Summary:
It's just a haircut. But it's also a gesture of faith.
Spoilers: Post-Ep for 7x17 "all things", and a metric tonne of Young!Dana flashbacks.
Disclaimer:
Oh, gods above and below, are we still doing these? All right. I disclaim, disavow and deny any ownership of these characters, and do not intend any infringement or material gain from the publication of this thing. This is a work of homage to the creators and actors involved in that sweeping modern epic known as "The X-Files".
Notes:
This was first published in February 2002, under an old old pseudo. I thought I'd join this month's X-fic party and re-release, as many old X-Philes seem to be leaping out the woodwork! (Hello, hello, everyone!) So, with a few minor edits, here is 'Snip' again, polished and restored to its former...something.
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"Snip"
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Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife – chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here." -Frank Herbert's "Dune"
A lot of thinking can happen in the length of time it takes to wash a person's hair. Some researchers assess the speed of thought by the response time between an incoming synaptic signal and the neuron's release of neurotransmitters in response. Others bring the type and length of neuron into question, or base their assessment only on the original signal and the eventual response, like the initial contact of a fingertip with a hot stove and the pulling away. Tests show that human beings tend to estimate the point of an extreme stimulus as being before the actual event, which is why witnesses can get so confused about the order of things in the retelling. Is the speed of thought 0.7 miles per hour, as some claim, or 120 miles per second? Can time actually run backwards briefly, if an event is of enough magnitude? If it's only in our perception that these things matter at all, then can we, as humans, jump back to before critical events occurred, and look around for a millisecond or two?
...just the random thoughts of a woman getting her hair cut, after being scolded by her hairdresser for not coming around often enough.
"You sure? I get to do what I want?" Raphaela asks.
"Well. Something a little less FBI, anyway..."
Raphaela chuckles behind me, her long red nails making a pleasant gentle rasp against my scalp as she lifts my hair gently. It's something all hairstylists do. Perhaps they teach them in aesthetician school, or maybe it's something that marks their vocation. Reminding the client that though hair is the most common primary visual reference, it grows from within, and keeps growing, from the inside out. Choices can be unmade, given enough time.
"Something sexy." Raphaela replies, as if in agreement. She sees my eyebrow rise in the mirror and her dark eyes widen innocently. She always scolds me about being so proper, which would be annoying, but from Raphaela it brings back vague memories of sassing back Sister Paul just to hear her fond recriminations. "What?"
"Well. I'm no Charlie's Angel. But not this plain cut anymore. Something that looks more like the real me."
"Oh, Dana, Dana, that's the sexiest of all, don't you know?"
I give up. Raphaela's relationship with my wayward mop verges on the divine, save once when I insisted on a thick fringe of bangs against her advice. "As long as it takes less than ten minutes in the morning, then okay."
"Okay. Come on, little one." She leads me to the row of gleaming white basins at the back, and as I lean into the neck rest, she whips a plastic cape over me. I hear, and then feel, the warm spray move over my forehead and close my eyes. We don't talk during this stage. We never have. It's my time to think without having to think about where my thoughts are going.
Maybe this is why I've avoided coming here for some time. The mind is a wild horse, as the saying goes, and when mine is let off the rein, it gallops fast and freely, dragging me with it regardless.
I think:
Cutting hair is just the removal of dead protein we've already shed. But it's not that simple. It's part of the nervous system, letting us pick up signals we don't even process consciously. Electricity. Humidity. Danger, in ourselves and in others. Hair holds in living warmth and scent. But I have also come to believe that each experience is imprinted in the journal of the flesh, in every cell, healthy or sickened, and so each act of cutting hair is also a small release.
I relish that thought for a moment. We pathologists take hair samples not only for DNA identification, but a stunning array of secondary tests. Dietary habits. Evidence of medications taken long ago. Periods of shock, trauma, or illnesses. I like the idea of trimming away old memories to let the space be filled with new ones. It's all there on the floor of beauty salons the world over. No wonder nuns and widows in history have shaved their heads. Total renunciation.
It's been a tempting thought at times, to accept the pigeonhole many seem to place me in, as a single-minded careerist, or a sort of secular, scientific nun, unconcerned with the trammels of femininity in the modern age. But I'm here for less philosophical reasons. Feminine or not, I want my old self back. Submerged beneath the navy suits and plain haircut breathes Dana, that freckled kid who could hang upside down from the highest bar in the playground without flinching, and whose heart later got her into more trouble than anyone ever knew.
Such a simple, ordinary thing for a woman, a new haircut. Trim away the old and start anew. But today isn't about routine self-care, nor, truly, is it all about giving Mulder something closer to home to keep him guessin'. It means so much more.
It means there is a benevolent future to look forward to. That by this time next year, we will not be consumed with killing each other over the last remaining stockpiles of human food supplies and clean water, while alien occupiers and their grovelling human allies herd us into smaller and more remote enclaves. We'll be walking along familiar streets with the same everyday tangle of conflicting thoughts, reactions, desires and as we always have. We'll be sipping lattes and getting our hair cut because these things feel good, and we can allow ourselves that luxury.
Why this sudden leap of faith, this desire to bring Dana out of hiding, when the past ten years have been marked by a thickening of the shell, like rings around the sturdy willow heart that used to be mine? Mulder may be the catalyst, but these past few days apart from him were the fuel.
Mulder may test my faith a hundred times a day, but his faith in me is stalwart and unchanging. If we're to take this alchemical leap into the crucible together, it's only fair that I join him as I truly am, not as the world has shaped me.
Oh, speak honestly for once: as I have let the men in my life shape me. Grit your teeth on that, Dana, and call it what you like – innocence, pride, prudence or running for your life, it all amounts to seeking admiration from the men you admire.
