TITLE: Bourne Bridge AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com) ARCHIVE: Gossamer, Xemplary. Others please ask. CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: VA, M/S UST if you care to see it that way. SPOILERS: vaguely, for Season 6, first half. RATING: PG SUMMARY: Memory and meaning. Old places and new eyes. THANKS: to Dasha, who by law must point out all shippy moments, and Dahlak, an officer in the Adverb Police. Fine beta by both. SPECIAL: to JiM, who knows the North Shore, the South Shore, and everywhere else on the shore. * * * * * * * Bourne Bridge by Vehemently * * * * * * * Another case, another trip north. Not an X-File; a pair of brothers in Falmouth, the last dairy farmers in Massachusetts, selling manure without a license. Mulder could not help his internal cringe, but it wasn't in anticipation of the bovine excretions they were going to be forced to examine. Few cases had drawn him back here, all of them somehow disastrous. One, years ago: a firestarter on the Cape, thirty miles away, across the rocks and water, from his childhood home. He had been wrapped up in another part of his history then, a part with a Scotland Yard badge, who wrapped her fingers around his neck and promised him the lusts of youth. Another case: a madman with a thing for little girls. Too frantic for philosophy. But now, today. The awkward availability of commercial flights off- season, and Mulder was driving east from Providence's Green Airport with his partner quiet at his side. The commuter flight had been cramped and the stewardesses had thought it charming to sing off-key while the plane lurched to a landing. Mulder drove and drove and drove, along a highway he knew too well, past the exit for the shore and a summer house ransacked and tainted with memory, past the turnoff for Boston, on and on into nowhere country, tall leafless bushes and twisted pines lining the highway. In January the traffic could hardly convince anyone that the same roads would be packed and stagnant come July. There was a certain superiority in that, Mulder realized, a clubbish- ness in claiming these lands even out of season. He grasped at his childhood, at the disdain he had felt when the outsiders arrived in May, their designer windbreakers, their city cars, their unnecessary gear. It had been a comforting thing then but now it was hollow. He belonged here no more than anywhere else; it was just the visual imprint of familiarity that got him thinking about things lost. It was stupid. He opened the window a crack, as if the chilly air could shock him back to normalcy. Scully held the map in her lap but he knew every leg of the ride, could have navigated it blind by the smell - not salted, not yet, but a marshy, cool wet smell, like the feel of New England rock sand in November, like the texture of hair after an hour in the offshore breeze. Mulder thought of clams and gray silt and the fishermen at Menemsha as he came around the turn and saw Bourne Bridge before him. He watched as Scully twisted in her seat for a better view, first ducking to look up, then leaning sideways for that glimpse of the water far below. Mulder knew that it wasn't much worth looking at, full of diesel fuel and cast-off cigarrettes, but he didn't tell her that. Let her enjoy what she's seeing, he thought; don't infect her with your cynicism. He thought again of his contempt for the tourists and was ashamed. "Can we stop soon?" she asked, as they descended, like royalty, down the gentle slope of the bridge to the plain below. She noticed the Cape Cod sign, lettered in flowers, at the center of the traffic circle, and smiled as if the chrysanthemums were not mostly dead and brown. "During the L'ively case I didn't really get a look." Not having a good enough reason not to, Mulder obeyed, and pulled into one of the clone restaurant-souvenir places that ringed the traffic circle. The bus stopped here, he remembered, the bus from Woods Hole, and sometimes after a weekend visiting his father he had sat on his suitcase in the parking lot waiting for the driver to sort the Boston-bound from those, like him, on their way west to Connect- icut. It was a dreary memory and he quashed it ruthlessly. Scully was getting out of the car. She tramped between the two buildings, both of which advertised lobsters, and she resolutely ignored the bright signboards. She only stopped when she had gone beyond the structures, out onto the grass, where her view was unobstructed. Mulder, inexorably drawn, tumbled out of his seat and followed her. What she was looking at was a surprising view of the bridge. He knew it to be gray-green, in that way of bridges painted during World War II for camouflage, and plain steel girders with button-rivets. He knew it to be a place of arriving and leaving, a drafty airport lobby, a symbol, but nothing more. With Scully at his side, Bourne Bridge became a dour descendant of other feats of antigravity: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate. Its boxy canopy convex rather than concave, nonetheless the bridge before him seemed suddenly a swoop over a chasm instead of plain steel bars. The advancing squall hung low in front of them to the west, and Mulder felt a little drizzle on his face. Scully was breathing in great lungsful of sharp air, watching the precipitation to their west as it rolled slowly towards them. Some