Summary: he knew her inside out and upside down

Even in the early days, the dowdy days, her nails had always been perfect. It must have been the one feminine indulgence she allowed herself, the weekly sessions with Cyrrene. For once, she let someone take her hand, let someone else be focused. Cyrrene would do the paraffin dip and then busily buff and polish. And at the end, there would be no traces of aliens or autopsies.

And now she dressed in suits made of Italian fabrics and no one could call her dowdy anymore. Now she was sharp and sassy, words that he hated. He thought they made her sound like the token black woman playing comic relief on a short-lived UPN show. They degraded her – or if degraded wasn't quite the word – they made her less. But now the nails that nobody had noticed but him in the first place now fit with the rest of her image.

After that many years of working together, he knew her inside out and upside down and so he knew when she started to let the manicures slide something was wrong. The chipped polish, the roughened cuticles, the ragged ends. Somehow he knew it wasn't her family or Skinner or that shabby black filing cabinet in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover building causing any of it. But he couldn't ask, because asking a woman about her damaged manicure seemed about two steps of tactlessness away from asking her if she'd gained weight.

Until that night. That night that they were in the usual roadside fleabag motel, and they had gone to separate rooms for the night, and then he had had a really amazing insight into the case, involving string theory and the relative angles at which the victim's yard flamingos were staked into the ground. So naturally he called her cell phone, but she didn't answer, so he wandered over to her room, you know, in case her phone was off or had died or something. But when he had knocked gently and pushed open the door, he saw she'd already crashed for the night. He turned to go, but she shifted and he saw that in her sleep, she was chewing on her nails. So he leaned down, and pulled her hand away from her mouth, and fuckall, he accidentally woke her up.

She sat bolt upright in bed. There was a look in her eyes that seemed familiar to him, and it took him a second to place it. Then he knew. It was the look his sister had when she was small, waking up from a nightmare, and she would cast her eyes around frantically until she saw him, and then she would smile beatifically and lie back down to sleep. She did the same thing now, except when her gaze landed on him, she started a little, and then pulled her knees up to her chest and sat on her right hand, the more badly chewed of the two.

And all of a sudden, he knew why he knew she wasn't ruining manicures because of her family, or because of Skinner, or because of the shabby filing cabinet. It was because he knew her inside out and upside down and he needed to be here always to catch her frantic castaway gazes and he hadn't been before. He didn't know the words to make her not less but he knew she wasn't dowdy or sharp or sassy but he knew he was here and somehow between him and her and Cyrrene they would work it out.