And if he can't handle me as I am, if he doesn't want that, or thinks that love is a baseless foundation for anything in a world about to be consumed…
Faith. Right.
It seems futile to look back and rake through things that cannot be changed. But looking back is what I do: trace back from the evidence. Had I seen that each painful stumble would eventually make sense, I might have lingered more often to enjoy them, but they came to me as pain and fear and I kept running away.
I didn't stop running until my legs gave out beneath me in a tiny Buddhist shrine in Chinatown, smelling of incense and dust and age, and was shown the heart of an old lover. At last I understood that his heart was my heart, because they had touched, and I could no longer run from that. Daniel's poor compromised heart shared the same pages of history as Dana's cautious one, as with the joy and pain of every person I had ever let in. It was time to look back along the path and revisit them all, to trim them away and move on.
Begin with the evidence at hand...
10:00 am. Raphaela's salon, not far from the Hoover. The storm-beaten air outside is now lazy and lax, replete, and mild. I was supposed to be there an hour ago but I left a message assuring Mulder I'd turn up for our meeting with Skinner at eleven-thirty.
I am wearing a navy suit and pumps, my standard workweek armour, but my hands don't want to stay still. A scalpel would calm them instantly but there is none nearby.
Four hours ago, I left Mulder alone in his apartment, in his warm bed, and slipped out to drive through the tail of the slackening storm. I could have stayed with him, could have been with him until we had to leave for our meeting. I left instead. One last ritual remained.
The waking of Dana.
Meeting Mulder on the street yesterday felt like the curtain closing on a strange and disturbing act in my life, from which I looked around and arose changed. What did Dana want, in that moment? To spend some time with her best friend, just being best friends. So she invited him in, and he accepted.
It was so simple. I tried to explain everything to him, but there were so many stories that could not be told in one night. But now, it seems, we've given each other the gift of time. No longer a frenetic race to evade conspiracists or aliens or humans who just don't like us and our work, with barely a nod to each other. Time to speak, and listen to all the stories of those winding paths that brought us to his couch with our feet up, mugs of tea steaming on our laps.
As Mulder and I talked last night it seemed the words did not come from us but through us, as if we were merely the instruments through which sound emerged to blend in the air of its own will. We knew the script so well that forethought was hardly required, even in our disagreements. We simply enjoyed the interplay of our voices as they merged. And finally as the warm layers of semi-consciousness pulled me under, I heard the sounds his voice made, playing in the space between us: "A lot, a lot, a lot..."
Mulder's shoulder was warm and solid, and then I was on the bridge of a huge grey Navy ship that was docked at the end of a long pier, pressing my cheek against my father's scratchy woollen side as he spoke with his First Mate.
"You're quiet, Starbuck." Ahab at length, looking down at me. I shrugged inside my thick tweed winter coat and grinned up at him. How to explain the thrill, the sense of rightness and satisfaction at the vastness of the sea, the endless bulk of the ship, and the consoles, instruments, maps and charts on the bridge that only unravelled a fraction of the mystery?
"I like it here."
My father grinned back at me, and I knew he understood. He tugged one skinny ginger pigtail to make me scowl at him, and then we laughed together. Laughed as we recognized the hold that the sea had over both of us. Laughed, knowing that it was easy to laugh at the sea while we were tied up at dock.
In the rolling white squall of an uncertain storm, even taking a moment to smile can be fatal.
I am my father's daughter, beyond a doubt.
"Show me how this works." I demanded.
"What, all of it?" Ahab pretended to look shocked and doubtful.
"All of it."
"You're after my job, aren't you?"
"Daddy!"
A few chuckles from the sailors around us were hastily covered with coughs and grins, and Ahab laughed the deep belly laugh that I tried to tease out of him once a day.
"Come on, Star. Look, this is a navigational array. Information from our antennae are matched with sonar reports from the Carl Vinson. So we always know where we are, and they always know where we are. Now, a long time ago, we didn't have these. Ships used to have big touchstones suspended from the ceiling of the bridge, that always pointed north..."
Mulder murmured something then about the lateness of the hour, and I shifted against him. I think I nodded. I'm not sure. It was Mom's voice I heard then, quiet in the night as she stood in my bedroom doorway.
"Dana Kate, it's after two. What are you doing?"
I looked up from a dog-eared P.D. James with a guilty shudder and bit my lip, expecting the usual lecture on decent sleeping hours. Magellan the Golden Retriever scrambled off the white duvet and made for the hallway, tail down. Mom had been more snappish than usual, during this tour of duty of Ahab's, and we kids had a pact to make life as easy for her as possible. Getting to bed on time and keeping the dog out of the upstairs bedrooms was part of the deal.
Mom looked drawn and tired as she knotted the belt of her robe around her.
"Sorry, Mom." I reached up quickly to take off my glasses, but she waved her hand absently and spoke again.
"Never mind. Come downstairs, I'll make coffee. I can't sleep either."
My mother's and my relationship changed that night, in the dark hours before dawn, taking turns refilling each other's coffee mugs as we sat in the kitchen in our dressing gowns. It was our first real talk as women together.
"It's like he's got a drug in him. He tried staying home one year. Remember, Dana Kate, when you were about eleven? And how you had to repeat everything to him twice, because he wasn't really here?"
"He taught me the stars that year. I remember that."
"Imagining himself back on ship."
"Maybe." I nodded slowly. Standing in the deserted field at midnight with my father had seemed so much simpler than that, as we stared up at Orion, the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, and Vega of the Lyre.
"He needs me to be strong here while he's away, and I don't mind it, really. I can hold things together. All the wives do and we help each other. I just miss him so much. We're still very much in love, you know. If the worst ever happened..." Her hands shook and she lifted her mug to hide it. I heard the frightened Belfast girl in her voice again, who sometimes crept out when Mom was very tired or anxious. Mom knew what it was like to live in a constant state of anxiety for her father and younger brothers, two of whom never came home, though they were hurting nobody, and were only guilty of being Catholic on the wrong street.
