Between the Victim And His Stain
Mar. 17th, 2026 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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txf_fic_hubSummary:
"It made sense to accept Jack’s request for her help on the Dupre case because the X-Files department had been office-bound for a few weeks while Mulder continued recovering from Lucas Henry’s bullet, yet to be re-cleared for field work. Jack had called her up and asked her to get a cup of coffee together, and she’d almost turned him down — he’d always been more persuasive than was good for her and she’d made a pretty clean break — but he’d assured her that it was work, a case she’d once been interested in."
Lazarus, Dana Scully and her past loves, her needy controlling men, and an exploration of pattern recognition and dark mirrors.
Rating: Mature
Relationships:Fox Mulder/Dana Scully Dana Scully/Other (past, minor)
Characters:Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, Jack Willis
this started as part of the poang pals 'post ep first time challenge' but it's gotten away from me lol. Scully's romantic past between Jack Willis and Daniel Waterson and the things she is drawn to is such a rich subject to dig into. But please don't worry, despite the lack of Mulder in the first chapter here, MSR is the endgame here (as always, for me)!
Shouldering your loneliness
like a gun that you will not learn to aim,
you stumble into this movie house,
then you climb, you climb into the frame.
Yes, and here, right here
between the moonlight and the lane,
between the tunnel and the train,
between the victim and his stain,
once again, once again,
love calls you by your name.
Leonard Cohen, Love Calls You By Your Name
I see them as infinite, substratal
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of generation, sleepless and fatal.
They prolong this vain uncertain world with thread
In whose vertiginous web we are shrouded;
Sometimes in the evening they become clouded
By the breath of a man who is not yet dead.
The glass lies in wait for us. If among the four
Walls of my room, a mirror is mounted there,
I am not alone. There is another: the reflected glare
Which in the dawn assembles a secret stage floor.
Jorge Luis Borges, Mirrors, translated by Daren Jonescu
Chapter Text:
It's true that all the men you knew were dealers
who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.
Leornard Cohen, The Stranger Song
**
She had chosen Jack for some signpost in her life early on. She had tried to will her way into the frame of his perception, and they had crept towards each other at a cautious and steady pace, like a couple of half stranded wanderers on an unsteady mountain ridge or uncertain sea rocks at rising tide, neither quite sure which of them was the party offering or receiving rescue or respite. It had been ill advised from the start but had also felt inevitable from their first conversations after class, from her first cautious but insincere refusals.
It had been two years since Daniel, the last decisive breaking off, but they’d been an intensive two years, finishing the second half of her residency, securing her certification as a pathologist, forensics courses and sneaking away to accept recruitment into the FBI behind Ahab and Maggie’s backs.
Dana Scully was not quite 27 years old when she met Jack Willis during her training at Quantico, but she felt much more his peer despite the 20 years between them than she did the other young and fresh faced cadets in her class. She had left for college at 15 dreaming of outer and inner space and then found nothing concrete enough to sustain her, studied medicine and the found that querulous patients and diseased hearts invited a kind of flinching resistance within her, and a deep well of second guessing and horror at the unfixable and insurmountable, and then, while observing the autopsy of heart transplant patient of Daniel’s who had seemed to thrive only to suddenly fail — a patient whose previous two surgeries she had assisted and whose vitals she’d taken at rounds — she had become intimately acquainted with death and the drive to understand what specific and minute faults caused it. She had also in that time loved a man who she knew even when she had worshiped him would never fully love her back. These outlying experiences all gave her a kind of sturdy remoteness that offset her from her fellow 20-and-30-something trainees, and attracted the eye of many of her teachers and advisors, Jack Willis included.
Jack was a divorced man aged 46 years, an expert in behavior and violent crime. He came from an unstable home with a long-suffering and prickly mother from a pleasant middle class family who was had imagined a literary life for herself but had left her degree for marriage and pregnancy and eventually work as a secretary, who had quietly blamed Jack for her reduced and tumultuous lot in life, and a casually violent father who had been a charming chancer, an intermittent longshoreman and a not unsuccessful gambler. His father had been a would-be gang leader by Jack’s description, who had alternately charmed and terrified everyone loyal to him.
