Work Text:
post-anasazi/blessing way/paper clip, bc what else do you watch with a fever of 100.1?
—
“Does this tie say, ‘sorry I collared you in the hallway of our workplace, I was under the influence of LSD’? Or is it just ugly?”
“I got fired in my best suit.” Scully is fully dressed, trim on the edge of Mulder’s couch. Today, like yesterday but not the day before, she wears black. She’s staring at the bullet hole above his Fancy typewriter poster like it could have the answers she’d demanded at her sister’s bedside last week. “I looked unimpeachable and nobody cared.”
“Ouch. Matching patent leather?”
Rain trawls the window, nicking the bullet’s point of entry and dripping into the heavy mug Scully’s placed strategically on the desk. Her lipstick’s peachy ectoplasm; her fine knowledge of parabolic arcs. When she’d let herself in, Mulder had been wandering around in one sock with a puddle forming under the bookshelf. The air is frowzy with coffee and April, cut now by Scully’s fresh perfume.
“Suede.” This like Whittier’s saddest word. Scully’s mouth closes so carefully around the sound. She’s never going to tell him about the wet asphalt on the long road to her mother’s house, the blood in the vamp of her shoe. Maybe in some way he already knows. You remember the Navajo dad showed us as kids? From the Pacific theater? she’d asked with her bruised feet in her mother’s teal bathtub. It was like that, with Mulder and I.
Difficult to understand? Maggie had sluiced lukewarm water up her daughter's shin. Dana, her stern and distant darling. Her own most damning judge.
Secret, Scully had said, thinking of endless chains of consonants. 16 syllables just to mean the word submarine, just to mean the word drown. And so long.
“Say it ain’t so.”
A sigh. “So.”
“Bastards.”
“Yes,” Scully agrees.
Mulder moves to stand between her and the typewriter. A healing pink scratch high on her forehead from when non-union poultry workers had tried to feed her to their plumed god — or whatever the hell had been happening in Arkansas. When he’d come back from the dead last week, she’d turned her back and bowed her head under ICU fluorescents to show him a different kind of scar.
The indignity of her name on misconduct reports and in manila files. Decorated Captain Scully’s earnest daughter, sitting with her spine straight in rooms full of men, on Mulder's couch, across from the bullet hole in his drywall. He’d cleaved to the flare of her honor in a road-side diner with Skinner across the laminate. She’d soothed his fever and nursed his paranoia and fired her gun. She’d driven him across the country on a careful dose of diazepam and then come to pick him up for work this morning. There’s nothing to say for it.
He asks, “Did they even ask you who you were wearing?”
“They asked me, um,” Scully blinks like she does when she’s waking up in cars, “if I’d lie to protect you. The OPR committee.”
“Oh?”
She looks at her watch. “We’re gonna be late. You’re ready?”
“What’re they gonna do, fire us again?” He see-saws his tie in its band. “What’d you say?”
Scully’s knuckles are pale around her scuffed briefcase, the same one she’s had since 1992. When he’d met her she’d been dressed in her best Girl Friday, a passé ‘30s flare to her square cut. It had been a shock, the slight of her shoulders under a robe and his hands not 36 hours later. Revealed: her real stature, no less straight and fine.
“Late,” she reminds. She kills the lamp by the fish tank. Her shoes are muted and sensible, low, and she tees them up at his threshold. “Let's go.”
He tags her elbow at the elevator. The same liminal spot where she’d admitted to some transcendent sureness in him, lighter and leaner than science or liturgy. I sent you signs, he’d said, on the way down. You get any of those?
She’d shifted against the back wall. I had strange dreams.
I’m talking omens, Scully. Like white oxen, weather patterns, that kind of thing. No? Maybe they got sent to the wrong address.
Now, as they wait, he says, “You’re not gonna tell me?”
When she turns toward him, her eyes are washed in the blue of Coventry’s stained glass, the dazzling fragments of war. Her mouth quirks the same knowing way it had before. It builds him up and cuts him down to size. He isn’t Lazarus; he is her partner.
“The tie is perfect,” she finally answers.
The tie is purple. The tie is littered with jitterbugs. The tie is awful. Mulder laughs; the elevator comes. Outside, pigeons hob-knob around his car, and only one of them is the white of Picasso’s dove. The truth is that Scully’s integrity is outweighed only by her unfailing kindness, and the question is only which one of them it will kill first.