I knew she felt she was responsible for all of the men under Daddy's watch as well as Daddy, and their young wives. His crew always called her 'Ma'am' as if they were calling her Mom. When they were in port, she sewed their buttons back on and made them write letters to their own mothers at the same kitchen table where we sat.
"Does that happen, Mom?" I asked quietly, feeling the sudden vertigo of unlooked-for truth. "Do men get killed on regular work? Even if they're not in action?"
"Oh, yes. Not often, but it can happen. That's why the nights are the worst. I mean – " she gave a self-derisive half-laugh, "Statistics make sense in daylight. At night, only fear makes sense. It's not just accidents either – the stress can be terrible, too, and their poor hearts can get bad – " she broke off.
Selfishly, I redirected her.
"Daddy takes care of them, too," I reminded her. "He's not one of the horrible, mean ones. And his boys are mostly young ones – he's supposed to train them, not ruin them."
"Did you know our Billy wants to join up? Did he tell you that?"
"He didn't say when, specifically, but he always figured he would. He wants to go right away?" – meaning, in Navy brat terms, as soon after his eighteenth birthday as he could find a recruiter. "What do you think, Mom? You know Charlie wants to go Navy, too."
"Oh, honey, Charlie's only ten. He wants to be a firefighting astronaut and build his first rocketship with Lego."
"Yes, but Billy's seventeen and a half. Are you going to be okay with him sailing?"
"I have to admit, it's a life that would suit him, especially while he's young and single. I couldn't hold him back. I'd be proud of him and I'd miss him terribly when he was away. And I'd be praying for him every day at sea. Just like I do for your father. To come home alive. No matter what shape he comes home in."
"Me too, Mom."
"Dana. We don't ever tell them how it is for..."
"No, I know."
From that day, I was never again Dana Kate. I was Dana.
And Dana I remained for ten hectic years, through university, heartbreaks and crises of religious and human faith. I was downright belligerent at times, beyond the family-indulged intellectual arrogance that had not yet begun to mellow. Free from the word of Navy bases and strange new schools, finally, to find my own feet on my own terms, I could never escape the event horizon of a good argument or an emotionally dangerous relationship.
Having grown up largely as a boy – for how could I ever compete with Missy? – and having no interest in the clothes or hobbies that other girls did, I assumed I would be out of the running in the Aphrodite stakes. Who would be interested in a short, argumentative girl Math nerd in glasses who had no clue how to flirt or wield a mascara wand?
I was wrong. I hadn't reckoned that speaking to the boys with the same hectoring affection as I did to my brothers, ruthlessly correcting their homework, and whipping them at pool would cause my weekends to fill up so fast. It was fun. A lot of fun, actually, and I began to understand Missy's rueful but unrepentant weakness for men, but none of them held my attention once they tried to be romantic.
I began to gather a stock of gentle let-down phrases.
It was not a lack of interest or passion that made me pause. I loved them dearly, more than they knew. But I'd have crushed them. I needed someone strong-minded and strong-hearted enough to withstand and want every part of me and still have their own life. Someone who didn't laugh about my earnest night prayers or weekly phone calls home. Who wasn't daunted by my endless questions and insistence on precision and perfection in my classes. Or my on-again, off-again relationship with my own femininity.
These were scarce in the Undergrad population.
I started idly wondering about a brainy and suave English TA of mine, five years older than I. When he asked me frankly to be his lover, like making a movie date, I was outclassed in a storm of supposed sophisticated feminist maturity and sexual discovery and convinced myself it was true modern love.
My toes still curl to think of my equally casual response: "Sure, let's do that." I walked back to his residence with him after class and even took charge of things once we arrived. It was sweet and fumbling and puzzling, and like walking through a glass window with my eyes closed and my breath held. In the moments after, I waited to feel cast out of Grace, but felt only the warmth of the bed and the gentle concern of my lover: "How do you feel? Do you hurt?" I told him I was fine, gazing myopically up at the ceiling as I cradled his head on my breast.
I could not confess losing my virginity to the local, elderly priest at St. Ann's near the campus. But neither could I refrain from calling Missy the next day at her experimental community two hundred miles away. She correctly interpreted my thoughtful silences and asked if I wanted her to visit. I loved her for being willing to drop everything and drift over to see me, but I realized that I needed this time alone. Being a Scully was so all-encompassing, so intrinsic to every detail of life, that moments of simply being Dana without the Scully repercussion were precious.
Ironically, the thought of surrendering my independence proved so strong that it caused me to break up with that first lover of mine, a few weeks later. I believe it was a first for him, being the jilted and not the jilter, but to his credit he bore it well. He meant me no harm, after all, whatever he was looking for. I marvelled that he could continue to treat me so civilly and nicely in Seminar, until realizing he'd gone on to the next girl almost immediately.
Physics was a release from the difficult depths of heartstuff, a razor-strop for the mind, a game of observation, conjecture and the indispensable high keystone of pure mathematics. It was like picking a fight with Ahab. Data and conclusions had to be rock-solid and impenetrable, or lives could be lost at sea.
I picked a fight with Einstein instead, and in the hollow victory of accolade and acceptance, I felt the weight of ages upon me: kill the king, take the throne. But only until the next game.
What was the next game?
It was a warm evening in late spring, right after I had received my Master's, and I was staying at my parent's house for a while. Not in my old room, but in my parent's guest room. They had gone up to Seattle to the Whidby Island Navy base, and had a house big enough for only the two of them. I was impressed but nostalgic, and perhaps was drawn to the happier memories of Navy life as a result.
I asked Ahab about Navy work, and whether he thought I should try to use my skills there.
