Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG

Word Count: 5248

Prompt: Mulder: While stalking Eugene Tooms Excuse me. Could you help me find my dog? He's a Norwegian elkhound. His name is Heinrich. I use him to hunt moose. Wk 43

Setting: Second Season Episode: "Little Green Men" (From scifi_muses on LiveJournal)

AN: Welcome to Season Two, everyone...and I start it with an explosion of words. Sorry for the length, but the end of Season One was a bit traumatic for Dana. It is unnecessary to have read Seasons: First, but if you want to know what was going on before, take a gander at it. Hope you enjoy it.

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Scully's air conditioner whined loudly at her, she glared at it in silent supplication. She had it scheduled for routine maintenance later in the week. When she had leased the car a year before, she hadn't expected to have to drive it back and forth to Virginia, more than an hour each way. In the last month she had put more miles on the engine than she had in the last year, and that wasn't including the disgusting crawl through Northern Virginia. She pulled her sedan into her parking space, feeling grimy and musty despite the cold air straining her car's motor. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bath and into bed, with a sandwich sufficing for her evening meal. Beside her sat the latest copy of The Journal of the American Medical Association, known colloquially as JAMA. She could tear through it in the few hours it would take her to drift off to sleep before, bright and early the next morning, she would return to this again.

And again…and again…to more dead bodies, more perfunctory paperwork, more classes, more rules, regulations, and rigidity. In short, back to being Agent Dana Scully of the FBI Crime Lab in Quantico. In the few short weeks since she had been removed from the X-files, her life fit back into the same, predictable rhythm it had once held before Fox Mulder's name had ever been brought to her attention by Section Chief Blevins. On the days she had morning classes with the new group of Academy students, she spent her afternoons in the morgue, dissecting bodies and performing sample analysis for the cases out of the field. On her days with afternoon classes, she did the opposite, punctuating the time in between with reports that were sent to agents flung across all of the corners of the United States, doing all manner of work from child abduction, to organized crime, to anti-terrorism, to hate crimes. Though the bodies all shared the commonality of death, the cases couldn't have been more unique. And as Scully picked through each body, she found herself wondering what it was about the poor victims that drew their attention to the FBI. Were they a mother, a son, a friend? And what was the reason for their death. What sort of case were these silent people drawn from, and what were the reasons, outside of the biological, for their demise.

She would never know for certain, of course. She was nothing more than an over-glorified coroner, paid by the Bureau to find the reasons their bodies expired, but not the causes behind why such expiration occurred. That wasn't her place anymore. After all, they had given her the big shot at being a real field agent. And they had taken it away from her the minute the strange, military man had shot his fatal blow into the man she had known as Deep Throat.

Scully found herself unconsciously wiping her right hand against the twill of her lightweight slacks, her mind fluttering to Fox Mulder. What was he doing right now? Had he found anything further on his work, on the strange flask she was asked to obtain in order for his release? Had he come any further in his search for his sister, for his truths, or was he stuck, beating his head silently against the invisible walls of his bureaucratic prison, losing all hope and faith as all of his work and effort was stifled.

She glanced at he watch. It was six o'clock, if he even made it home, he wouldn't be home then. Scully wanted to call him, to just check in with him to ensure that he was all right. Somehow she doubted he would take her call. Mulder's paranoia, always high at best, had ratcheted itself to such levels in the weeks since their reassignment that he pointedly refused to take even the occasional call she dropped him, and hadn't responded to a single discreet email sent his way. Her few brief conversations with the Lone Gunmen, mostly with the strange but weirdly endearing Frohicke, had turned up nothing in terms of Mulder and how he as doing. In Frohicke's words, "the punk ass hasn't been talking to us either, the paranoid son-of-a-bitch," a case, of course, of the pot calling the kettle black.

Scully at least took some comfort in knowing she wasn't the only one feeling hurt and left out. With a heavy sigh, she grabbed her briefcase and medical journals, slinging her load across her slight shoulders, and made her way towards the front of her building and her apartment. She smiled politely at a couple out for an early evening walk in the setting twilight of summer, pushing a stroller between them that held an infant no more than six months old. Scully vaguely remember them, a young couple that seemed to be relieved that they had an FBI agent in the building with them. She had just been thrilled to have nice, normal people living around her, in a quiet, relatively nice neighborhood in DC, with a lease that was by no means cheap, but didn't eat a giant chunk out of her government paycheck either.

