Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Ezio: I thought... I thought I was beyond this. But I'm not. I've waited too long, lost too much. Requiescat in Pace, you bastard! (Assassin's Creed II) Vol 2. Week 47 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Four Episode: Saguinarium
The firestorm over Ephesian's mass suicide had not let up one wit for the Justice Department, but for Scully and Mulder things quieted down considerably in the weeks following the incident. Anger and questions shifted, and Scully was not sorry to see the ATF on the hot seat, especially considering it was their fault lives were lost. Mulder agreed, though he had little to say about any of it beyond that. They had conveniently stepped around the entire issue lying there between them, returning to the basement office and the X-files as if Melissa Riedel had never happened.
But Scully knew she had. She could see it in every far away look on Mulder's face as he sat at his desk, his long fingers twiddling a pencil absently until he finally noticed her gaze on him. She pretended not to see how he had kept photocopies of the two pictures of Sarah and Sullivan, the former neatly repaired after Melissa had destroyed it. Marion at the Hall of Records had been less than pleased. Scully said nothing though as she caught him staring at them one morning, before he shuffled them away in a desk drawer that she was fairly certain housed the videos he swore he didn't own. It was as if Melissa and her memory had turned into some tragic, secret romance for him, hiding in his desk where he pined for a dead girl he barely knew.
It was so Byron-esque, she thought she was disgusted by it, but Scully didn't say a thing. And that was how it had remained in the weeks since Chattanooga, her not saying a thing. A barrier had slid neatly between them since, dividing her table from his desk, her efficient coolness from his dark brooding. Not that anyone could tell from just a casual glance, they were polite as ever, worked as well together. But Melissa Reidel had come between them, or at least Scully had allowed her to come between them. Perhaps she should be more understanding of the dead, but the heartbroken schoolboy act had worn thin, leaving Scully heartily wishing they had never taken the Ephesian case at all.
"Earth to Scully," Mulder's gravelly monotone finally sunk into her consciousness as she looked up over her computer monitor at him, frowning as he stood over her, waving a fax in front of her face.
"You doing OK?" He'd asked that question so many times over the last week she'd considered tattooing "I'm fine" on her forehead, just so he would get the message. Instead she simply nodded, glancing at the blurry black ink. "Acton Center of Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery. Finally wanting to get to the bottom of your Ms. September mystery?"
It was the first banter she had cracked in days, and it delighted Mulder to hear it. "Well as certain as I am there must be alien technology holding those breasts up, this case is a tad more mundane than that. Chicago police don't know what to make of it, and frankly neither do the doctors involved."
"Someone lose their breast implants?" See, she thought, I can be silly, I can crack a joke, I can pretend quite well, thank you.
"No, one of the surgeons stabbed a patient to death on the table, in full view of the cameras recording the entire procedure." Mulder waggled one dark eyebrow in excitement, spinning to his desk with the sort of bounce in his step she hadn't seen since before Chattanooga. "Dr. Robert Lloyd, part of the Acton Center, was scheduled for a routine liposuction at Greenwood Memorial, where Acton is contracted. The prep nurse says she informed him that his patient was ready, she left him to start the procedure, and when she came back from prepping another surgeon's patient, she saw the video of Dr. Lloyd stabbing the patient in the abdomen with the suction instrument."
"Stabbing?" Even she grimaced at the mental image, rubbing her own flat stomach in sympathy. "Did Dr. Lloyd know the patient personally?"
"No, in fact this makes the case all the better. The patient Lloyd killed wasn't even one of his. Lloyd was supposed to be working on a woman in for a liposuction procedure on her abdomen; the patient he killed was a man going in for hair plugs. The patient was anesthetized, and didn't even know what was happening."
"Oh, no." The doctor in Scully was horrified at the idea; it had all the trappings of one of the fantastic tales that would get passed around in med school amongst sleepy-deprived residents who began to wonder if they should slip something extra into that fifteenth cup of coffee. "How did Lloyd not realize?"
"The doctor said he can't recall any of his actions from the moment he stepped into the hospital that morning. He doesn't even remember going into surgery. When police took him into custody they claimed he was 'non-responsive'."
"Drugs?" That was the most obvious answer Scully had. Drug usage was the dirty little secret of the surgical community, the one that everyone turned a blind eye towards. It had been rampant in her days in the cardiology program under Daniel Waterston, and it had been one of the big reasons for her to consider the switch from cardiology to pathology. The pressure of long hours, high stress cases, and all the small, tiny things that could go wrong with any major surgery often drove many to self-prescribing medication for themselves just to get by. Sleeping pills for the insomnia was common, as were pain pills, anti-anxiety pills, you name it, it was imbibed in droves…and that wasn't counting the other illegal drugs.
"Lloyd admits to using some medications, but insists he never took them before surgery. Police ran a test on him when they booked him, but so far nothing."
Strange. Still, perhaps it wasn't that unusual, plastic surgery was a high-end business. People paid good money to look beautiful, hence why it had become such popular discipline when she was in medical school. How many times had Daniel bemoaned the best and brightest students gravitated towards cosmetology just for the sheer money factor? Little did many of them know that these places had such high volume that the work factor alone would burn them out long before they lost the ability to perform the surgeries. But the money was certainly nice.
"We could just be dealing with a case of mental of emotional fatigue, here, in which chase I can't see what the X-file angle to this is? It's a case of manslaughter at worst, and a nasty malpractice suit."
"Aren't you the one who is always yelling at me to take more realistic cases? So, we got one, what could be more normal than a case of a strange, accidental murder?"
"Except that's not what we investigate." She hated pointing out the obvious, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out why Mulder would even sniff at a case like this. "What's the weird factor here?"
"Does there have to be one?" He shot her a lazy smile as he leaned back in his chair, ready for a full on banter session. But somehow Scully hardly felt in the mood.
"For you, always. Something your intuition is hinting at again? Another 'feeling' that will lead us down the merry, goat trail, an ache in your toe this time, or perhaps a well-educated hunch?"
It was crossing a line, she knew that, and to be honest, Scully couldn't really say why she did it. He had teased, she had responded with a canon blast across his desk. It hit with all the painful immediacy of one too, hurt exploding across Mulder's lazy expression for a long, startling moment, before it was swallowed back, replaced by a hesitant shrug and smile, a convenient cover of the confusion she glimpsed.
"Sure, Scully, intuition. That's what Spooky Mulder is good for right?"
Shit, she sighed mentally, flushing with guilt and kicking herself for her bitchiness, but he ducked away before she could even come up with a good apology, turning to his computer. "You mind if we take a flight out to Chicago in the morning? I'll call the police there, set something up for us to speak to Lloyd."
What could she say in response? "Yeah…sure, no morning is fine." Her gaze lingered on him briefly as he nodded absently, slipping on his wire-rimmed reading glasses as he began clicking away on his keyboard, filling out travel forms. She should say something, Scully thought, at least beg forgiveness, claim it was hormones, a bad nights sleep, offer to buy him coffee, sunflower seeds, smile and make it up to him. But there was a corner of her pride that wouldn't allow it. Perhaps it wasn't fair, he hardly understood. She couldn't seem to make him understand. And that was where her frustration lay, in between them, like everything else.