He didn't laugh, which pleased me. He waved me out to the front steps, where he was banished to smoke his pipe, and sat down beside me.
"Mind if I smoke?" he asked, before lighting a match. I shook my head, smiling at one of the last old-fashioned gentlemen I knew.
"Daddy...If you're going to tell me it's a man's job – "
"No, Starbuck, I'm not. In many ways I raised you to take over for me, you know that. But it's a hard life. Not just the work. You remember what it's like to move around all the time, and your mother..."
"Yes. I know. And Billy and Charlie are already in, and who knows what Missy'll get up to next. Mom would freak out if I joined up."
"She knows you've got the sea in your blood. But for that very reason, you'd never be content with a ground job, and you've got better things to do with your time than playing suffragette and lobbying for women to be allowed to go to sea with the men."
"Have I?" I pulled up straight and looked at him, "And what would you think of me if I let them dictate my role to me?"
"I'm saying choose your fights carefully. Think of the brains you have and how you can best use them. Women don't go on tours of duty at sea, Star. I know people keep saying it'll happen, but it's not here yet. Don't be romanced away from reality."
"Well, what, then?" I grumbled. "Honestly, I like physics, Daddy, but I don't want to get into deeper academic research. I'm already bored stiff TA'ing intro level Physics and Math. I want to work. But I don't see myself designing better factories or hunting for new particles or anything. Navy work would be…a logical place for me. And it's familiar."
"You're not going in for your doctorate? I thought you'd been making applications."
"I was. I am. I thought that's what I wanted. But I'd just be in the same place three years from now, only older."
"You're only twenty-four. A lot of folks have no idea at that age. You could change tracks entirely if you wanted. You're already a Master. You don't have to be a Doctor."
"Make me sound like I'll be wielding a scalpel and sutures next." I grinned, "Still, I never got sick around blood. I was always the one with bloody knees or a gashed forehead from falling out of a tree."
"Mmm." Ahab pulled again at his pipe. "You'd need a footstool for operations. Ouch! Careful, this thing is lit."
"Footstool…" I huffed.
Four years later, the young Dr. Scully was still called Dana by her colleagues, over Friday beers or on dates. Daniel Waterston, my Surgery professor, claimed more and more of the dates and then the occasional weekend at out-of-town conferences. He said he was introducing me to people who could further my career.
He always bought me a new suit while we were away, and sometimes shoes.
I wondered what on earth I was doing and why I didn't feel the flames of hell. There were five trips in all that year. I could not deny the pull towards the keen and ambitious minds I encountered nor Daniel's intensity which translated into near-poetic surges of eloquence and passion in work and in sex. I was his Goddess, his muse, his Dana of the green and growing hills, and I could provide for him what his wife and daughter could not. Only I understood him and made him complete. He told me so often.
Just yesterday, in fact. Hooked up to tubes and oxygen and all.
"Oh, God." I groaned on a sigh as Raphaela carefully combed my wet hair smooth.
"What is it, little one? You hurt somewhere?"
'No, no. Just got lost in a memory."
"Well, let it go."
I was beginning to recognize faces at the conferences, but recognized less of myself each time. I liked the slim-fitting silk-and-wool blend skirt suits he picked out, which made me look taller, and both demure and a little dangerous, but I didn't like the strappy high heels he bought me, or the fussy French twist he liked me to do with my hair. "Less red to see," he said, teasing but not really, and would tell me the name of some Andalusian wine I should order at the bar.
Well-cut suits and good wine, at least, I have kept a taste for. And makeup at least covers sleepless nights.
That last weekend away...I was sitting by myself in a sunny corner of a hotel lobby in downtown Chicago, in another black suit with a white conference nametag, absently turning the pages of a medical journal. Daniel had brought me coffee in bed and had left soon after, to fetch the rental car. He would return in a few minutes to pick me up.
An article on FBI recruitment of medical professionals caught my eye, and I was deeply engrossed when Daniel came up behind me.
"Oho, so you want to be a cop now? That the Irish coming out in you again? Your father an' mither would be proud, to be sure."
"So kiss me, I'm Irish." He did. "But it's worth looking at, this government angle. What can one newly-trained doctor do in the hospitals but grunt work for someone else? Look, the FBI is recruiting five forensic pathologists next year. I aced all my Path courses. I loved it. Not everyone can hack it. It could be a good move to specialize."
"Sure, you could shoot your own autopsy subjects. Save the government a pile of cash. Remind me to pick you up some Eau de Morgue later."
"Be serious."
"I am. Have you actually met any forensic techs? They're creepy. Women like you with minds like yours don't become morgue rats, slicing up murder victims and gangsters."
"No?" I raised an eyebrow at him.
"No. They make the right connections and secure a lucrative and very coveted position in surgery, and pay back their student loans within a few years while publishing award-winning articles in much better journals than that rag. Remember, love? That's why we're here. For you."
"We're going to be late."
"We're going to talk about this later."
But as always after a tense episode, like a true devotee, Daniel was very placatory for a time, and brought offerings of lunch and respectable mentor-to-student conversation to the office I shared with two other students.
A week later, lying in my bed in the early evening, I watched him dressing to go back to his family for dinner. I was appalled that the thought didn't disgust me and wondered what had happened to my soul.
I lifted myself up on one elbow and picked at the sheet.
"D'you think she still doesn't know?"
He paused, tying his shoelaces. "I don't believe she does. What brought this on?"
"Just thinking."
"You went to Mass, didn't you?" he asked, not quite accusingly.
"You know I can't. No, it's deeper than that. I think my soul is damaged, Daniel. I should horrify myself, but I don't." I rolled over onto my back and laced my fingers over my belly.
