Leaving Comity
This is for aud_woman_in, who so generously bid on me at help_haiti. She gave me the slightly terrifying non-prompt of "write what you want!" I hope this does the trick. Thank you, thank you, aud_woman_in, for donating!
And thanks to meatfight for a quick grammar consultation and for not at all twisting my arm to include a silly inside joke.
Their battery dies three miles out of Comity.
It’s a slow whine and then they crunch to a stop as Scully rides the brake and the car lists over to the shoulder.
Her hair still smells like smoke and she feels slightly hung over. Metaphysically nauseated.
“Now what?” she says, because it’s what she always says. She’s never sure if that means she’s too dependent on Mulder, or if she’s just waiting for him to fail.
---
They try to rattle it back to life.
“How many degrees do we have combined?” Mulder says, his hand wrapped in an undershirt he’d pulled out of his bag. The hot engine makes it hard to breathe.
“Shit.” His wrist bumps against the radiator.
Scully holds his tie back the way she sometimes does when he’s bending too close over a mangled body. She points to his left.
“Try there.”
There’s a hollow popping noise.
“I think we’re well and truly screwed, Scully.”
---
They walk on the side of the road. Back behind them is the rental car, its hood still popped, gray and sharkish. They keep to the tree line, taking turns walking backwards to head off vehicular danger.
The beam of Scully’s flashlight looks ghostly when she swerves it across the edge of the woods.
Mulder ticks off examples of batteries being drained by entities, sucked dry.
“It’s all an exchange of energy,” he says with a little too much affection for the idea for Scully’s taste. He drags his fingers through the air.
“So what?” she says.
“Sorry,” he says, sticking his thumb out. “Whaddaya say, Scully, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Southern New Hampshire?”
There’s a blister starting on her heel.
---
She’s lying on her bed in the dark, fully dressed. She still doesn’t feel quite herself.
Mulder knocks on the adjoining door and leans in without waiting for a response. He hangs off of the doorjamb, loose limbed and unconcerned.
“Hey. Let’s go get something to eat.”
She groans without opening her eyes.
“It’s the middle of the night, Mulder.”
“It’s only…two-seventeen.” He checks his watch. “Come on. You need sustenance.”
“I need to lie here in the dark, actually.”
“You need to eat. It’s a well-known fact that planetary alignment when Uranus is in the house of Aquarius causes low blood sugar and weakness. Among other things.”
“You just like saying Uranus.”
“Come on, Scully. I found a place. Open all night.” He’s bouncing on his toes.
I’ll sleep it off, she’d thought when they got there.
She went into the bathroom, ran cold water over her wrists, and then turned the lights out. The car would be fixed in the morning. Everything would look better in the light of a new day.
Now, she sits up slowly to put her shoes on and Mulder bends over her bedside lamp to turn it on, an occluding shadow against the dusty yellow wall.
---
The diner Mulder’s procured is a quarter of a mile down wet, curving, two-lane road. The motel owner, a man with the improbable name of Dan Shasta (“Like the soda!” Mulder crowed as they opened the doors to their rooms), had recommended it after dispatching a tow truck for their car and giving their suits and shoes a disapproving eye.
Mulder slides into the booth across from her, and for a split second, she wishes he’d sit down next to her, close and warm at her elbow. She hates people who do that and she frowns at herself as she opens the menu in its sticky plastic sleeve.
The white-aproned cook throws a line of patties onto the grill, small pink balls of ground chuck sizzling, and then presses each one flat in quick succession, the edges going crooked and lacy.
Scully orders a Coke, and she has to admit the hit of caffeine clears up her muddled head a little bit, blood vessels constricting with fizzy happiness. Mulder stirs sugar into his iced tea, clanking the spoon noisily against the glass. She doesn’t yell at him.
---
“Do you ever get used to this?”
“To what?” Mulder says through a mouthful of French dip. He swallows and licks au jus off the side of his hand.
“To not being yourself. To constantly walking into situations where you’re altered or stolen or switched. Missing time. Missing memories. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” she says without letting him answer.
“You know,” he says, “I don’t think you do. And maybe you shouldn’t.”
“You say that, Mulder, but look at you! You’re not even fazed.”
“You callin’ me a liar? It’s just my cool exterior, Scully,” he says, filching a fry off of her plate. “You know that.”
