the third-drawer mess. She emptied the
dresser onto the bed and folded the whole lot, rearranging
shorts and sweatpants and socks. Boxers and briefs, an equal
number of each.
The second time there weren't any clothes to wash but she
opened the dresser drawers anyway and was appalled at the
order she'd imposed. He'd come back to folded underwear
where he was used to disarray and suddenly the idea was
horrific, untenable, so she tossed it all on the bed again
and filled the drawers haphazardly, shaking creases out of t-
shirts and releasing the socks from their pairwise bonds.
His detergent ran out the third time, when she was washing
the place mats that were scrunched in a kitchen drawer and
all the blankets from the linen closet. She bought a new
mega-size bottle, 300 cost-effective ounces.
This time, 8 a.m. on this Saturday morning with thin Indian
Summer sunshine filtering through the windows, she walks
through the apartment and straight to the bed. Nobody sleeps
here but the sheets are her excuse for coming over. They'll
get covered in dust, make him sneeze, provoke an allergic
reaction, make his eyes water when he comes home and crawls
into bed.
She takes the bedding to the basement and waits for the
washing machine to finish with the whites of a balding
middle-aged man who isn't inclined to small talk, thank God.
Middle-aged man leaves and the basement is her laundry
domain, her land of domestic duty. She's sure the neighbors
think she's moved in with her boyfriend, the lanky FBI agent
on the fourth floor.
Halfway through, the sheets tangle around her hands, catch on
the agitator and resist transfer from washer to dryer. One
of her quarters sticks and she smacks the dryer with the flat
of her hand and then her fist, hitting the coin-box over and
over, punching like a prizefighter until her knuckles are
meaty and blood seeps from a tear on the inside of her lip.
When the sheets are finally back on the bed it's noon already
and there's a dull ache pooled between her shoulders,
Saturday half wasted on laundry that didn't need washing and
not one iota closer to finding him. She gives the fish a
once-a-week pellet and leaves, wincing as she turns the key
in the deadbolt.
- - -
He catches her drooling on the desk blotter at 6:40 one
morning, still in the outfit she was wearing the day before.
If he was her friend he'd suggest therapy. As it is, he
offers to get her coffee. She refuses, of course. She
doesn't drink coffee.
- - -
She paid for Mulder's cellphone service for three months, and
called his number every day. His voicemail message never
changed, and he never called back.
- - -
Orion tips incessantly, poised for an interstellar cartwheel,
and she wants to spend her days puzzling out the cosmos: can
a spaceship travel faster than light, and if it could, where
would it go?
The corner of her eye shows Doggett's fist clenched around
the steering wheel but she stares upward, through the
windshield, and wants more than anything to be a physicist.
But she is someone else, an FBI agent who investigates cases
that can't be solved and tries to save children who don't
exist, a woman speeding down a highway toward an airport that
will look no different than it did three days ago.
Traveling west to east is always harder, the hours adding up
double-time and night flights only offering low-fat pretzel
snack mix and the beverage of her choice. Coffee is out of
the question so she almost-sleeps instead, feet resting on
top of her shoes and head sagging toward her shoulder. On
the other side of the armrest, so close that their suit
jackets brushed when they sat down, Doggett pretends to read
Business Week. He flips the pages too quickly, snaps them
straight under his fingers and repeats before he can possibly
have read more than two paragraphs even if he has an abiding
interest in third-quarter earnings announcements, which she
suspects he does not.
She would say something -- wants to, even, to stop his
crackling abuse of the magazine -- but she used up all her
words against the backdrop of Billy Underwood's grave. So
she keeps her eyes closed, toe tracing along the curve of her
shoe. Doggett will sleep poorly tonight, she thinks, and
dream of child-sized ghosts. She sleeps poorly every night,
with ghosts the size of an Oregon forest.
- - -
He's had embarrassing dreams before, the kind that warm the
back of his neck when he runs into certain coworkers at the
copy machine. But they've never run in this direction, never
murderous, and he feels an obligation to tell her that his
subconscious would chop off her head. But they are some
shade of partners, and there will be plenty of time.
The problem with plenty of time is that it slips by
unnoticed, suddenly lunchtime and then home at the end of the
day. But home has changed; his bedroom feels violated. He
spends the first night in his own bed but the next three in
the spare room, sleeping in a twin bed with Sesame Street
bedding and a Bible on the nightstand. Just in case.
He'd rather not resent the fact that she saved his life.
He'd also rather not believe it, but that isn't happening
either.
He sits across from her, next to her, practically on top of
her in the office and tells her nothing. He barks out
"Agent" for the next three weeks, unable to wrap his lips
around her name.
- - -
It comes as a surprise, that she suddenly cares that a man is
turning into metal. She hasn't cared since Doggett landed in
the basement office, has walked rote through the cases trying
to brute-force her way into paranormality. Hasn't felt the
tug of scientific curiosity until now, leaning in to stare at
the metamorphosis of a smear of blood.
