Title: Moment of Inertia Author: Pteropod (beth_monster@yahoo.com ) Category/Spoilers: Season eight through This Is Not Happening Rating: PG-13 Archive: Please ask; I'm very accommodating Summary: Season eight Disclaimer: These characters belong to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions, not to me. Bummer. URL: http://www.pteropod.net/ Author's Notes: A blessing on the heads of JET and Maria Nicole, for the gift of beta beyond compare. Thank you. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - She is alive, fecund, fertile as springtime and burgeoning with life, a miracle mother-goddess with baby-soft skin and hair that needs cutting every three weeks. She waxes rotund with life but the watering can sits empty under the sink, halfway hidden behind the dish soap and a box of Brillo pads. She watches her plants die, day after day, and sleeps on the sofa more nights than not. - - - He reads through the X-Files in a weekend, and finds them full of bullshit, absurdity, brilliance, and death. He feels entitled at first, reading files about garbage monsters and brain-sucking teenagers as if they were written just for his entertained eyes. The cases are ridiculous, impossible, documented in ass-covering reports with words like 'allegedly' and 'postulate'. He reads file after file without connecting them to his world, and then he reads about Dana Scully getting shot in the gut by Special Agent Peyton Ritter. He drops his head to his hands and thinks that she'll want a new partner no more than she wanted to lose the old one. - - - Her seatbelt feels tight, binding about her middle as she drives to Baltimore, pinning her to the seat until she fumbles it undone in the middle lane of I-95. A swerve into the left lane as she stretches it to its full extent and clicks it shut. When she gets out of the car she pulls her overnight bag from the trunk, a deliberate, square-shouldered motion. The walk up the driveway is paced and premeditated, clackity clack. She falls into her mother's arms at the door, clutching like a child, head buried against a bony shoulder and sobbing into the crevice of a collarbone. She spends the night curled in fetal position, her mother's hand stroking her hair. In the morning they go to Barnes & Noble and buy books about the first nine months of life. Fetal nutrition, the importance of protein and vegetables. - - - For all his flesh and pumping blood he's less of a presence in this room than Mulder is. Whenever he reaches outside his area her glare warns him not to touch anything, not to leave whorling fingerprints where they aren't wanted. A pencil drops from the ceiling and beans Scully, right on the melon. She reaches around and puts it in a drawer, barely looking up from her reading. Doggett studies his shoes. After Scully leaves for the night he stands in front of the bulletin board, hands clasped behind his back. Toward the lower left corner is a picture of the two of them. The day must've been cold, pinked nostrils puffing out steam. They're squatting in a field, coat hems sloshed with mud, and Scully is pointing at something on the ground. Can't tell what, from the photo. Something small. Mulder's arm is extending -- in another second his hand will reach hers. - - - A body in motion tends to remain in motion, so she pendulum- swings from work to home and back to work again. Each morning she pulls on a suit, tests the button at the waistband. Wonders when it will pop. - - - They eat breakfast together in Idaho, and then lunch on the plane back to DC. Add two days of meals while chasing a man- shaped bat or a bat-shaped man and he thinks he has a handle on her. Dana Scully drinks herbal tea instead of coffee and seems to be waging a war against wheat. She won't eat bread or tortillas or pasta or cereal and picks the insides out of sandwiches. He doesn't want to ask, but she's eaten four salads in three days and he's taxi-stand punchy. He can't help himself. Wheat, she tells him with a glance down to her watch, causes dampness. He stares at the top of her head as she picks up her suitcase, and stops himself from asking what kind of dampness. - - - Her world has become bloated, threatening to burst its seams. It began just below the navel, biology laying waste to one hundred sit-ups every night since she turned twenty-five. Now everything presses against its boundaries. She drives to work each morning and the nights follow her in, bleary-eyed and dragging, murmuring about UFO activity hotspots and aliens with human faces. She can hold the cosmos together until noon but the prenatal vitamins she takes on the sly at lunchtime threaten to pop out of their bottle, spill onto the floor in a clatter of folic acid and iron. - - - She starts every night with arithmetic. Counting by sevens, counting backward by sevens, the multiples of seven up to seven hundred. Numbers stack up in her brain, fill columns and rows and then leak into the spaces in between when she moves on to the constants. The world begins and ends with pi, but she's never been able to hold on to more than the first twenty digits. 