Fic:: Lullaby For A Stormy Night [XF] 1/2
lizziwig and jacinthsong are being productive behind me.
I am not.
On the bright side, I finished it. :)
Fic:: Lullaby For A Stormy Night
by Raven
R, The X-Files, Mulder/Scully UST. Scully is sure this isn't supposed to be happening, and if it is, that there should be a scientific explanation.
In two parts, because of LJ's posting limits.
“It’s like I have a speciality,” he’s saying, and there’s a cracking fretfulness in his voice, a note of something faintly unreal, “it’s like everyone knows about it, whenever you get some perp raping and eviscerating twelve-year-old girls, they all think of me, time to bring in Spooky and his spooked-out brain, why do I always, I mean, why is it always me?”
“Spooked-out is right,” Scully tells him crisply. “I can hear your neurones misfiring.”
She deposits him on his desk and steps out to the bathroom. When she gets back, he’s fast asleep and the room smells of lilacs. She steps delicately in, moving around the mess, the strewn sheets of papers on the floor and the scattered sunflower seeds, and breathes it in, casting her eyes around for the source of the scent. It isn’t Mulder - she stops beside him, lets careful fingers brush back his hair - who hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours, at least until two minutes ago, and probably hasn’t had a shower in twice as many. His eyes are tightly closed, and she pulls the paper from his hands, the pen from beneath his cheek. He doesn’t wake up. She isn’t surprised.
She thinks she ought to go; get a cab because she is too tired to drive herself, go to bed and get some sleep and wipe clean her memory of endless roads and unsolved cases, just for a while; but she finds herself lingering regardless. Her hand touches Mulder’s head again, a quiet caress in a quiet room, and this time she is aware of his breathing, a rhythm of movement and sound almost beneath perception. He shifts beneath the touch, comes no closer to waking. They are together in silence.
“He’s not yours,” says a voice from the door.
Scully turns on one heel, hand already going for the weapon that isn’t there, feeling a rush of anger at the intrusion and another at the words, but they vanish, crushed beneath stiff composure as she asks, primly, “Who are you?”
The woman steps in without being invited, closes the door behind her and perches on the edge of the desk. “He’s not mine, either,” she continues, conversationally.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” - Scully can hide anger very well indeed, mask it under layers of Bureau professionalism - “but unless you have legitimate business here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Almost lazily, the woman flashes a badge at her, too quickly for Scully to see the name. “I do have legitimate business here, as it happens,” she says, still in that conversational tone. “I’m here to tell you that he” - she points to where Mulder is still sleeping, undisturbed - “is not yours. He’s not who you think he is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Scully is tired, so tired, and it’s beginning to show through as exasperation.
“Agent Scully...”
“How do you know who I am?”
Even as she says it, she knows she shouldn’t snap. She is a federal employee and there are half a dozen ways anyone could find out her name, and besides, a name isn’t a weapon. But it’s something else that’s getting at her, something about her own tiredness, something about the smell of lilacs and the broken shards of intimacy and most of all, something about this strange woman and her strange presumption that she can just walk into this room, this space made for just two people.
“Come on, Scully.” The woman sighs and crosses her legs. “You know who I am. Just think about it, will you?”
Scully blinks and looks at her again. The other woman is taller than her, but not much taller; she has short, razor-cut hair that would be a mass of brown curls if it grew out, she has a gun at her hip and heels that tap; she’s not pretty enough to be striking, but has large, familiar eyes. Scully opens her mouth to say I’ve never seen you before in my life, but closes it again because that isn’t true.
Something must have shifted in her expression, because the stranger nods and smiles slightly. “You see, you do know. You do. You just don’t want to believe it.”
Scully says nothing, and the woman hands her the badge. Scully looks at it and says clearly: “That’s impossible.”
“Is it?” The lazy tone has crept back into her voice. “Doesn’t seem impossible from where I’m sitting.”
Scully tries, through the haze of exhaustion, to think about it scientifically. She looks at her critically, trying to see someone else in her, and almost succeeds; there is something familiar, something in her eyes and her gestures and the ungainly fluidity of her movements. Even the attitude - the quiet assurance, the believer’s arsenal deployed against Scully’s scepticism - strikes a chord.
Almost against her will, Scully nods. “But it’s still impossible,” she persists. “You’re dead - Samantha is dead! She died more than twenty years ago!”
“Thy pronouns betray thee, Agent Scully.” She chuckles. “Even if you can’t quite commit to belief, surely you can let yourself hold the simplifying assumption, just for a minute, that my name is Samantha and that is my brother asleep on his desk over there.”
Scully sits down suddenly. “I’m very tired,” she says, surprising herself with her own honesty. “I’m not sure I can deal with this right now.”
“It’s imperative that you do.” Samantha’s voice has hardened. “I said it when I came in - that is not who you think it is.”
Scully glances across at Mulder, who hasn’t moved at all. She has rarely seen him sleep so peacefully. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says calmly. “We’ve been in Ohio, tracking a murderer. Local law enforcement wanted a Bureau profiler, so we got conscripted. We’ve been gone for three days. In all that time, I had no reason to entertain any suspicion that that’s not Fox Mulder. My partner,” she adds, pointedly.
“I’m not disputing that,” says Samantha, thoughtfully, “but there’s something I’d like you to explain.” Standing up, she strides across the tiny room to his side and runs her fingers down along the curve of his neck. Dispassionately, Scully notices that she has no qualms about touching him. In one movement, she pulls something out from around his neck.
“Answer me this,” Samantha says, with an accurate semblance of Scully’s calm. “Why is he wearing this” - her fingers uncurl to reveal a perfect gold cross - “next to his skin, next to his heart?”
Scully’s hands have leapt to her own neck, seeking and finding first the length of chain, then the pendant, skin-warmed and familiar.
“This is the part where I would explain it,” Samantha goes on, one hand still resting lightly on the back of his neck. He stirs, hands clenching and unclenching, and mutters something. “Hush, Fox,” she says gently. “But you” - this to Scully - “wouldn’t believe it.”
“There’s some explanation,” Scully says breathlessly. “There has to be.” But there isn’t, points out an inner voice; this is the one thing Mulder doesn’t believe. She moves to touch it herself, the cross warmed against his Jewish atheist heart, but she can’t; the room is getting fuzzy, and those few inches of dark space between her hands and the white lines of his skin are the fuzziest things in it.
“I have to go,” Samantha says suddenly. “It’s not possible for me to stay long. I’ll be back.”
