TITLE: A Departure, With Travel Notes
AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com)
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: V, uh, reckless weekending?
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: only for Georgetown traffic.
SUMMARY: Some things you can't quite explain. But they still make
sense, don't they? A bit of a departure for me as well.
DISCLAIMER: As always, people are the brainchildren of 1013 /
Chris Carter and as such are used without permission.
* * * * * * *
A Departure, with Travel Notes
by Vehemently
* * * * * * *
Dana Scully walked out of the Kennedy Center in jeans and a
sweater, hustling between men in tailored suits and women in unseason-
able full-length fur coats. Beside her, Kerry chuckled under his
breath, and leaned down to mutter in her ear:
"They don't wear them half as well as Bette Davis." Scully
could not help but laugh, and blushed when she realized a woman in
fox was eyeing her imperiously. I should be insulted on my partner's
behalf, she thought, and the incongruity of thinking of him at this
moment closed her mouth. Kerry didn't seem to mind, ambling steadily
a few paces behind her, as if he had taken lessons from Mulder.
They did not talk again until they were outside, in the
stagnant air of September in the city. "So, Great Dane," said Kerry
as he stuffed his hands in his pockets, "it's Friday, it's evening,
it's t-shirt weather. What do we do now?"
Scully looked over at her neighbor, at his tousled mop of
hair, at the vestiges of adolescent acne on his chin. "Go on, have
fun," she told him. They were wandering along the street towards the
Watergate, and the breeze off the Potomac made her cross her arms.
"I'm an old lady. Go do what young people do these days."
"Oh," Kerry groaned, "the great crone has spoken!" He gave
her that look, the look that said he had folded her laundry just to
count how many pairs of red underwear she had. He knew it was
devastating and he normally used it sparingly. "Do young people go
to the AFI to see 'Now, Voyager?' Do young people rhapsodize about
Paul Henreid? I'm actually older than you, Dana. I just had a jar
of Oil of Olay broken over my head when I was a baby." Scully
laughed, as he had meant her to, but then she stopped laughing.
With her arms close about her, Scully walked, and Kerry
walked with her. He allowed her to keep her silence, seeming totally
absorbed in picking lint balls out of his pockets and shooting them
with deadly accuracy at cracks in the pavement. She watched him, in
the dank streetlights, mirrored vaguely in the display windows of
the pricey boutiques.
"All right," she said suddenly, stopping in her tracks.
"Let's go somewhere, just us old folks." It had come out of her mouth
like a confession, like a startled denial of something true. Having
said it, she wondered but did not renege.
Kerry smiled the smile that Scully knew would have him
married someday and he took her shoulders to redirect her physically.
"That's Georgetown," he said from behind her, in her ear. "At the
least we can go laugh at drunken tourists."
So they went, the wobbly lights drawing them forth. It was
something Scully didn't do any more, now that she actually lived in
this neighborhood. Tonight, fey and with a careless young man at her
side, she traveled down M Street with a new crazy perspective. As
always, hundreds of people crowded past her, cursing, or talking with
their hands, or tramping carefully in awkward-looking party-gear. As
always, triumphant sport-utility vehicles maneuvered through streets
not meant for the heights of technology. The city seemed to be
talking, a sussurating murmur from every brick and cobble around her,
and Scully thought if she listened hard enough she would decipher its
meaning.
It was magic. Mulder should be here to see it, she thought.
And then: he probably wouldn't understand it. And if he did, I
wouldn't know what to say to him. Scully looked at Kerry as he kept
pace with her, his skinny features outlined in neon light, his hands
in his pockets. She reached out and took his arm and he looked at her
with a sweet startlement.
"I'm so old I might topple over," she said, by way of expla-
nation. He grinned, as if he knew who she was really reaching for,
and turned her gently towards a club at the corner.
