The Behavior of Shells, a x-files fanfic

THIS FIC IS THE NEW AND (HOPEFULLY) IMPROVED VERSION OF THE LAST FIC I POSTED, 'INTO HER DRINK AND WRY'. IHDaW WASN'T WORKING FOR ME AS IT WAS SO I OVERHAULED IT DRASTICALLY AND CAME UP WITH THIS. JUST FYC.

Title: The Behavior of Shells

Author: amyhit

Summary: She is changing now.

Rating: PG-13

Spoilers: Never Again

Disclaimer: 'See no infringement, hear no infringement, speak no infringement.'

Feedback: is the opiate of the people.

Author's Notes: This is part one in a nine-part fic detailing the unseen events of 'Never Again'. It is the longest of all the parts but the others are finished and waiting to be posted, I'm just not certain when. This is not beta'd (unfortunately).

---

At the hoodoo motel

the kitchen comes fully equipped, the bed

has magic fingers. Everything but my heart comes

equipped.

--Susan Musgrave

---

Her feet are sneak-sneaky on the living room carpet, her mother's purse in hand; she's fishing for the matchbook when from the kitchen there comes footsteps. "Maggie, don't walk away," he father growls. Just in time she ducks behind the drapes as her parents enter the room, her mother a step ahead of her father, looking bed-creased, as though she's been trying to sleep. Her father looks as though he's still up.

"It's your first night back, I don't want to fight about this," her mother huffs. "Please. You need to rest." As they pass, her father catches her mother by the shoulders and sweeps her onto the couch. She sits up with a gasp, pressing her helpless hands between them. He climbs on top.

"I don't want to do either," says her father.

"Bill, no, not here."

"Here," he says.

"Think about the kids, they'll– "

"Take this off, Maggie." He is tugging the sash out of her mother's drab robe. As the fabric parts Dana turns her face to the window. Her reflection is visible, pale against the dark storm that's beginning to howl in the eaves. One day earlier and her father would have been out in this gale, shoulders and face bowed against the lashing rain, and below deck the smell of the storm as salt. "I said take it off."

Dana keeps her eyes on the storm as her parents do everything. Her sock feet are the same color as the long drapes so she just holds very still and keeps her eyes on the storm and waits. Her father makes guttural sounds and her mother is silent. The couch huffs a little as the cushions compress beneath their combined weight. Finally the clouds crack and rain begins to fall, the drumming outside blessedly drowning out the sounds behind Dana in the room.

Her mother straightens the couch after, while her father is in the kitchen rinsing his mouth from the tap. He comes back and stands beside the window, close enough that Dana doesn't dare breath. Her mother comes to touch his face. "I missed you too; you know that," she says, voice plain. Her father, with dark eyes and silver temples, looks down. Humph, he says and snugs the robe closed around her. Against the fabric his hands are calloused and they look splintered. Like wood, like the masthead of a vast ship.

Once the upstairs has stopped creaking with her parent's footsteps she edges the window open and reaches her arm out into the storm. The rain gathers at her hand and forms a rivulet down her crooked elbow into her sleeve. She can see her skin through the moiré of her nightgown, covered in gooseflesh under the intimate watch of the moon.

The matchbook, when she finds it, is empty.

"Well, I was raised Catholic," she says by way of an answer. She adds, "not to mention Naval Services, which you already know." Scully is smiling but it's into her drink and wry. A gesture Ed duplicates with his own. They've been flirting this way all night.

"So what you're saying is I'd better have you home by eleven or your five strapping brothers will have me in traction?"

She eyes his solid profile. "Something like that." Her gaze flits down. The watch face on his wrist gleams. "But by Pacific Standard Time it's actually morning already, so it seems we may as well stay a while longer."

In the Hard Eight she's slowly crunching the remains of her fourth drink, ice and salt. It's fodder for this nervous malocclusion she can't shake. That and the feeling she's about to do some serious plundering of her mother's proverbial cigarettes. Ed knows she has a flight out tomorrow and she knows that he knows, and yet here they sit - two people with sober dispositions getting painfully drunk and pretending their intentions are honorable.

I bet Ed has some bad ideas about you Dana. Just like those one's you have, isn't that right?