Scully blinks, says nothing. She’s tired. She watches as Samantha walks away, her heels making sharp, painful little sounds on the hard floor. They echo the short, stabbing pains in Scully’s sleep-deprived head.
“By the way, you didn’t answer my question.” Samantha pauses in the doorway. “I can answer it for you.”
“What question?” Scully asks.
“Because,” she says, “it’s all that he has left of you.”
She shuts the door quietly behind her.
*
“Mulder, what was she like?”
“What was who like?” he asks, stretching out. The basement office looks no different in daylight; Mulder is sitting exactly where Scully left him the night before. He cracks his knuckles and she winces. “Scully, why do you let me fall asleep on my desk? If you’d woken me up I’d have gone home to bed.”
Scully sits down and begins to sort efficiently through the day’s paperwork. “You don’t have a bed.”
“If I did, I might have used it, last night.”
“You were sleeping so peacefully,” she tells him. “And if you had gone home, you wouldn’t have slept. You would have stayed up all night and watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t on last night.” He looks sheepish. “It was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.”
Scully takes a moment to lament, once again, the unfortunate combination of a man with an eidetic memory and the TV guide. “So I did you a service by leaving you here and not letting you make your own brain start dribbling out of your ears.”
“You impugn it. It’s a masterpiece. What was who like?”
Scully pauses in her paper-shuffling. “Samantha.”
He looks up sharply, eyes meeting hers through the swirling dust motes in the room. She holds his gaze and he relaxes, slowly, letting his hands drop back to the surface of the desk. “Why do you ask?” he says mildly.
“I’m curious.” It isn’t the sort of answer he’ll take at face value, but she can’t bring herself to tell him about something she is fairly sure she only dreamed. Mulder believes in dreams like he believes in everything else.
He shrugs. “She was my little sister. She got on my nerves, she stole my candy bars, she always had to play the boot in Monopoly. She got good grades, she liked baseball, she was just a regular kid.”
“What would she have been like as an adult? Do you think she would have been like you?”
“She wouldn’t have been an FBI agent, if that’s what you’re asking.” He isn’t looking at Scully, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been, if she hadn’t… you know. I’m a psychologist, not a cop. I don’t know, maybe I would have gotten as far as Violent Crimes. Hell, she used to pull the heads off her dolls, maybe she would have too. Scully, why are you asking me this?”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she really is; these are the questions the men in shadows ask him, and she doesn’t want to become something else he fears. “I don’t mean to pry. I just... I just wondered, that’s all.”
“I’ve wondered, too.” He still won’t look at her. “But I really don’t know. She was very young when she was taken. No one knows what she might have done, what she might have become.” He smiles wryly. “That’s the whole point.”
Scully nods, slowly. “I’m sorry,” she says again; she’s sorry about a death that happened decades ago, she’s sorry she asked, she’s sorry about the whole sorry world, and just so she has something to do with her hands, she starts shuffling papers again. Beneath the sound there persists a charged silence, the noise of what they aren’t saying, the alarms that don’t go off when they cross these old, gouged-in lines.
“Scully?”
Scully stares hard at the page in her hand, unseeing, hoping for the sight of him brandishing an X-File and that this will be a conversation they won’t return to, at least not in words. She gives it two seconds, and then looks up.
“Scully!” Mulder yells, and he sounds both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, rougher and lower, as though he’s taken up smoking again, with the sharpness that makes her go for her gun without thinking about it. And she realises he’s crying - his voice has cracked, broken - and his chair is on the floor, overturned, and the basement lights are flickering madly like candle flames guttering in a storm.
She steps towards him, fumbling in the sudden gloom, and the dust chokes her, rising from mountains of files and mess and cobwebs that bear no sign of her having ever tried to return them to order. He is hidden by the shadows, each breath he takes audible as tearing paper, and she fights her way through it all to get to him, pick him up out of the dark where he’s murmuring her name like it will keep him safe in this dimmed world. Something is shining around his neck, etched gold against the black, and she presses her hand to it, cold against his skin and hers, and she holds on.
“Scully? Are you all right?”
Scully blinks. She’s standing up, and her chair has fallen over. Mulder peers enquiringly at her from below his notice board of UFO clippings.
“Um.” She blinks, takes a deep breath, coughs on non-existent dust. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” He reads her very well, except when he doesn’t; and now he has the look that says he knows something’s wrong, but won’t ask her about it until one or both of them is dying.
“You look... different.”
“Really, I’m fine.” She is fine. The room is quiet but not oppressive, stark but well lit, and Mulder is slipping down in his chair as if he plans to go back to sleep on his desk.
“Listen, Scully, I’m sorry.” He notices he’s slipping and sits up again. “It’s okay to be curious, really. I don’t mind talking about her. I don’t want to be the only person who remembers her.”
Scully nods. “Thank you. I don’t want to make you think about things you don’t want to think about.”
“It’s probably good for me when you do.” He’s smiling as he says it. Silence drifts back again, and Scully shuffles papers. There are paper cuts on her thumbs.
*
The phone rings and rings, and then stops ringing. Scully listens carefully to the silence on the other end before saying, “Frohike? Byers?”
Her heels tap down on the frozen sidewalk, tap tap tap, three times before she hears any answer. She doesn’t stop walking.
“Hello?” The voice sounds utterly panicked, and she sighs. Clearly, they have stopped answering their phone with actual words in case the electromagnetic radiation permeates their tinfoil hats, or something.
“Frohike, this is Dana Scully.”
“Agent Scully? Uh… wow. Um. How can I, how can we, uh, how can we help you?”
“I’d better not be on speakerphone,” she warns him.
Something clicks. “Definitely not.”
“Or being recorded.”
Something clicks louder. “No, Agent Scully.”
“Good.” Scully pauses, thinking about it. “I need your help with something.”
“We’re ready and waiting at your service! Um. Not like that. Er. Unless you wanted us to. Or. Um.”
“I need your help,” Scully continues through gritted teeth, “in a professional capacity.”
“But aren’t you back from Ohio already? They sent you home, didn’t they?” Now it’s a matter of factual detail, he sounds competent rather than bumbling. She doesn’t ask how he knows, because they always know. “Byers guessed it wasn’t an X-File.”
“It wasn’t. It’s a murder case. VCU brought Mulder in last week.”
“They must be desperate.”
“They are.” Scully realises she’s sinking into digression with unconscious intent, her mind leading her away from what she’d rather not say. “We were sent back yesterday night. I’m back in DC. It’s not about that. It’s about, um,” - she hates her own hesitation - “um, it’s about Mulder.”