"Dana, put that superstitious nonsense out of your head. You're a brilliant girl with a wonderful future, and everything is going to work out fine for us. God does not hate you," he enunciated, "And my wife is not going to find out. For the simple reason that we have been very sensible and discreet, and anyway, it's practically expected in certain classes of the medical field, as I'm sure even you can't have missed, my wide-eyed innocent. It's not a life that just anyone can understand. Meetings of the mind are rarer than meetings of the married."
"Don't be crass. And don't make fun of me."
"You love it when I'm crass and make fun of you. It makes you blush like a schoolgirl."
"That's sick. And you're still not taking me seriously."
"You're not talking seriously." Was that an edge of fear in his voice? I looked at him closely. He was watching me, and the nearly imperceptible tic at the corner of his eye was back.
"But I am, Daniel." I said carefully.
"This is about the FBI thing, is it? Think I'm not listening, that I don't care about your happiness? I do, Dana. I also care about your best interests."
"I believe you. In terms of my career, I believe you do have my best interests in mind, but since you're so quick to dismiss my feelings I wonder if you can possibly have my happiness at heart."
"You're just starting out. I don't want you to make mistakes you'll regret. You're the best student I've ever had, you bring me such delight. Not like my daughter. You're worth spending my time on. You make me so proud. Look at how far you've come since we got together."
There it was. With one stroke he had revealed his colours and opened the Pandora's Box of my deepest self, all that had been locked away in the name of pleasure and ambition and arrogant pride.
I started up from bed, one hand over my mouth, and bolted for the bathroom. From behind me, I heard him gasp: "Oh, shit, are you pregnant? Is that what this is about?"
No, how could I be? I chose contraception over Communion, you asshole, I shrieked back at him in my mind. I knew it was shock and recognition and horror, hitting me in the gut like no murder closeup could as I retched. The acrid stink of hell reached my nostrils as medieval words describing me appeared shimmering behind my eyelids. Adulteress. Whore. Abomination. Thou shalt not. Whoso among you...
Finally came the quiet and relentless voice of one girl's conscience, whispering, you met his wife and fucked him anyway, you just had to do the worst thing you could just to see what would happen, didn't you? If you kicked away all the discipline, all the unquestioning faith of your family in their perfect girl?
"Just go." I hissed at him, between heaves over the toilet, as he stood uncertainly in the door. "Just go."
"But you're sick – "
"Yes, I am, finally. Now go." I flushed the toilet, stood up naked and ashamed and made him look at me. Wiping the back of my hand across my mouth, I stared him down. "Go, Daniel, or I'm calling the police."
"I'll go, I'll go, but...you'll call me?"
I stood still. Backing away, he left.
I heard him gather up his briefcase and coat and close the door behind him. When I was sure he would not come back, I went to the door, locked it, and returned to the bathroom. I was freezing cold and shaking. While the bathtub filled and the mirror steamed up I brushed my teeth and tried to stop them chattering. Then I got into the tub and scrubbed myself all over until parts of me were raw and stinging.
I heard my mother's voice in my head, unutterably sad. A married man, Dana Kate? We thought better of you. And my father: You've always thought you were smarter than anyone…He must have got into your head. He convinced you there was some justification, and you got to thinking you knew better than us, better than the Church.
The night passed in fits of wild dry sobs and more retching, and when the sun rose again I ached all over and felt like I'd been punched in the gut. The phone rang five times that day, but I let it ring. I made only one call, to Missy. After a few moments when I thought I would be sick again, for I had never learned to cry, I managed to speak, and she heard my whispered confession. I expected her to be shocked and disgusted, or speak of no-strings-attached free love, but she didn't.
"You should go to Confession soon." she said, sensibly. "Before you scare yourself out of doing it forever. Then you can know God heard you and whatever happens next, you can know it's what God wants for you. You'll go on expecting bad things to happen to you and not accepting anything good, otherwise."
"Oh, God, Missy, I can't. To a priest?"
"Yes, to a priest, silly. You think you're the only churchgoer who's had an affair? Don't take more than your share of it. He's the one who's married. And the creep has a kid your age, too. Go to a church far away if you want. It hardly matters which one. Isn't that what we were taught, that in Confession every priest is the ears of God?"
"But you don't believe that, do you?"
I felt her smile down the phone, and not for the first time, I envied the serenity of my older sister, so unlike the rest of us, who were never satisfied to let things be. "It doesn't matter what I think. You need to use what you believe to get back to where you want to be. Sort that out first. And then do it."
It took me closer to a month to confess. I had to face Daniel many times, in class and in my own office, and he was polite and distant. He enquired about my "flu", and I told him I was quite healthy. I would give him nothing, and he would not ask. Once I looked up at him too quickly and caught his habitual expression of condescension, and something else that made my blood run cold. It was a look of glittering impatient eagerness, and I realized he thought that I thought I was raising the tension by keeping him waiting.
He hadn't gone back to his family at all, I learned from a fellow student. Hadn't I heard? His wife had finally kicked him out, after all the years he'd fucked around on her. I was lucky, my friend informed me, because med school gossip had me pegged as the next on his list of conquests. Hopefully he'd wise up now, and stop leering at me in lecture.
I wasn't so sure. I thought, if what I knew of Daniel and his ability to be denied anything was correct, that he was glad to be shot of his comfortable, average wife and daughter, and was already dreaming about some sparkling, rejuvenated new life among the international research elite, with me in tow as a sort of intelligent trophy.
I made my Confession the next day. The good Father at the church that I found two towns over, an hours' drive down a country highway, was somewhat shocked. But he recovered quickly, and said he was glad to know I felt I could make my confession. He said that the real meaning of events doesn't always appear until much later, that I seemed a like a good person who had been led astray, and that he felt there must be some future good in such an experience, perhaps in finding compassion for those who also made mistakes.
Father gave me enough penance to seem worthwhile and advised me to concentrate on the better aspects of my life until I had a deeper understanding of why the unfortunate thing had happened. He urged me to stay in town for dinner and come back for the evening Communion Mass – do the thing in full, as he said – which I found I was glad to do.