“Well, I hate it,” she says, crumpling her napkin onto her plate and pushing it to the center of the table. “It’s embarrassing.”
She flushes and crosses her arms, thinking of unwrapping the cellophaned package of cigarettes. It had felt good, satisfying, to yank the handle and hear the thud of the pack hitting the bottom of the machine. She thinks of Detective White’s limbs spidering over Mulder’s prone body, the ugly, surprising possessiveness that clenched at her throat. She thinks of snapping at Mulder, bald hate sloshing in the pit of her stomach for the past few days. His voice had needled her, made her skin crawl.
“But it’s over now,” he says gently. His eyes are dark and kind and it makes her feel like a moody adolescent, cranky and discontent in the face of his good grace.
“For now,” she replies darkly, disappointing herself again. “Until the next time.”
“It must be what it’s like to have an out of body experience,” he says. He’s read the literature, she knows; he has an entire subsection of a file cabinet devoted to the topic. “You look down and you don’t recognize yourself.”
The waitress slips their check onto the table.
“Well, I’m sick of it,” Scully says.
---
They walk back to the motel.
“This is so dangerous, Mulder,” Scully says, squinting for the flashing headlights of cars wending around a corner.
“Live a little, Agent Scully.”
He picks up two pinecones and juggles them.
“Maybe you should quit the FBI and go to clown college,” Scully says.
“You’ve got the hair for it,” Mulder replies. “And I’ve got the nose.”
She smiles at him in the dark for including her.
He chucks the pinecones down the empty road in quick succession. They crackle unseen against some distant asphalt.
“Look at that arm. Forget about clown college, pitchers and catchers report in a month, Scully.”
---
The car’s ready in the morning.
“Good as new,” the mechanic says, banging a knuckle against the hood.
They stand at the counter while he runs the Bureau credit card and Mulder reaches down and squeezes her fingers. It’s a quick pulse, and a second later, he’s signing the receipt with a blue pen that’s attached to a string with some masking tape. Almost like it never happened.
“So. Better?” he asks her outside. “Back to Scully?”
He’s folding his wallet back up and putting it in his pocket and the collar of his coat is askew. Scully presses it down and he looks up at her, surprised.
“Better,” she says, and gets in the car.
[season3, syzygy, motel, diner]
And thanks to meatfight for a quick grammar consultation and for not at all twisting my arm to include a silly inside joke.
Their battery dies three miles out of Comity.
It’s a slow whine and then they crunch to a stop as Scully rides the brake and the car lists over to the shoulder.
Her hair still smells like smoke and she feels slightly hung over. Metaphysically nauseated.
“Now what?” she says, because it’s what she always says. She’s never sure if that means she’s too dependent on Mulder, or if she’s just waiting for him to fail.
---
They try to rattle it back to life.
“How many degrees do we have combined?” Mulder says, his hand wrapped in an undershirt he’d pulled out of his bag. The hot engine makes it hard to breathe.
“Shit.” His wrist bumps against the radiator.
Scully holds his tie back the way she sometimes does when he’s bending too close over a mangled body. She points to his left.
“Try there.”
There’s a hollow popping noise.
“I think we’re well and truly screwed, Scully.”
---
They walk on the side of the road. Back behind them is the rental car, its hood still popped, gray and sharkish. They keep to the tree line, taking turns walking backwards to head off vehicular danger.
The beam of Scully’s flashlight looks ghostly when she swerves it across the edge of the woods.
Mulder ticks off examples of batteries being drained by entities, sucked dry.
“It’s all an exchange of energy,” he says with a little too much affection for the idea for Scully’s taste. He drags his fingers through the air.
“So what?” she says.
“Sorry,” he says, sticking his thumb out. “Whaddaya say, Scully, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Southern New Hampshire?”
There’s a blister starting on her heel.
---
She’s lying on her bed in the dark, fully dressed. She still doesn’t feel quite herself.
Mulder knocks on the adjoining door and leans in without waiting for a response. He hangs off of the doorjamb, loose limbed and unconcerned.
“Hey. Let’s go get something to eat.”
She groans without opening her eyes.
“It’s the middle of the night, Mulder.”
“It’s only…two-seventeen.” He checks his watch. “Come on. You need sustenance.”
“I need to lie here in the dark, actually.”