3.14159265358979323846. Planck's constant is 6.6261 times ten to the negative thirty-four Joule-seconds; the permeability of vacuum is four pi times ten to the negative seven Newtons over Angstroms squared. But constants are constant, teaching her nothing, and tonight she's long since moved on to trigonometric identities. John Doggett cut a slug out of her back with a pocketknife. She prefers to ignore it, and pretends she never clutched at her belly as he sliced into her like he was gutting a fish. She's taken to wearing turtlenecks and shirts with high collars. - - - The second desk turned the office into a maze of narrow passages, below decks on a bulky administrative boat. The smirking maintenance man dumped the desk in the middle of the room, leaving Doggett to drag it to the side and shrug in Scully's direction. It would've made sense to shift Mulder's desk a few inches to make more room, but he didn't suggest it and she didn't offer. When they're in town they sit across from each other for hours at a time, shuffling paper and breathing the same air. They turn aside for each other's phone calls, as if looking the other way means they can't hear every word. Scully drinks tea, always herbal, from an alien-head mug and eats lunch at her desk. Salad every day, lettuce and broccoli and mushrooms and chickpeas and peppers. An abundance of bean sprouts. Sometimes tofu. - - - Three times she's done the laundry; this is the fourth. She folded the t-shirts the first time and found she couldn't put them on top of the third-drawer mess. She emptied the dresser onto the bed and folded the whole lot, rearranging shorts and sweatpants and socks. Boxers and briefs, an equal number of each. The second time there weren't any clothes to wash but she opened the dresser drawers anyway and was appalled at the order she'd imposed. He'd come back to folded underwear where he was used to disarray and suddenly the idea was horrific, untenable, so she tossed it all on the bed again and filled the drawers haphazardly, shaking creases out of t- shirts and releasing the socks from their pairwise bonds. His detergent ran out the third time, when she was washing the place mats that were scrunched in a kitchen drawer and all the blankets from the linen closet. She bought a new mega-size bottle, 300 cost-effective ounces. This time, 8 a.m. on this Saturday morning with thin Indian Summer sunshine filtering through the windows, she walks through the apartment and straight to the bed. Nobody sleeps here but the sheets are her excuse for coming over. They'll get covered in dust, make him sneeze, provoke an allergic reaction, make his eyes water when he comes home and crawls into bed. She takes the bedding to the basement and waits for the washing machine to finish with the whites of a balding middle-aged man who isn't inclined to small talk, thank God. Middle-aged man leaves and the basement is her laundry domain, her land of domestic duty. She's sure the neighbors think she's moved in with her boyfriend, the lanky FBI agent on the fourth floor. Halfway through, the sheets tangle around her hands, catch on the agitator and resist transfer from washer to dryer. One of her quarters sticks and she smacks the dryer with the flat of her hand and then her fist, hitting the coin-box over and over, punching like a prizefighter until her knuckles are meaty and blood seeps from a tear on the inside of her lip. When the sheets are finally back on the bed it's noon already and there's a dull ache pooled between her shoulders, Saturday half wasted on laundry that didn't need washing and not one iota closer to finding him. She gives the fish a once-a-week pellet and leaves, wincing as she turns the key in the deadbolt. - - - He catches her drooling on the desk blotter at 6:40 one morning, still in the outfit she was wearing the day before. If he was her friend he'd suggest therapy. As it is, he offers to get her coffee. She refuses, of course. She doesn't drink coffee. - - - She paid for Mulder's cellphone service for three months, and called his number every day. His voicemail message never changed, and he never called back. - - - Orion tips incessantly, poised for an interstellar cartwheel, and she wants to spend her days puzzling out the cosmos: can a spaceship travel faster than light, and if it could, where would it go? The corner of her eye shows Doggett's fist clenched around the steering wheel but she stares upward, through the windshield, and wants more than anything to be a physicist. But she is someone else, an FBI agent who investigates cases that can't be solved and tries to save children who don't exist, a woman speeding down a highway toward an airport that will look no different than it did three days ago. Traveling west to east is always harder, the hours adding up double-time and night flights only offering low-fat pretzel snack mix and the beverage of her choice. Coffee is out of the question so she almost-sleeps instead, feet resting on top of her shoes and head sagging toward her shoulder. On the other side of the armrest, so close that their suit jackets brushed when they sat down, Doggett pretends to read Business Week. He flips the pages too quickly, snaps them straight under his fingers and repeats before he can possibly have read more than two paragraphs even if he has an abiding interest in third-quarter earnings announcements, which she suspects he does not. She would say something -- wants to, even, to stop his crackling abuse of the magazine -- but she used up all her words against the backdrop of Billy Underwood's grave. So she keeps her eyes closed, toe tracing along the curve of her shoe. Doggett will sleep poorly tonight, she thinks, and dream of child-sized ghosts. She sleeps poorly every night, with ghosts the size of an Oregon forest. - - - He's had embarrassing dreams before, the kind that warm the back of his neck when he runs into certain coworkers at the copy machine. But they've never run in this direction, never murderous, and he feels an obligation to tell her that his subconscious would chop off her head. But they are some shade of partners, and there will be plenty of time. The problem with plenty of time is that it slips by unnoticed, suddenly lunchtime and then home at the end of the day. But home has changed; his bedroom feels violated. He spends the first night in his own bed but the next three in the spare room, sleeping in a twin bed with Sesame Street bedding and a Bible on the nightstand. Just in case. He'd rather not resent the fact that she saved his life. He'd also rather not believe it, but that isn't happening either. He sits across from her, next to her, practically on top of her in the office and tells her nothing. He barks out "Agent" for the next three weeks, unable to wrap his lips around her