Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-files
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1433
Prompt: Don't Stop Believing-Journey, wk 39 (From scifi_muses on LiveJournal)
Setting: Second Season Episode: "Little Green Men"
AN: Some borrowed dialogue.
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It really was a shit a hole. Scully eyed the shabby apartment building distastefully as she tried not to step in anything that looked vaguely like a damp spot in her brand, new high heels. Stale smells and peeling paint certainly added to the atmosphere of dark, dank, and suspicious. Personally, if she were involved in organized crime, she would never chose a dump to run her operation out of. After all, it was the first sort of place the FBI would start looking. However, it never failed some two-bit operator for some organized crime family would think it best to go and hide in shambles, discussing family secrets, as if it were an open invitation for them to be caught by the authorities. No wonder Mulder was bored to tears, Scully smirked; it was practically like shooting fish in a barrel.
The FBI had staked out one small, cramped room on the far side of the apartments, well away from the prying eyes of the men they were listening to. Scully knocked on the thin, particle board door, waiting patiently as she heard the shuffling inside, and the pause as Mulder inspected to see who it was on the other side of the door.
"You got the secret password," his dry voice was serious on the other side of the door.
"Sunflower seeds," she held up a bag of them for him, waving them enticingly through the peek hole in the door. She grinned as she heard the door open, and Mulder leaned against the doorframe, frowning at the plastic bag.
"You shouldn't be here, Scully. It's not your case."
"Weren't you the one who tried to convince me once the way to a man's heart was through his stomach?"
"Aren't you the one who tells me seeds have too much sodium?"
"I figured we'd call a truce," she shoved the plastic bag at him, forcing him to take it as he moved away enough to allow her in. "Nice place you got here, Mulder. A little paint, a couch, it might just be livable." Her eyes roamed the small space, with its lack of drywall; it's particleboard, and the cans of paint sitting unused on a dusty drop cloth.
"Super cut a deal with the FBI to let us use the place. Seems he wasn't too keen on us poking too deeply into his business transactions," Mulder shrugged his shoulders in his tired looking suit coat, and moved back to the small table filled with recording equipment. Scully immediately saw the tape he had so carefully brought back with him from San Juan.
"You haven't listened to it yet," Scully nodded her head towards it, surprised he hadn't tried to take it to the Lone Gunmen immediately.
"Skinner predictably had my ass the moment I got home. It didn't leave much time."
"How bad was it?"
"Bad," Mulder shrugged, so used to Skinner's rants at him about breeches of protocol by now it hardly seemed to faze him. "Our smoking friend was there again."
Scully didn't know why she should be surprised at all by that statement, but she was. "Did you find out why?"
"Nope," Mulder shook his dark head as he threaded the tape he brought back from Puerto Rico into the machine. "Whoever he is, he worked a bit too hard trying to get me out of this joint. Skinner actually put his foot down."
"His foot down," Scully was mystified. "What do you mean?"
"I think the smoker wanted me out of the Bureau. This was his big chance. And Skinner told him to take a hike." Mulder didn't look pleased, but he sounded that way. "I don't know, perhaps what you said about Skinner, about him sitting on the fence…maybe there is something to it."
"Maybe," Scully still wasn't sure what to make of Skinner and just where his allegiances lay in terms of the X-files and Mulder's work. "But I'd like to know who that man is, and why he's so keen on making your life miserable."
"Never have been able to figure anything out about him." Mulder began to spool the tape carefully. "He's a shadowy figure at best, no name, no identity, I once pocketed one of his cigarette butts in the hopes of getting a fingerprint or DNA match off of him. Nothing. It's as if he doesn't exist."
"Then why is here there? Who does he work for? And why is Skinner so afraid of him?"
"I think the bigger question, Scully, is not why Skinner is afraid of him. I think the bigger question is who is he protecting, and why he's protecting it. Because he's going to awfully dangerous lengths, exposing himself, for just one, crazy guy locked in the basement of the FBI?" Mulder pressed play on the spool of tape, and leaned into the machine intently, listening for…what? Scully wasn't sure, but she found herself talking a chair beside the small table, pulling her pencil skirt primly over her knees, and leaning in to listen, carefully.
For several moments they listened, but were greeted with nothing more than the sound of static silence on the other end. Mulder's jaw twitched angrily, but he said nothing as he pushed the rewind button, and then play again. Still, nothing but the soft scratch of metallic tape against the player head sounded over the speakers.
"It should be right here," he scowled in confusion, rewinding and playing it yet again. The tape ran till it ended. But there was nothing to be heard.
"The entire tape is blank," he muttered, defeated, as he pulled it off the tape machine. He had been so sure, so utterly sure this was the proof he needed. He had left behind everything else in the hopes that this one spool of flimsy, magnetized acetate would provide for him the evidence that he needed to reopen his work, to continue his research. It was heartbreaking to Scully, both as a scientist and as his friend.
"You know," she offered quietly. "An electrical surge in the outlet…the storm may have degaussed everything, erasing the entire tape." It was a theory, admittedly not a good one, but something for him to hold on to.
Mulder set the tape down, staring at it as it sat on the table between them.
"You still have nothing," Scully sighed sadly. All of that work, all of that danger, and he had come out with what? A lesser woman would have pointed out that this was the reason why he shouldn't have gone alone. But Scully wasn't that sort of person. She found it all very frustrating and disheartening.
"I may not have the X-files, Scully," he sighed, looping another tape from his recent surveillance session onto the player. "But I still have my work."
It relieved her to hear that out of him, she realized. For all of his frustration and depression the last few weeks, she had feared he would let go of his search for the truth, for answers. Perhaps this excursion, though it turned up nothing of substantive value for his work had done the one thing her words had been unable to do…restore his drive to go on.
Mulder stood, adjusting the tapes in the player, spooling the tapes one to the other. "And I've still got you," his green eyes glided towards hers briefly, appreciatively as she felt herself blush lightly. She shrugged self-consciously, looking away and nodding. For now, at least, as long Mulder was willing to chase his little green men, he still had her on his side. She looked up at him as he sat back down, and slipped the giant headphones over his ears.
"And I still have myself," he sighed, as he pressed play resignedly.
She smiled tightly at him, reaching out to squeeze his hand lightly as she rose, shooting him a parting, knowing nod. She turned to leave him, relieved at least in the knowledge that while they still had nothing for their efforts, they still had the work. And no matter how many shadowy, smoking men there were in the world, Mulder could still search for his truths and his sister. And he could at least count on Scully to still be there to help him out as best she could.