“You need to eat. It’s a well-known fact that planetary alignment when Uranus is in the house of Aquarius causes low blood sugar and weakness. Among other things.”
“You just like saying Uranus.”
“Come on, Scully. I found a place. Open all night.” He’s bouncing on his toes.
I’ll sleep it off, she’d thought when they got there.
She went into the bathroom, ran cold water over her wrists, and then turned the lights out. The car would be fixed in the morning. Everything would look better in the light of a new day.
Now, she sits up slowly to put her shoes on and Mulder bends over her bedside lamp to turn it on, an occluding shadow against the dusty yellow wall.
---
The diner Mulder’s procured is a quarter of a mile down wet, curving, two-lane road. The motel owner, a man with the improbable name of Dan Shasta (“Like the soda!” Mulder crowed as they opened the doors to their rooms), had recommended it after dispatching a tow truck for their car and giving their suits and shoes a disapproving eye.
Mulder slides into the booth across from her, and for a split second, she wishes he’d sit down next to her, close and warm at her elbow. She hates people who do that and she frowns at herself as she opens the menu in its sticky plastic sleeve.
The white-aproned cook throws a line of patties onto the grill, small pink balls of ground chuck sizzling, and then presses each one flat in quick succession, the edges going crooked and lacy.
Scully orders a Coke, and she has to admit the hit of caffeine clears up her muddled head a little bit, blood vessels constricting with fizzy happiness. Mulder stirs sugar into his iced tea, clanking the spoon noisily against the glass. She doesn’t yell at him.
---
“Do you ever get used to this?”
“To what?” Mulder says through a mouthful of French dip. He swallows and licks au jus off the side of his hand.
“To not being yourself. To constantly walking into situations where you’re altered or stolen or switched. Missing time. Missing memories. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” she says without letting him answer.
“You know,” he says, “I don’t think you do. And maybe you shouldn’t.”
“You say that, Mulder, but look at you! You’re not even fazed.”
“You callin’ me a liar? It’s just my cool exterior, Scully,” he says, filching a fry off of her plate. “You know that.”
“Well, I hate it,” she says, crumpling her napkin onto her plate and pushing it to the center of the table. “It’s embarrassing.”
She flushes and crosses her arms, thinking of unwrapping the cellophaned package of cigarettes. It had felt good, satisfying, to yank the handle and hear the thud of the pack hitting the bottom of the machine. She thinks of Detective White’s limbs spidering over Mulder’s prone body, the ugly, surprising possessiveness that clenched at her throat. She thinks of snapping at Mulder, bald hate sloshing in the pit of her stomach for the past few days. His voice had needled her, made her skin crawl.
“But it’s over now,” he says gently. His eyes are dark and kind and it makes her feel like a moody adolescent, cranky and discontent in the face of his good grace.
“For now,” she replies darkly, disappointing herself again. “Until the next time.”
“It must be what it’s like to have an out of body experience,” he says. He’s read the literature, she knows; he has an entire subsection of a file cabinet devoted to the topic. “You look down and you don’t recognize yourself.”
The waitress slips their check onto the table.
“Well, I’m sick of it,” Scully says.
---
They walk back to the motel.
“This is so dangerous, Mulder,” Scully says, squinting for the flashing headlights of cars wending around a corner.
“Live a little, Agent Scully.”
He picks up two pinecones and juggles them.
“Maybe you should quit the FBI and go to clown college,” Scully says.
“You’ve got the hair for it,” Mulder replies. “And I’ve got the nose.”
She smiles at him in the dark for including her.
He chucks the pinecones down the empty road in quick succession. They crackle unseen against some distant asphalt.
“Look at that arm. Forget about clown college, pitchers and catchers report in a month, Scully.”
---
The car’s ready in the morning.
“Good as new,” the mechanic says, banging a knuckle against the hood.
They stand at the counter while he runs the Bureau credit card and Mulder reaches down and squeezes her fingers. It’s a quick pulse, and a second later, he’s signing the receipt with a blue pen that’s attached to a string with some masking tape. Almost like it never happened.
“So. Better?” he asks her outside. “Back to Scully?”
He’s folding his wallet back up and putting it in his pocket and the collar of his coat is askew. Scully presses it down and he looks up at her, surprised.
“Better,” she says, and gets in the car.
[season3, syzygy, motel, diner]