“What’s he done to himself now?”
“Nothing, nothing. He’s fine. I wanted to know about… um, when I was gone. Taken. What was he like, then? I, um, need to know.”
She cringes as she says it. No preamble, no introduction, no explanation, because she isn’t good at small talk, she needs to know.
But he doesn’t ask her why, and with a soft rush of gratitude, incongruous amid the bitter chill and crackly cell phone reception, she remembers that they’re the same, she and Mulder and the Lone Gunmen too; it’s why they work in a basement with guns and dust, it’s why he falls asleep on desks and why her head and heart hurt out here in the cold: because they need to know.
There’s a pause on the other end, some swift conferring, and she’s pretty sure she’s on speakerphone now, but doesn’t care. Finally Frohike returns, and his voice is low, serious. “He was crazy.” A brief pause, the sound of distant disagreement. “I mean, he was crazier. He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t sleep, he, turned up here in the middle of the night and took all our salsa. One time Langly had to sedate him with a baseball bat. He was crazy.”
“Oh,” Scully says. She never asked before because she was afraid of the answer, and now the fear is bitter in her mouth, sharp and choking. The night is clear, stars out and bright above, and she feels the stillness of the freezing air, pressing her into insignificance beneath.
“He used to spend a lot of time here,” Frohike goes on, his words slow and thick with memory. “I think maybe he didn’t want to go home. All the time you were gone, he wore your cross.”
“Oh,” Scully says again, looking down from the sky. “Oh.”
“Did you want to know anything else?”
“What? Uh, no, no. Sorry to bother you.”
“No problem. Hey, tell Mulder we’re watching Plan 9 From Outer Space, if he wants to come. And tell him to bring nachos.” He stops, inhales, and says, with a studied indifference, “You should come, too.”
“I don’t think so,” she says, but there’s warmth in it. “Thanks anyway. And thank you for your help, Frohike.”
“Sure thing.”
The receiver thuds down - apparently both opening and closing greetings are now verboten - and she flips her phone shut. She’s shivering, cold creeping in between layers of cotton and skin, and she hurries, avoiding ice crystals beginning to freeze into place along the cracks in the paving stones. Safely in her apartment, she makes steaming hot tea so she can thaw her hands out on the mug, but her eyes are closing even before she sips it.
She leaves a message for Mulder - hey, it’s me, the Gunmen want nachos, see you tomorrow - and gets ready for bed without really thinking about it, depositing the mug in the kitchen sink, switching off lights, going to the bathroom without looking up at the mirror. Lights sweep across the ceiling as cars pass in the street, but she’s slipping smoothly into sleep, aware only of cool sheets and shifting dark and then nothing, nothing at all except the black.
Hours later she smells lilacs. Her eyes are closed, but she sees livid red as though sunlight is shining in from behind them. She moves and the colour fades, becomes black as pitch, and she finds she can feel warmth in the dark. Her hands reach out for the softness of cotton, of flesh, and she turns over to meet a parallel gaze, eyes that gleam green, black, colourblind with each passing light-flash.
She recognises a face through touch, tracing the curve of cheek and jaw, onwards and upwards to feel the flutter of eyelashes beneath her cold hands. A pause, while she moves her hands, and she can both hear and feel his lips moving, shaping words against her palm. It’s Mulder’s voice she hears, low and gentle and speaking a language she doesn’t know, and this, all of this, the shifting strata of light, the whispers in her ears, they are a dream she will not speak of, she will never speak of. Her hands move downwards, and brush against his; the edged points of his nails leave brief, vivid sense impressions and then she feels only skin in long smooth arcs, her fingertips gathering sweat and details, each scar and curve of bone.
She thinks she hears him say, “Help me,” into the whirl of alien words, into the dark, but that might not be real. She can believe she’s dreaming this because she can’t do this, taste a human being, taste strawberries in his mouth with ancient cigarette smoke, she can’t make a man a poem just because she’s held him naked and profane.
So she hangs on to him, holding him with her, because this is her dream and this is how it’s supposed to go. Everything is slow, distant, a sepia reel of a forgotten film, and she isn’t surprised, isn’t afraid to respond to the heat, the touch. She finds truth in the sweep of sheets on her skin and his as they come closer together, the scent of flowers diffusing through the dark so she thinks to feel for the petals crushed between their bodies, between and beneath in bursts of sweat and perfume and the old, nameless feeling. She feels for him in her and around and inside her, feels his eyes half-closed and lips bruised by lust, feels for him to know what she cannot see, a body undone for her when the dark is too thick to see the warning lines.
He says, “Help me.”
And then every breath she takes is a deep, sharp hiss, once twice thrice and then something like light floods the scene, holding them both still - wrapped about each other, a freeze frame of heat, contentment - and suddenly it’s all over, it’s gone, and she’s shrinking from the inward rush of cold air.
The light creeps in and she’s not sleeping. When the digital clock reads five thirty, she can still smell the flowers. She gets up and walks around, noticing the way the sheets crumple along the careful lines of his body in her bed, the way his eyelids flicker. The room is filled with first light, fading through purple and grey into overexposed white, the high bright contrast showing up the mystery, the fact he can’t be in her bed and he is, because he doesn’t ever play by the rules of the game. He turns over, mutters into the quiet. He’s dreaming, and she thinks that perhaps she, the ghostly figure padding around his sleeping form, is the dream; perhaps he will wake up and she will disappear, a melted snow crystal in a city morning sky. She feels as though the dark has disappeared and not brought clarity, as though the surrealist whirl persists and the night continues through the dawn.
All at once she’s tired, and she’s getting cold. She gets back into bed and feels him against her, shivering into stillness. She’s too exhausted, suddenly, to do anything but sleep there with him, among the hollows and dips of morning light on tangled sheets. She falls asleep touching one of his hands, the fingernails translucent and visible against the soft weave. It is the sort of detail she never remembers in dreams.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the silence shatters. The sound of her alarm launches her into consciousness, a visceral shock in her ears, a herald of loss. She’s missing something with desperation that becomes dispassionate. It is a dull morning, shadows lingering around the edges of her vision and dripping down as serpentine shapes across the floor. She sits in the warmth for five minutes, wrapping the covers around her knees. When her eyes open, the room is unchanged and she is alone. She is driftwood on the empty sheets, left by the falling tides of the dream.
*
“So, do you believe me yet?”