They’d never been truly without but there had been prosperous and lean years, times when the police had come asking ominous questions, and Jack had always said that he was glad that wherever his father had gotten the money to pay for Jack’s college tuition, it didn’t show up on his own background check. The fear and wonder inspired by his father, and his mother’s bitter loyalty had driven Jack into psychology, and later into law enforcement, in service of other little boys who sometimes prayed that one time when the cops came knocking, they’d take the old man away for good.
Jack was tall and broad shouldered and lean with a raw-boned face somewhere between roguish and classical. He had dark curling hair just starting to thread through with silver when she met him, though multiplying rapidly. His gruff taciturnity and pithy bluntness made him unpopular with many of the cadets, especially those who had come in with credentials and a dream of distinguishing themselves immediately and viewed his imperviousness as churlish. Jack had no time and patience for fools or egos or ingratiatiation. His hot eyed intensity and his profiling work, his casually mumbled analysis of books he thought she should read, and of baffling people whose lives intersected with theirs, showed a depth, a thoughtful complexity beneath the hard shell, a well of perception and analytical working so deep-bored that it would be dangerously invasive to try to fathom it, at least that’s what she had intuited or presumed.
Jack wasn’t more careful with her, exactly, than the others under his instruction, but he was curious to hear her thoughts. He pressed her to elaborate her conclusions, and support her intuition with behavioral theory. In their own time, away from the work, over the cups of coffee and then over glasses of stout — to which he had persuaded her by his apparent and matter of fact expectation that she would refuse — he had asked her about the books she read, the places she’d studied, the people she’d met. His interrogatory style had made her feel like she was being profiled herself but she’d impressed him by remaining coolly unruffled, and secretly thrilled by the specific and close attention.
Jack’s divorce was recent, an important fact of his life but not one he seemed to feel too deeply. He told Dana about incidentally and casually because one time she came to meet him to talk about her profile, she interrupted a call from his lawyer. The ex-wife considered that he had been unfaithful to her by marrying the job ahead of her, and Jack considered that ex-wife had been unfaithful to him by having flings with both her painting teacher and the marriage counselor. Once the papers were signed, he didn’t appear to give the several years long relationship another thought, which should have given Dana more pause than it did, besides a general bewilderment that the woman had put up with her as long as she had, and a vague annoyance that chivalry dictated that Jack give up the townhouse where they’d lived and remove himself to a bachelor apartment filled with too many boxes and not enough furniture.
He explained this the first time he took her home for dinner and they had the choice of eating standing in the kitchen or in the living room with their plates on their laps because he didn’t have a dining table and chairs. At the time Dana was living in the academy dorms, having previously lived in communal housing with med students and residents, in college dorms, and briefly in a tiny, expensive apartment provided by Daniel before her awareness of his reluctance to leave his wife and move in with her had gathered strength and coalesced into a stinging shame that had spurred her away from him, so she didn’t mind Jack’s haphazard arrangements. His furniture was solid and bought new, his tall windows were clean and hung with slightly outdated linen vertical blinds, always pulled open to let in the light, his carpets plush and regularly vacuumed by a hired weekly cleaner. His apartment smelled of his cologne and faintly of his occasional cigar, not the reek of cigarettes, mildew, old spills, disinfectant, group anxiety and all-nighters she’d lived with in her medical days.
It was a clean, cozy, imperfectly appealing place to stage an affair and she was conscious of thinking so the first time she visited him, even though she was then meant to be only a friend letting her mentor lend her a stack of books from his shelf. An imperfectly appealing place suiting an imperfectly appealing man, and at least Jack had shed the encumbrance of his unwanted, unwanting wife before she'd met him. Dana felt relief at this cleanliness as well.
By the time she found herself being made careful, deliberate love to on Jack’s soft, almond-colored carpet, Chinese food and wine abandoned on the coffee table pushed away beside them, and later in his wide, modern bed, with its glossy blue tubular metal bars for her to grasp, Dana had started to wonder with equal parts hope and horror if Jack would want to marry again. He looked at her so seriously, with so much intent. She wondered if he’d ever realized that he’d inherited a piece of that gift of calling up fear and wonder in the path of his dark eyes and large, nimble hands.