I looked around at the crowd of strangers filling up the pews, and I thought that Missy was right: there was no way I was the only one who had had an affair. And I realized that I felt better not because the Church had offered me absolution, but because I had found my own way around to recognizing that sleeping with Daniel was only a symptom of needing to feel cut free from expectations, unperfect, uncaring of what others might say. It wasn't, after all, about using him as a career ladder, even if he was using me as a crutch to feel admired.
And admittedly, I thought, grinning inwardly while gazing steadily at the Host, the sex had been mindbendingly intense and good, especially after a rigorous debate or lecture. I had learned that brainsex turned me on more than anything. I would miss that.
Before I left, Father took my hand in his feather-light elderly one, and enquired carefully if I was certain that I would be quite all right in the future, with no further concerns. I knew what he meant. I shook my head and looked away. I was fine, I told him. He smiled in relief. "I wish I could commend the sensibility of young women these days, in certain areas of secular life, but of course, I am not permitted to do so." he said. "Go in peace, daughter."
Some of them are spookier than my Mulder, those priests.
"You got a smile on your face, now. More memories?"
"Yeah. Good ones. I think."
"That's better."
Upon receiving my official letter of invitation to interview with the local FBI recruiter, I first called my parents, and then went out to buy a new suit. I refused to wear black suits with long skirts anymore. I found myself a burgundy wool pantsuit with a black velveteen collar and cuffs and was deliriously parading it in front of my mirror before I recalled the tone of my father's voice on the phone.
"The FBI, Starbuck?"
"Yeah, Daddy. There are five openings for pathologists and I think I have a good chance. I could go so much faster that route than the hospitals. They're really broadening medical forensics in legal cases, and I could be part of that. Make a real difference."
"I see."
"So wish me luck! I'll call and tell you all about it."
"Please do."
I wore that burgundy suit to my first interview, revelling in the quick glances from the other agents that said they never expected a slice-and-dicer to look like that. I smiled as though my heart was not pounding and my palms not slick, and spoke about my fascination and respect for the human body, my ability to remain focused and professional through crises and horrifying scenes, and calmly agreed that I was indeed in the top three percent of my graduating medical class at Maryland.
I called my parents that night but they had gone out. In retrospect, I'm convinced it was a blessing that they had, for if the showdown had happened before I was accepted, I think I'd have backed away. It didn't seem real yet. Dana Scully, FBI? But it made sense. It felt right.
A week later, I accepted the FBI's invitation to the Academy, and after first calling a jubilant and highly stoned Missy, I called my parents again.
My ears were ringing when we hung up an hour later. And the next day. And the next. I was throwing away a promising career, I was doing a great dishonour to my teachers, and I was setting myself up for certain failure. My own Surgery professor had called them, to beg them to urge me to reconsider, did I know that? Surely he knew best what a young doctor should do in her early career. Nice girls did not belong in the basement morgues of the FBI, which dealt with the lowest scum of humanity. Why on earth didn't I become a Navy doctor, since I was so determined? I was breaking my mother's heart, did I know that?
My mother was indeed crying, sobbing as I had never heard her before. If but once she had asked me to back away, I would have done so, but she never did. Not once. She only asked me to listen to my father, and asked us both to stop screaming at each other. But she never asked me not to go.
Finally I understood what she would not say. Her words of so many years ago came back to me: "...I couldn't hold him back. I'd be proud of him and I'd miss him terribly when he was away. And I'd be praying for him every day...We can't ever tell them how it is for..."
For those left behind on the shore.
There was my answer, and it stiffened my resolve to continue.
At last there was silence. Kill the king, take the throne. The hollow ring of victory. Ahab went back off to sea, no longer angry with me but sad and disappointed, and not understanding where our connection had gone. My mother, in her letters, never mentioned the fights they must have had, but always added that he had asked after me and hoped I was happy.
But at last, also, there was purpose and a new field of challenge and discovery. It wasn't what my father or Daniel had expected, or could ever understand, but for once I was ready to stand up and do it anyway. I was going to be the best pathologist the FBI had ever seen. I was going to re-write the books and help expand the field. If only the months until September would fly by faster...
God, no greener girl than I ever entered the halls of Quantico. It was like being a college freshman all over again. I was both laughed at for my intensity and sought after for my assistance. But here were intense, like-minded people of my own age, for once, and senior agents who deal with reality, not theory, and explained the state of crime in America in a way that made each of us want desperately to do something.
And here also was Jack Willis. Oh, Jack. Intelligent with wisdom rather than cleverness, heartfelt and direct, he seemed the essence of honesty and decency. It took him six months to ask me out, and two seconds for me to accept. This time there was no need for secrecy. By the time we were dating regularly, though he was still my instructor, we were nearly colleagues, both unattached, and rarely working together. True, the Church might not officially approve, but my friends did, and this time I thought God would understand I was trying to do the right thing.
He asked me to come to his cabin, the weekend of our shared birthday, and for a moment the memory of Daniel swam before me. But Jack would never have thought of showing me off in front of a conference of doctors as his protege. He just wanted some quiet time with me at his cabin, away from work. I was charmed.
It was cold at the cabin, as the heat had been off all winter. He wrapped me in a big patchwork quilt and made a fire in the wood stove while I drank real cocoa from a thermos. While the big open room heated, he sat behind me and wrapped his arms around me. We sat in perfect silence like that, not speaking, not needing to. Just staring into the dancing flames, and each other's eyes. I had never looked into anyone's eyes like that, nor let anyone see so deeply into mine. I felt safe and at ease for the first time in years.