She was rather proud of her small apartment, the first home she had chosen for herself out of school, halfway between Quantico, where she had been working at the time, and her parent's home near Baltimore. In comparison to Mulder's Spartan, ramshackle home, which looked more like he had chosen it because of it's cheapness and ability to hold his couch and television, she had created a true place she could call comfortable. She had filled it with chintz and Crate and Barrel, had carefully painted the walls, and hung each of the pieces of art. And despite the one incident with Eugene Tooms over a year before, her home had always felt safe, secure, her place of refuge and respite, hidden away from the secrets and lies she had encountered everyday in her world on the X-files. Home was some place she didn't have to fear as she came home of an evening. She could just walk in, kick off her shoes, and be.

Managing to wiggle her keys from her purse, Scully startled as she set the metal into the lock and found the door unlocked already. Odd, she wondered, as she pulled her own keys from the doorknob. Mulder obviously had a set, but if he hadn't once bothered in the past few weeks to answer one of her messages, she highly doubted he would sneak into her apartment now and do something so foolish as leave the door unlocked.

Deep Throat's dying words murmured in the back of her mind. Trust no one. She swallowed, glancing up and down the hallway nervously. Perhaps, her frantic brain mused, the man from the bridge that night, with the close cut hair and dark, dangerous eyes might search her apartment for some evidence she may still carry. She swallowed in a mouth suddenly gone dry as she envisioned her comfortable home turned upside down by other, prying hands, walking in on them as the cold-faced, military man shot her down as easily as he had shot down Deep Throat.

Without thinking, her hand moved towards her gun at her waist. All FBI agents, even those stuck in the lab, were required to carry one; you never knew what you could run up against in a case. Juggling her medical journals to the other arm, she pulled her weapon, and carefully as she could with her left hand opened the door to her apartment, her right hand already pointing the weapon inside.

As she looked around she could see nothing in her apartment appeared to be touched. Her living room looked in order, but her stereo was playing softly in the background, some jazz tune she wasn't familiar with. She frowned, slowly coming around the door, to peek into the kitchen quietly, her sense of smell finally registering some sort of delicious food smell emanating there.

In the moment it took for Scully to realize that the tall, red-haired woman standing at the stove with a gun pointed at her was her own sister, Melissa Scully turned. A brilliant grin froze as she saw the semi-automatic pistol pointed, momentarily, at her own chest.

"Jesus, Missy," Scully immediately lowered her weapon, releasing the breath she hadn't realized till then she was holding, her heart beating adrenaline into her ears. "You scared the hell out of me."

"I can tell," Melissa's grin continued up her pretty face, as she waited for sister to put away her weapon and to set down her things. "Do you greet all of you siblings waving your weapon, or just the ones who surprise you."

"I've been tempted with Bill, but haven't," Scully laughed at her own paranoia, as she held her arms open for the elder sister with whom she parted ways so acrimoniously a year ago. Melissa gladly stepped into her younger sister's embrace, stooping to wrap her arms around the shorter Dana in a rib-crushing hug.

"Mom said you were in town, I thought you would call," Scully pulled away, glancing at her stove where strange and good smelling foods were bubbling.

"Yeah, well it's Tuesday. We always have dinner on Tuesday, remember," Melissa produced a key from her pocket, waving it in front of Scully. "And as I remember it was my turn to cook."

"That was a year ago, Missy," Scully laughed. Frankly, she had nearly forgotten her weekly ritual with her sister herself. They hadn't parted on the best of terms a year before. Melissa had called her unexpectedly, announced she was moving to California in a week, begged her to help pack her belongings, and had offered her younger, more-responsible sister little comfort about her plans. To make matters worse, the two girls who had always spoken to each other, frequently, even in all of the years of college and jobs since they had moved out on their own, had not shared as much as a phone conversation in the twelve months since.

Not until Melissa had decided to surprise her by breaking into her apartment and making…Scully sniffed. She eyed the pots curiously, and lifted one of the kids, inhaling briefly.