Scully suppresses the shriek of surprise and barely avoids ploughing into the car in front. Having regained control and shaken off the urge to grab her gun, she risks a quick glance at her mirrors and is met by familiar eyes. “What,” she says tightly, fighting the urge to raise her voice, “what the hell are you doing in my car?”
Samantha is sprawled full-length on the backseat, heels on the window. “I don’t know,” she says, sounding more exasperated than anything else. “Five minutes ago I was creeping through DC traffic, getting late for work, and now I’m” - she peers outside - “still creeping through DC traffic, and getting later for work.”
Scully looks out at the grey morning, at the indomitable chess-players on Dupont Circle, and comes to a decision. Slipping through the next convenient gap in traffic, she makes a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and accelerates more than is strictly safe at this time of day. She doesn’t speak even as Samantha is thrown gently sideways, and finally draws to a careful stop outside the nearest Starbucks.
There is a pause as she takes the keys out of the ignition and the noise of the engine fades, to be replaced by the sound of fresh, driving rain. Scully turns around properly to see Samantha gather herself up and move a careful hand towards her holster. “What are you doing, Agent Scully?” she asks, with a guardedness that is all Mulder’s.
“Getting astronomically late for work,” Scully informs her, and gets out of the car. “What will you have?”
“Excuse me?”
“Latte, americano, cappuccino, what?” Scully taps her foot.
“Uh, a latte, please.” Samantha gets out of the car. Five minutes later they are seated across from each other at a small chequered table, both with steaming mugs of coffee. Rain drips slowly down the window, blurring the view of the street outside, of colour-splashed umbrellas and puddles reflecting clouds.
“Right,” Scully says, breaking abruptly into the silence. “Now tell me: what’s going on?”
“You first,” Samantha snaps back. “What is this, the third degree and associated interrogation over a civilised breakfast?”
“More or less,” Scully replies, crisply. “I’m not taking you into the office, and you know why. But I mean to get to the bottom of this. Something strange is happening, and I think you know what it is.”
“Do I?” Samantha sits back in her chair. “I’m in the same position as you. You think I asked to be tossed across dimensions without warning at eight o’clock this morning?”
“Tossed across dimensions?” Scully is getting good at conveying scepticism with the minimum amount of facial movement.
“Yes, that’s the theory. You see,” she says, and her voice is warming up, “it’s wrong. Things have happened that shouldn’t have happened. Things will happen that ought not to. It’s like history is all messed up. Tell me the odd things that are happening to you.”
The change of tack makes Scully pause; she takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of coffee, before speaking. “This,” she says simply.
“Yeah, that’s on my list too.” Samantha grins. “What else?”
“The first night I saw you,” Scully says slowly.
“That’s it?” Samantha looks impatient, and Scully is reminded of someone else’s impatience. "There are other things. You’re just not telling me about them.”
“I prefer to wait for hard evidence before I start speculating.” Scully licks the foam off her cappuccino. She realises she can’t remember the last time she stopped to have breakfast like this.
“Of course you do, of course you do. Okay, let’s get this out there: I blame our mutual friends.”
“Our mutual friends?”
“You know them,” Samantha says, with a slight smile playing about her lips. “Little grey dudes. Big eyes, spindly little legs, kinda lacking in a certain department if you get my drift.”
Scully nods. “It must be hereditary,” she says, almost to herself.
“What?”
“Anything at all that needs explaining, and it’s always aliens,” Scully says. “Why does it always have to be aliens? Why can’t there be a simpler explanation?”
“That’s interesting.” Samantha clasps her hands together. “You might not agree with me, but I notice that you’re no longer in doubt as to whether I’m actually Fox’s sister. Even though she’s dead.”
“It’s what you said the other night.” Scully looks straight at her. “It’s a simplifying assumption. And I’m willing to simplify things if it means I get an explanation. That’s all I want, believe me.”
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” Samantha leans forwards. “There’s some reason why you’re so very committed to that explanation. Something made it personal.”
Scully merely looks at her. “Don’t tell me, you studied psychology at Oxford too.”
“Philosophy, actually. What happened, Agent Scully?”
Scully glances out of the window and yawns, bringing one hand to her face. “I’m waiting for my explanation,” she says softly. “Tell me.”
Samantha raises her eyebrows at the evasion. “Fine. Have it your way. There’s a hole in the space-time continuum at the end of my bed.”
Scully doesn’t say anything.
“No, I’m quite serious. I’ve taken to sleeping on the couch until I can get it fixed.” Samantha leans forwards, elbows on the table. “As far as I can gather, the various universes - wait, you know the theory, right?”
“Let’s assume for a minute I don’t.” Scully is careful to keep her face impassive.
“All decisions split off universes like tossing coins - in this universe it comes up heads, but another universe it comes up tails.” She delivers the explanation in clipped, abbreviated tones, as if expecting Scully to have heard it many times before.
Scully sighs; even though Mulder has probably seen that episode of Star Trek a hundred times, and the Lone Gunmen probably a thousand, it doesn’t make it any less fantastical. She has a sudden image of herself striding through the basement office wielding her coffee stirrer as Occam’s Razor, and blinks and shakes her head to clear it. Staring into her mug, she watches the last of the foam disappear into a whirling foam spiral galaxy. “That is silly, romanticised bad science,” she tells it.
“Simplifying assumption, Agent Scully. An assumption, furthermore, which fits the facts. One of which is how three days ago I woke up, rolled over in bed and found myself in the ladies’ room of the Hoover Building.”
“What?” Scully asks, for the principle of the thing. She knows she heard correctly the first time.
Samantha continues, apparently enjoying her discomfort. “And I said to myself, how strange, I’m sure that the ladies’ room was painted white.”
“It’s green,” Scully says, and realises she’s fallen into the trap. “But in your universe it’s white, of course.”
“Of course,” Samantha grins. “You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t know what I believe.” Scully leans back in her chair, and her thoughts bubble to a standstill beneath the comforting murmur of the rain, of Samantha’s voice, of other people and their clinking teaspoons and rustling newspapers. It’s warm here, the electric light making a haven against the grey behind the glass, the air filled with the butter-sweet smell of brioche. “I don’t know what I believe.” She laughs suddenly. “Agent Mulder. That’s your name, isn’t it? That’s what you’re asking me to believe?”
“You don’t have to believe.” Samantha frowns at her. “I’m not some crank trying to proselytise. I can show you.”
Scully considers it. She’s very late for work already, and Mulder is probably sitting in the dark with a yellow legal pad, thinking about murder.