Beneath the table her shoes stick to the floor slightly when she shifts. Ed was right about this place, she thinks. She does feel a little lofty here – a sort of 'de haut en bas' brought on by its dilapidation: the scuffed pool table, the woman at the bar, plastic earrings swinging on chains as she leans in to hiss come-ons at the bartender before getting cut off.

Scully turns her head away; her and her G-woman salary and her G-woman stride. 'Modesty' may not be something one attains with a mouth like hers – plush and suggestive and spouting postulations on the unabridged Truth – but she'll settle for 'austerity' if it means she can keep wearing lipstick.

Mulder called her 'squirrel'. He called himself 'moose', but still she wonders how much he meant by it. As though she doesn't know she's wound entirely too tight. As though she isn't constantly over-identifying with his busy ugly ties. Fucker.

She contemplates Ed's mysterious tattoo, her attention drawing his. They shift in their seats under the other's scrutiny and she thinks, 'Jesus, at least he's almost as bad at congenial conversation as I am'. She cocks an eyebrow and for a while manages not to look away.

"So now that we've exhausted the topic of my familial lineage, what about yours? Care to elucidate me on the Jerse family tree?" She's asking mostly to stave off the silence and to provide a point of focus. Fuming about upsidasium mines is not an option.

The Hard Eight smells like fuel, pungent enough to provoke a headache. Probably the same one she's been courting for what feels like a month. On some distant lit-up jukebox The Stones are bemoaning their lack of satisfaction and Scully's feeling pretty witless just now, still a little riled from their scuffle a moment earlier: Ed's hand on her bicep – she'd gasped, felt her pupils dilate; twin event horizons fed by bad liquor and a hard day. Or was that hard liquor and a bad day? Whatever. Memory rips through her like buckshot. She is pinioned by a touch, stinging, as though sewn to it…

"That's Hydrogen. The valence of its electrons allows it to bond easily with other elements. That's Lithium, it's the same."

Hot-boxed in the back seat of her sister's Hyundai, drawing molecular compounds on the fogged window because she has homework to do – damn it, Missy – and her sister won't take her home until she's sure mom and dad will be at dinner. 'It's your anniversary, you guys go. Charlie's camping anyway, and Dana and I can look after ourselves for a night.' Danny something-or-other with a taped knee is asking her what she's drawing for the second time, still not listening, and if she weren't so damn annoyed she might be getting worried about where his hands are going. She wriggles away and crosses her legs. "Melissa," she says with a frown, "can we turn this down?"

"Jimmy, you wanna do that," says Melissa, licking the edge of a rolling paper, "I'm a little busy here."

"Sure babe." But Jimmy turns Van Halen up not down, until Dana in the back next to the speakers can barely hear her own voice.

"SO WHAT'S THAT ONE?" hollers Dan, leaning into her and pointing.

"Argon. It's a– " She humphs. His hand is back on her leg. " –IT'S A NOBLE GAS."

"OH YEAH?"

"THAT MEANS ITS VALENCE DOESN'T REQUIRE IT TO BOND WITH OTHER ELEMENTS."

"REALLY?" He gives her knee a little squeeze and grins. "SO THAT ONE'S SOCIAL, AND THIS ONE ISN'T? SOUNDS FAMILIAR."

"WHAT?"

He pulls her against his side and snakes his arm around her, using it to direct her gaze up front. Melissa breaks it off with Jimmy in order to give them a glare. "WHAT ARE YOU TWO LOOKING AT?"

With an eye roll Dan jerks his thumb back to Dana. From sister to sister and back again. He grins. Dana's eyes widen.

"WHATEVER, I DON'T GET IT," says Melissa, going back to Jim who is fumbling under the seat for his lighter.

Dana looks at her lap, then sideways at Dan. "Maybe a little familiar," she says, knowing he won't be able to hear. He grins sympathetically anyway. A drop of sweat or condensation tickles along her hairline and she shifts in the confined space.

Surrendering the hand he has situated on her knee, he lifts the hair off the back of her damp neck. "Better?" he mouths. When she doesn't answer he leans forward, slow slow, and kisses the furrow in her brow. He pulls back to survey how this is all going over with her. She tries not to look devastated or anything. "Better?"