"Hope you like Mexican, I learned this killer recipe for mole," Melissa immediately swept to the pans; closing the lid on the one Scully had opened, and shooed her sister away. "Don't ruin it."

"Looks like brown goop," Scully teasingly grumbled, though in reality it smelled divine. Her stomach growled in loud betrayal.

"It's a spicy Mexican sauce, with chili peppers and chocolate," Melissa laughed, turning to Scully's cabinets and pulling out plates and cups. "I'm making it to put over the enchiladas, turkey ones, which are warming up in the oven, and then we can eat."

"You mean you've been here all day…cooking," Scully blinked stupidly at the pots, then at her sister, feeling vaguely like her own privacy had been violated.

"No, silly, most of this stuff I did at Mom's, we had it for dinner last night. I just brought the leftovers." She chuckled, setting the kitchen table, and glancing at Scully, still in her work clothes, still smelling of chemicals and the morgue. "Maybe you should take a shower, get relaxed. Dinner will wait."

"Shower," Scully frowned momentarily down at her clothes, nodding vaguely. "Right, just…well, make yourself at home."

Not that Missy seemed to be having any trouble doing that, she reasoned, as she stumbled from her kitchen to her bedroom, shedding her jacket and shoes at her bed. She grabbed her robe, and moved towards her bath, wishing vaguely she could have had a long soak than a shower, and a sandwich over…what was it again, mole? Perhaps she remembered having it, when they were children in San Diego. She was never sure, Melissa had always been the more adventurous one regarding food…regarding everything really.

She had always been secretly jealous of her tall, beautiful, freehearted sister. Scully admitted that in her more honest moments. As children Dana had related more to the boys than her girlish sister, and had preferred playing Cowboys and Indians with Charlie, or tagging around with Bill and his friends than to playing Barbie dolls and dress up with Melissa. But things change so quickly when you are young. Just a year-and-a-half younger than her sister, Dana had found one day that her brothers never-ending games of baseball interested her less and less, and she took to her books, and to spending long summer days with her sister, wondering how it was possible that anyone could be so caught up in clothes, make up, and boys as she was. And by the time Dana had caught up to her elder sister in terms of clothes, make up, and boys, Melissa had moved on as well, shunning the faith of her parents, taking up new ideas, new beliefs. Melissa would tease Dana for being practical, so "good"; never questioning her the ideas or the beliefs she had spent a lifetime accepting. Dana, she had said, would be a hopeless nerd, never looking beyond the obvious, never searching past herself for the truths that the universe held.

In truth Dana had always felt, slightly, like she was forever trying to catch up behind her sister. While Melissa danced through life with hardly a care, dropping jobs, boyfriends, and life plans with the ease that most people shed clothes, Scully was always picking up behind her. They were the two halves of the same, Scully coin. Melissa had a dual inheritance from their parents. She had heir mother's loving, accepting nature, and she tended to play open-minded peacemaker, much like Charlie. But she also was imbued with old Ahab's love of wandering, the inability anyone had of totally tying down the old captain, his sense of adventure, of excitement, of floating around the world on nothing more than a good current and stiff breeze, trusting that he would make it home to those he loved someday.

Missy was more like Ahab than Scully liked to let on. Scully seemed to inherit all those things from her parents that made her the lesser sister. She had her mother's practicality, her sense of duty and loyalty, all the things that allowed her to stand lovingly by the side of a man who loved nothing more than to stand at the helm of a ship. But then she had inherited Ahab's temper, his stubbornness, and the rigid way of thinking he had, his diligence to his work. Her love of science and reason was purely her father, the logical order of a man who had devoted his life to his country and to the service. He was a man who put truth and honesty above all other things in life, and that was a legacy Scully carried with her.

But it earned her no friends, and it gained her few adventures…not like Melissa. Missy who could see into the heart of any problem and just understand it for what it was, who held her younger sister's hand anytime she even dreamed of doing something that broke the mold, and convinced her it was all right. Melissa never asked questions when she took the deep plunges, she never checked it out to see what was at the bottom of those lakes. She just did it. And she always came out fine in the end. Scully envied her sister that ability. It was something Melissa shared with Mulder. It was both commendable and terrifying all at the same time. And Scully highly doubted she could ever change that about herself.

