From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:30:23 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Ordinary Man (BTC) by Blue Samutra
Source: direct
Reply To: bluesamutra@gmail.com
Title: Ordinary Man
Author: bluesamutra@gmail.com
Classification: VR - Vignette/Romance
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: The X-Files is owned by Fox; no
infringement of copyright is intended
Feedback: Yes, please...
Spoilers: Pilot (including the deleted scenes)
Summary: For the Bad Touch S1 Challenge... Missing
scene from the Pilot.
***
Mulder eases the mud-spattered Taurus into a space in
front of his new motel room and shifts the car into park,
leaving the engine running. Six units over, tendrils of
smoke continue to roll off the charred remains of his old
room. The motel manager had not been very pleased,
until Scully flashed her badge and started making noises
about safety-code breaches, loss of evidence and the
damage of Federal Government property. For someone
so short and with no appreciable field experience, she
knows how to get her point across.
His Mother, who, like all well-bred New Englanders,
knows a thing or two about how to volley blame without
getting her hands dirty, would have smiled approvingly
and called Scully 'feisty'. He wondered what else his
Mother would think about Dana Scully. Oh, she'd
comment on her pretty face and her intelligence, nod
approvingly at her $300,000 education and her father's
reputation; but at the end of the day she'd ask pointedly,
the question she already knew the answer to: 'And she's
Catholic?' Scully could be a Kennedy for all the
difference it would make to his Mother.
Beside him, The Feisty One shifts in her damp clothes
and a waft of pine needles and wet dog raincoat plucks at
his nose. Her manicured fingernail scrapes at some
dried mud on the knee of her pleasingly fitted jeans.
"Mulder, what happened tonight?" she asks in a low
voice, and her eyes search his face as he chews on his
bottom lip.
Drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel, he
turns to look at her, at the honest confusion in her face as
her analytic, rational mind struggles to assimilate the
facts. The facts that seem to go against everything she
thought she knew was true.
Over her shoulder, the rain-slicked passenger window
reflects the neon yellows and blues of the sign for 'Tony's
Bar-be-cue', the gas in the 'cue' apparently nearing the
end of its life as it flickers, spasmodically, against the
bleak night. Mulder flips off the ignition and the car
peters into near silence, the only sound the dim clicks of
the engine cooling, and the quiet smeeze as Scully
breathes through her nose, wide-eyed and still watching
him. He lets his head fall back against the squashy
headrest and tilts to look at her.
"You wanna get a drink?"
She smeezes some more, considering, and then nods
slowly, a wave of still-damp hair brushing against the
smooth curve of her cheek. She really is quite pretty, in a
Girl Guide, obnoxious little science-geek kind of way.
He pulls the key from the ignition. "Okay then."
***
The cracked maroon leather of the barstool protests as
he eases himself tiredly onto the seat, tossing his coat on
top of Scully's on an empty chair. Beside him, she hooks
a heel over the footrest and boosts herself into her own
stool, squinting up as she does, at the surprisingly well-
stocked liquor rack. Tony himself slopes over to them,
drying his hands on a tatty Corona towel. Ropey muscles
bulge in his forearms like snakes ready to pounce and his
name is stitched in scarlet over the outline of a flattened
soft-pack in his breast pocket. He tosses the thready
towel aside and slides a couple of rippled Coors Lite mats
onto the scuffed bar in front of them.
"What can I getcha?" he asks, gruff-voiced and leery, as
strabismic brown eyes cast suspiciously between them.
His eyeballs seem to hare off in different directions and
Mulder isn't sure which one to look him in.
"Vodka tonic," Scully asks, before Mulder can even open
his mouth, and Tony's left eye looks like he wants to ask
her for ID.
"A Heineken for me, please," Mulder interjects, settling
on the right eye, and Tony grunts begrudgingly and turns
away to fix their drinks.
Over the crappy Walmart speakers, Tammy Wynette
wails about her lack of luck in love, and at the other end
of the bar, a local in a soggy red Berghaus jacket looks
over with undisguised interest. Mulder considers that in
Bellefleur, Oregon, population: 9,057, he and Scully stick
out like sore thumbs - or Feds in a small town - and the
little incident with the motel room burning down
probably hasn't helped.
Tony slaps their drinks down with a complementary
bowl of peanuts and Mulder grabs his beer and gulps
down a welcome mouthful, before reaching for a nut.
"You know the statistics for fecal contamination of bar
snacks, right?" Scully points out without taking her eyes
of her own drink, a tiny line appearing between her eyes
as concentrates on stabbing at the lime with her stirrer
until the whole glass is pulpy and apparently fit to drink.