*
Mulder wasn’t happy with the idea of her working with someone else even temporarily, she could tell by the way the line of his jaw sharpened and his eye went momentarily bleak when she told him, but he covered quickly and he was gracious about it. He was still limping, and he was still pale with stress, there was no way they were going out in the field for another week or two and he couldn’t argue with Skinner’s approval of inter-office cooperation. She’d suspect of playing up to his audience, pricking her conscience for leaving him in the lurch, but she knew from the past weeks that Mulder was genuinely bewildered about the level of care she showed him.
Watching him putter carefully around the basement and try to appear unbothered by her temporary abandonment speared her through with sudden regret. She wouldn’t be here to hand him his pills every 6 hours. She wouldn’t be here to shuffle them out the door at a reasonable hour. She wouldn’t be here to tell him he was insane if he thought he was going haring off after some secret tip before his thigh muscles were ready for the lengthy sprint that almost always followed. She realized that she hadn’t even secured assurance that she would be put rightly back on the X Files once Mulder was declared fit and not left in limbo with the Dupre case, which had already dragged on for at least 18 months, for the duration with Jack.
“I know you’re a little tired of me at the moment, so I thought… It’s just until you’re cleared,” Scully promised with false confidence. She stood leaning against the back of her red chair at her little table, arms folded across her chest, watching Mulder shuffle files from his desk to the computer desk. She was aware of her defensive posture but didn’t unbend. “And then you can find us a suspected cryptid mauling citizens or something else interesting and I’ll be back.”
“It’s fine, Scully. I can cope with the busywork by myself for a week. We only have one computer down here anyway,” he grinned affably but didn’t meet her eyes, going back to his pantomime at the keyboard. “The VSU connection is a good one to maintain, Scully. Life in the Bureau doesn’t have to be all rotting corpses and mutant bile.”
Scully wanted to grasp the stiff curve of Mulder’s carefully affably slouched shoulder, turn him, stare him down and insist that she loved her job and she wasn’t looking for an exit. But saying that would be definite in a way they didn’t do, and she was worried about impinging even further on his already smarting pride.
“It’s a favor, Mulder, for an old friend. I’ll be back before you know it.”
*
It made sense to accept Jack’s request for her help on the Dupre case because the X-Files department had been office-bound for a few weeks while Mulder continued recovering from Lucas Henry’s bullet, yet to be re-cleared for field work. Jack had called her up and asked her to get a cup of coffee together, and she’d almost turned him down — he’d always been more persuasive than was good for her and she’d made a pretty clean break — but he’d assured her that it was work, a case she’d once been interested in.
He was still as tall and dark and tightly contained as she remembered as they met under the spangling incandescents of the clean, narrow and alliterative Capital Corner Cafe. His broad shoulders were drawn up tight under his dark overcoat and his eyes were tired, though they came into focus as they sought her. She didn’t rise from her booth as he loomed up at her, not wanting to find out if he would try to shake her hand or give her a ‘friendly’ kiss. He looked incongruous in the scrubbed red and cream linoleum and vinyl atmosphere like he always had to her, though Scully had never been sure if the impression he gave was of a gambling hall tough given a good coat and a bright badge, or of some kind of country aristocrat slumming it. Before she’d gotten used to the equally looming Mulder and his ridiculous and mercurial ease wherever they went, she’d assumed it was just a feature of his being a tall man in a crowded world that he never seemed quite comfortable anywhere, but now she thought it was just Jack.
He smiled at her though, when he saw her, with genuine warmth. It was like slipping back in time for a moment.
“I hear you’re up to interesting things, these days,” she’d said, when they’d exchanged greetings.
“I am, I think you’ll find it interesting, too. Unless a blue collar spree killer is too mundane for you now, Dana,” he teased in a low rumble that she’d wanted to take as affectionate rather than scornful, but his deadpan was sometimes hard to decipher. It had been more than a year since they parted ways and since then there had been Mulder, a whole new difficult man with his own deadpan drollery and his own cascade of inferences and minutiae, a new language she had learned superseding the old.
“Jack,” she’s said, drawing the name with gentle warning. The sound of his name in her voice was more familiar than she’d expected. “I’m not sure what you’ve heard about what I’m doing in our department down there, but listen…”
“I heard about Lucas Henry, Luther Boggs and those two kids you saved,” he said, “and I heard that your hothead partner got himself some injury leave and that you might have some time on your hands.”