Later, wonderfully warm in a nest of quilts and golden skin in front of the fire, we talked about dreams and fears, hopes and visions. We rarely spoke of the past, only the present, and the future. For a scientist used to picking over the bones, quite literally, it was new and refreshing.
Jack never called me his Goddess, or his muse. He told me in words what he was feeling, and never minded when I asked him what he was thinking. He was always thinking about something interesting. And he listened to every word I said, and asked me probing questions afterwards. He didn't presume that I wanted to build a life with him, or needed him, but hoped our dreams matched and that we would always be good for each other. In his arms, I cried in relief and he was not threatened. He made love to me slowly and gently through my tears, and for the first time in my life I fell asleep first.
I was thrilled when I was assigned directly to teaching medical forensics, as well as consulting on investigations. As the new Agent Scully, I took delight in wearing colours to work where everyone else wore black and navy-blue. I darkened my hair to the shade of autumn redwoods, and wore it long and loose where other female agents pulled theirs back or cropped it short. My students and I were known to eat lunch together on occasion, and if other agents despised or rolled their eyes at the gamine in their midst, I attributed it to narrow-minded envy.
It was nearly summer before I began to recognize the building sense within me of misplacement, of playing a role that had gone on for too long. Jack's kindness and placidity came perilously close to making me scream with the need to fight for something, and my students' familiar treatment of me bordered on disrespect at times.
Changes had to be made.
The first, and hardest, was leaving Jack. Even then, he put up no resistance, but simply asked if he could have done anything better for me. He was quite shocked when I told him, as one example of my restlessness, that I needed to argue now and then, and to have my ideas debated and fought over. He seemed to behave as if I had admitted to a hidden drug habit that he could not reconcile with his image of me. He asked me to be good to myself, that he would help me in any way he could, and hoped I would find a peaceful resolution to my needs. I gritted my teeth and hugged him back.
I still shiver inwardly to think of our last moments together, years later. The violence and power in that dear, familiar body, taken over by some killer's soul, the safest pair of arms in my memory turned lethal. And then Jack, my Jack, the real Jack, slipping away from me into a coma just as he recognized me before his final death. I could not state exactly what happened, but I know what I saw, and the memory haunts me still.
My relationship with my students and colleagues took longer to change. Oh, I held onto Dana for as long as I possibly could, but every day there were more pressing reasons to give up the helm to Agent Scully. Narrow-minded or not, there was no getting around the increased level of respect I received when I was in full Agent mode.
So I dressed soberly and did not smile when I delivered status reports and findings. Students learned to answer promptly and accurately, and to visit my office only during posted hours. They stopped inviting me for Friday drinks. I called nobody by their first names and ate at my desk. I very nearly joined in the gallows humour of the other forensic pathologists, which to me seemed the most disrespectful and ungodly way of dealing with death. I told myself I was growing up, but looking back, the long slow slide away from Dana began that first year with the FBI.
Raphaela's hands angle my head gently back and forth under the spray, and sounds of the world around me begin to penetrate. I wonder if I will feel like Dana again, when she is finished with me, or if it's even possible to truly regain a former self.
This ritual of self-change and new beginning is an ordinary thing that normal women do, but I can't even pretend to be an ordinary woman anymore. I've never felt like a normal girl, never really cared for the differences between the sexes. But now it's a constant thrum in my blood and bones, something that began with the removal of my chances for childbirth, and the piercingly clear few days of having Emily in my life.
Something to fight for, indeed. Around thirty-seven, thirty- eight, if a woman has never been pregnant, her hormonal system begins to step down. The years preceding are when so many women crave the physical state of pregnancy, responding to the preliminary changes.
It's when a woman is supposed to be in her sexual prime, for God's sake, and some days that seems all I have left to offer. What else is there? The irony is hardly lost on me. But the usual patterns of courtship, relationship-building and shared milestones are so far from my social sphere now that it would be laughable to consider, even if there were any offers.
Mulder has scared away all of the men that weren't scared by me. Sometimes this pleases me a great deal, especially as he manages to do it in such a way as to convey that he knows I don't need him to, but he's going to do it anyway. Sometimes I've quietly closed our office door and turned to him just to watch him squirm for a moment before I lay into him for his presumption. ("Yeah, but I was right, wasn't I, Scully?") Sometimes it's been disastrous and he's found me with that hidden targeting software he has in his head. Too many times. Holy God.
I used to fear that Mulder was using his feelings for me as a whip to punish himself for all manner of things – for Samantha, for his mother's unhappiness and his father's death, for his own career – and that staying aloof was my only to disengage myself from his quixotic intensity. Maybe that was true once. But we are both different now. We have changed each other. We balance each other in a hundred maddening ways that I'm only just beginning to see.
Are we the only couple who has ever asked if we have earned the right to love each other yet? If we deserve to be human beings around each other? From what are we seeking absolution? What stroke of perfect timing are we waiting for? You'd think that the notion of human civilization's time being more limited than expected would have been a good enough reason to throw caution to the winds, if nothing else.
A normal woman would have taken the obvious leap of faith last night and gone through the door that was left open for her – that had been open for her for years, literally and metaphorically. A normal woman would have left a note on the dresser, at least, before sneaking away before dawn like a guilty mistress, to drive and think in the storm-washed air. God knows I wanted him. What made me hesitate, and consider, at that last moment? I could have gone to him with a clean conscience and enough good reasons to scale that massive wall of this is not a good idea, that we had built up over the years.
Perhaps it was because he took such good care of me. The men in my life have always tried to protect me, even while trying to push me forward. My father demanded toughness, accuracy and honour. Jack wanted the sort of sentiment and soul-connection that was Missy's forte. Daniel played Pygmalion. I left each one not because of these things, specifically, but because they all seemed to think I needed saving from myself. It took a long time and many mistakes, but I realize now that my ambivalent sense of myself as a woman, or even being small, had nothing to do with it. I don't blame them for believing that that was their motivation, because I believed it, too. It was my own internal conflict they sensed, the mind and the heart.