He smells like Neosporin and basketball rubber and pot. He goes to her school but he's older and she doesn't know his last name. The furrow in her brow is no less deep for his kissing it. The next thing he kisses is her bottom lip, just her bottom lip; then just her top lip, then both and she feels his tongue a little bit that time. "Nice," he says when he pulls away enough for her to see. Dana doesn't want to be thinking the same thing all girls are thinking after it happens, which is, 'I wonder if he knows I've never…' so instead she thinks about atomic numbers, atomic behaviors, and the invisible shells of electrons that keep everything together and apart and ordered.

On the window all her molecules are beginning to drip down. "MISSY," she says, startling Jimmy enough that he pulls his hands out of her sister's bra.

"JESUS DAY, WHAT?"

"LET'S GO HOME."

The ice in Scully's glass gives out, startling her as it plinks down into the bottom. "…name's Amanda," Ed is saying, taking no apparent notice in her lack of attention.

Something about what he's been telling her rankles. "You're the elder child?" she says, her focus once again sharp.

"Nah, younger by a mile. She's been gone since I was a kid."

"Gone?" Very sharp.

"Yeah. She claims Cambridge was too pretentious to merit graduation but she just couldn't bring herself to give up the local pub-crawl and move back. The last time she answered her phone she sounded just like Eliza Doolittle from- uh- that movie. It was…" he gestures an inarticulate hand, describing 'strange' in a pantomime Scully's grown accustomed to in her line of work.

"Old world charm," she offers, sympathetically. "It must be infectious." Scully knows perfectly the ways family can be unfamiliar.

Ed nods. "Actually, I'm pretty much an only child. The phone bill from the university was impoverishing so we didn't talk much. 'We don't', I guess, would be more accurate." He ducks his head sheepishly and flirts with his drink some more.

A male employee appears offering a fifth round. "You two look like you could use a couple pick me ups." He's weighed down with a tray full of suspicious looking green highballs, sloshing and sticky. "Zombies. You like 'em?"

Ed beseeches her input. Scully is busy bracing for his joke (Depends, are they vegetarian?), and doesn't notice. No quip comes of course and she looks up to find both men waiting on her.

"Uh, I'm sorry?"

"Joel was wondering if we wanted another round." Oh, right, Zombies. Scully dissents with a nod

"I'm fine, thank you." No one is here but her, and Ed.

It isn't until Ed haphazardly tips the server that she realizes the night is probably all but over. At her behest no less. Home by eleven Dana, her alter ego chides mercilessly.

"Home before eleven," her father says in all seriousness. "And the boy had damn better park his car in the drive when he drops you off Starbuck. None of this secluded front-seat business. He'll park in the drive where I can see him. Are we clear?" Her father's weathered hand blocks the doorknob and there's a young man outside waiting, hearing every word.

"Sure. Fine daddy." She opens the door with a grim face and forgets to smile at her date. Forgets for fifteen years.

Scully tilts the last ice cube from her glass into her mouth, allows the server to take it away. Once the tab is settled and they're alone again she says, "When she left was it… it must have been difficult." She tries not to lean forward intently. She's acutely aware her curiosity is misplaced. Displaced. Whatever.

"What, Mandy?" Ed looks mildly bashful, admitting, "Actually, I kind of took advantage of it. Once she was gone my parents pretty much bagged the parenting scene. You have no idea the hell a kid can get away with." He shakes his head.

Scully looks away, closes her eyes, opens them and looks back. "No, I suppose I don't."

Her mouth is frozen with ice; she feels it very deeply. She must seem distracted because Ed tilts a little towards her, teasing. "So Dana," he says, "as you've no doubt speculated, I'm quite the catch – selfish and impetuous. Now that you know you'd better act fast 'cause," he looks furtively around, "I think that woman at the bar has been giving me the eye."

"You mean the woman face down in the bar nuts?" Scully studies the woman in her tube top, slouched over, and thinks about ordering another drink. She thinks about sisters, fathers, psuedo-sisters, and psuedo-fathers, and about ordering another damn drink.

Ed startles her by touching her shoulder. "Hey, is everything al– "

Reflexively she takes his wrist in her hand, startled, and suddenly they're back in the same antagonistic pose as before. His wrist is warm in her grasp. The incongruity of her temperature with his raises gooseflesh down the length of her spine. "Dana?" he says, trying to reach her with her name, but she is not calmed. Her nervous system is one giant SNAFU these days. Too many men have held her in order to hurt her. To many, perhaps, have not held her in order not to.