trick of the heavy gray clouds allowed a few wayward rays through, westerly and straining yellow, the late afternoon sun's last effort before retiring. He looked out into the water, seeing low unseasonable fog, and watched the waves lap and gambol, whitecaps frequent below him. He had dived into water like this, from the half-cliffs of the south shore; he had sat in the house as a very young child and listened to hurricane winds whip the surf into a frenzy. Buzzards Bay was unquiet today. Scully, calm standing solidly next to him. They had not spoken and her eyes moved quietly, attentively, over the windy landscape. "My father grew up poor in New Bedford," he said abruptly, as if trying to sneak past his own defenses. Scully was looking at him, but her features safely retained the vague distance of her looking on the bridge. "His dad and his older brother were mechanics. They might have helped build this bridge. It's one of those public works, you know, the New Deal job programs." "I didn't know you had an uncle," said Scully neutrally. "He was a Seabee in the Pacific during the war. His whole crew, from New Bedford and Fall River. He was killed in '44. My grand- mother showed me pictures of him." He couldn't quite fathom why he was talking, why now of all times he should try to explain himself. Once begun, it somehow continued. "She came from Fall River, my grandmother. She was Portuguese, Dad always said I took after her. She was dark, you know, had the Sephardic features." Mulder watched the bridge as he spoke, the twining beams of super- structure, the brusquely elegant curve of the incline. "They took my dad and made an officer out of him. He used to tell stories about being stationed in France, when all of Europe was going hungry, and everyone's back yard was given over to vegetable gardens. Then he got sent to MIT, and he married my mother. I don't really know how they met; I guess I never asked." Scully wrinkled her brows. She reached out her hand a little, but Mulder pretended he hadn't seen it and in a moment it withdrew. "I guess you know she comes from money," he said, and it came out apologetically, but she only nodded, her face tilted to advantage in the cool gray light of the afternoon. "She was a Wellesley socialite and he worked hard to get rid of his accent. Sometimes," and the memory gave him a rueful smile, "sometimes, when they fought, it came out again, it drove her crazy." Scully smiled with him, a luminous thing. "I know she gave up a lot when she married him. I never met my grandparents on that side of the family, they didn't want anything to do with her. So she went with him, and they settled on the Vineyard. It was sort of a rich place -- well, it still is -- and I think it meant to Dad that he'd made it. He'd fly in and out of the airport in his little Cessna, home two days, gone four days, home again. And while he was gone my mother would go over to the neighbors and teach herself how to cook. She didn't know how before, I guess, but she was determined to learn." "Is this the point," asked Scully, with a mild humor in her voice, "at which I'm supposed to comment on the can-do Yankee?" Mulder looked over at her, at the way they stood side by side but not touching, at the way the air had warmed in the space between them. "If you like," he said, aware of but unable to remove his own lame half-smile. She looked at the hardy grasses at her feet as they bowed to the wind. "You remember last time we were here?" "On the Cape?" he asked, unsure why she brought it up. "That ex of yours, the Englishwoman. She had you wrapped around her fingers." Scully's skeptical look was only betrayed a little by the amused twitch her lips gave. Mock-outrage was the best outrage he could muster. "She did not." "Whatever you say, Mr. Rented Tuxedo," she replied, and strands of her hair whipped across her face like a curtain and away again. "I saw the room you got, big enough for two." "Good thing, since you showed up." An awkward silence. He was opening his mouth to ameliorate his blunder when she said: "I'd only known you what, two months, and there I was stripping you naked." She was looking away from him, but he could see her teeth in a small, private smile. "Uh, I had a witty reply, but I've forgotten it." "Noel Coward you're not," she said, and shot him a glance sidelong. He did not know where to go next with the conversation, so he just stood by her side, too tall in the face of her compact reality, and they watched cars rattle and thump across the bridge. "Look," he said at last, stupidly, "the sky is going red. Isn't there something about sailors and red skies?" "Red sky at morning," she recited, dreamlike, "sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight." Her gaze was distant, thoughtful, ocean eyes in a warm face. "Too bad we're not sailors," said Mulder, watching her. "What do you think it means then?" she asked, but her voice was a contemplation rather than a query. He knelt to throw a rock into the roiling dirty waves. He thought, with an unreal magic, that the next wave threw it back to him. "I don't know." Scully stood next to him and watched the traffic to their northwest and breathed a great breath. It might have been a sigh. She took his hand and led him back to the car. In the sky, the sun was falling behind pregnant, red-streaked clouds towards night. * * * * * * * end (2/99)