Her fingers were wrinkled by the time she stepped out, toweling dry and wrapping her wet hair up as she slouched into her thick robe. From outside of the bedroom she could hear her sister humming to herself, flipping through something. Probably one of the medical journals she had left on the couch.

"Do I need to dress for anything," Scully called as she hovered in the space between her dresser and closet.

"I'm not offended by pajamas to dinner, Dana," Melissa called, laughing. "Wear pink slippers for all I care."

"If I had pink slippers," Scully snorted, pulling out comfortable pajamas and slipping them on, tossing her robe carelessly across a chair, and undoing her damp hair from the towel. "How about blow drying?"

"Is this where I point out I've seen you naked and that I don't care?"

Scully rolled her eyes, and scuffled out to the living room, dripping and comfortable in her oversized pajamas. Melissa's bright, blue eyes sparkled at her over the edge of one of the purloined copies of JAMA that Scully had snagged from her tiny office at Quantico.

"Finding anything interesting," Scully waved as it as she curled up on one end of the couch, tucking her feet comfortably under her. Melissa, despite her nature, was never and idiot, and had always found her younger sister's medical studies fascinating.

"You seem to be very interested in gene therapy and genetic testing," Melissa pulled up a sticky note that Scully had used to mark her place, a bright pink one with the scribbled words, "For M."

Interested, it had been her private obsession since the minute Deep Throat had died in her arms. "I'm doing some research for a friend. For some work we are doing for the Bureau."

"Ahhh," Melissa nodded sagely. "I don't know it feels like such a violation…messing with things that nature never intended for humanity to alter."

"I'm sure nature never intended for humanity to increase its life expectancy either, but once you let the genie from the bottle, you can't put it back again." Scully offered defensively.

"But they aren't discussing longer and healthier lives, Dana," Melissa frowned as she tossed the large magazine aside. "They are talking about altering the building blocks of all of creation in the name of disease prevention."

"Should we rely then on copper encrusted crystals, and ancient Indian shamans to help us ward off cancer and AIDS then?" It was a low blow, Scully knew it, and she had meant it to be. Anything to deflect Melissa from an argument on this very subject, to move her away from the dangerous topic of extra-terrestrial, bio-engineered viruses carried in altered bacteria, and used in government experiments, the nature of which remained a mystery to Scully.

Some of the sparkle dimmed in Melissa's laughing eyes, her pretty mouth tightening a fraction. "I didn't say that any of those things would cure AIDS and cancer. But they are at least more natural and do less damage than what they are proposing there," she pointed towards the magazine. "And even you can't argue with that, Dana."

No, she couldn't. "I'm not here to ague anything with you, Missy," she sighed, yawning widely. "It's…just been a long day at work, that's all." She tried to look as apologetic and drained as possible, not exactly hard when she felt as tires as she did. "What's this about Mexican food?"

Her sister knew when to leave things be. Her smiled was firmly back in place, and she as up and bustling in Scully's orderly but small kitchen. "I hope you like it, I learned it from a woman at the home I was staying at, Lupe."

"Where were you at again," Scully settled at the table, watching as Melissa began opening pans, reaching for the plate in front of Scully and quickly filling it with spicy, cheese covered food.

"I started Cambria, at least for the first bit. It's this artist town, by San Simeon and Hearst Castle. You remember the Castle, don't you?"

"Is that the place that looked like a Spanish cathedral stuck in the middle of no where," Scully had recalled many hot, sweaty family vacations, with four kids pilled into the family station wagon.

"Yeah, where Charlie got sick on grape soda all over a piece of priceless Roman marble," Melissa laughed fondly, setting the plate of food in front of Scully and reaching for her own. "One of the girls we knew in junior high lives in Cambria now, and I spent some time with her. Then it was to Berkeley for a while, and then to San Diego to visit Bill and Tara. And after a while of all to familiar, naval domestic bliss, I decided to head north again."

"Bill finally got on your nerves," Scully grinned around a mouthful of turkey enchilada and the warm, spicy, slightly bitter brown sauce called mole.