Mulder thinks of the summer waiting job he had at The
Slug and Pellet when he was in college; about what he'd
seen done to a steak that was sent back for being
undercooked. With a grimace, and a silent apology to his
growling stomach, he drops his hand back down on the
sticky bar.
Scully takes a long drink of her cloudy vodka and turns
to look at him. "Okay Mulder, what happened tonight?"
she asks, repeating her earlier question. His pregnant
pause elicits a roll of her eyes, "You don't seriously think
that this was aliens?"
Mulder allows himself a tiny smile, "Well, what do you
think took those kids, Doctor Scully?"
"Well, obviously not aliens," she informs him
imperiously, and he raises his eyebrows, encouraging
her to continue. "Because they don't exist," she qualifies,
and he has the keen premonitory sense that he will hear
those words again from her in the future. If she sticks
around.
"I see," he says thoughtfully, rolling the sweaty Heineken
bottle between his hands. He turns to look at her just as
she tips her head back to take a long sip from her murky
drink, exposing the arch of her neck, milk-white and as
sleek as a cat. The thrill of a challenge sparks in his belly;
at least, that's what he tells himself it is. "So, you
think...?"
"Something summoned those kids into the woods; I'd be
inclined to think, looking at their age, relationship, the
family dynamics... that there might be some cult or cult-
like involvement." Mulder stifles an amused smirk at her
arrogant intelligence as she finishes her drink and
signals for another round. Tony lumbers over and clears
the empties, still eyeing them mistrustfully.
"'Cult-like involvement'? They teach you that in
Profiling-101 at the Academy?"
Scully bristles at the inferred reminder of her
inexperience and he's willing to bet a hundred bucks that
the quickest way to insult Dana Scully is to question her
intelligence.
"Statistics clearly show that in cases of multiple teen
disappearances, when the individuals are know to one
another, typically there is some kind of cult involvement:
Portland, Stanton Ridge -" she lectures primly, and
Mulder interrupts, continuing the list of examples.
"... Ruby River, Glasgow, Wyattstown - yeah, I know the
cases too. I used to be in the VCU; I worked on Ruby
River myself." He pauses while Tony sets down fresh
drinks, "Those are completely different cases to what we
have here. How do you explain the marks on their
backs? The implants? You saw those things with your
own eyes, Scully."
"As I said in Washington, those marks could be any
number of things. However, given the presence of the
organic substance found in the surrounding tissue,
needle-punctures seems the most likely cause," she
hypothesizes while stabbing her lime into submission.
Raising the glass to her mouth, her lips quirk just before
she takes a sip. "Occam's Razor, Mulder."
"And the fact that they disappeared on Billy Miles?"
"What do you mean? They healed, I suppose. That
happens with skin wounds."
"That's your medical opinion? The marks healed
overnight?" he scoffs and she shrugs her agreement,
cheeks lightly flushed as the alcohol begins to take effect.
"Well, what do you make of the implants?"
In the dim light of the bar, her eyes gleam, and he can see
she's enjoying this as much as he is. "I admit they're
strange. I need to run some tests on the one I removed
from the body we exhumed... But I did remove a not-
dissimilar foreign object from a cadaver once before. A
man who was suffering from paranoid delusions; he
believed himself to be an alien abductee who was being
monitored by his captors, ultimately becoming so
detached from reality that he implanted a magnet under
his own skin. He thought it would stop the aliens from
invading his thoughts."
"How did you know the implant wasn't extra-terrestrial
in origin? That he did it to himself?"
She looks at him over the top of her glass and blinks.
"Because it had the brand-name stamped on the side.
Because he severed his carotid artery with a paring knife
as he was implanting it."
"I admit that sounds conclusive," Mulder concedes with a
smirk and they lapse into silence as they finish their
drinks. He was a profiler for four years, the best the
Bureau had to offer, but right now he can't get a handle
on Dana Scully. The information the Gunmen had
managed to pull up on her only confirmed what he
already knew. Fiercely intelligent, she was an
overachiever: top of her class at Stanford, Director's
Leadership Award at the Academy - everything she did,
she excelled at, and from what he'd gathered around the
Bureau, she didn't make enemies while doing it. Dana
Scully was a rare breed: capable, congenial and
honorable to the core; it was no wonder the FBI had
pursued her in med school. The question in his mind
now though, was why they'd paired her with him? Did
they really think she'd be willing to be used as a pawn?
"What are you going to write in your report?" he asks
and she looks at him sharply.
"Are you asking me if I'm going to discredit the X-Files?"
"I'm asking you what you're going to write in your
report."