Daniel comes to her door at three in the afternoon. At first she thinks it's about something else – something real like the practice of medicine she's been living and breathing for months and years. But he stumbles into the room, eyes red and bright, and with not a trace of business in them. "Dan- Dr. Waterson, are you alright?"

"No… no, I don't think…" She steps forward to see better. What she sees frightens her a little. He's never been to where she lives but he certainly isn't looking around just yet, only at her.

"Daniel, what – "

He doesn't let her ask. "I assume you are aware by this point that, well..." he scrubs at his face, agitated. She watches his fingers rub along his jaw. She's never touched his face before. "Dana, I want you. Very much." Her throat closes, shuts, alveoli useless as sea anemones. He looks at her strangely, with an unpleasant expression, a grimace really. "At first I thought maybe it was something else. You're very– you're a- a very good student and I thought maybe that had something to do with...this, but– " He shakes his head as though he can't hear. As though he cannot get a sense of 'this', of her. "But the 'diagnosis' as it were, is clear to me." Just like that, she thinks, Well, and she knows, in an hour, how this is going to feel. Only things that are hard once you start them ever start this easily. Yesterday morning she was playing with fire – grasped his hand instead of the clipboard he was passing her, looked him in the eyes. Now this.

Without her consent he comes to stand near her where she is halted at the door. It is locked but there are three of them living here – coworkers, not friends – and they all have keys. She crosses to the window and he follows her there too. Outside it is autumn and scattered, the gutters a bright papier-mâché of leaves. What a strange hour, she thinks, for him to be here. As though for lunch. As though it were that innocent. Her voice when she finds it is husky and the last thing from innocent. "My roommates, they- they should be out for a while. A couple of hours."

He holds her shoulders with both hands, giving her quite a lot of his weight. "Get your things," he says, "I know a place."

"No."

Surprised, he turns her around to face him. He is tall – of course he is, everyone's so god damn tall all the time – and she has to look up a long ways to see if he is going to kiss her or leave. "No," she repeats, "You're here now, I think it ought to be here," she steps into him. "Now." Hotel soap and paranoia at being caught can come later, if there is to be a later. These are her terms. She tries to believe that in setting them they will hold. That they will be things for her to hold. She is standing very close now.

With a shaking hand she finds the circle of his ring in his pants pocket. She presses it with her palm and traces it once, twice. He tries to draw her closer but she resists, instead bringing his hand to her mouth. She takes the naked finger past her lips to its base, to where the narrow working interosseous disappear beneath the ligament. "All right, here then." He strokes her neck with his opposite thumb, speaking to her in the tone that, the first time she'd heard it, had made her think of Anubis, jackal-god who weighs the hearts of the dead and passes their judgment. Light comes through the trees and moves over their unmoving faces. "Now," he says, "if you'll allow me..."

And she does allow him. He presses her desperately against the window ledge, moaning her name as the blinds billow with afternoon light, and she grasps out, and finally draws them shut.

She forces herself to let go of Ed's arm. Freed, he scrubs his face with those warm hands of his. "Look I'm sorry. I've been so out of it tonight. I haven't been myself these last few days. I just...well I guess you already saw that photograph but I– I didn't mean to make you feel– "

"Ed, it's not– " her head hurts. "I'm just a little jet-lagged is all. It's fine, really."

"I wish I'd taken you to that restaurant. I should have." She knows the undiluted regret in his eyes. Knows it's about far more than just this one evening with her. In the photograph on his desk, the figure with a cigarette burn for a face was wearing a wedding band. She supposes that means something. She saw that picture and didn't leave. Everything means something. "Maybe if you're ever back in town we could..."

"Ed." She needs him not to appreciate this. Not him.

"It's a real nice place, Dana. You deserve better than some crummy bar and some lunatic you met in a– "

"I wanted to be here," she says firmly.

He assesses her a moment. "But not anymore, right?"

"Ed..."

After an excruciating amount of time he seems to accept his name as an answer of sorts. She's good with names, fortunately – knows how versatile they can be. "I don't know. Maybe we should be the ones living in the old world," he mutters. His shoulders drop very slightly lower. "Or sometimes it feels that way."