"Bill is all right if you know how to deal with him," Melissa shrugged as she sat across from her. "Tara mellows him out a lot. I like her. We bonded while I was there."

"Glad she bonded with someone," Scully mumbled guiltily. She was the first to admit she hadn't gone to any great length to endear herself to her only sister-in-law.

"She's lonely, you know. Her family live far away, and she's not used to the military life, like we were." Melissa, always the diplomat, Scully doubted she would ever say true ill against anyone.

"Anyway, after Bill's I went up to Seattle for a while. Mom says you just got back from there."

"Yeah, I had a case there a couple of months ago." Suddenly the tortillas filled with shredded meat and cheese lost much of their flavor as her mouth went dry. "Murdered jet propulsion scientists in a lab out there."

"That was you," Melissa's burst out, jaw half hanging open, forkful of food hanging over her plate. "That was all over the news out there. They said the FBI was involved, but…I had no idea that was my little sister."

Scully allowed a brief smile, shrugging lazily as her fork picked at the food on her plate. "Yeah, well I didn't know you were there to call. Perhaps we could have gotten together."

She hadn't meant it to be another jab at her sister. But Melissa took it that way all of the same. She set her fork down on her plate carefully, studying her food briefly. "You're still angry at me for leaving, aren't you?"

"Missy, I wasn't angry," Scully began.

"Yes you were," Melissa replied, propping an elbow on the table and leaning her face against her hand. "You thought I was abandoning everyone."

"It's your life," Scully stabbed viciously at her enchilada. The fork stuck in the contents, standing upright on her plate. She let it stay there, standing ridiculously.

"And you are angry because you felt abandoned by everyone while you stayed here, good, little Dana, and did you duty?" Melissa didn't say it to be snide. In fact as her calm blue eyes regarded Scully's own, she looked sad and sorry.

"Melissa, if this were the first time you had up and run off like that, I perhaps would have been angrier, but…" Scully sighed, staring at the fork in her food, thinking of her past year, of her loss of Ahab, of her loss of Jack, of her loss of the X-files and Mulder. "I needed you this year," she finally admitted. "You know, when we were growing up, you always came to me to be your cover person, because I was reliable, I was dependable. And you could run around, finding yourself, wherever that was. I always was so sure of who I was, so certain. It never occurred to me that there would ever be a point in my life when I would ever question it, when I would have my life be questioned in such a way. And the one person I knew would understand, the one person who I could turn to, and you were busy finding you inner chi somewhere, incommunicado, without a letter, a phone call, anything."

She chanced a glanced upwards towards her sister, expecting to see anger, even irritation. She hadn't expected to see her sister look regretful, much less apologetic. Across the scrubbed, wooden surface, Melissa reached a hand out to her, palm up, fingers extended. Scully stared at it for long moments, before reaching her own small hand to take it, feeling her fingers curled into her sister's longer ones tightly.

"I'm sorry, Dana," she replied, her voice thick with emotion. "Mom told me some of what you've been through…about Dad, and work, and how you lost that person you used to date."

"Jack," Scully supplied automatically.

"I wish I could have been there for you," she continued. "I didn't know that I would be gone so long. And I didn't mean to lock you all out of what was going on. To be honest," Melissa sighed in self-recrimination. "I just didn't think about it. I had my own personal questions to answer, my own insights to find. And not all of us can find them at the end of a microscope, Dana. Some of us have to search for them outside of ourselves, to the experiences and people we meet, and the truths they have to tell us."

It sounded like something Mulder would say, Scully thought weakly, as she squeezed her sister's fingers tightly. "I didn't say you had to find your truths at the end of a microscope. I'm just saying you could have picked up a pay phone, written a letter…. something."

"I could have," Melissa acknowledged. "And I'm sorry I didn't." A small, knowing look quirked her mouth upwards, "But you'll forgive me anyway, right?"

"Don't I always," Scully laughed, letting go of her sister's hand, and pulling the fork from out of her meal. "After all, I only get the one sister."

"Even if she believes in crystals, and mantras, and everything that makes Dana Scully's logical mind screech into flights of dubious protestation." Melissa teased as she returned to her own food.