“It wasn’t Mulder’s fault that he got shot,” Scully defended, automatically sharp.
“I didn’t say it was, Dana. Happens to the best of us. Remember the cross-fire on the Linton case? Two weeks with my arm in a sling and then I couldn’t take you rowing at the lake like we’d planned.”
“I said at the time we could still go, even with the sling,” she said with a laugh, “I’m better with oars that you are anyway, city boy.”
“Yeah, but how would that look to the boat rental guy, and anyone who saw me putting you to work? Tiny little thing like you, kid,” he joked with slow a shake of his head
“You know, I hated when you called me that, Jack.” She said it quietly, down at her coffee cup, but she was glad she’d finally admitted it. Scully thought about how she’d started out with Mulder feeling like the unwanted tag along little sister all over again, coming up to his shoulder and trotting to keep up with his loping stride and being as loud and contrary as possible to try to cover the feeling. But he’d never called her ‘kid’ or even seemed to notice her baby face or petite size, and within a couple of cases together the feeling had faded. Jack used to call her Kid with a wry little smile like he was Bogie and she was Bergman or Becall and then she’d feel the years between them snap and shake, almost like a wagging finger.
“What, kid? You never said. I thought I was being charming and self deprecating by calling attention to the obvious difference in our ages and general stature.”
“Yes, well… That may be, but I didn’t like it.”
“Okay, then. I’m sorry, Dana, I wish you’d said.” Jack grumbled it as if annoyed but he looked honestly regretful. “How about I stick with ‘Agent Scully’ for now and see from there, how's that?” He goaded, a little lighter. “It really is work I wanted to talk to you about, you know. Maybe you’ve heard, they finally gave me back Dupre and the Taskforce is scrambling to get up to speed. This isn’t some kind of nostalgia bit, all right? It’s your mind I’m after.”
“You know Teddy Dupre and Lula Phillips better than anyone in the bureau, what could you need me for?”
“I do know them. It’s still my profile, which is why they gave me back the case when they started shooting up banks again a few weeks ago. But you know I have a reputation, after Philly. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees, the section chief said. They want me on it but they don’t want me working alone, I need a partner on this and you’re the only one I thought of who I’d feel comfortable bringing in.”
Dana was quiet for a long moment, wondering if he only wanted her brought in because she knew that he’d impressed her, back then. That something in her had always just a little bit hesitant of and in awe of his authority, his half-repressed fury. He’d had authority over her for the first few months and seniority over her afterwards, though he’d never tried to press that particular point home. Was he looking for a partner to rubber stamp his decisions and cover his ass with the higher ups? She didn’t think that was like Jack but she also knew how desperate he’d been to close this case, chasing Dupre’s sprees around the eastern seaboard and letting other profiles fall by the wayside. And her, it had to be said, their relationship.
Then again, Mulder stuck behind a desk and still suffering pains from his injury that he wouldn’t admit he was suffering was a sarcastic, biting, grizzling prospect, waiting for her even now back at the office. Mulder found her hovering grating, even claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been willing to explain to him how it felt to watch him almost bleed out in an ambulance and emergency room bay so that he would see why her worrying was unpreventable. It was an impasse, and not a thrilling set of working conditions. What’s more, old loyalty still called to her; Jack needed her. Jack had once needed her a great deal.
“Okay, Jack, if you square it with Skinner, and if you understand that this is temporary, you’ve got me,” she agreed.
She let him order them sandwiches, and a piece of pie to split. She asked after his old partner, the one he’d had when they were dating and found out that he’d asked for a transfer after Philly. She let him tell her about the boy he was mentoring, a bright, troubled 15 year old with a store clerk mom and a dad in jail, a dad he didn’t want let out of jail though in all likelihood he would be before the boy was out of high school and away.
“He’s so young, but he doesn’t think he is,” Jack said as he shredded his napkin contemplatively, “It’s funny how we’re always finding little echos of ourselves, outside of ourselves, showing us things we didn’t realize.”
She reached over and stilled Jack’s hand, remembering, and then withdrew, fidgeting awkwardly under his curious gaze. The instinct to touch him was honest but she’d realized it wasn’t the hand she’d expected under her own.