She says, “Show me.”
part two
I am not.
On the bright side, I finished it. :)
Fic:: Lullaby For A Stormy Night
by Raven
R, The X-Files, Mulder/Scully UST. Scully is sure this isn't supposed to be happening, and if it is, that there should be a scientific explanation.
In two parts, because of LJ's posting limits.
“It’s like I have a speciality,” he’s saying, and there’s a cracking fretfulness in his voice, a note of something faintly unreal, “it’s like everyone knows about it, whenever you get some perp raping and eviscerating twelve-year-old girls, they all think of me, time to bring in Spooky and his spooked-out brain, why do I always, I mean, why is it always me?”
“Spooked-out is right,” Scully tells him crisply. “I can hear your neurones misfiring.”
She deposits him on his desk and steps out to the bathroom. When she gets back, he’s fast asleep and the room smells of lilacs. She steps delicately in, moving around the mess, the strewn sheets of papers on the floor and the scattered sunflower seeds, and breathes it in, casting her eyes around for the source of the scent. It isn’t Mulder - she stops beside him, lets careful fingers brush back his hair - who hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours, at least until two minutes ago, and probably hasn’t had a shower in twice as many. His eyes are tightly closed, and she pulls the paper from his hands, the pen from beneath his cheek. He doesn’t wake up. She isn’t surprised.
She thinks she ought to go; get a cab because she is too tired to drive herself, go to bed and get some sleep and wipe clean her memory of endless roads and unsolved cases, just for a while; but she finds herself lingering regardless. Her hand touches Mulder’s head again, a quiet caress in a quiet room, and this time she is aware of his breathing, a rhythm of movement and sound almost beneath perception. He shifts beneath the touch, comes no closer to waking. They are together in silence.
“He’s not yours,” says a voice from the door.
Scully turns on one heel, hand already going for the weapon that isn’t there, feeling a rush of anger at the intrusion and another at the words, but they vanish, crushed beneath stiff composure as she asks, primly, “Who are you?”
The woman steps in without being invited, closes the door behind her and perches on the edge of the desk. “He’s not mine, either,” she continues, conversationally.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” - Scully can hide anger very well indeed, mask it under layers of Bureau professionalism - “but unless you have legitimate business here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Almost lazily, the woman flashes a badge at her, too quickly for Scully to see the name. “I do have legitimate business here, as it happens,” she says, still in that conversational tone. “I’m here to tell you that he” - she points to where Mulder is still sleeping, undisturbed - “is not yours. He’s not who you think he is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Scully is tired, so tired, and it’s beginning to show through as exasperation.
“Agent Scully...”
“How do you know who I am?”
Even as she says it, she knows she shouldn’t snap. She is a federal employee and there are half a dozen ways anyone could find out her name, and besides, a name isn’t a weapon. But it’s something else that’s getting at her, something about her own tiredness, something about the smell of lilacs and the broken shards of intimacy and most of all, something about this strange woman and her strange presumption that she can just walk into this room, this space made for just two people.
“Come on, Scully.” The woman sighs and crosses her legs. “You know who I am. Just think about it, will you?”
Scully blinks and looks at her again. The other woman is taller than her, but not much taller; she has short, razor-cut hair that would be a mass of brown curls if it grew out, she has a gun at her hip and heels that tap; she’s not pretty enough to be striking, but has large, familiar eyes. Scully opens her mouth to say I’ve never seen you before in my life, but closes it again because that isn’t true.
Something must have shifted in her expression, because the stranger nods and smiles slightly. “You see, you do know. You do. You just don’t want to believe it.”
Scully says nothing, and the woman hands her the badge. Scully looks at it and says clearly: “That’s impossible.”
“Is it?” The lazy tone has crept back into her voice. “Doesn’t seem impossible from where I’m sitting.”
Scully tries, through the haze of exhaustion, to think about it scientifically. She looks at her critically, trying to see someone else in her, and almost succeeds; there is something familiar, something in her eyes and her gestures and the ungainly fluidity of her movements. Even the attitude - the quiet assurance, the believer’s arsenal deployed against Scully’s scepticism - strikes a chord.
Almost against her will, Scully nods. “But it’s still impossible,” she persists. “You’re dead - Samantha is dead! She died more than twenty years ago!”
“Thy pronouns betray thee, Agent Scully.” She chuckles. “Even if you can’t quite commit to belief, surely you can let yourself hold the simplifying assumption, just for a minute, that my name is Samantha and that is my brother asleep on his desk over there.”
Scully sits down suddenly. “I’m very tired,” she says, surprising herself with her own honesty. “I’m not sure I can deal with this right now.”
“It’s imperative that you do.” Samantha’s voice has hardened. “I said it when I came in - that is not who you think it is.”
Scully glances across at Mulder, who hasn’t moved at all. She has rarely seen him sleep so peacefully. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says calmly. “We’ve been in Ohio, tracking a murderer. Local law enforcement wanted a Bureau profiler, so we got conscripted. We’ve been gone for three days. In all that time, I had no reason to entertain any suspicion that that’s not Fox Mulder. My partner,” she adds, pointedly.
“I’m not disputing that,” says Samantha, thoughtfully, “but there’s something I’d like you to explain.” Standing up, she strides across the tiny room to his side and runs her fingers down along the curve of his neck. Dispassionately, Scully notices that she has no qualms about touching him. In one movement, she pulls something out from around his neck.
“Answer me this,” Samantha says, with an accurate semblance of Scully’s calm. “Why is he wearing this” - her fingers uncurl to reveal a perfect gold cross - “next to his skin, next to his heart?”
Scully’s hands have leapt to her own neck, seeking and finding first the length of chain, then the pendant, skin-warmed and familiar.
“This is the part where I would explain it,” Samantha goes on, one hand still resting lightly on the back of his neck. He stirs, hands clenching and unclenching, and mutters something. “Hush, Fox,” she says gently. “But you” - this to Scully - “wouldn’t believe it.”
“There’s some explanation,” Scully says breathlessly. “There has to be.” But there isn’t, points out an inner voice; this is the one thing Mulder doesn’t believe. She moves to touch it herself, the cross warmed against his Jewish atheist heart, but she can’t; the room is getting fuzzy, and those few inches of dark space between her hands and the white lines of his skin are the fuzziest things in it.
“I have to go,” Samantha says suddenly. “It’s not possible for me to stay long. I’ll be back.”