It had to be Dana alone coming to him, not Scully, though he can call me that in his sweet rough voice just as much as he likes.
Just yesterday, Colleen Azar called it Ajna and Anahata, the eternal dance. It was not my body or my sexuality they were trying to protect but what joy in living and willingness to feel that I had left. Had I known that, I might have been more forgiving.
While I railed against my cancer and the forces who inflicted it upon me, Colleen was grateful for hers. It was a wake-up call, she felt, that opened her eyes to the true needs of her heart and soul.
When she found out that my cancer was located between the eyebrows, she nodded as if she knew already, and stated, "Ajna. The center of intellect and intuition. When the intellect and intuition are out of balance, the center becomes diseased. Call it conspiracy if you need to, but it happened in your own body. When intellect doesn't provide the answers, what will you do?"
What, exactly, does my intuition need that I have not given it? Only that I admit the truth as I feel it, even if it runs counter to every law or common sense. But that's my role, that's my job, to be the fricative force to Mulder's overwhelming intuitive leaps. I can admit I've been deeply tempted to follow his paths of logic to the same places at times, but even when I am, that's not how I can best help him.
And what does Mulder ask of me? Only that I recognize him as my necessary counterbalance as well. He is my intuition, my unspoken self, the places in my soul and heart for which my mind has no measure or calibration. We are each other's safe place and dangerous ground, with very little in between. We are so used to the dangerous ground that safety has become something to be coveted from afar. Maybe we can rest together now, just for a little while.
"So, little one." Raphaela is poised with comb and scissors, and I nod, unsmiling. "Now we make you look like you."
This is for you, Ahab, for twelve years of long tight pigtails. (snip.)
This is for you, Daniel, the red hair you said was jejune. (snip.)
This is for you, Jack, the lock of hair you asked me for. (snip.)
This is for you, Mulder, for the way you touched my hair last night...
Agent Scully, I believe that's called a fatal slip. But that's what this is all about, after all, isn't it?
The smile in the storm.
It's just a haircut.
It means there's a benevolent future to hope for, in which civilization as we know it continues, and things like haircuts still matter, and –
"Look at you!" Raphaela is practically clapping her hands in delight.
I open my eyes and feel myself stare, then grin as my own reaction hits home. How can I look both older and younger? The old severe bob has been rendered into a sleek cap that accentuates a slim throat, feline jaw and small pink earlobes. My natural ginger looks striking and touchable as it springs and falls with a life of its own. My eyes, no longer in shadow, look more open. I see not a scientist and doctor, inaccessible to human emotion, out to save the world through the catechism of science, but a passionate, self-aware woman who has paid her dues and for whom the gates of the world stand open.
Despite everything, Dana is not dead after all.
"Raphaela, I – it's so different!" I manage. She nods, understanding. She's seen this reaction many times.
"You look like you now." she says.
"I love it." I tell her finally. I do.
"And here, you see, you can grow it long now, it'll keep a nice shape in the back."
"How did you know I was thinking of it?"
She rolls her eyes expressively and hums as if she knows something I don't.
"Go show your boyfriend." she commands, dusting me down with a soft brush before letting me up.
"He's not – " I begin, and realize I'm caught. Raphaela laughs and waves a long finger at me. "Well, I didn't do this for him, anyway." I retort, and she purses her lips and nods seriously before laughing again. I can't win. I tip her generously and leave to the sound of her welcoming her next client.
The drive back to the office takes longer than I expect, and I arrive just in time for Mulder's and my meeting with Skinner. I hurry straight to Skinner's floor and call a greeting to Kim, in the outer office.
Kim looks up and does a double-take. "Morning. Oh, hey, I like it!" She gives me a warm, genuine smile.
"Thanks." I can't help but grin broadly. The feminist in me hollers at the surge of pride I feel in having scored a further point in this game of being a woman in the modern age. It's post-modern feminism, I holler back. Kim's eyes are fairly dancing at this point, as she sticks out her thumb towards Skinner's door and nods me inside. I know that she knows Mulder hasn't seen it yet. It's something women know, and would take Mulder and Gertrude Stein together to figure out over a large bottle of Glenfiddich with their sleeves rolled up.
I tap on the door, and open it. Skinner glances up, and Mulder turns in his chair to face me and I will not look at him, I will not look at him...Skinner is a master at reading people, and I don't intend to open the pages for his benefit.
If I look at Mulder I might just say something about leaving him all alone last night and how it'll never happen again and maybe we can tell each other some more stories later tonight.
"Sir." I nod to Skinner and seat myself, only now admitting into my mind the possibility of greeting Mulder. I face him and smile, the strangely intimate formal smile we keep for each other. I see he is already watching me closely. Not asking questions behind his eyes, or speculating, or even staring. His eyes are simply warm and –
Oh, my. I don't believe I've ever been on the receiving end of this look.
Simple enjoyment.
Whatever else he's thinking, he's happy for me because I'm happy for myself. My heart, to employ a poetic term, leaps. I can feel it in my throat, in my stomach. Yesterday I would have looked away. Today I hold his gaze just for a moment. God knows we have little enough to share in celebration. Why not celebrate a decision to change something in oneself for the better?
Why not celebrate the kind of relationship that is so complete that one person's joy is sufficient unto the other?
I feel the halcyon tomboy, the seeker of truth and the ambitious scientist begin to reconcile, balance and merge. For the first time in a long, long while, Dana wakes, stretches and grumbles contentedly about being hungry. I know that Mulder, with his radar for puzzles, senses something but he will wait for me to explain.
"If we can begin..." Skinner grumbles impatiently, and I wonder if he has observed all this, but only a split second has elapsed, and he just wants to hear our report.