"It made sense to accept Jack’s request for her help on the Dupre case because the X-Files department had been office-bound for a few weeks while Mulder continued recovering from Lucas Henry’s bullet, yet to be re-cleared for field work. Jack had called her up and asked her to get a cup of coffee together, and she’d almost turned him down — he’d always been more persuasive than was good for her and she’d made a pretty clean break — but he’d assured her that it was work, a case she’d once been interested in."
Lazarus, Dana Scully and her past loves, her needy controlling men, and an exploration of pattern recognition and dark mirrors.
Rating: Mature
Relationships:Fox Mulder/Dana Scully Dana Scully/Other (past, minor)
Characters:Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, Jack Willis
this started as part of the poang pals 'post ep first time challenge' but it's gotten away from me lol. Scully's romantic past between Jack Willis and Daniel Waterson and the things she is drawn to is such a rich subject to dig into. But please don't worry, despite the lack of Mulder in the first chapter here, MSR is the endgame here (as always, for me)!
Shouldering your loneliness
like a gun that you will not learn to aim,
you stumble into this movie house,
then you climb, you climb into the frame.
Yes, and here, right here
between the moonlight and the lane,
between the tunnel and the train,
between the victim and his stain,
once again, once again,
love calls you by your name.
Leonard Cohen, Love Calls You By Your Name
I see them as infinite, substratal
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of generation, sleepless and fatal.
They prolong this vain uncertain world with thread
In whose vertiginous web we are shrouded;
Sometimes in the evening they become clouded
By the breath of a man who is not yet dead.
The glass lies in wait for us. If among the four
Walls of my room, a mirror is mounted there,
I am not alone. There is another: the reflected glare
Which in the dawn assembles a secret stage floor.
Jorge Luis Borges, Mirrors, translated by Daren Jonescu
Chapter Text:
It's true that all the men you knew were dealers
who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.
Leornard Cohen, The Stranger Song
**
She had chosen Jack for some signpost in her life early on. She had tried to will her way into the frame of his perception, and they had crept towards each other at a cautious and steady pace, like a couple of half stranded wanderers on an unsteady mountain ridge or uncertain sea rocks at rising tide, neither quite sure which of them was the party offering or receiving rescue or respite. It had been ill advised from the start but had also felt inevitable from their first conversations after class, from her first cautious but insincere refusals.
It had been two years since Daniel, the last decisive breaking off, but they’d been an intensive two years, finishing the second half of her residency, securing her certification as a pathologist, forensics courses and sneaking away to accept recruitment into the FBI behind Ahab and Maggie’s backs.
Dana Scully was not quite 27 years old when she met Jack Willis during her training at Quantico, but she felt much more his peer despite the 20 years between them than she did the other young and fresh faced cadets in her class. She had left for college at 15 dreaming of outer and inner space and then found nothing concrete enough to sustain her, studied medicine and the found that querulous patients and diseased hearts invited a kind of flinching resistance within her, and a deep well of second guessing and horror at the unfixable and insurmountable, and then, while observing the autopsy of heart transplant patient of Daniel’s who had seemed to thrive only to suddenly fail — a patient whose previous two surgeries she had assisted and whose vitals she’d taken at rounds — she had become intimately acquainted with death and the drive to understand what specific and minute faults caused it. She had also in that time loved a man who she knew even when she had worshiped him would never fully love her back. These outlying experiences all gave her a kind of sturdy remoteness that offset her from her fellow 20-and-30-something trainees, and attracted the eye of many of her teachers and advisors, Jack Willis included.
Jack was a divorced man aged 46 years, an expert in behavior and violent crime. He came from an unstable home with a long-suffering and prickly mother from a pleasant middle class family who was had imagined a literary life for herself but had left her degree for marriage and pregnancy and eventually work as a secretary, who had quietly blamed Jack for her reduced and tumultuous lot in life, and a casually violent father who had been a charming chancer, an intermittent longshoreman and a not unsuccessful gambler. His father had been a would-be gang leader by Jack’s description, who had alternately charmed and terrified everyone loyal to him.