- - -
He owns the street tonight, the neighborhood. Frigid air
slides around his face and he owns the whole goddamned
suburb. He tucks low and rounds a corner, pulling his body
into the turn.
He'd gone three blocks before realizing he was out of the
house. It's been years since he communed with the pavement
but the middle of the night startled him awake, and he's not
in the habit of lying wide-eyed in bed. Doesn't want to get
in the habit, so he's up and off and it's colder than shit.
Sodium orange delineates his empty neighborhood. He passes
under streetlight after streetlight, darkness to bright to
dark again, and imagines how he looks from above, zebra-
striping down the street. Pumps his legs harder, quads
burning.
3 a.m. bike rides cost him a marriage, from the perspective
that doesn't admit it was eaten alive by a murdering child-
molesting sick fuck son of a bitch. There were months when
he thought letting tears streak across his face and soak into
the chin strap of his bike helmet was better than letting
them drip into a shot glass in the living room, but his wife
woke up in an empty house one time too many.
Breathless air tunnels down his throat.
If he looked down he'd see twenty-mile-an-hour pavement,
chalky with midwinter salt and spiderweb cracked. Or maybe
his hands, fingers bloodless to the third knuckle and frozen
around the handlebars. But he's looking down already, has
been for half a block, and doesn't see anything at all except
a filthy dead man and the tilt of Scully's eyebrow as she
said, "something...small. With small hands."
His legs pound the pedals. The suburb is dormant but his
breathing rattles through a cottony mouth.
He pushes harder.
Harder.
When his body reaches its limit he spills the bike to the
ground and retches into a sewer grate. A streetlight fritzes
above him, strobing the brittle grass, the curb, the vise-
grip of his hands on his knees.
He spits the taste of vomit onto the grass, over and over,
then gets back on the bike and turns in the direction of
home.
The boy Scully shot was in that age gap, younger than Luke
would've been but older than he'd ever made it to.
Maybe he could've made that shot. Maybe not.
- - -
They are bound together by a growing collection of diners.
He's watched her order meals in five states; her anti-wheat
campaign only lasted for three weeks but she seems to have
something permanent against coffee.
- - -
His life doesn't flash before his eyes.
A faint tinfoil haze crinkles between this world and the next
and despite the fact that on some level he knows this is it,
that he's dying and this is his last moment to exercise
consciousness, all he can think is that a bullet passed
through Dana Scully from front to back, and now one has
traveled through him in the opposite direction.
- - -
It's unbelievable, the condition of downtown Boston.
Remarkable to think that the infrastructure of a city could
be assembled so entirely from concrete barriers and orange
plastic fencing and big pits in the ground. Another
unbelievable thing is that four hours ago she called him
partner. Not to his face but she said it all the same, in
one of those panicky moments when everything is supposed to
become clear.
She expected it to feel like betrayal, but somehow it didn't.
- - -
They've reached a sort of equilibrium, a certain comfort in
the places where they sit and stand and the paths they take
as they walk around in the office. In the beginning they
stayed in their assigned seats but things have gotten looser,
more at ease.
It's the end of lunchtime and Scully gulps down vitamins,
huge horsey pills that she wrist-flicks from hand to mouth.
One tan and one greenish. Doggett finishes his sandwich, a
pastrami and Swiss on rye that was goddamned delicious. He
tosses the wax paper in the trash and wanders to the bulletin
board.
The clippings and photos and tabloid headlines and desire to
believe haven't changed in the months he's been here, which
he takes to mean that Mulder is the scrapbook keeper of the
X-Files division. Was. Is. As he stares at the curling
edge of the lower left hand photo Scully murmurs, "North
Dakota, 1996."
Doggett turns, questioning. She quirks an eyebrow and keeps
talking.
"North Dakota, near Washburn. Up I-83 from Bismarck.
November, I think. Very cold."
"What on earth are you pointing at? I've been wondering for
months." He grins down and she smiles back, a little.
"A ten dollar bill. There were remains in that field and it
was unexplained so we went. No X-File but I made ten bucks
and someone snapped a picture."
She stops and looks down at the desk. Sees a stapler, the
salad container, a box of paper clips. Her hands, raggedy at
the nails. A year-old phone number scribbled on the blotter.
Says, "It's funny sometimes. What you get to keep."
- - -
Following a path into a clearing because milling around is
useless and paths are meant to be followed and then --
He'd told Scully and Skinner and Kersh and the man in the
moon and anyone else who would listen that he was going to
find Fox Mulder but this wasn't what he'd meant. Not this.
Mulder was supposed to be vertical, dammit. Walking around.
His shout is wind-ripped, guttural.
"Agent down! Agent down!"
- - -
"Someone killed my son. That's why I'm here."
She touches the back of his hand with death-cold fingertips,
a reach to touch him for the first time in twelve cases and
seven states, and her voice breaks on the last syllable.
"I'm sorry. So sorry."
A minute later or maybe five.
"Will I live through this?"
He reaches for her hand. Places its palm against the curve
of her belly.
"You will."
- - t h e e n d - -