Scully blinks, says nothing. She’s tired. She watches as Samantha walks away, her heels making sharp, painful little sounds on the hard floor. They echo the short, stabbing pains in Scully’s sleep-deprived head.
“By the way, you didn’t answer my question.” Samantha pauses in the doorway. “I can answer it for you.”
“What question?” Scully asks.
“Because,” she says, “it’s all that he has left of you.”
She shuts the door quietly behind her.
*
“Mulder, what was she like?”
“What was who like?” he asks, stretching out. The basement office looks no different in daylight; Mulder is sitting exactly where Scully left him the night before. He cracks his knuckles and she winces. “Scully, why do you let me fall asleep on my desk? If you’d woken me up I’d have gone home to bed.”
Scully sits down and begins to sort efficiently through the day’s paperwork. “You don’t have a bed.”
“If I did, I might have used it, last night.”
“You were sleeping so peacefully,” she tells him. “And if you had gone home, you wouldn’t have slept. You would have stayed up all night and watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t on last night.” He looks sheepish. “It was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.”
Scully takes a moment to lament, once again, the unfortunate combination of a man with an eidetic memory and the TV guide. “So I did you a service by leaving you here and not letting you make your own brain start dribbling out of your ears.”
“You impugn it. It’s a masterpiece. What was who like?”
Scully pauses in her paper-shuffling. “Samantha.”
He looks up sharply, eyes meeting hers through the swirling dust motes in the room. She holds his gaze and he relaxes, slowly, letting his hands drop back to the surface of the desk. “Why do you ask?” he says mildly.
“I’m curious.” It isn’t the sort of answer he’ll take at face value, but she can’t bring herself to tell him about something she is fairly sure she only dreamed. Mulder believes in dreams like he believes in everything else.
He shrugs. “She was my little sister. She got on my nerves, she stole my candy bars, she always had to play the boot in Monopoly. She got good grades, she liked baseball, she was just a regular kid.”
“What would she have been like as an adult? Do you think she would have been like you?”
“She wouldn’t have been an FBI agent, if that’s what you’re asking.” He isn’t looking at Scully, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been, if she hadn’t… you know. I’m a psychologist, not a cop. I don’t know, maybe I would have gotten as far as Violent Crimes. Hell, she used to pull the heads off her dolls, maybe she would have too. Scully, why are you asking me this?”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she really is; these are the questions the men in shadows ask him, and she doesn’t want to become something else he fears. “I don’t mean to pry. I just... I just wondered, that’s all.”
“I’ve wondered, too.” He still won’t look at her. “But I really don’t know. She was very young when she was taken. No one knows what she might have done, what she might have become.” He smiles wryly. “That’s the whole point.”
Scully nods, slowly. “I’m sorry,” she says again; she’s sorry about a death that happened decades ago, she’s sorry she asked, she’s sorry about the whole sorry world, and just so she has something to do with her hands, she starts shuffling papers again. Beneath the sound there persists a charged silence, the noise of what they aren’t saying, the alarms that don’t go off when they cross these old, gouged-in lines.
“Scully?”
Scully stares hard at the page in her hand, unseeing, hoping for the sight of him brandishing an X-File and that this will be a conversation they won’t return to, at least not in words. She gives it two seconds, and then looks up.
“Scully!” Mulder yells, and he sounds both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, rougher and lower, as though he’s taken up smoking again, with the sharpness that makes her go for her gun without thinking about it. And she realises he’s crying - his voice has cracked, broken - and his chair is on the floor, overturned, and the basement lights are flickering madly like candle flames guttering in a storm.
She steps towards him, fumbling in the sudden gloom, and the dust chokes her, rising from mountains of files and mess and cobwebs that bear no sign of her having ever tried to return them to order. He is hidden by the shadows, each breath he takes audible as tearing paper, and she fights her way through it all to get to him, pick him up out of the dark where he’s murmuring her name like it will keep him safe in this dimmed world. Something is shining around his neck, etched gold against the black, and she presses her hand to it, cold against his skin and hers, and she holds on.
“Scully? Are you all right?”
Scully blinks. She’s standing up, and her chair has fallen over. Mulder peers enquiringly at her from below his notice board of UFO clippings.
“Um.” She blinks, takes a deep breath, coughs on non-existent dust. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” He reads her very well, except when he doesn’t; and now he has the look that says he knows something’s wrong, but won’t ask her about it until one or both of them is dying.
“You look... different.”
“Really, I’m fine.” She is fine. The room is quiet but not oppressive, stark but well lit, and Mulder is slipping down in his chair as if he plans to go back to sleep on his desk.
“Listen, Scully, I’m sorry.” He notices he’s slipping and sits up again. “It’s okay to be curious, really. I don’t mind talking about her. I don’t want to be the only person who remembers her.”
Scully nods. “Thank you. I don’t want to make you think about things you don’t want to think about.”
“It’s probably good for me when you do.” He’s smiling as he says it. Silence drifts back again, and Scully shuffles papers. There are paper cuts on her thumbs.
*
The phone rings and rings, and then stops ringing. Scully listens carefully to the silence on the other end before saying, “Frohike? Byers?”
Her heels tap down on the frozen sidewalk, tap tap tap, three times before she hears any answer. She doesn’t stop walking.
“Hello?” The voice sounds utterly panicked, and she sighs. Clearly, they have stopped answering their phone with actual words in case the electromagnetic radiation permeates their tinfoil hats, or something.
“Frohike, this is Dana Scully.”
“Agent Scully? Uh… wow. Um. How can I, how can we, uh, how can we help you?”
“I’d better not be on speakerphone,” she warns him.
Something clicks. “Definitely not.”
“Or being recorded.”
Something clicks louder. “No, Agent Scully.”
“Good.” Scully pauses, thinking about it. “I need your help with something.”
“We’re ready and waiting at your service! Um. Not like that. Er. Unless you wanted us to. Or. Um.”
“I need your help,” Scully continues through gritted teeth, “in a professional capacity.”
“But aren’t you back from Ohio already? They sent you home, didn’t they?” Now it’s a matter of factual detail, he sounds competent rather than bumbling. She doesn’t ask how he knows, because they always know. “Byers guessed it wasn’t an X-File.”
“It wasn’t. It’s a murder case. VCU brought Mulder in last week.”
“They must be desperate.”
“They are.” Scully realises she’s sinking into digression with unconscious intent, her mind leading her away from what she’d rather not say. “We were sent back yesterday night. I’m back in DC. It’s not about that. It’s about, um,” - she hates her own hesitation - “um, it’s about Mulder.”