"I would be remiss," said Kerry gravely, "if, as your repre-
sentative of youth culture, I did not inform you of the retro trend
of swing dancing." And with a clever smile he led her into a darkened
vestibule which throbbed with ecstatic brass horns. She stepped past
the bouncer, and then kept a very straight face while Kerry fumbled
before the stone-faced man for his driver's license. "The cutest
little baby face," Kerry remarked, and Scully saw in him the mixed
annoyance of having to prove his age and vestigial thrill of being
considered an adult.
They entered the club, where, in unfortunate faithfulness
to the time period, everyone was smoking. Scully felt out of place,
but then she realized that only a very few wore the saddle-shoes of
full costume, and most of them were on the dance floor. At tiny
tables in half-shadow, fingering their mixed drinks, sat people in
the remnants of office clothing, or khakis and a blazer, or jeans.
They seemed like the yacht club elders, idly watching their children
cavort on the parquet.
Wordlessly Kerry found them an unoccupied space of wall to
lean on while the band screamed and thumped. Scully fought for a
moment against it, the bass bouncing around her ribcage in an unfam-
iliar rhythm, but soon she surrendered and laughed at the twirl of
effortless skirt and flashing smile. It was a startling thing, the
brightly-colored dresses, the curled hair, the long watch chains
some of the men sported. A man flung his partner in the air and
Scully saw that she wore the old-fashioned garter belts, attached
with white bows.
On a little raised stage, a band of eight people played, the
brass section throwing sweat, the singer clasping the stand-up micro-
phone to her breasts as if it were a lover. The drummer, sitting in
back, leaned back in his seat and surveyed the crowd, grinning like
a madman while the sweat rolled down his face and stained the band
of his pushed-back hat. He might have been a staid, normal family
man during the day, a tax attorney or something, but with his drums
below him and shifting bodies in front of him he glowed with
pleasure. Scully wondered what it would be like, to be in front of
everyone, to look down and know that it was you who had caused
everyone to start moving.
She did not dance, though Kerry begged her. She waved him
away, smiling, and he propositioned a total stranger onto the dance
floor. He stumbled among the enthusiasts, an obvious novice in his
jeans and his arrhythmic jumping, but he didn't seem to mind and
neither did his partner. They laughed and Scully laughed with them,
though she knew they could not hear her.
It was a crystalline hour of pleasure, unadulterated by
consequence or context. Scully took a breath and turned, all of a
sudden, to see if Mulder was smiling. He was not, of course; he
wasn't there. He was at home, or wandering a trainyard somewhere,
or wherever it was he spent his Friday nights. He was elsewhere and
Scully felt a pain in her sternum at the overwhelming need to bring
him into her enjoyment of the night.
There was a pay phone near the restrooms; Scully had spied
it on her way in. She felt a powerful urge to dig through her pockets
for thirty-five cents and dial Mulder's number. She would call him up
and shout at him above the music and . . . and what else she did not
know.
It struck her suddenly that this was not the sort of thing
Mulder would ever go to on his own. He might chuckle, eyes averted,
and tell her to go have fun; he might ask, his voice straining with
masked jealousy, if she'll be all right getting home; he might snort
and ask her since when did she follow the latest trends. Scully
wondered, as she had never done before, if he would go if she asked
it. She did not know the answer.
And so, when she turned her eyes back to the dance floor, she
smiled but did not laugh at the acrobatic antics Kerry and his
partner were attempting. She soaked it in, the flashing feet of the
dancers, the hyperactive colors under the lights, the sharp stink of
stale cigarrette smoke, the frantic tunings of trombone and thunder-
ing drums. She stored it up, for Monday, when she would see Mulder
again. She absorbed the night so as to transmit it to him, in a safe
context, distilled by her sense of propriety, boiled down into a
glint in her eyes and an extra syncopation in her walk.
She hoped he would notice. She did not think she could
explain the evening in words. Scully settled back against the wall,
her arms across her chest, keeping close the image of her Monday
demeanor. The weekend had never seemed so endlessly slow.
* * * * * * *
end
NOTES: And for those of you keeping score, that's Plausible
Deniability at the drums. Blame him for this story.