"The truth," she snaps and then cocks her head,
relenting. "Until we interview Billy Miles and I get the
analysis done on the implant, I don't know. Right now,
our findings are pretty inconclusive."
"I wouldn't hold your breath for a conclusive answer,
Scully," he says, sounding more dejected than he means
to.
Her lips curve in a smile as she roots in her coat pocket
for her wallet and tosses a twenty on the bar.
"What?" he asks warily, and she casts her eyes across his
face, smile growing.
"I don't know Mulder. You're not like I expected." She
stands up and pulls on her jacket.
He shifts self-consciously, "What did you expect?"
Scully pauses, adjusting the collar on her coat. "Your
reputation at the Academy, in VCS... I... think I was
expecting someone larger than life."
Mulder's mouth snaps shut and he tries not to look
offended. "I'm sorry to disappoint," he mutters, and
though Scully's smile fades from her lips, her eyes are
still kind.
"You don't disappoint me, Mulder."
Her tone is so open, so honest, he can't quite bring
himself to voice the flip comment that jumps to his lips.
Instead he just takes his coat from her outstretched hand
and shrugs into it as he follows her from the bar.
"Still," he says, nudging her arm with his elbow as they
walk across the frost-coated parking lot towards the
motel, "It sounds a bit like my reputation is more
impressive than the real thing..."
Scully sighs softly as she considers what she really
means to say, and they come to a stop in front of the
peeling door to her motel room. "I'd heard so many
stories about you," she explains, fiddling in her pocket
for her key, "I think I just built up an unrealistic image of
what you'd be like...but..." She nudges his bicep with her
own elbow and looks up at him with warm eyes, "You're
just an ordinary guy, looking for answers to
extraordinary questions."
Mulder kind of likes that image of himself, and smiles
back, nodding his head softly. "Thank you," he says,
squeezing her shoulder in gratitude, and then
inexplicably, two-Heineken on top of jetlag inexplicably,
he lets his hand rest on the firm slope of her shoulder.
Before he really has time to consider what he's doing,
he's leaning down, hazy-headed to press a kiss against
her cheek. That's all he means it to be, but at the last
second, Scully turns her head and his lips brush against
the corner of her mouth. A startled gasp escapes her lips
and he freezes, mouth hovering millimeters away from
hers. She stares at him, black-eyed and wild. Harsh puffs
of limey breath warm his mouth and he shifts forward,
or she does, and then his hot tongue is in her cold mouth.
She tastes of lime and salt, and oh, but this is a bad idea,
though he can't think of any of the hundred reasons
there are not to do this.
Strong, talented hands rake through his hair, scratching
at his scalp and he stumbles forward, pressing her
against the door and letting his own hands roam under
her coat, fingers biting into her narrow waist and
dragging her hips against his, and though his mind is
addled, and his blood is thrumming in his veins, he feels
her body stiffen against him.
"Mulder," she murmurs against his mouth, pushing on
his chest, and dropping her head forward to break the
kiss. Appalled at his lack of control, he gasps against the
wavy hair on the top of her head and squeezes his eyes
shut. Fucking idiot, he berates himself, and Scully clears
her throat and continues in a low, thick voice that
doesn't do anything to help calm his raging libido,
"Mulder, I uh... I'm sorry. I'm.. with someone... and this...
This isn't a good idea."
He lets his hands drop away from her waist and sucks in
a deep, shaking breath. Forcing himself to meet her gaze,
he finds her cheeks flushed with a mixture of arousal and
embarrassment, and her eyes dart between his mouth
and his eyes.
"You're right," he agrees at last, and is surprised by how
calm his tone is. "I don't know what..." came over me, he
thinks, but instead finishes, "...The work is too
important." He reaches out a hand, thankfully steady,
and smoothes her hair away from her face.
"Yes," she agrees in a thin voice, looking at him strangely.
Then she blinks and repeats herself more firmly, "Yes,
you're right.
Stepping back towards his own room two doors away,
Mulder nods awkwardly, "Okay then."
"I'll see you in the morning, Mulder." He analyzes her
voice for malice or disappointment and finds none, and
he isn't sure if that reassures him or unsettles him. He
shoves his key in the lock, and the flimsy door swings
open before him, a waft of mildewed air escaping.
"Scully, I -" he starts and she looks at him questioningly,
fingers still curled around her room key. "Sorry."
She smiles, pushing her door open, and glancing over her
shoulder at him, "Don't be."
With the taste of lime lingering in his mouth, he smiles
back as she closes her door softly, almost pointedly so,
and leaves him on the frost-slick porch, under a night sky
bright with stars. He knows it will be a long time before
he kisses Dana Scully again.
And he is sorry.
END
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