“What’s he done to himself now?”
“Nothing, nothing. He’s fine. I wanted to know about… um, when I was gone. Taken. What was he like, then? I, um, need to know.”
She cringes as she says it. No preamble, no introduction, no explanation, because she isn’t good at small talk, she needs to know.
But he doesn’t ask her why, and with a soft rush of gratitude, incongruous amid the bitter chill and crackly cell phone reception, she remembers that they’re the same, she and Mulder and the Lone Gunmen too; it’s why they work in a basement with guns and dust, it’s why he falls asleep on desks and why her head and heart hurt out here in the cold: because they need to know.
There’s a pause on the other end, some swift conferring, and she’s pretty sure she’s on speakerphone now, but doesn’t care. Finally Frohike returns, and his voice is low, serious. “He was crazy.” A brief pause, the sound of distant disagreement. “I mean, he was crazier. He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t sleep, he, turned up here in the middle of the night and took all our salsa. One time Langly had to sedate him with a baseball bat. He was crazy.”
“Oh,” Scully says. She never asked before because she was afraid of the answer, and now the fear is bitter in her mouth, sharp and choking. The night is clear, stars out and bright above, and she feels the stillness of the freezing air, pressing her into insignificance beneath.
“He used to spend a lot of time here,” Frohike goes on, his words slow and thick with memory. “I think maybe he didn’t want to go home. All the time you were gone, he wore your cross.”
“Oh,” Scully says again, looking down from the sky. “Oh.”
“Did you want to know anything else?”
“What? Uh, no, no. Sorry to bother you.”
“No problem. Hey, tell Mulder we’re watching Plan 9 From Outer Space, if he wants to come. And tell him to bring nachos.” He stops, inhales, and says, with a studied indifference, “You should come, too.”
“I don’t think so,” she says, but there’s warmth in it. “Thanks anyway. And thank you for your help, Frohike.”
“Sure thing.”
The receiver thuds down - apparently both opening and closing greetings are now verboten - and she flips her phone shut. She’s shivering, cold creeping in between layers of cotton and skin, and she hurries, avoiding ice crystals beginning to freeze into place along the cracks in the paving stones. Safely in her apartment, she makes steaming hot tea so she can thaw her hands out on the mug, but her eyes are closing even before she sips it.
She leaves a message for Mulder - hey, it’s me, the Gunmen want nachos, see you tomorrow - and gets ready for bed without really thinking about it, depositing the mug in the kitchen sink, switching off lights, going to the bathroom without looking up at the mirror. Lights sweep across the ceiling as cars pass in the street, but she’s slipping smoothly into sleep, aware only of cool sheets and shifting dark and then nothing, nothing at all except the black.
Hours later she smells lilacs. Her eyes are closed, but she sees livid red as though sunlight is shining in from behind them. She moves and the colour fades, becomes black as pitch, and she finds she can feel warmth in the dark. Her hands reach out for the softness of cotton, of flesh, and she turns over to meet a parallel gaze, eyes that gleam green, black, colourblind with each passing light-flash.
She recognises a face through touch, tracing the curve of cheek and jaw, onwards and upwards to feel the flutter of eyelashes beneath her cold hands. A pause, while she moves her hands, and she can both hear and feel his lips moving, shaping words against her palm. It’s Mulder’s voice she hears, low and gentle and speaking a language she doesn’t know, and this, all of this, the shifting strata of light, the whispers in her ears, they are a dream she will not speak of, she will never speak of. Her hands move downwards, and brush against his; the edged points of his nails leave brief, vivid sense impressions and then she feels only skin in long smooth arcs, her fingertips gathering sweat and details, each scar and curve of bone.
She thinks she hears him say, “Help me,” into the whirl of alien words, into the dark, but that might not be real. She can believe she’s dreaming this because she can’t do this, taste a human being, taste strawberries in his mouth with ancient cigarette smoke, she can’t make a man a poem just because she’s held him naked and profane.
So she hangs on to him, holding him with her, because this is her dream and this is how it’s supposed to go. Everything is slow, distant, a sepia reel of a forgotten film, and she isn’t surprised, isn’t afraid to respond to the heat, the touch. She finds truth in the sweep of sheets on her skin and his as they come closer together, the scent of flowers diffusing through the dark so she thinks to feel for the petals crushed between their bodies, between and beneath in bursts of sweat and perfume and the old, nameless feeling. She feels for him in her and around and inside her, feels his eyes half-closed and lips bruised by lust, feels for him to know what she cannot see, a body undone for her when the dark is too thick to see the warning lines.
He says, “Help me.”
And then every breath she takes is a deep, sharp hiss, once twice thrice and then something like light floods the scene, holding them both still - wrapped about each other, a freeze frame of heat, contentment - and suddenly it’s all over, it’s gone, and she’s shrinking from the inward rush of cold air.
The light creeps in and she’s not sleeping. When the digital clock reads five thirty, she can still smell the flowers. She gets up and walks around, noticing the way the sheets crumple along the careful lines of his body in her bed, the way his eyelids flicker. The room is filled with first light, fading through purple and grey into overexposed white, the high bright contrast showing up the mystery, the fact he can’t be in her bed and he is, because he doesn’t ever play by the rules of the game. He turns over, mutters into the quiet. He’s dreaming, and she thinks that perhaps she, the ghostly figure padding around his sleeping form, is the dream; perhaps he will wake up and she will disappear, a melted snow crystal in a city morning sky. She feels as though the dark has disappeared and not brought clarity, as though the surrealist whirl persists and the night continues through the dawn.
All at once she’s tired, and she’s getting cold. She gets back into bed and feels him against her, shivering into stillness. She’s too exhausted, suddenly, to do anything but sleep there with him, among the hollows and dips of morning light on tangled sheets. She falls asleep touching one of his hands, the fingernails translucent and visible against the soft weave. It is the sort of detail she never remembers in dreams.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the silence shatters. The sound of her alarm launches her into consciousness, a visceral shock in her ears, a herald of loss. She’s missing something with desperation that becomes dispassionate. It is a dull morning, shadows lingering around the edges of her vision and dripping down as serpentine shapes across the floor. She sits in the warmth for five minutes, wrapping the covers around her knees. When her eyes open, the room is unchanged and she is alone. She is driftwood on the empty sheets, left by the falling tides of the dream.
*
“So, do you believe me yet?”