She agrees. "I hear the pub-crawl is second to none." Neither one of them has a drink to smile wryly into anymore. Her silence is alluvial; all her small talk has long passed its best-before date; she hasn't had anything succinct happen to her in years. Oh, please. You know what you want to do, don't you Dana? You've wanted it all night. In fact, you've wanted a lot of things all night. Her thoughts feel more like taunts tonight. Her alter ego, the one she shut away years ago like a recalcitrant shadow in a drawer, is rattling to get out. And she finds it's true, she does know. So then what are you waiting for? Unless you're afraid, that is.

With vigor she doesn't much feel she squirms back into her coat. It has been lying scrunched behind her in the booth since they sat down. Ed's fingers whisk along her skin as he helps her to slip it back up over her arms. "I'll bet there's one thing the Cambridge pub-crawl doesn't have en route," she announces. "Something we can make use of."

He looks at her curiously. "What's that?"

Sliding from the booth she squares her shoulders and stands. When she turns around he's standing tall behind her just like she's use to. They are standing very close. She has to look almost straight up to see his face – dark – and the rancid yellow light behind him. It burns in her vision. "All night tattoo parlors," she says very low. She can't help watching him search her eyes, trying to read her. He isn't any good at it. Not at all like she's used to.

"Come on," she says, walking on ahead of him. At the door she thinks she feels his hand come to rest low over her spine, but looking back she sees Ed's not so near, and his hands are in his pockets.

The motel room is an allotrope, fire and water anxiously toying with the occupants; rain journeying the glass windows, candles reaching higher as they burn – and every now and then he or she wriggles, like children will do, deeper and closer into this adventure: each other and the weather. Maybe they should build a fort, he says.

But what kind of a fort would it be with only – she counts furniture – two corners?

A fort for two? he wonders. She looks at her lap, then his face, but it's as innocuous as ever. Just trying to be fortright with you, Scully.

Isn't that your forte, Mulder? she thinks, but she's in his room and it's the middle of the night and that might be flirting.

He takes the floor, she the bed, curling until her body is a petite question mark. Both their elbows are propped on the mattress. The candle he held to her back earlier has burnt the lowest. She can't think of why. The stories he is telling are most bewildering, but oh, the way he tells them… He has the weather on his side – of course it would be; rain prancing harder on the rooftop until it's noisy enough to make her lean close. She's listening, god help her she's listening to every word.

And then he's on his knees – runner's knees she remembers – saying, this is all that matters, and, this is the closest he's ever been, and his entire expression is gleaming in his eyes. 'Aqua fortis,' she thinks. The kind of strength she's never had, though maybe she does have a little of it, maybe just a bit.

She is touching his hand when the phone rings but her fingers jump away frightened. When she leaves Mulder's bed it is warm and a little crooked with her girl-shape. Between his door and hers the storm forces the rain and her robe against her. When she comes back, dressed and shivering, his door is closed. He comes out fighting with his watch, which he claims no longer holds time when he winds it. He taps it and squints at the face, turning away to face the porch light. "Here, Mulder, I can– "

"Are you ready?" He turns back around.

She looks at his wrist. Somehow he's got the watch back on already. She swallows and nods. "Uh- yeah." Her sister would call Mulder a lone wolf and she can just see the look in Missy's eyes. Her father, on a good day, would call him a crank, laughing the hard laugh that can make anyone feel provoked. Mulder's outlandishness lights a wick in her all right, something taut and warm and difficult to speak around.

In the car with the wipers streaking, he idles long enough to swipe on the overhead light. "Lean forward," he says in a voice that gets her to do it. She feels the briefest brush of heat on her back as he pulls up the hem of her suit, then the cold air. When she realizes what he's doing she sits up with a glare.

"They're mosquito bites, Mulder, I'm fine."

"Just checking," he says forthrightly.

They're silent as they drive. Sense, like time, keeps up its strange transmutation, unknowable, no matter how she means to keep it. A wheelchair-bound girl is dead and the rain is pounding the center line through their high beams. This is the closest I've ever been, she thinks, and she finds it is true; she doesn't know what she is close to but she is very close indeed. Belief ticks inside of her, its own clock, and she is changing now.

End.

Author's Facts: Cambridge, and indeed Mulder's alma mater Oxford, both have pub crawls that are second to none. However if there's one thing Americans excel at it's 24hour convenience. According to the Internet, though Philadelphia has plenty of all night tattoo parlors Cambridge appears to have none.