They’d never been truly without but there had been prosperous and lean years, times when the police had come asking ominous questions, and Jack had always said that he was glad that wherever his father had gotten the money to pay for Jack’s college tuition, it didn’t show up on his own background check. The fear and wonder inspired by his father, and his mother’s bitter loyalty had driven Jack into psychology, and later into law enforcement, in service of other little boys who sometimes prayed that one time when the cops came knocking, they’d take the old man away for good.
Jack was tall and broad shouldered and lean with a raw-boned face somewhere between roguish and classical. He had dark curling hair just starting to thread through with silver when she met him, though multiplying rapidly. His gruff taciturnity and pithy bluntness made him unpopular with many of the cadets, especially those who had come in with credentials and a dream of distinguishing themselves immediately and viewed his imperviousness as churlish. Jack had no time and patience for fools or egos or ingratiatiation. His hot eyed intensity and his profiling work, his casually mumbled analysis of books he thought she should read, and of baffling people whose lives intersected with theirs, showed a depth, a thoughtful complexity beneath the hard shell, a well of perception and analytical working so deep-bored that it would be dangerously invasive to try to fathom it, at least that’s what she had intuited or presumed.
Jack wasn’t more careful with her, exactly, than the others under his instruction, but he was curious to hear her thoughts. He pressed her to elaborate her conclusions, and support her intuition with behavioral theory. In their own time, away from the work, over the cups of coffee and then over glasses of stout — to which he had persuaded her by his apparent and matter of fact expectation that she would refuse — he had asked her about the books she read, the places she’d studied, the people she’d met. His interrogatory style had made her feel like she was being profiled herself but she’d impressed him by remaining coolly unruffled, and secretly thrilled by the specific and close attention.
Jack’s divorce was recent, an important fact of his life but not one he seemed to feel too deeply. He told Dana about incidentally and casually because one time she came to meet him to talk about her profile, she interrupted a call from his lawyer. The ex-wife considered that he had been unfaithful to her by marrying the job ahead of her, and Jack considered that ex-wife had been unfaithful to him by having flings with both her painting teacher and the marriage counselor. Once the papers were signed, he didn’t appear to give the several years long relationship another thought, which should have given Dana more pause than it did, besides a general bewilderment that the woman had put up with her as long as she had, and a vague annoyance that chivalry dictated that Jack give up the townhouse where they’d lived and remove himself to a bachelor apartment filled with too many boxes and not enough furniture.
He explained this the first time he took her home for dinner and they had the choice of eating standing in the kitchen or in the living room with their plates on their laps because he didn’t have a dining table and chairs. At the time Dana was living in the academy dorms, having previously lived in communal housing with med students and residents, in college dorms, and briefly in a tiny, expensive apartment provided by Daniel before her awareness of his reluctance to leave his wife and move in with her had gathered strength and coalesced into a stinging shame that had spurred her away from him, so she didn’t mind Jack’s haphazard arrangements. His furniture was solid and bought new, his tall windows were clean and hung with slightly outdated linen vertical blinds, always pulled open to let in the light, his carpets plush and regularly vacuumed by a hired weekly cleaner. His apartment smelled of his cologne and faintly of his occasional cigar, not the reek of cigarettes, mildew, old spills, disinfectant, group anxiety and all-nighters she’d lived with in her medical days.
It was a clean, cozy, imperfectly appealing place to stage an affair and she was conscious of thinking so the first time she visited him, even though she was then meant to be only a friend letting her mentor lend her a stack of books from his shelf. An imperfectly appealing place suiting an imperfectly appealing man, and at least Jack had shed the encumbrance of his unwanted, unwanting wife before she'd met him. Dana felt relief at this cleanliness as well.
By the time she found herself being made careful, deliberate love to on Jack’s soft, almond-colored carpet, Chinese food and wine abandoned on the coffee table pushed away beside them, and later in his wide, modern bed, with its glossy blue tubular metal bars for her to grasp, Dana had started to wonder with equal parts hope and horror if Jack would want to marry again. He looked at her so seriously, with so much intent. She wondered if he’d ever realized that he’d inherited a piece of that gift of calling up fear and wonder in the path of his dark eyes and large, nimble hands.