Scully suppresses the shriek of surprise and barely avoids ploughing into the car in front. Having regained control and shaken off the urge to grab her gun, she risks a quick glance at her mirrors and is met by familiar eyes. “What,” she says tightly, fighting the urge to raise her voice, “what the hell are you doing in my car?”
Samantha is sprawled full-length on the backseat, heels on the window. “I don’t know,” she says, sounding more exasperated than anything else. “Five minutes ago I was creeping through DC traffic, getting late for work, and now I’m” - she peers outside - “still creeping through DC traffic, and getting later for work.”
Scully looks out at the grey morning, at the indomitable chess-players on Dupont Circle, and comes to a decision. Slipping through the next convenient gap in traffic, she makes a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and accelerates more than is strictly safe at this time of day. She doesn’t speak even as Samantha is thrown gently sideways, and finally draws to a careful stop outside the nearest Starbucks.
There is a pause as she takes the keys out of the ignition and the noise of the engine fades, to be replaced by the sound of fresh, driving rain. Scully turns around properly to see Samantha gather herself up and move a careful hand towards her holster. “What are you doing, Agent Scully?” she asks, with a guardedness that is all Mulder’s.
“Getting astronomically late for work,” Scully informs her, and gets out of the car. “What will you have?”
“Excuse me?”
“Latte, americano, cappuccino, what?” Scully taps her foot.
“Uh, a latte, please.” Samantha gets out of the car. Five minutes later they are seated across from each other at a small chequered table, both with steaming mugs of coffee. Rain drips slowly down the window, blurring the view of the street outside, of colour-splashed umbrellas and puddles reflecting clouds.
“Right,” Scully says, breaking abruptly into the silence. “Now tell me: what’s going on?”
“You first,” Samantha snaps back. “What is this, the third degree and associated interrogation over a civilised breakfast?”
“More or less,” Scully replies, crisply. “I’m not taking you into the office, and you know why. But I mean to get to the bottom of this. Something strange is happening, and I think you know what it is.”
“Do I?” Samantha sits back in her chair. “I’m in the same position as you. You think I asked to be tossed across dimensions without warning at eight o’clock this morning?”
“Tossed across dimensions?” Scully is getting good at conveying scepticism with the minimum amount of facial movement.
“Yes, that’s the theory. You see,” she says, and her voice is warming up, “it’s wrong. Things have happened that shouldn’t have happened. Things will happen that ought not to. It’s like history is all messed up. Tell me the odd things that are happening to you.”
The change of tack makes Scully pause; she takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of coffee, before speaking. “This,” she says simply.
“Yeah, that’s on my list too.” Samantha grins. “What else?”
“The first night I saw you,” Scully says slowly.
“That’s it?” Samantha looks impatient, and Scully is reminded of someone else’s impatience. "There are other things. You’re just not telling me about them.”
“I prefer to wait for hard evidence before I start speculating.” Scully licks the foam off her cappuccino. She realises she can’t remember the last time she stopped to have breakfast like this.
“Of course you do, of course you do. Okay, let’s get this out there: I blame our mutual friends.”
“Our mutual friends?”
“You know them,” Samantha says, with a slight smile playing about her lips. “Little grey dudes. Big eyes, spindly little legs, kinda lacking in a certain department if you get my drift.”
Scully nods. “It must be hereditary,” she says, almost to herself.
“What?”
“Anything at all that needs explaining, and it’s always aliens,” Scully says. “Why does it always have to be aliens? Why can’t there be a simpler explanation?”
“That’s interesting.” Samantha clasps her hands together. “You might not agree with me, but I notice that you’re no longer in doubt as to whether I’m actually Fox’s sister. Even though she’s dead.”
“It’s what you said the other night.” Scully looks straight at her. “It’s a simplifying assumption. And I’m willing to simplify things if it means I get an explanation. That’s all I want, believe me.”
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” Samantha leans forwards. “There’s some reason why you’re so very committed to that explanation. Something made it personal.”
Scully merely looks at her. “Don’t tell me, you studied psychology at Oxford too.”
“Philosophy, actually. What happened, Agent Scully?”
Scully glances out of the window and yawns, bringing one hand to her face. “I’m waiting for my explanation,” she says softly. “Tell me.”
Samantha raises her eyebrows at the evasion. “Fine. Have it your way. There’s a hole in the space-time continuum at the end of my bed.”
Scully doesn’t say anything.
“No, I’m quite serious. I’ve taken to sleeping on the couch until I can get it fixed.” Samantha leans forwards, elbows on the table. “As far as I can gather, the various universes - wait, you know the theory, right?”
“Let’s assume for a minute I don’t.” Scully is careful to keep her face impassive.
“All decisions split off universes like tossing coins - in this universe it comes up heads, but another universe it comes up tails.” She delivers the explanation in clipped, abbreviated tones, as if expecting Scully to have heard it many times before.
Scully sighs; even though Mulder has probably seen that episode of Star Trek a hundred times, and the Lone Gunmen probably a thousand, it doesn’t make it any less fantastical. She has a sudden image of herself striding through the basement office wielding her coffee stirrer as Occam’s Razor, and blinks and shakes her head to clear it. Staring into her mug, she watches the last of the foam disappear into a whirling foam spiral galaxy. “That is silly, romanticised bad science,” she tells it.
“Simplifying assumption, Agent Scully. An assumption, furthermore, which fits the facts. One of which is how three days ago I woke up, rolled over in bed and found myself in the ladies’ room of the Hoover Building.”
“What?” Scully asks, for the principle of the thing. She knows she heard correctly the first time.
Samantha continues, apparently enjoying her discomfort. “And I said to myself, how strange, I’m sure that the ladies’ room was painted white.”
“It’s green,” Scully says, and realises she’s fallen into the trap. “But in your universe it’s white, of course.”
“Of course,” Samantha grins. “You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t know what I believe.” Scully leans back in her chair, and her thoughts bubble to a standstill beneath the comforting murmur of the rain, of Samantha’s voice, of other people and their clinking teaspoons and rustling newspapers. It’s warm here, the electric light making a haven against the grey behind the glass, the air filled with the butter-sweet smell of brioche. “I don’t know what I believe.” She laughs suddenly. “Agent Mulder. That’s your name, isn’t it? That’s what you’re asking me to believe?”
“You don’t have to believe.” Samantha frowns at her. “I’m not some crank trying to proselytise. I can show you.”
Scully considers it. She’s very late for work already, and Mulder is probably sitting in the dark with a yellow legal pad, thinking about murder.
She says, “Show me.”
part two