"Well," Scully shrugged, "I've had a lot of experience in the last year or so trying to think a bit more open mindedly. Mind you, I still don't believe that waving a stone over a person's head will cure their headaches, but…"

"And how did Dr. Dana get so open minded?"

"I've had to be in the last year or so," Scully shrugged. "The division they had me in specialized in unexplained cases."

"I remember that," Melissa looked thoughtful as she swallowed. "Something about aliens, wasn't it?"

"Amongst other things," Scully shrugged, tucking into her food again.

"And you had that partner you said was cute…what was his name again?"

"Mulder," Scully smiled ruefully. She had told her sister he was cute…and her mother…and Ellen. She prayed to God that never got back to Mulder. He'd become insufferable.

"Mom said they transferred you back to Quantico," Melissa sensed she was touching a dangerous area. "What happened?"

How much of the truth behind Deep Throat and the last, frantic days of the X-files could she tell her sister? How much of it should she tell her sister? After all, Melissa was as open-minded as anyone in the Scully family could be. And yet, how could Scully even begin to explain what she had seen in that flask, the strange virus that she had discovered. She couldn't explain to herself the things she had seen.

"It was politics," Scully replied simply. It was about as clear an answer as she could manage. "Mulder doesn't play the political game well, and well…he lost."

"And you along with him?"

"Sort of," Scully sighed heavily. "My record isn't as hurt as his is. They just sent me back to what I was doing before?"

"And they didn't with him?"

"No," Scully thought of Mulder, in some crappy hotel room somewhere, listening to conversations about beer and strip joints, and slowly crawling the walls of his own, private prison. "He hasn't made a lot of friends at the FBI, let's just say."

"Except for you," Melissa always was perceptive. "You miss him, don't you?"

"Miss Mulder," Scully hated to admit she did. "Yeah…I guess I more worry about him. Mulder isn't what I would call a people person. And his work…his work means a lot to him. And to be honest, it means a lot to me as well. I mean…cutting up corpses and finding what killed them is one thing, Melissa. But the work I did there, the ability I had to use my skills as a scientist to explain these things that the FBI so easily writes off as strange, abnormal, and crazy, it made me feel useful. Like I was doing something that actually made a difference to someone, that I wasn't just performing the routine."

"Like you were meant for something more than the ordinary in this life?" Melissa nodded wisely. "I know the feeling, believe me I do? Why do you think I went to California, Dana? Just to give Mom more gray hairs and to run around like I was a teenager once again?"

"Well…yeah," Scully replied impishly as her sister rolled her eyes.

"There is so much more to this life than the simple explanations our society wants to give us, Dana. Our faith, our parents, our government, everyone creates a nice, orderly world by which we rule our lives. And for some of us, that isn't enough. We want to see what is going on outside of the neat borders of our box, we want to delve into those strange shades of gray and find what is lurking there. And it's OK to want to find those answers, to discover why that is. You and I are looking for the same things, Dana. Just because I approach it from my angle and you approach it from yours doesn't make either of our searches any less valid."

Scully stared at her elder sister for the longest of moments, wondering quietly to herself when had the sister she had known all of her life morph into the man she had been partnered with for the last year. "You and Mulder would so get along." She grinned madly at her sister.

"Is he single," Melissa winked, as she took another bite of enchilada.

"More or less," Scully could never be sure. It seemed Mulder's endless string of pretty, silly office workers had lessened somewhat in the months since they had begun working together. At least the nasty phone messages left at the office had dropped off. However his predilection for leaving his porn all over the place hadn't lessened in the slightest. "Mulder I don't think has a lot of time in his life for serious relationships."

"Pity," Melissa shrugged casually. "No wonder you two get along so well, you sound like you are both workaholics. Two peas in a pod?"

"I think I'm just more understanding of his idiosyncrasies. After all, I grew up with you."

"Thanks for that vote of confidence," Melissa snorted. "Friends again?"

"Always," Scully smiled brightly at her older sister. "Just don't sneak into my apartment again?"

"Not when my baby sister carries a gun, I won't," Melissa agreed readily. "Finish your dinner, it's getting cold."

"Yes, Mom," Scully obliged her sister with a large forkful of homemade enchilada.