*
Mulder wasn’t happy with the idea of her working with someone else even temporarily, she could tell by the way the line of his jaw sharpened and his eye went momentarily bleak when she told him, but he covered quickly and he was gracious about it. He was still limping, and he was still pale with stress, there was no way they were going out in the field for another week or two and he couldn’t argue with Skinner’s approval of inter-office cooperation. She’d suspect of playing up to his audience, pricking her conscience for leaving him in the lurch, but she knew from the past weeks that Mulder was genuinely bewildered about the level of care she showed him.
Watching him putter carefully around the basement and try to appear unbothered by her temporary abandonment speared her through with sudden regret. She wouldn’t be here to hand him his pills every 6 hours. She wouldn’t be here to shuffle them out the door at a reasonable hour. She wouldn’t be here to tell him he was insane if he thought he was going haring off after some secret tip before his thigh muscles were ready for the lengthy sprint that almost always followed. She realized that she hadn’t even secured assurance that she would be put rightly back on the X Files once Mulder was declared fit and not left in limbo with the Dupre case, which had already dragged on for at least 18 months, for the duration with Jack.
“I know you’re a little tired of me at the moment, so I thought… It’s just until you’re cleared,” Scully promised with false confidence. She stood leaning against the back of her red chair at her little table, arms folded across her chest, watching Mulder shuffle files from his desk to the computer desk. She was aware of her defensive posture but didn’t unbend. “And then you can find us a suspected cryptid mauling citizens or something else interesting and I’ll be back.”
“It’s fine, Scully. I can cope with the busywork by myself for a week. We only have one computer down here anyway,” he grinned affably but didn’t meet her eyes, going back to his pantomime at the keyboard. “The VSU connection is a good one to maintain, Scully. Life in the Bureau doesn’t have to be all rotting corpses and mutant bile.”
Scully wanted to grasp the stiff curve of Mulder’s carefully affably slouched shoulder, turn him, stare him down and insist that she loved her job and she wasn’t looking for an exit. But saying that would be definite in a way they didn’t do, and she was worried about impinging even further on his already smarting pride.
“It’s a favor, Mulder, for an old friend. I’ll be back before you know it.”
*
It made sense to accept Jack’s request for her help on the Dupre case because the X-Files department had been office-bound for a few weeks while Mulder continued recovering from Lucas Henry’s bullet, yet to be re-cleared for field work. Jack had called her up and asked her to get a cup of coffee together, and she’d almost turned him down — he’d always been more persuasive than was good for her and she’d made a pretty clean break — but he’d assured her that it was work, a case she’d once been interested in.
He was still as tall and dark and tightly contained as she remembered as they met under the spangling incandescents of the clean, narrow and alliterative Capital Corner Cafe. His broad shoulders were drawn up tight under his dark overcoat and his eyes were tired, though they came into focus as they sought her. She didn’t rise from her booth as he loomed up at her, not wanting to find out if he would try to shake her hand or give her a ‘friendly’ kiss. He looked incongruous in the scrubbed red and cream linoleum and vinyl atmosphere like he always had to her, though Scully had never been sure if the impression he gave was of a gambling hall tough given a good coat and a bright badge, or of some kind of country aristocrat slumming it. Before she’d gotten used to the equally looming Mulder and his ridiculous and mercurial ease wherever they went, she’d assumed it was just a feature of his being a tall man in a crowded world that he never seemed quite comfortable anywhere, but now she thought it was just Jack.
He smiled at her though, when he saw her, with genuine warmth. It was like slipping back in time for a moment.
“I hear you’re up to interesting things, these days,” she’d said, when they’d exchanged greetings.
“I am, I think you’ll find it interesting, too. Unless a blue collar spree killer is too mundane for you now, Dana,” he teased in a low rumble that she’d wanted to take as affectionate rather than scornful, but his deadpan was sometimes hard to decipher. It had been more than a year since they parted ways and since then there had been Mulder, a whole new difficult man with his own deadpan drollery and his own cascade of inferences and minutiae, a new language she had learned superseding the old.
“Jack,” she’s said, drawing the name with gentle warning. The sound of his name in her voice was more familiar than she’d expected. “I’m not sure what you’ve heard about what I’m doing in our department down there, but listen…”
“I heard about Lucas Henry, Luther Boggs and those two kids you saved,” he said, “and I heard that your hothead partner got himself some injury leave and that you might have some time on your hands.”