name. - - - It comes as a surprise, that she suddenly cares that a man is turning into metal. She hasn't cared since Doggett landed in the basement office, has walked rote through the cases trying to brute-force her way into paranormality. Hasn't felt the tug of scientific curiosity until now, leaning in to stare at the metamorphosis of a smear of blood. - - - He owns the street tonight, the neighborhood. Frigid air slides around his face and he owns the whole goddamned suburb. He tucks low and rounds a corner, pulling his body into the turn. He'd gone three blocks before realizing he was out of the house. It's been years since he communed with the pavement but the middle of the night startled him awake, and he's not in the habit of lying wide-eyed in bed. Doesn't want to get in the habit, so he's up and off and it's colder than shit. Sodium orange delineates his empty neighborhood. He passes under streetlight after streetlight, darkness to bright to dark again, and imagines how he looks from above, zebra- striping down the street. Pumps his legs harder, quads burning. 3 a.m. bike rides cost him a marriage, from the perspective that doesn't admit it was eaten alive by a murdering child- molesting sick fuck son of a bitch. There were months when he thought letting tears streak across his face and soak into the chin strap of his bike helmet was better than letting them drip into a shot glass in the living room, but his wife woke up in an empty house one time too many. Breathless air tunnels down his throat. If he looked down he'd see twenty-mile-an-hour pavement, chalky with midwinter salt and spiderweb cracked. Or maybe his hands, fingers bloodless to the third knuckle and frozen around the handlebars. But he's looking down already, has been for half a block, and doesn't see anything at all except a filthy dead man and the tilt of Scully's eyebrow as she said, "something...small. With small hands." His legs pound the pedals. The suburb is dormant but his breathing rattles through a cottony mouth. He pushes harder. Harder. When his body reaches its limit he spills the bike to the ground and retches into a sewer grate. A streetlight fritzes above him, strobing the brittle grass, the curb, the vise- grip of his hands on his knees. He spits the taste of vomit onto the grass, over and over, then gets back on the bike and turns in the direction of home. The boy Scully shot was in that age gap, younger than Luke would've been but older than he'd ever made it to. Maybe he could've made that shot. Maybe not. - - - They are bound together by a growing collection of diners. He's watched her order meals in five states; her anti-wheat campaign only lasted for three weeks but she seems to have something permanent against coffee. - - - His life doesn't flash before his eyes. A faint tinfoil haze crinkles between this world and the next and despite the fact that on some level he knows this is it, that he's dying and this is his last moment to exercise consciousness, all he can think is that a bullet passed through Dana Scully from front to back, and now one has traveled through him in the opposite direction. - - - It's unbelievable, the condition of downtown Boston. Remarkable to think that the infrastructure of a city could be assembled so entirely from concrete barriers and orange plastic fencing and big pits in the ground. Another unbelievable thing is that four hours ago she called him partner. Not to his face but she said it all the same, in one of those panicky moments when everything is supposed to become clear. She expected it to feel like betrayal, but somehow it didn't. - - - They've reached a sort of equilibrium, a certain comfort in the places where they sit and stand and the paths they take as they walk around in the office. In the beginning they stayed in their assigned seats but things have gotten looser, more at ease. It's the end of lunchtime and Scully gulps down vitamins, huge horsey pills that she wrist-flicks from hand to mouth. One tan and one greenish. Doggett finishes his sandwich, a pastrami and Swiss on rye that was goddamned delicious. He tosses the wax paper in the trash and wanders to the bulletin board. The clippings and photos and tabloid headlines and desire to believe haven't changed in the months he's been here, which he takes to mean that Mulder is the scrapbook keeper of the X-Files division. Was. Is. As he stares at the curling edge of the lower left hand photo Scully murmurs, "North Dakota, 1996." Doggett turns, questioning. She quirks an eyebrow and keeps talking. "North Dakota, near Washburn. Up I-83 from Bismarck. November, I think. Very cold." "What on earth are you pointing at? I've been wondering for months." He grins down and she smiles back, a little. "A ten dollar bill. There were remains in that field and it was unexplained so we went. No X-File but I made ten bucks and someone snapped a picture." She stops and looks down at the desk. Sees a stapler, the salad container, a box of paper clips. Her hands, raggedy at the nails. A year-old phone number scribbled on the blotter. Says, "It's funny sometimes. What you get to keep." - - - Following a path into a clearing because milling around is useless and paths are meant to be followed and then -- He'd told Scully and Skinner and Kersh and the man in the moon and anyone else who would listen that he was going to find Fox Mulder but this wasn't what he'd meant. Not this. Mulder was supposed to be vertical, dammit. Walking around. His shout is wind-ripped, guttural. "Agent down! Agent down!" - - - "Someone killed my son. That's why I'm here." She touches the back of his hand with death-cold fingertips, a reach to touch him for the first time in twelve cases and seven states, and her voice breaks on the last syllable. "I'm sorry. So sorry." A minute later or maybe five. "Will I live through this?" He reaches for her hand. Places its palm against the curve of her belly. "You will." - - t h e e n d - - 1