“It wasn’t Mulder’s fault that he got shot,” Scully defended, automatically sharp.
“I didn’t say it was, Dana. Happens to the best of us. Remember the cross-fire on the Linton case? Two weeks with my arm in a sling and then I couldn’t take you rowing at the lake like we’d planned.”
“I said at the time we could still go, even with the sling,” she said with a laugh, “I’m better with oars that you are anyway, city boy.”
“Yeah, but how would that look to the boat rental guy, and anyone who saw me putting you to work? Tiny little thing like you, kid,” he joked with slow a shake of his head
“You know, I hated when you called me that, Jack.” She said it quietly, down at her coffee cup, but she was glad she’d finally admitted it. Scully thought about how she’d started out with Mulder feeling like the unwanted tag along little sister all over again, coming up to his shoulder and trotting to keep up with his loping stride and being as loud and contrary as possible to try to cover the feeling. But he’d never called her ‘kid’ or even seemed to notice her baby face or petite size, and within a couple of cases together the feeling had faded. Jack used to call her Kid with a wry little smile like he was Bogie and she was Bergman or Becall and then she’d feel the years between them snap and shake, almost like a wagging finger.
“What, kid? You never said. I thought I was being charming and self deprecating by calling attention to the obvious difference in our ages and general stature.”
“Yes, well… That may be, but I didn’t like it.”
“Okay, then. I’m sorry, Dana, I wish you’d said.” Jack grumbled it as if annoyed but he looked honestly regretful. “How about I stick with ‘Agent Scully’ for now and see from there, how's that?” He goaded, a little lighter. “It really is work I wanted to talk to you about, you know. Maybe you’ve heard, they finally gave me back Dupre and the Taskforce is scrambling to get up to speed. This isn’t some kind of nostalgia bit, all right? It’s your mind I’m after.”
“You know Teddy Dupre and Lula Phillips better than anyone in the bureau, what could you need me for?”
“I do know them. It’s still my profile, which is why they gave me back the case when they started shooting up banks again a few weeks ago. But you know I have a reputation, after Philly. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees, the section chief said. They want me on it but they don’t want me working alone, I need a partner on this and you’re the only one I thought of who I’d feel comfortable bringing in.”
Dana was quiet for a long moment, wondering if he only wanted her brought in because she knew that he’d impressed her, back then. That something in her had always just a little bit hesitant of and in awe of his authority, his half-repressed fury. He’d had authority over her for the first few months and seniority over her afterwards, though he’d never tried to press that particular point home. Was he looking for a partner to rubber stamp his decisions and cover his ass with the higher ups? She didn’t think that was like Jack but she also knew how desperate he’d been to close this case, chasing Dupre’s sprees around the eastern seaboard and letting other profiles fall by the wayside. And her, it had to be said, their relationship.
Then again, Mulder stuck behind a desk and still suffering pains from his injury that he wouldn’t admit he was suffering was a sarcastic, biting, grizzling prospect, waiting for her even now back at the office. Mulder found her hovering grating, even claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been willing to explain to him how it felt to watch him almost bleed out in an ambulance and emergency room bay so that he would see why her worrying was unpreventable. It was an impasse, and not a thrilling set of working conditions. What’s more, old loyalty still called to her; Jack needed her. Jack had once needed her a great deal.
“Okay, Jack, if you square it with Skinner, and if you understand that this is temporary, you’ve got me,” she agreed.
She let him order them sandwiches, and a piece of pie to split. She asked after his old partner, the one he’d had when they were dating and found out that he’d asked for a transfer after Philly. She let him tell her about the boy he was mentoring, a bright, troubled 15 year old with a store clerk mom and a dad in jail, a dad he didn’t want let out of jail though in all likelihood he would be before the boy was out of high school and away.
“He’s so young, but he doesn’t think he is,” Jack said as he shredded his napkin contemplatively, “It’s funny how we’re always finding little echos of ourselves, outside of ourselves, showing us things we didn’t realize.”
She reached over and stilled Jack’s hand, remembering, and then withdrew, fidgeting awkwardly under his curious gaze. The instinct to touch him was honest but she’d realized it wasn’t the hand she’d expected under her own.
